RE: [Fis] Sustainable use of resources

Dear Pedro and others,

The relationship between various concepts of value is important, and consideration of moral values and other "alternative" value systems is necessary. But these alternatives frequently do not coincide (in terms of valuation, some items valued low in one hierarchy may be valued high in the other), and one reason why they co-exist in a society could be that they complement each other. Moreover, economic valuation often seems to be driven not by fundamental factors, but by the chaotic nature of market itself (stock prices may change dramatically in just few minutes, often having no apparent reason). Thus, a search for "universal" valuation system seems to me a task most likely unsuccessful.

As it seems, we agree that vaulation systems have developed evolutionary to help our survival in social / natural environment, and thus they "pinpoint" proper (or evolutionary advantageous) behaviour. Thus we may distinguish three types of values in terms of origin:
- "biological": human as a living system;
- "socially acquired": those transferred from parents, peers etc. in course of socialization;
- "socially adapted": those emerged within a given individual through his personal experience with society.
Social values may also be distinguished by a "degree of sharing"; they may be values of a given person, or of the whole society (e.g. religious values). Prices in economic system give a hint how values can be adjusted: if a person is unwilling to pay the price, it means that this person disagrees with "social valuation" of the good; if too many disagree, price "goes down", or relative valuation of a good changes. Moral values may be more stable, but they may have a similar mechanism: last century observed great "leaps" in social moral. Thus, value systems adapt to, and then result in mass-like, evolutionary more efficient behavior.

Both you and Loet refer to a human inventive capability, manifested through "increased social complexity" or "scientific breakthroughs". Indeed, i the past, a number of "technological revolutions" managed to improve social life significantly, the "green revolution" being one of its best known examples. However, let me add few arguments that were missing when I mentioned "concrete wall" metaphor. First, as far as I am aware, so far there are no ways to produce "net energy" (that is, energy produced with a technology less energy to create and maintain technology) other than burning non-renewable fuels. Solar cells, and fuel cells too, until recently have been thermodynamically "net energy consumers". This makes tapping energy from the sun inefficient - so far, at least. I suggested that this tapping can be made through natural biosphere, but there may be other technologies, for which we may hope. Second, I am hardly aware of any major crisis that was resolved by the science b!
efore it occurred (maybe the only example is a recent development of new vaccinations). So, most probably, civilization will continue the same evolutionary path until it comes close to, or runs into, the total exhaustion of natural resources.

I think that law of entropy does play important role for all complex systems. Struggling internal (and inevitable) degradation, all of them have evolutionary developed mechanisms of self-maintenance and self-reproduction. Provision of resources for these processes involves the whole diversity of relations between a system and its environment. So, reference to law of entropy does not necessarily imply reductionism: social self-reproduction may be a very complicated process that involves the whole system of medicine and education, but it is still driven (in the very essence) by the law of entropy.

However, I cannot agree totally with what Sergio was saying. Basic analysis of energy flows and "stocks" tells very little about information content of the system. There may be, say, same level of energy in human head and a piece of charcoal size of human head, but information content is different. Also, two men may have same nutrition level, but it does not allow us to determine their intellectual capabilities. There is, certainly, some relation, especially if different layers of organization are considered: a bacteria has a different level of complexity, and a different level of energy consumption, than a multi-cellular organism. But this relationship is very vague.

Now, in response to Heiner's note: I do not see problems whatsoever in using metaphors and models, even though subject of survival concerns everyone so much. Using metaphors is one of possible ways to communicate ideas on a rather sophisticated issue, and it does not undermine the scientific value of a discussion. And, let me imply, a strong metaphor may have very serious impact on human behaviour. In ancient Scandinavia, scalds were chanting "praises" and "abuses" to impact rulers, and legends say there were very succesful at this. I think scientists should also look for good metaphors and bright simple models to impact policy makers.

Kind regards

Pavel

> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Pedro C. Marijuan" [mailto:marijuan@unizar.es]
> Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 14:14
> To: fis-listas.unizar.es
> Subject: 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 Wed Dec 3 20:47:58 2003