[FRIAM] "All [persons] are created equal"

[Marcus Daniels]

You are made of matter following some trajectory that was initiated with the big bang, and you will go where you will go.  There is no "deserve".

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of thompnickson2 at gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2021 1:04 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] "All [persons] are created equal"

Sarbajit,

If I understand the shape of the globe correctly, you are waking up pretty soon, and I would like to pick up the conversation about caste, if you don't mind.

I believe the proposition in the subject line.  Given the many ways that proposition can be understood as plainly false, I feel that my belief in it must be defended.

In what sense equal?  Not in genes.  Not in uterine environment. .  Not in early nutrition and cognitive stimulation. Not in social capitol. Not in financial capitol.  Not in access to health care.  Not in exposure to future parasites.  Not in almost anything that I can think of.   So, why is the aphorism not just nonsense.

I find, that if I examine my thinking in this matter, a very primitive metaphysics about the moment of an individual's creation.  What follows is flagrantly silly, but here it is.   On my account, at the moment of birth a soul is taken out of storage and assigned to a body.  By "person" in the aphorism, I mean the combination of a particular soul with the particular body.  These assignments are at random.  So, for good or ill, no soul deserves the body it gets.   I cannot claim credit for my genes, my good uterine environment, my social capitol, my financial capitol, my bad hip, the draft deferment it provided, my getting a phd at absolute peak of demand for phd's, my good education, even my FRIAM membership.  They are all consequences of that initial, random assignment.   Now YOU may credit me in some ways, because knowing that all these advantages have been assigned to me may make me useful or pleasing (or the opposite) in many ways, and that may bring me the advantages of your association.  But ==> I <== do not ==>deserve<== those advantages.

This odd metaphysics leads me to enormous gratitude for the life I have been allowed to live and great sympathy for rigorous taxation of the advantaged, so that so much a soul's future is not determined by that moment of assignment.

I have no idea what happens to this primitive metaphysics if I try to integrate it with my monism.  The religious scholars among you might recognize as some backass weird perversion of Calvinism.


Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

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