what is the goal?

what is the goal of society? Is it to make everyone happy? Is it to increace freedom to the max? To maintain order and stability? To ensure prosperity? I think that this is the big decision that we have to make, then we can decide on everything else.

Note: Freedom increased to the max goes by the name Anarchy.

well, that's what I'm asking. Do we want anarchhy? if not, what should the goal of goverment be? how much power should it have. These are the basic questions.

The goal of government cannot be anarchy, as that would be a contradiction.

Fairness?

my own opinion is that the goal of society should be to foster conditions where the goals of individuals can be best be achieved... so what are the goals of the individual?

i think at the very core is the need to survive... beyond this is the need to survive "well"... in other words, to achieve a sense of self-esteem, security, and justice... to have a sense of well-being, and satisfaction in one's own endeavours, and in the locale where one survives...

as long as society fosters these conditions for each individual, i think it is achieving its goals... however, for society to do this, each individual must accept their social responsibility...

so you're saying that we don't choose one, but let the members of society choose themselves, andhelp them along on their way?

I agree completely.

When you "design" a society without clearly defined goals, you get what we already have.

exactly. I say this is the defining feature of the CSCS- we have something that we are aiming towards, a goal, a reason etc. We will have a purpose, while everyone else flounders around to no effect.

The goal of the society should be-

Hmm. That's difficult.

I say that the goal of society should be to create a true meritocracy- to get as close as possible to energy in=money/rewards out.

What place do the very young, the elderly, the seriously disabled, or the mentally impaired have in your "meritocracy"?

Well, first of all, I would like to point out that I am most certainly not one of the 'let them die' righties, so don't think I am. Live and let live is fine with me, but live and let die is just unacceptable.

Perhaps it should be 'work in as a percentage of capacity', although that would be a nightmare to even try to institute.

It's an ideal. I don't think anyone can honestly say that rewards being a function of how hard you work is a bad concept.

Maybe measuring input in joules, so that the mentally disabled could do physical labor, and reap the same reward as someone working as hard at more intellectual pursuits. The elderly or seriously disabled could work on intellectual tasks, and children will be in school. Perhaps rewards for work there should be ade integral as well, somehow, although I don't know how.

I don't think anyone will argue against the idea that "work deserves rewards".

But surely an enlightened and successful society would generate enough excess capacity to support everyone willing to "pitch in" as they can.

well I'm saying that everyone should get out what they put in- and be they mentally disabled or not, they can work just as hard as anyone, if given proper instruction.

With industry and automation, a society can produce more than what its people "put in".

yes, that is true. But you only get paid for what you contribute. If a machine does it, why should you reap the reward?

What if I built the machine?

Actually, I was hinting at collective industry. As an example, it takes workers and machines to build cars.

If you built the machine, you would get payed based on the amount of energy you put into building it.

And machines don't get paid. The workers get payed based on E in.

But then you end up with a situation where the energy that is being paid for is less than the energy coming out.

As Tom Kalfbus said, "when we have good enough robots we can let them do all the work". We're very near that stage, indeed, food production and clothes manufacturing (to use two examples) are almost all automated already. It won't be that hard to push them over into full automation. In that case, the government would be able to own it and simply give out 'free' clothes and food, using taxes to buy in the raw materials. Perhaps people could use their 'energy allowance' to buy them.

I can tell you what the goal shouldn't be: make everyone happy. The easiest way to make someone happy is to drug them out of their mind, but it isn't much of an existence.

I agree with most of what you said. I still think people should be paid based on E in. A thing to remember, though, is that there are two broad types of labor: construction, building physical objects, and intellectual, labor which requires thought. Any system should incorporate both.

Ah, but then you get into difficulty with ability and computing E. For example, if I was being paid for my Art (stories), I wouldn't be putting much effort in, because I find it easy. However, someone else would find it harder to do the same quality. That, therefore, makes their achievement greater than mine, and they've put in more E than me.

well, theoretically some way to measure metabolic rate would be used, perhaps by monitoring blood sugar, or carbon dioxide, or something of that nature.

But that only works for physical labor. Plus it's possible to cheat.

Soory, the idea just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's good in theory, but it's almost impossibleto calculate E.

I say it could work, if an implant was used that could accurately measure metabolic rate. And yes, you would need to check in/out accurately. This would be illegal, though, and with large penalties.

But my metabolic rate doesn't increase when I'm doing mental labor, only physical labor. And if you pay people based on effort, there's no incentive to improve.

And that doesn't touch on the basic question - "who pays?"

Well, actually, thinking does use energy. How much, I don't know.

And this currency is energy backed- IOW, it is payed for by itself.

Who pays? ie. who is employing people?

people post jobs that need to be done on some sort of job market. One can choose whichever job one feels they can work the most at or will enjoy the most. Perhaps you need to pay for a posting, so as not to have people putting up frivolous and useless things.

Then you end up with everyone applying for certain jobs, and no-one applying for others. So long as there is a pay differential, though, the economy will still work.

Make people get a job after becoming unemployed, and give them a week to choose. That way, we can minimize how much money they require to keep them going.

I'm not totally sure how well this one would work, but ideally, paying people proportionally to E in is the best. This is the CS, after all. Even if it's not workable, though, we should include some elements of this into our chosen economy.

What should be the goal? To quote myself from the Abortion thread:

I wrote:

I have two simple rules: 1) Don't do anything that has a too much of a negative effect on someone, and 2) Be who you want to be, except when it conflicts with the first law. I'll probably right in a third law, and find someway of of clarifying the 1st law, but it'll do for now. I can then deduce all other laws from those.

Now, in effect the 1st law is to protect the 2nd, but also limits the second law. I'll do some more thinking on the 1st law, to clarify what precisely I mean. Claiming that you are hurt emotionally by what your friend/child/etc wants to be, so therefore they can't do it as it would conflict with the first law. If that friend/child/etc decided to become a morally degenerate sadomasochistic woman beater, however, then that *would* be a case of conflict with the first law. Tricky cases include

• Gay adoption - effects on the child
  
• Divorce - again, effects on the children
  
• Sadomasochists - if they want to be whipped and beaten themselves
  
• Etc - I trust you get the idea now
  

The goal of society should be to implement those two laws (three if I can come up with another one, perhaps to regulate the expression of them enough to make it [near] failsafe).

well, those seem they would be more like the bill of rights in the USA, although I suppose it could work if sent strait to the judicial. Then congress (See my post in the location thread) would spend it's time only on programs, of which I approve.

I think this topic desperately needs to be revived. We're talking about specific systems already when we don't even know what we're trying to accomplish? What madness is this that we're deciding what to do before we decide why?

I think that this thread is so important that, until we have this settled, I don't plan to reply to anything else. I don't want to be petty, but I think it's that important.

I suppose I'll start: The goal of the CSCS is to promote humanity as a whole and to try to help it to survive as long as possible, to the end of the universe and maybe beyond being the ultimate goal.

No. Wrong goal. That leaves no room for Liberty or Individuality.

The goal of a CSCS is to maximise the entropy of choice - that is, the total amount of choice that each individual holds. This implies an ultraminimal state, which naturally evolves into Nightwatchman Federalism - which is why we should plan for the end result from the beginning.

Why should that be the goal of the CSCS? If you don't care about the ultimate survival of humanity isn't this exercise utterly pointless in the end?

Maximum freedom is absolutely worthless if you're dead. "Live Free or Die"- Too bad the laws of physics put absolute limits on the amount of freedom that people can have.

This is a discussion of goals, not systems. Leave your nightwatchmen nonsense at the door and talk about the reasons. If we can ever manage to agree on anything we'll pick systems later.

"Promoting Humanity in general"- In this sense I am talking about humanity as a collection of individuals. That's all it can ever be. You further humanity as a whole by furthering all of the sapients within that society individually.

Remember, we are deciding on a goal in this thread. That means compromise. It doesn't mean beating each other over the head in ideological warfare. If two people can't agree on the very first thing, then you can kiss any CSCS goodbye.

By the way, on that note, there should be at least three people in this thread. Why don't you chime in, Mike?

I am talking about a goal - to maximise freedom that people have. Leave you're UU nonsense at the door and talk about what the aim should be.

Give me liberty, or give me death. Entropy means everything eventually dies; what's the point of losing everyone's freedom in order to drag out survival by another trillion years? The laws of physics, after all, put an absolute limit on how much power one has.

Hence the solution to Fermi's paradox - within a century or so of discovering entropy, civilisations commit mass suicide.

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Leave you're UU nonsense at the door and talk about what the aim should be.

Please point to me one place since I resurrected this thread where I have advocated any system. I have intentionally not done so. The reason I have not done so is because it makes absolutely no sense to do something before we decide what the point of doing that is.

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what's the point of losing everyone's freedom in order to drag out survival by another trillion years?

1. Strawman- I never said that we should take away people's freedoms, only that they are not the central aspect to the goal of ensuring Humanity's survival and ultimate good.

And gee, let me think for a second about the possible good things about humanity surviving another 1,000,000,000,000 years (365,000,000,000,000 days, 32,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds). Say the average number of sentients over that time period is 1 trillion (A low estimate, considering how much space there is in this universe on which to upload minds). That means that by extending human existence over that trillion years, you give people 32,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (3.2e28) person*seconds in which they can live, can be happy, can love, can grow, can think, can explore, and can advance to the point where both my mind and the English language as it exists now are utterly incapable of describing the positive activities which they will, by and large, pursue, perhaps from the ashes of this universe and into the seeds of the next one if a next one is to come around.

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within a century or so of discovering entropy, civilisations commit mass suicide.

Strangely enough, people have had a conception of entropy since 1769 (241 years ago), was first scientifically investigated in 1803 (207 years ago), and was mathematically described by 1854 (156 years ago). So far as I know, there was no mass suicide in 1954. We're actually closer to 2 centuries from a fully mathematical explanation now, and Humanity is doing okay. Even though it's dirty, Coal and Natural Gas will last at least another 50-100 years, and the Sun has a good 5-6 billion more summers in it. More if we stir it around a bit.

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Give me liberty, or give me death.

Or maybe not- you don't seem to have killed yourself in protest of the restrictions on liberty imposed by the laws of physics.

Freedoms are good governance- they do seem to be helpful in running an effective country. But this noble savage nonsense is just ridiculous.

Where did I mention noble savages? I'm not advocating anarchy...

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And gee, let me think for a second about the possible good things about humanity surviving another 1,000,000,000,000 years (365,000,000,000,000 days, 32,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds). Say the average number of sentients over that time period is 1 trillion (A low estimate, considering how much space there is in this universe on which to upload minds).

What makes them 'good'? Where do you draw this irrational conclusion about what is 'good' from?

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That means that by extending human existence over that trillion years, you give people 32,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (3.2e28) person*seconds in which they can live, can be happy, can love, can grow, can think, can explore, and can advance to the point where both my mind and the English language as it exists now are utterly incapable of describing the positive activities which they will, by and large, pursue, perhaps from the ashes of this universe and into the seeds of the next one if a next one is to come around.

Alternatively, you give them all that time in which they can be miserable, wreck others lives, can hate, can sink into a mire of self-pity... these things are more likely to occur than those you describe, given the fallen nature of the human condition.

I advise you read some Paul Birch; there's an article by him regarding flaw's in Utilitarianism. The problem occurs is that you have more person-days of happiness with 1 trillion people in misery than 1 billion happy people, so if the objective is to maximise total happiness...

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What makes them 'good'? Where do you draw this irrational conclusion about what is 'good' from?

I don't know about you, but I enjoy living very much. Screw the philosophers and naysayers, life is good.

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Alternatively, you give them all that time in which they can be miserable, wreck others lives, can hate, can sink into a mire of self-pity... these things are more likely to occur than those you describe, given the fallen nature of the human condition.

I advise you read some Paul Birch; there's an article by him regarding flaw's in Utilitarianism. The problem occurs is that you have more person-days of happiness with 1 trillion people in misery than 1 billion happy people, so if the objective is to maximise total happiness...

Clearly minimizing unhappiness is just as much a factor as maximizing happiness- they're part and parcel. There should only be a trillion people if they can be supported well enough to be supported sufficiently.

There is, of course, a very simple compromise in this situation: There need not be just one goal.

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I don't know about you, but I enjoy living very much. Screw the philosophers and naysayers, life is good.

I don't know about you, but life is terrible. Screw the counsellors and the psychiatrists, life is terrible.

Does that sound like good enough reasoning to massacre everyone?

Albert Camus wrote:

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

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I don't know about you, but life is terrible. Screw the counsellors and the psychiatrists, life is terrible.

Does that sound like good enough reasoning to massacre everyone?

Not really. Perhaps a reason to commit suicide, maybe.

Speaking of suicide: Take the number of suicides as the proportion of people who think that way, in that they hate life and choose to end it. Though the proportion varies, suicide in the US is 11.1 people per 100,000 per year. Say that the average person who commits suicide lives for 1 month (A gross exaggeration, but I'll call it that) under whatever makes them miserable enough to commit suicide before they do it. That means that in a given month, about 1 person in 100,000 will have circumstances that to them merit suicide. Suicide is also highly correlated with substance abuse, poverty, mental disorders (Meaning people that are completely insane as opposed to just depressed), depression (A chemical imbalance in the brain that is treatable and perhaps curable), and furthermore many suicides are pleas for attention.

Even with all of these, that is 00.001% of people who do not feel that life is worth living at any given time. A large majority of the world, including (it would seem) you, agree with me on my "irrational conclusion" that life is worth living. As I said before, screw the philosopher, humanity has already decided by and large that it enjoys living.

The goal is to gain advantage through domination and control.
Those in control need the controlled,
and the interaction can evolve into parasitic or symbiotic.

A clean slate is just the start, but will it evolve into a steady state ?

Humans have also decided, by and large, that they all enjoy as much liberty as possible. Therefore, we need an ultra-minimalist state. I got there using exactly the same logic as you.

Anyway, had you tried extending your simplistic model over the next several trillion years, with a population that doesn't reproduce (with indefinite life extension, quite likely) you will likely discover that after a few billion years the population will get quite low...

Utilitarianism has too many flaws to serve as a viable model. For example, 9 people could be 90% happy, but as a side effect it makes 1 person 20% happy. So on average, each person is 83% happy. Is this a preferable situation to one where there are 10 people, each 80% happy, because in the latter both the the total and average happiness is lower?

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Humans have also decided, by and large, that they all enjoy as much liberty as possible. Therefore, we need an ultra-minimalist state. I got there using exactly the same logic as you.

Have any statistics? Anything?

Rights and freedoms are a viable strategy to have a stable society, but I don't see them as a goal.

By the way, you seem to have used a very utilitarian way of thinking to justify making freedoms the #1 goal.

Furthermore, you seem to have missed the most important part of my post:

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There is, of course, a very simple compromise in this situation: There need not be just one goal.

While I absolutely disagree with what you say and most of where you're coming from, there is no reason why our list shouldn't be longer than 1 goal. As my history teacher likes to say, "There are no simple solutions to complex problems, only complex solutions to complex problems"- Why not choose both?

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The goal is to gain advantage through domination and control.
Those in control need the controlled,
and the interaction can evolve into parasitic or symbiotic.

A clean slate is just the start, but will it evolve into a steady state?

I think you may have missed my meaning, we're not talking about the way things are now but instead how we thing that they should be in the prospective CSCS (Clean Slate City-State)

Genesis 9:7
"And ye, be fruitful and multiply: swarm on the earth, and multiply on it."

God really meant all of the universe.

No response to this, NoMoreLies?

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Furthermore, you seem to have missed the most important part of my post:

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There is, of course, a very simple compromise in this situation: There need not be just one goal.

While I absolutely disagree with what you say and most of where you're coming from, there is no reason why our list shouldn't be longer than 1 goal. As my history teacher likes to say, "There are no simple solutions to complex problems, only complex solutions to complex problems"- Why not choose both?

The Clean Slate City-State is an Utopian dream -- or a nightmare.
From the present and the past come wishes and desires.
Imposing a goal, dictating to others, according to imagined benefits.

The Clean Slate City-State picture looks like a neighborhood rebuilt around a subway stop. Old ideas with recent buildings. Bunch of high rises with little imagination.

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I don't know about you, but life is terrible. Screw the counsellors and the psychiatrists, life is terrible.

Suicide is a form of co-operation. When someone, maybe your girlfriend, demeans you. -- I love her and will drink myself to death. (or at least to forget) -- Playing a hand of cards, is all each individual has.

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The Clean Slate City-State picture looks like a neighborhood rebuilt around a subway stop. Old ideas with recent buildings. Bunch of high rises with little imagination.

Yeah, I think the picture could definitely be better but that just came from a google search AFAIK it's not an actual portrayal of any concrete city plans because quite honestly at this moment we have none.

And every society needs a goal or some sort of founding declaration. In America, it's the constitution. In many other places there is no constitution or physical founding document, but instead cultural norms and expectations that keep the system stable. Or they may have neither of these, in which case a short term peace is enforced through violence and repression (a contradiction but nevertheless true) and then within a few years violence reigns again.

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There is, of course, a very simple compromise in this situation: There need not be just one goal.

While I absolutely disagree with what you say and most of where you're coming from, there is no reason why our list shouldn't be longer than 1 goal. As my history teacher likes to say, "There are no simple solutions to complex problems, only complex solutions to complex problems"- Why not choose both?

I don't assume that my opinion here holds any weight, but nevertheless I agree with Redsand on this one. I think we can do better than a simple goal that can be summed up in one or two sentences. Perhaps we could have a system of goals, each with defined weights, and the provision to evolve to match societies best interests over time?

However, unlike Redsand I'm not sure that the establishment of such a goal (whether any specific goal, or even any general philosophical direction) is strictly required for a society to be progressive and productive (or, if you will, "good"). I consider myself an Agnostic, and that philosophy (or lack thereof?) tends to pervade into these sorts of issues as well. Is it constructive or "good" to engineer a goal or reason from nothing (or at best, without the existence of sufficient philosophical understanding or agreement)?

Such a debate to me would seem similar to trying to answer the question of whether God exists, or the question of the purpose of life. I'm not expert enough to answer either, and I can't imagine that anyone else is either.

But I do like the idea of a goal. Goals can be very important tools. So while we might lack sufficient philosophical understanding to truly justify one of these 'big romantic goals' that many might like the idea of, I don't think we should be really afraid of using them anyway. So by all means, have a goal, so long as it is well-communicated that such a goal is not absolute, not necessarily sufficiently justifiable, and never definitive. It should always be able to be subject to debate and criticism.

Just like everything else, then.

The idea is to have a free-enough and smart-enough society that you don't have to worry so much about these things anyway.

- Mike