Young Master Smeet
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Well, it's not immigrants or immigation that lowers wages: it's employers. As socialists we stand in solidarity with our fellow workers, without distinction of nation, race or sex, and see the successful resolution of the class struggle as the only way to address the poverty our class suffers. We can't let the employers divide us and play us off one against the other. If we organise in unions, and politically, we can fight back.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=O7D9AyU-nLYC&dq=pannekoek+history+astronomy&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PnsYUsqiJaeM0AXV9YFY&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAAThere is a copy of this book in the party library. He does apply cod Hegelian structures, he talks of science as the transformation of quality into quantity (for example, rather than a star being 'bright' it is a measurable figure on the luminosity scale). Not quite Engelsian in saying such dialectics occur in nature, he seems to be implcitly saying the dialectic lies in the scientific process.
I think Alistair Campbell can come to our rescue here. Apparently in government, he banged on about OST: Objective, Strategy, Tactics. For us, it runs like this:Objective: The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.Strategy:That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.Tactics: Contest elections, hand out leaflets, sell the Standard. Now, Left unity flounders at the first stp, there is no common objective: socialism can mean anything from regulated markets, to Cuban style autarky, and all are included in left Unity.Even supposing an agreement on object, there is a wide disagreement on strategy, between the street protestors, the undoubted syndicalists and trotskyists and what nots who would object to any parliamentary route at all, and then the Left of Labour types who will be happy with electoral work. Of course, we disagree fundamentally on the question of pursuing reforms (and then you will have to agree among yourselves what reforms to pursue).
jondwhite wrote:I think you're using left in a sense of self-identified lefties who eschew revolution, strange in a topic about the Left Unity project. In the rhetorically "revolutionary" mileu, Occupy has done pretty well, in terms of breadth and depth of support, especially contrasted to non-"revolutionary" lefties, Labour etc.. Occupy Wall Street was also much better at this than Occupy London.Well, Left Unity isn't a revolutionary organisation, is it? The Spirit of 45 wasn't exactly revolutionary.
Quote:YMS: I've got nothing against you approaching the Socialist Platform if you want to. I was just drawing attention to the similarity between your own "means" and those you're wont to sneer at. It's no surprise to me that SPGBers would read the "Socialist Platform", note the similarity in words, and then turn up armed to the teeth with leaflets. It's just amusing to me that everyone's "means" and methods and actions are fair game for the most condescending sneering apart from your own, which is apparently a model of righteousness. Except, as I pointed out, they are in this case indistinguishable.Well, our means are correct, and the right way of doing things, hence why we defend them. It's entirely right for us to suggest that Socialist Platform types would be better off joining us rather than trying to yoke the reformist elements of UL to their platform. I don't see what's opportunist (or deceitful or underhand) about a public open letter pointing that out: we're standing by our guns. If anything, calling them out is a useful test to see if they will stand by theirs, or if they were engaged in submarine manoeuvres.
The nostradamus method appears to be better than the poor argumentation method.
Quote:Sid the Socialist: Building that house without cement will be a failure.Ollie the Occupier: OK, when, and by what standards, and compared with who or what?Sid the Socialist: Eventually, and when compared with our strategy, which is to get everyone to use cement.It is perfectly reasonable to argue that the methods being employed cannot achieve the ends desired, and to argue for the use of workable means. Given we've gathered together to advocate those means, it'd be odd if our approach to others with the same ends was not to argue for our means.
I'm not sure that's true, on a basic empirical level, several hundred thousand at least vote left in election, dwarfing those who engaged in Occupy. I'm not so sure that Occupy eshewed demands, as such, although there was no platform, central demand, it was rife with people who had money crankery up their sleeve.
Stuart,After the dismal failure of Occupy, because it was a formless idea-less movement, left unity based on a like formlessness around a sort of possiblism will go the same way: you don't have to be Nostradamus to see that. The "Socialist Platform" will be asked to subsume themselves to that possiblism, so there's no harm in saying to them that a separate explicitly Socialist Party already exists if they wanted to put the effort in.
It seems there are other useful mathematicians out there:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brams%E2%80%93Taylor_procedureFrom their patent (yeah, I know):
Patent wrote:In both methods, the parties are each given 100 points and then bid on each item using their points. Under the AW method, which is applicable to indivisible items, each party is initially allocated those goods, or wins on those issues, for which it bids the higher number of points. Then the goods or issues are reassigned, or resolved differently, to achieve equality of points based on the quotients of the parties' bids. Under PA, each good or issue is divided according to a ratio based on both parties' bids for that good or issue.Obviously, that sounds like market like behaviour, although it is a game in which the entrants do not bring a pile of money, but play according to the same rules each time. It seems there are a plethora of such methods out there that could be used.
Well, I won't try to define intelligence, largely because in computer terms, I'd suggest it isn't actually very interesting, and ends up being misleading. Intelligence like captures it better, because I would maintain that humans produce intelligence like behaviour, and mistake it for intelligence, much of which, as I said, is a by-blow of our linguistic capacities and our advanced orders of theory of mindhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mindSo, what I'm interested in is robots/computers that not only perform high order calculations, but can recognise real world objects (rapidly) and can make deep searches of vast databases and can not only retrieve data but find relevence and manipulate it to produce new data.Designing, say, an entire new model car, so that it would not just be efficient and cheap to produce, but also attractive to human beings, would be a very high order function.Even a computer that can drive a car safely (they exist at prototype stage now) is intelligence like, because it requires situational awareness of external objects, and some notion of how other drivers are going to react.These sorts of things, rather than an artificial personality (which is what many people, driven by the movies, mistake for AI).
LBird wrote:So,… the human 'designers' produce… and the robots do the donkey work…Sorry, my fault, 'computer designers' = computer based robots, as opposed to physical robots. The idea being that a computer could design a bridge, plan the project, place the requisitions for parts, and co-ordinate the physical robots to build the bridge.As for helping Deep Blue: the computer programmers reprogrammed it between matches, changing it's evaluations. So, it's true to say that it lacked an ability to learn.As I've linked to before, the Robot World Cup is worth watching:http://www.robocup2013.org/The level of computation to find and kick a ball is incredible.
Just to explain to people what the Chinese room is:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Searle wrote:"Suppose that I'm locked in a room and … that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken". He further supposes that he has a set of rules in English that "enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols," that is, the Chinese characters. These rules allow him to respond, in written Chinese, to questions, also written in Chinese, in such a way that the posers of the questions – who do understand Chinese – are convinced that Searle can actually understand the Chinese conversation too, even though he cannot. Similarly, he argues that if there is a computer program that allows a computer to carry on an intelligent conversation in written Chinese, the computer executing the program would not understand the conversation eitherSo, this is a refutation, more or less, to the Turing test (in which an AI passes if it can convince a human it is a human in conversation). The section on the wikipedia article called "Brain simulation and connectionist replies: redesigning the room" is directly relevent to this discussion. I find Searle interesting, but I find compelling the idea of some neuroscientists that intention in the human mind in retrospective (personally, I think as a result of language and our 'social' mind, in which we feel we are explaining ourselves to our fellows). But I do have some sympathy with the idea that only a physical entity structured like a human brain can actually produce human consciousness/intelligence.
ALB wrote:The November/December 2012 issue carried an article by Massimo Piglucci. a philosopher of science who writes a regular "Thinking About Science" column, entitled "Singularity As Pseudoscience".Well, that is one strong critique (certainly against the 'Rapture of the Nerds' end of the spectrum). But singularity also includes the possibility of human augmented intelligence, or network emergence.A couple of examples. Cricket: despite the ashes referral issues, one effect of technology has been to radically alter LBW calls. For years, human eye umpiring was giving not out to balls that Hawkeye proved were actually plumb. So, now the humans have responded by learning what a real LBW looks like, and are calling it better. Likewise, I've used this before, but early Twentieth Century chess masters were apparently blunder prone, and missed lines that are obvious to the current generation, who have been trained and schooled with computer chess programmes that can show them the deep outcomes of their choices.The point isn't that an artificial person might be created, but that intelligence-like activities, such as lawyering, or designing bridges, could be computerised and could be better than the human version.
Well, it's a philosophical problem that might be solved by computing methods. Though the computer tech response is to say that the question of whether a computer can think is as uninteresting as asking whether a submarine can swim. After all, Bertrand Russell after 350+ pages didn't manage to prove 1+1=2 (he got to a partial proof, but never managed to define addition), but that doesn't stop us using maths in any case. A computer beat Gary Kasparov at chess (with, yes, the help of human programmers), so we know that 'intelligence-like' capabilities can be produced by computers, up to the point where we may get computer designers producing schematics of cars for robot factories to build.BTW, I am taken with Searles Chinese box argument, but a fully virtualised brain could by-pass the question of intentionality.
To start with a quote I quite like:
Quote:In reality these words now have a social meaning in which the political meaning is dissolved. The Revolution itself was something quite different from a struggle for this or that form of State, as people in Germany still quite frequently imagine that it was. The connection of most insurrections of that time with famine, the significance which the provisioning of the capital and the distribution of supplies assumed already from 1789 onwards, the maximum, the laws against buying up food supplies, the battle cry of the revolutionary armies — “Guerre aux palais, paix aux chaumières” [War to the palaces, peace to the cottages] — the testimony of the Carmagnole[2] according to which Republicans must have du pain [Bread] as well as du fer [Arms] and du coeur [Heart, courage] — and a hundred other obvious superficialities already prove, without any more detailed investigation of the facts, how greatly democracy differed at that time from a mere political organisation. As it is it is well known that the Constitution of 1793 and the terror originated with the party which derived its support from the insurgent proletariat, that Robespierre’s overthrow signified the victory of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, that Babeuf’s conspiracy for equality revealed the final consequences of the democracy of ‘93 — insofar as these were at all possible at that time. [3] The French Revolution was a social movement from beginning to end, and after it a purely political democracy became a complete absurdity.Democracy nowadays is communism. Any other democracy can only still, exist in the heads of theoretical visionaries who are not concerned with real events, in whose view it is not the men and the circumstances that develop the principles but the principles develop of themselves. Democracy has become the proletarian principle, the principle of the masses. The masses may be more or less clear about this, the only correct meaning of democracy, but all have at least an obscure feeling that social equality of rights is implicit in democracy. The democratic masses can be safely included in any calculation of the strength of the communist forces. And if the proletarian parties of the different nations unite they will be quite right to inscribe the word “Democracy” on their banners, since, except for those who do not count, all European democrats in 1846 are more or less Communists at heart.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/12/01.htmApologies for extended quote, but the point remains, that the various logical and abstract tools we can imagine for democracy take secondary place to the real social movement and the classes that underlie it. I see no reason, for example, for a socialist society not to use representative democracy, but also referendums, juries, etc.
