Understanding Resource Programs
A program is implemented by some entity in order to promote or achieve a goal. Describing programs thus suggests they might be related to teleological accounts of things and their relationships, though I am not ready to concede that these are equivalent.
The most basic programs are biological imperatives “for” survival. These programs arose in self-sustaining patterns of life and fulfill evolutionary parameters dictated by environment and ecosystem.
Giving a full account of how programs arise is no simple task, nevertheless, the basic principles are captured in descriptions of Darwinian evolution.
Recognizing that the unique qualitative properties of life are systemic and emergent, and not intrinsic to a substance or thing, or immaterial, is of critical importance. I accept reductionist accounts of human experience.
Reductionist accounts do nothing to diminish the richness of life and human experience, the complexity of our social tapestry, or the importance of our social values. In fact, I believe that reductionism enriches these things, by placing them in a mathematical and computational domain. Far from eliminating nuance and mystery, the essential mathematical nature of virtual phenomena makes them appreciably complex, with the potential to engage the full power of human imagination and intellectual achievement and still present many unanswered questions.
Experience may be described as a computational performance of the dance of life. Mathematical temporal relations of information in biological organisms emerged much like the structure of rivers and tribute emerge in a natural world based on forces and repetitive cycles over time. But the immediacy of experience seems to make experience something that is not expressively described or efficiently reduced by the language or tools of mathematics respectively. The epistemic fractal reconstruction of the environment within cognitive computational realms also challenges expectations of a complete mathematical exposition of living experience.
There may be fundamental differences between the emergence of the phenomena of experience in an individual, and the arising of social narratives, culture, collective identity etc, in groups of individuals, or societies.
However, I think it is very important that we consider the possibility that there MIGHT NOT be fundamental differences in the nature of these phenomena, from an informational perspective, only that they happen at different scales and in different systems or subsystems of the natural world.
Philosophical discussion of consciousness, which I claim are usually actually focused on experience, not cognitive consciousness, might assert that abstract entities, such as the United States of America, are not conscious entities. Certainly, the linguistic abstraction “The United Stated of America” is not a conscious entity. But neither are linguistic abstractions which refer to individual organisms: “I”, “You”, “He”, “She”, “It”.
What then, are key differences we might want to be aware of in exploring programs in individuals, such as hunger and pain, versus programs in groups, such as social norms, culture, and institutional practice?
The information processes which happen in larger social systems, I suspect, are readily comparable to information processes which occur in the nervous system of biological organisms which give rise to individual experience. Certainly, biological living organisms exhibit highly specific regularity in their development, lifecycles, and the operational structure of the mature living systems of individual organisms.
Compared to the regularity of results of the programs of biology, mature social systems almost appear unstructured, random, or arbitrary. Nevertheless, I would encourage us to explore the possibility that a similar calculus is involved in the development of both.
In the future, development of social systems may become even more regular and foreseeable. I see finance as playing a role in helping to codify regularity in the structured development of living political and social systems.
But for this to occur, the design of finance must be “right”, or more accurately put, sustainable, just the same way biological life is a sustainable dynamic structural realization of evolutionary constraints.
If social systems do not adequately satisfy constraints of sustainability, they will be destroyed by dialectal process.
All this discussion is perhaps more detailed than what we really need to address the key issues of resource programs, but by recognizing the connection between social processes and biological evolution, that they are not just comparable, but that social evolution, is in essence, also biological, we are provisioning ourselves with powerful intellectual tools that may prove useful later.
The key thing, I think, is to recognize resource programs that exist, their modes of development, transmission, etc.
This is not too unusual a task, though still it still requires careful work, when applied to explicit legal processes(for example, the process of legislating laws). But like biological programs implemented in the gray matter in our skull, many societal programs are in fact hidden from view and obfuscated by incompatible interfaces, specific only to the context where the programs exist.
Let’s turn over every rock, and explore every nook, and learn to appreciate these resource programs wherever they exist.
If we are frustrated by political and legal process, we can turn to such hidden social modes of relation, if not to displace these formal processes mentioned, to complement, and enrich them. While this could refer to corruption and gang activity, I hope the reader would look for much more respectable and legitimate, though informal ways of engaging our social systems.
Only by employing this out of the box thinking will we break out of unsustainable dialectical restrictions against our true nature.
