However to any measurement proposal one would have to quantify the impacts and the results. What exactly measurable changed my countermeasurement for example introducing a basic income. Were this influences positive or negative on any other balances. Wellm things get quickly complex so one would need machines and simulations in order to evaluate it all.
Yes, estimating the effects of certain interventions is extremely difficult. Even computer simulations might not be able to catch all the different effects. If you really want to test a new system, you will sooner or later have to test it in real life to see how it actually behaves. Simulations are interesting, but I’d only trust a system that has been tested and proven to work with real people.
Yes indeed you need both, but extensive simulation helps you to avoid billions of time wasting mistakes with real people. Mistakes which can demoralize them and make them to give up the new ideas. The most mistakes in new communities are mostly psychologcial nature (like for instance ego fights of males) but also wrong or poor planning of resources for covering the the basic needs of the community can bring a community down, aw well as the lack of working organizational structures.
1 Like
I pretty much ends on who programs the system, and under which criteria. With simulations done as an automatic check of outcomes, we still need to produce input, and that input is either created by humans or from some godlike AI (yes, “godlike” doesnt sounds good). If as humans we are either upgrading ourselves biologically or cybernetically, the criteria would still be our product.
Now, I would like to think “in the meantime”, and hands up working for deliberation tools, which, if there is the need of having an universally connected brain, ultimately be the basis of it. A primitive, but still a step forward.
the main problem i see is the personal
lens. if you give a person power to built a futuristic society on
the earth, this person could not avoid to create something matching
her own taste. and all the others have to live with that, no matter
if they like it or not. and this is what we always had.
so it is inevitable to ask
philosophical questions:
- could there ever be a society for all
without exception? - what are the main values for orientation? : long
life, healthy life, long and healthy life, happiness, technology,
expansion?..
1 Like
Yes, if you give a single person the power to “impose” a futuristic “society” on others, the result would undoubtedly be coloured by the personal preferences of that person. That alone is a good reason not so let any single person have such power over others! The right way to create a better society it to aggregate different visions and then devise some clever “compromise”, or a superior synthesis of different models.
“Could there be a society for all without exception?” That depends on whether you want an “ideal” society for everyone or a “globally acceptable” or merely a “locally acceptable” society for everyone. I think only the last one can be actually realized. There are many contradictory interests. Some people want to impose their way of living on others. This can’t obviously work out for everyone if people actually have competing ideas of what is the best way to live. People who want to see liberal democracy everywhere and worshippers of a global dictatorial theocracy won’t be able to come to a mutual agreement that would be really “globally acceptable” for any one side.
However, if you allow a fractal society with different systems on many different levels, then everyone could have a small “society niche” in which life is truly acceptable unless you demand to look outside of your small political habitat. Whether to call such a complex and diverse construct a “society” is nevertheless rather questionable. But I think it could be based on an agreement that this scheme actually allows everyone to thrive under her own chosen systems.
What would be the main values for orientation? In the fractal society every order of values is legitimate. There would be no global ideology which would have to be imposed on everyone. Everyone would be free to follow his own brain farts. 
Yes, and this is why even creating an AI for managing policies must account that someone has to program it, at her liking.
Perhaps we can approach the entirety of population, plus answering what Radivis said. Now, I am not saying it would be perfect, but doable. I’ve developed a protocol to approach what I call “concord”, being this a concept untouched (yet).
The first part is done entering opinions into the more or less process known as “consensus”, but it needs more than that. Here comes the part of the “conformity”, measuring conformity its a novel approach (plus the word has seen wrong uses), but if we take conformity as the result of “what people agrees on which things get widely accepted”, then we have magic happening.
The first part comes from the synthesis mentioned too.
Yes, this is were things get really harsh, because its true what you say that this is more likely to happen. The result is that people who gets aware of other individuals with the same ideas join each other. I could use exact terminology for what it would happen, but because it sounds harsh, lets call this “social migration”. Did I mention I had a novel in the making about some societal implications of the future? its because this is a prolific story of humanity.
i think the problem has to be solved on a deeper level. your thought reminds me of the volonté générale
by rousseau. also kant had thoughts about that and created the Categorical imperative but the main problem persists: is there something for all, that equals all, a basical consensus, no matter how little ? or do we have to accept Cultural relativism no matter what kind of system a culture creates?
the only approach i had so far, is the question, what all people don´t want instead of the question “what do they want?”.
I think there is something that everyone wants: The ability to choose how he lives his life on a very foundational level. In the fractal society I depicted above that would mean the freedom and ability to choose in which “society niche”, or let’s better call it “social system”, you want to live. Even if that system brings with it certain restrictions of freedom. They might be stuck there for quite a long time without the choice to move to another system again.
But because people change, they should be given that right to move to some other system periodically (say, every 5 years for example). This would include the means to travel to the location you want to live in.
Pretty much yes. On the one hand we have the sociological view of “cultural universals”, which is still a concept on development. We also have evolutionary mechanisms which are the foundation of the human feelings. They might not be yet fully understood, but its a start.
I clear up than the “concord” aforementioned is a mechanism of census, thus approaching what is applied in real life. Among the ends is to reveal to the people involved the real feelings of everyone else on the vast subjects in existence, and as a plus we may find universals if we probe in the results.
In the draft I presented to the wikiparty of Spain, the word “primitive” appears, which is the logical result of a census which probes in the opinion gathered from having people thinking on the basis of their own opinions. Thus, this is the magic of fact-checking, concept linking wikis. To serve the purpose of knowing the mother-sibling-child structure of topics and ideas; the way how ideas relate.
EDIT: I must mention than the concept of “primitives” presented in the draft has the meaning of “an idea on which other ideas are based”.
if that is the core, people could leave society and try to live their life
outside somewhere in the wild. but there are not so much escapists in
this world. i think you miss something here.
what do you mean by “evolutionary mechanisms”? genetics? the “foundation of the human feelings” sounds interesting. this could be the most important discovery if we ever want to find something like the volonté générale. what do you think about my idea, to ask, what people don´t want?
1 Like
I just realized the importance of your approach. So let me rephrase this a bit. First, if its a dislike on the basis of a wrong idea, it can be debunked. Now, for individual ideas, each time we have dissent may not be a social failure.
What if dissent actually means this individual has developed a new approach, which was unknown in the society? It would mean a social evolution by itself.
We ended having either a debunking or a social evolution. And if we now something is certain, its that change a constant.
It comes down to genetic entities, yes. We may have some social entities having to do in the basis of some cultural ideals, but the basis of emotion has to do with the evolutive processes of the origin of behaviour. Its not yet fully understood, but we are starting to see some fundamentals. It is not to say that even aliens would behave this way, but seems that humans definitely share a lot of fundamentals.
there are many cases in history that prove you right. but how to distinguish between wrong ideas and a new approach?
what about experiences?
I thought I would throw in my penny’s worth on this.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve worked as the director of EOS and we have looked at the idea of moving to a sustainable, hi-tech, moneyless socioeconomic system.
Our plans for bring about such a society involves building ”stepping stones” of small communities networking together, each with their own way of doing things but cooperating together within a common frame work. We have made a start in that direction with the building of a bio-dome near Umeå in Sweden.
I’m coing to an end with my time with EOS this year and I’ve started to think about what to do post EOS. I’m thinking of a couple of things; one centers on poltics but the other centers on the idea of building a virtual nation. The virtual nation would represent a type of fantasy project where we get to ”pretend” we live in a futuristic society (bit like the good old days in Entropia, if anyone remembers them). However, the project I envision should extend into the real world. Forming clubs and get communities to start up.
2 Likes
Thanks for sharing your plans and visions, isenhand! 
I find the ideas of the EOS quite fascinating, but as you said, you are now focusing on other things – may I just ask the reason for that? Was there any disappointment about the progress of the EOS?
The idea of a virtual nation is not new. It’s what Zero State tried to do all along, but unfortunately Zero State has lost momentum.
BitNation is also a virtual nation project that seemed to have come further. It’s based on the decentralized blockchain technology. They projects look relatively promising.
And there’s also the new Transhumanist Party Virtual which seems just to be the branch of the Transhumanist Parties that is concerned with virtual spaces rather than “geospaces”.
I think your idea would fit most closely into the Zero State idea. Now, Zero State is unfortunately mostly still active in Facebook. I’ve tried to get them into this forum, but the resonance was close to zero. Anyway, the Zero State Facebook group would probably the best place to “sell” your idea to a public that would probably embrace it. However, your idea sounds more like a virtual nation game, rather than a “real” virtual nation. It’s an angle that hasn’t really been explored in Zero State, so I think you should give it a go.
Best explain your idea in a new thread in this forum and then post a link to that forum to the Zero State Facebook group. That should get some attention there.
As for anything that wants to expand from virtual space to geo-space: You need very many interested people or a few insanely enthusiastic people to reach the necessary density of people for geo-meetings to be feasible. Even Zero State struggled a lot, since it “only” has between 2000 and 3000 members on Facebook. Even the whole transhumanist movement probably doesn’t have enough people to turn regular geo-meetings into a commonplace occurrence. Do you have any good strategy for dealing with that problem?
1 Like
Sorry for the late answer, I was out on my vacation with zero internet connection.
We have been discussing this on the topic “A Wiki with fact checking?”, were i present the idea of “ideas based on ideas” and the “fallacies and truthful sources”. I admit is not perfect but is a start.
http://forum.sfmeta.net/t/a-wiki-with-fact-checking/73
I respect that this goes into the realm of psychology, but the processes of emotion are imprints from a master mold, and the mold is the physical part that were shaped by biological processes. Even so, I might be wrong in the kind of answer you mean, and I should answer the atavistic part. And the answer “might be” yes. I sort of recall a research that says fear can be kind of inherited and I do recall a research that shows how the brain could alter its genetics. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141111/ncomms6392/full/ncomms6392.html
Lets do this.
This emulation could use what we have at hand, and there is a lot of attempt by current communities like the RBE. Many of us collaborated in the “RBE Game” which was a project to bring the RBE ideas to the general public. We found that a game like Freeciv could be expanded into an actual simulation via upgrades.
An “emulation”, yes, but as soon as real resources are being feed upon the system, you get real economy on track. Think on the virtual currencies from the many online games, and their results.
i wouldn´t put it that way. we have the ability to feel in general ( and maybe research could show that this ability is universal ) but the way we feel is shaped through experiences. so to me psychology is the most promising approach to understand our world.
our knowledge based on assertions and memes starting somewhere, sometime…often far away in the past… in the heads of other people. many of them are claimed to be proven and believed by many people without being reconsidered. we don´t have the time and the ressources to prove everything we learn by our own. experiences and studies are constructed according to the perception, intelligence and the desired outcome of the study/ research of the researchers/sponsor. and they are also interpreted individually
…and not an insignificant amout of studies is paid by lobbies for a special desired outcome. …so…there is not really much, we could trust.
many people tried to find methods and ways gaining something like “truthful
sources” and “objectivity”…
with the idea “ideas based on ideas” there is chance you build on
quicksand.
I agree, a “fractal society” may be the only way to accomodate everyones’ prefrences.
1 Like
We should have the right to travel. I think people will form into groups based on their prefrences.
2 Likes
Welcome to the Social Future Forum, technologiclee
Yes, the right, and also the actual ability, to travel to the location which fits your overall preferences best is an important ideal. However, states often regulate migration movements to a large degree – often out of necessity, or economic, political, or cultural considerations.
For example, how to deal with refugees? When a nation lets too many refugees in, the local infrastructures will become overburdened and the refugees will have to live in refugee camps under horrible living conditions. There should be some supernational compensation system that somehow rewards nation for accepting refugees (or even other non wealthy immigrants), so that there would be some kind of market for letting them in. So, the refugee streams would be split up much more evenly among different nations, hopefully.