Jumping the gap
After watching a bit of that atrociously stupid bus-bomb movie, Jumping The Gap is on my mind.

Among today's inputs, an interesting contrapair. One article by standard academics has already jumped the gap into Natural Law thinking. Another article by a Catholic academic writing in an Intelligent Design website has NOT jumped the gap into Natural Law.

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First the already jumped:

A nicely written article on the hydra's regenerative ability.

Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have discovered the identity of the inhibitor, a protein called Sp5, and deciphered the dialogue between these two antagonistic activities, which helps maintain a single-headed adult body and organize an appropriate regenerative response. Published in the journal Nature Communications, their study points out that this mechanism has been conserved throughout evolution, both in Hydra and in humans. Sp5 could therefore be an excellent candidate to be tested as an inhibitor of human tumors in which the activator pathway is the motor of proliferation.

Unusual because the authors are working entirely within the Grand Blueprint model. They don't bother with "random mutations" or "increasing complexity"; they simply start with the assumption that a gene is a function, and all functions are present in the initial blueprint. Some phyla use some functions, some individuals use some functions.

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Now the not yet jumped.

Winston Ewert, writing in Mind Matters, briefly discusses the threat to human skills from AI. He misses the point because he's thinking in terms of GDP and Dow, not skills.

The true concern that the media coverage implies is that resources will not be allocated well, that almost all of them will end up in the hands of a few owners of automated factories while unskilled workers will end up starving. Many believe that the free market is simply incapable of adapting to that level of automation.

But what is the free market? What makes it free? Certainly not that the price of everything is zero! Rather, it is free in the sense of liberty. The market is made up of many different institutions, both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations including banks, insurers, manufacturers, agriculture businesses, charities, unions, etc. The freedom of the market is the freedom to choose whether to be part of any of these institutions and to what extent. Even a social instrument that seems as fundamental as money could be avoided by bartering or living in a commune.

First, he totally fails to grasp that modern Sorosian economics is NOT a market at all, let alone a free market. It's a black hole, designed to suck all resources into NYC banks and kill all non-NYC humans. It's not based on production or skills, it's based on sucking and killing.

Each of these institutions was invented to address a flaw in a free economy. Trade is much easier with money than with barter. Insurance allows us to pool risks and thereby reduce the damage caused by unlikely but expensive mishaps. Unions enable employees working together to bargain more equally with their socially powerful employer. All of these institutions were invented and then adopted by a free market because they proved useful.

Again he's starting from the Darwin assumption of random mutation and natural selection. Nature doesn't work that way, and an economy doesn't work that way.

All of these institutions arose from SKILLS which are part of the inherent human genome, created at the beginning and gradually diminishing since. Each can be seen in alternate forms among other animals and plants. Exchanging symbolic tokens is a constant activity of the nervous system, and more visibly used by birds and mammals in courtship and hive-control activities. Insurance is just an elaborate version of the family or clan, which developed FROM normal clan behavior via Mutual Benefit Associations. Unions also developed from the same origin.

These institutions weren't adopted by free choice, they are automatic parts of organized society. They grow in different ways within different environments, just as a tree grows in different ways depending on climate and wind.

Ewert concludes with pure Darwin:

If humans are free to experiment with new institutions, I believe we will find an excellent solution. However, there is a great danger that those who benefit from the status quo will use their influence to prevent the adoption of new institutions. Further, others will attempt to force institutions they think best on other people, leading to great suffering. The great danger we face is the danger of not being free enough to adapt to new and changing circumstances.

Again, there are no new institutions. Natural Law tells us what we have to do.

If we are working with God, we have no freedom. We have a GOD-ASSIGNED DUTY to use our skills to the utmost for good purposes. This duty is explicit in Sharia, implicit in some traditional Catholic viewpoints.

"Those who benefit from the status quo" are using their skills to the utmost for satanic aggressive purposes. They are destroying life, destroying beauty, and especially destroying REAL VALUE.

We must counter them by using our skills to make more life, more beauty, more value.

We can make use of existing institutions like unions in our self-defense, and we could also retrobuild Mutual Benefit Associations in their earlier form before they degenerated into commercial insurance companies.

Labels: From rights to duties, Grand Blueprint, skill-estate

  ¶ 7:01 AM