What is The Machine™

[Jasper]

Anybody?  Nobody?  Mm, oh well.

[Nast]

Well, I'm just a silly and simple boy who rarely comments in these types of threads, but I'd say that the middle is sort of like...environmental pressures that bend you into a convenient shape that fits into the hole. A social obligation to be or want something because of where you are in the social parfait.

[Doktor Howl]

This is The Machine:  http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=25885.0

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

[minuspace]

"You can't really fix it, or hit the "reset button", as the Ron Paul crowd would like to do, because you can't change the past, and you can't make history go away without creating a worse monster than you started with."

okay, so the system is dynamic, not only does it change, it changes change.  history will always be there, how are we going to make it count?

[MMIX]

On another tangent, I had a thought. 

The machine.  It's a mechanics metaphor, and I notice that all mechanics boil down to three components.   Every machine has a goes inna, a goes outta, and the thing inna middle.  How does this look with regard to The Machine?

It looks like the goes inna is humans, and the goes outta is...what we have lying around in the noosphere.  What's the thing inna middle?

So, if you put a person in this t-shirt it can bend and dance and jump up and down . . .

The thing in the middle in your example is currently a black box . . . a concept I picked up in uni while taking a course on systems behaviour. Yep, even systems behaviourists understand that emergent properties are sometimes needed as a temporary [long/short/whatever] heuristic when addressing the behaviour of complex systems . . .

[Captain Utopia]

Are you saying that what is in the middle is indescribable?

[MMIX]

Well not in the t-shirt case of course . . . 

but Sigmatic was using the model Input/s > Process > Output/s

and all I was observing, kind of tongue in cheek, is that it is not always necessary to be able to fully explain/describe the Process to get a reasonable understanding of how that particular model works. 

[Jasper]

Really I was just interested in trying to see deep the metaphor went. 

[Cain]

http://www.hbs.edu/bhr/archives/bookreviews/77/2003springcoxrichardson.pdf

"Setting out to uncover the roots of modern liberalism, Cohen believes she found them in the thought of late-nineteenth-century economists and social scientists. Liberal thinkers of the first postwar generation, like E. L. Godkin and George William Curtis, faced squarely the implications of the postwar expansion of democracy to include workers and people of color. Quickly, they began to fear that the poor would threaten private property and individual liberty, key tenets of liberalism, by demanding cooperative action and redistribution of wealth. In response, Cohen argues, liberal reformers denigrated political self-rule and elevated the idea of the "economic man" who strove to succeed in the marketplace; they clung to the idea of laissez- faire government; and they abandoned equal citizenship and embraced racism. Their plan was to "limit and constrain the power of propertyless majorities in a polity that had recently erected universal male suffrage as its cardinal political ideal" (p. 220).

[Requia ☣]

Thinking about the 'emergent' talk a bit more, I've decided the machine is not actually emergent in nature, an emergent system produces complex results from a simpler set of rules, but the rules that combine to make up the machine are both numerous and complicated, perhaps more complicated than the machine itself.

[Cain]

Much social policy does seem to come down to "divide and conquer", in one way or another.  Racism and nationalism great for breaking attempts at "working class solidarity", for example.

[Requia ☣]

Exactly, a host of different rules (whether you want to argue coincidence or conspiracy), leading to much the same effect.

[minuspace]

How nothing is the difference.

[Ob_Portu]

The Machine is your Mother.

[minuspace]

Mummy is not about politics