(no subject)

Встретил в ЖЖ старое выражение "продать душу дьяволу" и подумал, что, наверное, можно как-то смоделировать рынок человеческих душ. Например, кто может быть покупателем?  Очевидно, что богу душу нельзя продать, значит, дьявол является монопольным покупателем (monopsony). С другой стороны, чертей, в отличие от дьявола, много, значит у них должна быть конкуренция за души. Все это очень похоже на модель tin-pot диктатора.

Импортозамещение бананов

Сколько килограммов российской картошки надо съесть, чтобы не захотелось есть один килограмм австралийских бананов? 

The experience of democracy

In one of his lectures professor J.R.Searle used the following thought experiment to explain the subjective nature of consciousness:

Suppose we have two countries where traffic lights have two colors: red and green. The key difference between the countries is that their people have a color inversion. In country A they call low-frequency light "red" and high-frequency light "green". In country B they call low-frequency light - "green" and high-frequency light - "red". In both countries drivers stop on "red" and go on "green"; therefore, their traffic-related behavior is identical. Paradoxically, their subjective (internal) experiences are different because they see different colors! (Also see What is it like to be a bat?)

Probably the same paradox works when we discuss elections with people from authoritarian countries. We both use terms like "elections", "casting ballots", "counting votes", "election commision", "court", etc. We even behave similarly: participate in elections, cast ballots, count votes, protest to election commissions and even courts. Nevertheless, the difference in subjectve experience of an individual participating in each of those elections is enormous. Often, it is impossible to describe the difference because it is rooted in much deeper processes. When you tell them that their elections are not democratic, they say "What do you mean? We do everything the same way you do."

Maybe that's why arranging US trips for Russian youth doesn't really work, unless they actually participate in the democratic process, or education process, or whatever process of real-life experience.

upd: just in case, the concepts of low- and high-frequency lights are not necessary for the thought experiment to work. one could teach a new driver how to react to traffic lights by pointing to a specific light and saying "stop" or "go".

Deep controversy of the day - 2

Floridini (2012):

Information is one of those crucial concepts whose technical meaning we have not inherited or even adapted from ancient philosophy or theology. It is not a Greek word, and the Latin term happens to have a different meaning, largely unrelated to the way we understand information nowadays.

Be that as it may, ‘what is information?’ has received many answers in different fields. Several surveys2 do not even converge, let alone agree, on a single, unified definition of information.

unfortunately, the nature of data is not well-understood philosophically either, despite the fact that some important past debates—such as those on the given and on sense data—have provided at least some initial insights. There still remains the advantage, however, that the concept of data is less rich, obscure, and slippery than that of information, and hence is easier to handle

SEoP:

Until recently the possibility of a unification of these theories was generally doubted (Adriaans and van Benthem 2008a) but in the past decade conversions and reductions between various formal models have been studied (Cover and Thomas 2006; Grünwald and Vitányi 2008; Bais and Farmer 2008). The situation that seems to emerge is not unlike the concept of energy: there are various formal sub-theories about energy (kinetic, potential, electrical, chemical, nuclear) with well-defined transformations between them. Apart from that, the term ‘energy’ is used loosely in colloquial speech.

WTF. Why the ancients didn't provide us with a good definition?

(no subject)

Data as diaphora de re, that is, as lack of uniformity in the real world out there. There is no specific name for such ‘data in the wild’.

I wonder why Floridini doesn't consider data to be an interface between the known and the unknown.

For example, here the world is uniform; thus, there's no data there:
"Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep;"

Can we say that trust is based on an expectation of uniformity (no data) extended into the future?
"Most generally, trust can be considered the expectation held by each member of a society that the existing natural and moral social orders will persist. This is to say that members of society have an inherent trust or faith that ‘the sun will rise tomorrow’ and society will exist more or less as it did today (Barber, 1959)."