(2004-01-10) Edge Whats Your Law

EdgeOrg asked it's team to define laws.

• Frank Tipler said The laws of Physics place no limits on Progress, be it scientific, economic, cultural, or intellectual. In fact, the laws of physics require the knowledge and wealth possessed by intelligent beings in the universe to increase without limit, this knowledge and wealth becoming literally infinite by the the end of time. (Evolution)

• Danny Hillis said Successful representations of reality become more important than the reality they represent... The prize becomes more important than the achievement. (Meta Data)

• David Berreby said Human differences and human similarities are infinite, therefore any assortment of people can be grouped together according to a shared trait or divided according to unshared traits. Our borders of race, ethnie, nation, religion, class etc. are not, then, facts about the world. They are facts about Belief.

• Henry Warwick said Art tells the jokes that science insists on explaining.

• Robert Sapolsky said Think logically, but orthogonally. and It's okay to think about nonsense, as long as you don't believe in it.

• Ray Kurzweil said Evolution applies Positive Feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage.

• Michael Shermer said Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God... The ask-first principle: to find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first. The Happiness principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else's happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else's unhappiness. The liberty (Freedom) principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty. The Zeroeth principle: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Golden Rule)

• Geoffrey Miller said To understand any apparently baffling behavior by another human, ask: what Status Game is this individual playing, to show off which heritable traits, in which mating market? And In principle, there is an Evolution-ary trade-off between any two positive traits. But in practice, every good trait correlates positively with every other good trait.

• Howard Rheingold said Communication media that enable Collective Action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiply the power available to Civilization-s and enable new forms of Social Interaction.