intrust

You have perhaps heard that any two people on this planet are connected through 6 degrees of separation¹. That the number is so low, if true, is dramatic, but less significant than the fact that we are all actually connected. It just might be that all ideas and concepts, memes, norms and laws are also related by 6 degrees of separation. That is also an interesting notion to ponder. In extension, it might just be that all of the above: peoples, ideas, norms and laws are connected through 6 degrees of separation.

But if there is any truth in that, in what manner are these connections constituted? We could of course say – via communication; That people communicate ideas and concepts to each other or that laws and memes communicate to us. That laws communicate to laws and ideas communicate to ideas is something we are not quite ready to accept, after all they are our laws and our ideas. Even in creating vast libraries of dW3, we are not quite ready to forgo the paradigm of the library goer, who checks out books and reads and thinks and talks and writes perhaps new books. And then she returns to the library, and the book she borrowed, and the ideas therein she internalized, goes back on the shelf waiting for the next lender.

When the library shuts at night, when the lights go off, well that’s it. The books are not supposed to come to life like the toys in the story of the Little Tin Soldier. They’re not supposed to get down off their shelves and start having fun, dancing about, or more appropriately, considering their environment, start discussing issues and debating and showing off what they each know, and teaching each other things. They are definitely not expected to procreate and have little baby books and take off on their own genetically determined evolution. How would survival of the fittest for the species of dW3 play out anyway?

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers – James Thurber

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 14:48