Thoughts On Ray Kurzweil's 2010 Speech, "The Power of Hierarchical Thinking" From The H+ Summit @ Harvard

http://www.slideshare.net/humanityplus/kurzweil - The Full Slideshow From The Speech

"A Brain-Scan of Neo-Cortical Hierarchy vs. A Computer Simulation of One. Which One Is Which?" (Trick Question)

"Models often get simpler at a higher level, not more complex."

A few things that have occurred to me after reviewing the prior slideshow (and also after reading all of Kurzweil's books).

1. There are ideas so important to the pursuit of individual freedom that everyone here should be familiar with them.
2. Unfortunately, it's been my experience that most "libertarians" are unfamiliar with the basics of Kurzweil's ideas, and of classical liberalism. (They lack a legitimate "top-level" hierarchy, and confuse the means with the ends. Still worse, many are religious, and introduce magical thinking into their plans for individual freedom.)
3. Still worse, many libertarians call themselves "anarchists" (a term that is easy for most nodes in any political network to reject as "illegitimate"). (Most fail in this regard because their label sounds different than the pattern in reality it is referring to. One such label is "The Zero Aggression Principle" which mistakenly can be interpreted as something more similar to "The Zero Threats or Force, Including Retaliatory Force, Principle.")

At the highest level of a legitimate pyramidal hierarchy, there is "maintain civilization." Maintaining (and restoring) civilization is at the top of the hierarchy for many reasons:

1. Maintaining and restoring civilization is important. Without a free market, society is slowly dominated by short-sighted, narrowly-self-interested sociopaths.
2. It involves a lot of people, and hierarchies are good at relating to cybernetic systems comprised of people. (They are also good at relating to physical laws.)
3. Other people and their computer and communication tools comprise the machines by which "top-level" hierarchies are obtained. Because most humans have approximately the same intelligence, with some vastly more intelligent due to computer amplification, obtaining top-level goals is very difficult. (Intentional change tends to happen very gradually because of this, because of all the counter-goals at the top hierarchical level.)

Often times, libertarians who claim that social goals are incredibly important are given "short shrift" and dismissed as "collectivists" because their critics are focusing on only one of the prior three elements in the immediately prior list. They are caricatured as "too concerned with what other people think."

Yet, to move society toward freedom, the enlightenment-era thinkers all were intensely concerned about social organization. They solved all of these problems.

...And it seems that most "libertarians" I know are content to call themselves "anarchists" or "objectivists" so they have an excuse to not think about them. After all, if one is a radical individualist, and politics is hopeless, that leaves a lot more time for doing what is both most important and most comprehensible to most people: chasing short-term goals. Also: the low-level thinkers who favor coercive collectivism("socialism") often expressly claim to be concerned with others, with society, with emotion (the empathy that links others into voluntary networks).

Ultimately, I believe that an unwillingness to think hierarchically is most at fault with most of the existing plans to move society toward liberty. Because reality doesn't just contain physical systems to be bent to the will of the innovator. It contains human networks that must also be bent to the will of the innovator. (See Norbert Wiener's book "The Human Use of Human Beings; James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds"; Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control"; Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and "How to Create A Mind"; and Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence," for more on these topics.)

This typically results in very simple goals (maximizing theft at every level of society) directing the actions of nearly every human being toward something I refer to as "malevolent emergence."

Organizing society so that it maximizes voluntary decision-making is the highest-level goal humans can now possess. But to come right out and say this is to place a high level of importance on collective "organizing" --a skill that classical liberals and libertarians (especially religious ones) tend to be ill-suited for.