Re: [Fis] Sustainable use of resources

Dear Pavel and colleagues,

I keep interested in the value theme, basically for two reasons. On the one
side, if the whole economic system has entered in a vertiginous path of
'irrational exuberance' (most of it automatically guided by global
computerized systems and self-sufficient management elites) hardly
sustainable by the planet, we must look in all possible depth at those tiny
'bits' that connect the Big Automaton with our individual decisions and
actions. So I am much interested on hearing from other FIS parties about
the different economic views historically connecting, for instance, 'value
of use' with 'value of change' and the dynamics of the pricing systems.
Besides I think that our social use (probably in almost every language) of
a common term both for economic and moral 'value', suggests that a
homologous mental mechanism is in action when we build hierarchies between
social values and when we attribute some price (a cardinal number more or
less fine-tuned) to the exchange of some economic item. Actually both
operations could be contemplated as fitness instantiations: as attempts to
behave appropriately in order to thrive, or just survive, in a very complex
social setting... Maybe we have not properly connected yet economics with
the basic informational (communication) themes raised by Jerry at the
Introduction.

About the 'concrete wall' I like the metaphor, and I also share most of the
views and other vivid metaphors about sustainability in other messages.
But, in the historical aspects, I would emphasize the role of science
--concretely the scientific revolution-- in the onset of the industrial
revolution. Classical Mechanics did a lot to precipitate the new industrial
world, including the promotion of a new materialist (mechanistic)
cosmovision almost blind on any non-numerical aspect of our lives.
Ironically, mechanicism was shared by two opposed sides of the social
unrest of that time, particularly in Europe: Marxist 'social masses'
'productive forces' 'political forces' irreversible social processes'
'revolutions'... a genuine 'social mechanics' indeed (even dancing itself
was mechanized: see the very interesting comments by Tolstoi and by Lewis
Mumford on 'waltz').

Unfortunately mechanistic reductionism is still rampant in economic schools
opposed to established econometrics, now in the entropy basis. Some
sentences in Sergio's last posting are really difficult to handle: "Seeds,
money, DNA, books, software, religions, cities, database, have no hope to
last, reproduce, or even survive against the law of entropy, if resource
flows are not provided every day to counter their degradation." That
sentence (and the whole paragraph) implies hard core reductionism that
keeps ahead with the existing confusion and unidimensionality, particularly
about information. Apart from being wrong (entropy analysis of DNA???, or
of seeds???), it is self-defeating in terms of grounding a new integrative
contemplation of our contemporary problems. It is a very serious
criticism to apply to most authors of the ecological-economic field
(Martinez Allier's paragraph cited by Sergio, or Herman Daly himself,
Enzo... ). This current will hardly succeed in the 'paradigm clash' with
conventional econometrics if they do not radically depart from any 'social
mechanics' foundations. At the time being, no one has the good recipe about
how to do that ---in my opinion, it is a common problem that could also
concern fis information scientists: how to advance towards a sophisticate
view of social economic information processes beyond the self-complacient,
technoutopian and unidimensional views of 'information society'?.

I will try to put in a better form the above ideas. It would be great if we
could finally produce in this discussion a bunch of distinctions similar to
the ones we did on biological information. (for our colleagues just arrived
to this list, a perusal of the recent discussions we had on 'molecular
recognition' and biological information would be very interesting:
particularly that one cannot lump together the very different classes and
dynamics of bioinformational processes, and if one does, well the strategic
distinctions become completely lost.)

all the best

Pedro

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Received on Fri Nov 28 11:49:40 2003