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From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Thinking about the reduction of Entropy.
Summary: Seeing around the next bend.
Keywords: Heat Death and Light Life.
Message-ID: <48428@linus.UUCP>
Date: 9 Apr 89 15:05:04 GMT
References: <550002@hpfelg.HP.COM> <8300034@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu> <47325@linus.UUCP> <838@uceng.UC.EDU>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort)
Organization: IdeaSync, Inc., Chronos, VT
Lines: 22

In article <47325@linus.UUCP>, bwk@mbunix.mitre.org I wrote:

 > >  I just don't understand why an intelligent species would consciously
 > >  take self-destruction as a goal.

To which Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU) responds in
article <838@uceng.UC.EDU>:

 > For societies, self-destruction is not a goal at all.  Instead,
 > it is an emergent property resulting from a collection of entities
 > each trying to maximize its claim on available resources while
 > minimizing its personal effort.  Designing complex nonlinear systems
 > to have arbitrary pre-specified emergent properties is quite beyond
 > the state of current engineering (see the papers of Steven Wolfram).

Ah, then it is our collective ignorance which leads us to steam off
in the direction of disaster.  I understand that.

Perhaps if we took turns standing on each other's shoulders,
we could see a little further beyond the horizon.

--Barry