"Hell is the impossibility of reason." - Oliver Stone's Platoon
I have been busy trying to find the right rectifiers for my nervous system and at the same time working pretty hard on getting Eclipse EMF to do some basic things, like represent XMI metamodels as ontologies and lesser model types like UML and Ecore . But it's like pulling teeth, even with all the fancy stuff. So, I have not been able to give you, p(t), anything new. I know you are currently the empty set, but that's ok, I don't discriminate. But what is time to the empty set and, to some future onlooker, what tree fell in a forest here before you arrived?
hELL
Why have I needed to put new "industrial strength" rectifiers between my nervous system and the real world? Well, there's reading Sartre's Nausea and there's being in it. Kind of like "Total Recall" with an existential twist.
eNTAILMENT
But this all has to do with entailment. If we postulate something like a valid culture (identity, perspective, value system, etc.), then shouldn't global (system wide) ethics entail every valid culture. Before globalization, tribal "micro-theories" could co-exist and since the interaction between tribes was minimal, tolerance (entailment of the other culture), was not an issue. Increased population, and advances in transportation and communications, make the tribal approach untenable. Tribalism was fine as a precursor to the current dynamic, but it wastes too much information to handle any real complexity. Global ethics is defined institutionally but has not been personalized by very many people.
Is it OK to stone your wife because she committed adultery? If we say yes for some cultures, is it because they are too crude to understand that this is cruelty, that other cultures have abandoned this practice and lived through it? We should advance a simple upper ontology of basic good that has two simple constraints:
But this all has to do with entailment. If we postulate something like a valid culture (identity, perspective, value system, etc.), then shouldn't global (system wide) ethics entail every valid culture. Before globalization, tribal "micro-theories" could co-exist and since the interaction between tribes was minimal, tolerance (entailment of the other culture), was not an issue. Increased population, and advances in transportation and communications, make the tribal approach untenable. Tribalism was fine as a precursor to the current dynamic, but it wastes too much information to handle any real complexity. Global ethics is defined institutionally but has not been personalized by very many people.
Is it OK to stone your wife because she committed adultery? If we say yes for some cultures, is it because they are too crude to understand that this is cruelty, that other cultures have abandoned this practice and lived through it? We should advance a simple upper ontology of basic good that has two simple constraints:
- Don't hurt anyone
- Help as much as you can
Now of course, this entails quite a bit. You have to at least be honest enough with yourself to be able to tell if you are really doing those two things or not. Well, how do you know if you're being honest with yourself? That leads to more answers and as e.e. cummings used to say:
"Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."
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