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War as a social fauceir

This is actually a comment on comments made on this web page. Probably it is a good idea to read this page first although I quoted the most interesting points.

@ Tim Tayler

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Complex human societies are primarily a product of cultural evolution (since DNA evolution in the last 100K years has been pretty minimal).
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Right. According to the fauceir rule of accelerating evolution. More recent fauceirs show better adaptability. Actually that is the purpose of social progress to create fauceirs ever faster adaptable. So DNA still may evolve but at a much much slower pace.

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Warfare is quite focused on the deaths of organic creatures.
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Wrong. War is focused to solve a social conflict. It is about social fauceirs trying to enslave each other. Admittedly, that involves killing people. Mostly for two reasons: (1) to intimidate survivors and break their resistance, or (2) eliminate fanatics. (These two reasons easily merge.) The nobility, in recent times, miraculously did not kill each other, that is the best proof that war is not about physically killing an opponent but conquering.

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Cultural evolution is much more about differential reproductive success of memes than it is about the deaths of their human hosts.
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Right. In this case meme can be used as a special type of social fauceir.

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In modern times cultural evolution continues apace, while warfare is at an all-time low.
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Right. I hope that will continue.

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Memes survive wars quite well – via women – and can spread quite well without war – witness McDonalds and Starbucks.
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Right. Though I would argue that memes, that specific subclass of social fauceirs, not only survive because of women :-). You would probably agree that ideas may survive in books, films and other media, and yes men also make a humble contribution.

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A focus on warfare seems to put the focus inappropriately on human hosts (instead of culture) and on death (instead of differential reproductive success).
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Right. That's the crucial point. War is a social phenomenon. Stepping back the evolutionary ladder to pure biological individuals, killing members of the same population is rare as it significantly reduced a population's chances to survive. The behavior of killing its own kind evolves with the advent of societies. And there is a rule throughout the realm of biological fauceirs: the stronger the social bounds the more like members of the own species are killed. Not surprisingly, this rule holds among human societies too. For instance, Switzerland that grants more freedom to its people is a neutral country for centuries, while Germany that exhibits stark enslavement of its own people initiated 2 wars in the last century only and took part in two more. Of course, modern wars show a much different anatomy than ancient wars or even inner species conflicts, among lions for instance, still the fauceir abstraction is so general that it allows to easily cross borderlines and to model mathematically. That's why it has to be preferred to simple memes.

@ Jurhum

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My point being that such advancements were later used to get an edge in warfare should not lead to confusing them as fruit of war themselves.
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Right. You couldn’t be more true. And there are similar examples abound. Nuclear physics was not created to produce nuclear bombs.

@ netocracy

You made an interesting point.

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The knowledge is consciousness information and driving force for social evolution. In fact, social evolution is “evolution of knowledge”.
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Knowledge is a fauceir. (Tim Tayler would probably say knowledge is a meme :-).) Knowledge is a fauceir as it has all the essential properties of a fauceir:

  1. it is control
  2. it is information
  3. it consists of sub-fauceirs
  4. it is member of a master fauceir
  5. it evolves

I will explain this in detail now:

  1. We call some crumbs of information knowledge if and only if it may exert control. “Bl...bla ..bla” is nor knowledge as is not some randomly selected words “window snow distribution love”. Knowledge controls other knowledge, knowledge controls people, agriculture, environment and many many other fauceirs. Knowledge is controlled by people thru their brain function.
  2. While controlling other fauceirs knowledge assumes the property of information.
  3. Elements of knowledge are the bits of information it is composed of. These bits of information may be other knowledge (theories and observations) or simply a computer screen or the ink on a sheet of paper.
  4. As discussed before, knowledge may contain other knowledge, so not only it may become part of a greater more general theory, but also part of an ideology or policy.
  5. Knowledge evolves and it is in fact the most advantageous fastest evolving fauceir I'm aware of. It is much faster evolving than society, so it will overtake social control eventually. Despite societies' multiple attempts to monopolize and enslave knowledge (to limit the spread of knowledge by copyright and patent issues, for instance), knowledge has all potentials to outrun clumsy societies.

I'm optimistic.

 
   

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