Posted: Mar 20, 2017 12:20 pm
John Platko wrote:I would suggest that if we want our IP to last it should have the same quality that a gene needs to last, it should be useful for survival in those it is passed on to (or if you want to be more technically fussy, useful for it's own survival). So IP that tends towards being helpful for life to grow will have more legs. And IP that incorporates better explanations of reality, i.e. is a better approximation of the truth, will out last poorer approximations of the truth. IP that has those qualities will have a higher probability to thrive and spawn new IP than IP that provides explanations that are poorer. e.g. not many people are generating new IP using Aristotle's metaphysics compared to the people using modern physics. And I don't think the IP of the those using metaphysics today is going to have legs.
Yes, I think this is better than anything I suggested. You are using the analogy with genes and evolution, which seems as useful here as it would if we are talking about memes (which in many ways your 'snippets of IP' do seem to resemble).
Let me add a thought, possibly one that you will like, given the other thread you linked me to. Is a catchy tune useful for survival? If so, survival of what? Itself only? I try to use this example because a catchy tune doesn't seem to need to be true or false, or an explanation.
John Platko wrote:But I don't want to give the impression that IP is just about conscious information. IP is about more than that. There's our unconscious IP too.
Indeed.
Though I do think that if we want to talk about souls (or the equivalent by a different name) the bigger issue is the durability of people's IPs. To my way of thinking, these do not even remain intact while we're alive. In a trivial way, my IP is not what it was yesterday. In a less trivial way, a person's personality may change dramatically over the years, they may become mean-spirited and cynical if life does not pan out for them. And in a very fundamental way, if they get severe old age dementia it is not really them any more.