When I was a child I feared the dark, I feared inside it were living monsters and ghosts ready to eat me, and what I feared most were the shadows of the curtains made by the weak light coming from the window… It’s strange how things change in our lives, how something hated could be then liked.
I like the night, and I like the dark, but most of all I like that half light coming from the window. I like to eat late in the evening, leaving the lights turned off, the window open, the fresh air coming in, the radio playing its magic. It gives me a very pleasurable sensation, it turns me in the relaxed mood.
I do not know if someone has already proposed a theory like this and if they did, then I hope, better to say I am quite sure, they did it with a deeper knowledge of the matter than me. So the bulk idea is very simple, I think money is a symbolic exchanger of energy. In this sense I think natural laws in the economic field, I mean the laws of economics, can be reduced to physical laws in some way.
Do you have any research that can prove or disprove this? No, I have not. And I guess it will be quite hard for me to have a personal research on this matter in the future, giving the fact I am neither a researcher nor a very reach person able to pay researchers…
Maybe someone else will research on this field or they have already worked on it, but I just do not know.
Sometimes I think to it. Maybe it is some heritage coming from the Buddhist meditations I have done when I was young, maybe not, anyway it happens and I think to it. Don’t you do too? I mean, don’t you ever think to life and death and to sense of all of this?
Many things happens during our lives, we do and taste many things, many jobs, many people… we are always concentrated upon what we believe to be important, however what is really important?
Exactly one year ago I was experimenting the functionalities of WordPress opening a (now closed) blog on wordpress.com. That blog was intended to be about democratic principles and it was eventually merged into Rational Patterns, or better not really merged because I didn’t actually exported the posts, but the idea of writing about the argument persisted.
Today again is 25th April, the day of Italian liberation from nazi-fascism, and I decided to come back to the starting topic of that old blog: Freedom of Speech.
My 2008-04-19T09:10:11Z post was titled A cell phone will not make you free… if you are not allowed to use it for criticising your government as you like. However this was just the third or fourth reformulation I have done of it. The first formulation sounded like this A cell phone will not make you free… if you cannot say whatever you like using it. Unfortunately when you state freedom of speech in this way many problems arise and this is what we can call the problem of speech limits.
Firstly I note that (as in any human action) we have two sets of limitations: physical limitations and social limitations. So we can distinguish among what we can say and what we are allowed to say. The whole problem seems to be not to much about what we can say but mostly about what we can say without being allowed to say it. So the problem is just or mainly a social problem. We can say almost everything our tongue, mouth and vocal cords are able to articulate, but we are not always allowed to say it. In other words, should we be allowed to say whichever thing we can say and we want to say?
This last formulation also introduced a new element: our will. Now the problem seems to me just a subset of a wider problem, the problem of the conflicts among what we can do, what we want to do and what we are allowed to/have to/must do1. Anyway let’s come back to the speech problem a little. Assumed that what we can say is the basic dimension upon which we can “move”, the actual conflict arises among what we want to say and what we are allowed to say, or better it arises when we want to say something we are not allowed to say.
Well, what does it really mean not being allowed to say something? It means that we will have to pay some price if we will say it, maybe we will lose social appreciation or even we’ll be punished by some kind of authority. However digging a little in the idea makes clear that the conflict is among what we want to say and what other people do not want us to say. So coming back to the general point of view the freedom of speech problem, as many other problems about the limits of liberty, appears to be a problem of conflicting wills.
Ok, it’s enough for the moment. I’ll be back on this problem in the future.
Have a good 25th April!
1 In Italian this sounds a bit better Ciò che possiamo fare, ciò che vogliamo fare e ciò che dobbiamo fare. It was the topic of a little set of posts I published on an other old blog, this time on blogspot, just at very beginning of my blogging carrier. Again I do not think to have a copy of them, maybe I’ll search a little when I will have time.
Today I received a YouTube video via Facebook by a Chinese friend of mine.
My friend is a very honest and kind girl and I am quite sure she didn’t send me this video in order to show me how much present regime is able to manipulate history in order to preserve itself at expense of people civil liberties… and this makes me sad. I am still convinced it is time to ask, it is time to ask China to start its democratic reform.
At present we Europeans are living under United States military umbrella. I never liked United States imperialism, as it is called by someone, but at least it has the side effect of enhancing democratic development. Besides imperialism, I am not a fan of exporting democracy by bombing people too… Nevertheless I want to be able to keep my liberties and possibly to expand them and I do not think China, when it will be the new world emperor, will be able to grant me my present liberties, unless it will become an actual democracy.
So there are only two possible choices in my view: increasing European military expenditures in order to be ready to face any military threat China will be able to directly or indirectly pose to our democracies since the middle of this century on, or… trying to work through cultural and economical channels diffusing as much as possible the civil liberty ideals hoping they will root in that country.
Sincerely I prefer the latter, definitely.
The Complete Works of Charles Darwin now online! This is a very, very, very valuable thing!
Some weeks ago I was attracted by the Italian translation of some Darwin’s notebooks but finally I decided not to buy it following my general rule “Do not buy Italian translations of what you can just read in the original language”, and so I was waiting to have enough free time and extra money for the English version… and now here it is! Thanks to Cambridge University!
On my 2008-04-15T21:05:36Z post I set a basic theory of the relationships between choices, standards, ends and means. I do not claim it to be something spectacular just a starting point for looping in.
And on the first round of the loop I want just to review the idea of standard I used.
When I started thinking about that post, my plan was to put standards at the end of the sequence1, then while I was writing I changed my idea, but at the moment of publishing I was already thinking about time standards and the fact that is quite hard to see them as moral choices, at least this seems to me. They seem much more to be means for achieving convergence and interoperability.
So I started thinking a little more about what is a standard. The starting idea was to think to standard as a base upon which take a decision, or better a base or parameter by which creating a reference for judgement. However I think it’s possible to go deeper into the idea of standards thinking to them as widespread patterns of choices, I mean that setting a standard consists in granting (or at least wishing to grant) different operators taking similar choices in similar contexts. In other words, we have two sets: the set of choices and the set of situations, and let’s suppose that every situation needs some kind of choice and that a choice cannot be operated other then in some contextual situation. Then we need to match choices and situations in a 1:1 correspondence or bijection. Let’s suppose now that the matching works randomly, what makes a standard? Ordering! Firstly some kind of equivalence relationship is set both2 in the choice set and in the situation set. Then it is established the bijection that associates distinct equivalence classes in the choice set with distinct equivalence classes in the situation set, et voilà, the standard is done!I have just left a new comment to Margot Wallström’s blog explaining a proposal about how to upgrade the just launched Debating Europe forums (see Wallström’s post).
A proposal for developing a “forum++”
The problem
Web forums are very good to allow people discussing topics, and this means better information, more idea exchange and production, sometimes the development of a shared judgement about this or that policy. But will Commissioners be able to read 13,000 posts? Of course not… so European citizens will discuss things with other fellow European citizens, and this is anyway good, but they will not be heard by those people which seat where decisions are taken, and this is bad because democratic politics are made not only of discussions but also of decisions.
So what to do?
We need to add something to the conventional forum, I mean to add a kind of bottom-up tool which allows (i) people to propose policies to politicians and (ii) politicians to become aware of those proposals.
The following can be a draft description of the path of an idea inside this “forum++”.
- Step 1.
- An European citizen believes to have a good idea for an European policy;
- Step 2.
- She posts it publicly via some kind of web-form and in a particular format (i.e. not too long proposals and so on);
- Step 3.
- Some kind of editorial staff filters the proposals eliminating redundant ones and summarizing each proposal as much as they can (note that the not-filtered material must be anyway publicly accessible in order to allow citizens to check how the editorial staff is working, and note that this action of filtering has not to be confused with the common activity of moderation as it works for ordinary forums or blogs where they filter spam or offending material);
- Step 4.
- The edited material will be published on the net too.
- Step 5.
- People will be allowed to vote via internet about the various (edited) proposals.
- Step 6.
- Every month the ten most voted proposals will be checked by the Commission, this means that the Commission will be compelled to say if they intend or not to implement that proposals, why and in case how and when.