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View Full Version : Agents, Artifacts and Generative Relationships


Krazy P
09-22-2008, 10:05 PM
Artifacts (stuff) is has value to agents (people) only if the artifact fosters generative relationships that create value for agents (people).

Since mankind primarily experiences the real world through artifacts, this is not a trivial issue. (Think about this, of the things you touched, smelled, tasted, saw, and heard today, how many were from the natural world and how many from the man-made?)

You can have a lot of stuff. Does it create value to you by connecting you to others - and do those connections add value to your life?

If the artifact does not do this, it has no value.

This is one of the wisdoms of complexity - an emerging science that has received a lot of buzz lately:

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The Santa Fe Institute is devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community, one emphasizing multi-disciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems. Current research areas include...

Physics of Complex Systems

Emergence, Innovation and Robustness
in Evolutionary Systems

Information Processing and Computation
in Nature and Society

Dynamics and Quantitative Studies of Human
Behavior, History and Social Institutions

Emergence, Organization and Dynamics
of Living Systems

Monte314
09-23-2008, 04:48 AM
Excellent points touching on the fundamental difference between communism (which assesses value based upon the labor required to produce something) and capitalism (which assesses value based upon market demand, which generally derives from utility).

"New scientific communities" sounds interesting... I'll certainly want to check it out.