race to the bottom

One-celled organisms will eventually outlast fragile metazoans on this planet, as our sun moves toward it's "cool red-giant" phase. Meanwhile the delicate layers of social structure in communities of social-metazoans (like us) may be dismantled as well. Put another way, border-checkpoints between states and even cities may be in our long-term future as well as in our past.

However there's no need to let new-found electronic communications catalyze a race-to-the-bottom, via its ability to echo neolithic-ideas that are naturally attractive to humans in tough times. Runaway-cartoonification (e.g. bad-mouthing) of others is one of those idea-patterns whose seductiveness we discovered when part of our house was being used by a business, with the incidental consequence that patterns of employee-behavior unperturbed by the observation-process itself were impossible to miss.

Put simply, humans are not always by nature constructive. The ability of ideas to quickly spread themselves across the globe means that a close look at the idea-types that we echo may be quite important in the years ahead.  In this context what idea-types would you put on a list of "likely constructive", and what types on list of "possibly de-constructive"?

definitions of life

An organism-centered definition of life, inspired by an article on semantic consensus, is that " life is autonomous self-reproduction with variations".  This definition is organism-centered (betraying the pre-occupation of its definers) in that it fails to mention life's place as a hierarchically-ordered multi-layer interface between availability-flows and a substrate. 

Perhaps someday this dream of being substrate-independent will be realized, but we are probably not there yet.

information ethics

A layer of internal-community ethics that modulates the behavior of its members toward information provided by others can likely be justified on scientific grounds, if one recognizes that niche-network layer-multiplicity is an important part of a community's physical structure.  The precise form of this ethics, of course, is likely to differ from community to community and from one culture to the next.

This observation is inspired by the utility of a similar layer of ethics (as a complement to contractual non-disclosure agreements) when working with privileged information in the development of best-practice guidelines for analytical support.  Today's news-media, of course, has been tempted to ignore the ethics of information management altogether, in spite of its changing (and growing) relevance to everyday practice.

Look for more on this topic, hopefully soon...