Re:Stallman’s Law
by stcredzero on Sunday November 27, 2016 @09:42PM
(#13053043)
Just because your quasi-mathematical model breaks, that doesn't necessarily mean this has anything to do with reality. We have high confidence that mathematical models in physics and chemistry often do have consequences and say something about reality. Economics has an interesting track record here as well. In the realm of ethics, politics, and ideology? Ehhh...not so much.
Re:Stallman’s Law
by JacksonGariety on Monday November 28, 2016 @01:12AM
(#13053732)
Ideology has almost nothing at all to do with mathematics, you got that right.
Re:Stallman’s Law
by undershirt on Monday November 28, 2016 @08:02AM
(#13055111)
It's interesting that contradiction, that is inconsistency, is a hint that a mathematical system does not model something in reality, because we don't want to believe such a thing can exist. But it is about as hard to work out the kinks of inconsistency from of a mathematical model as it is from ideology, law, ethics, and other such systems that we construct to guide our behavior. So I would say that METAmathematics has a lot to say about us and our ability to construct consistent systems-- it's really hard.
Freedom is one such example since it cannot belong to everyone when competing interests are at play. That might be a strange way to slice it though, since the language we use to describe freedom is probably not as well defined as we think.
Stallman recognized this from the start of GNU:
"proprietary modifications will not be allowed"
“This procedure thus implies a certain logic of exception: every ideological Universal–for example freedom, equality–is 'false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity. Freedom, for example: a universal notion comprising a number of species (freedom of speech and press, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, political freedom, and so on) but also, by means of a structural necessity, a specific freedom (that of the worker to sell freely his own labour on the market) which subverts this universal notion. That is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labour 'freely’, the worker loses his freedom–the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of 'bourgeois freedoms’. - Slavoj Zizek