Three Phases of Human Sociality

"Individuals have full control over the character of their social environments, so they no longer need state protection (especially from physical violence)." Could you flesh this statement out for me? What do you mean? while the first part of this statement sound like it should make sense, when outside of a utopia do people not need state protection from physical violence?

"In Phase 3, deviance no longer exists." Do you mean as a definition, since everyone would belong to some subcommunity?

"In Phase 3, physical indicia of humanness are no longer evident, reducing humanness to its cognitive and communicative components. In Phase 3, computer programs that can mimic these components are subjectively indistinguishable." Alright here I see where you are going (Turing valuation, virtual interaction, etc.) but I think you are taking this to an extreme. In fact, I think the YouTube? craze struck the death knell for such concepts at least for the forseeable future. Yes, on Facebook or in an MMORPG it is possible that within twenty years the 'person' you are talking to is no more than an extraordinarily well designed heuristically learning, top-bottom bounded neural net and you will have no bloody clue. But the 'benefit' to things like YouTube? here is that they return some humanness to the environment. You get to 'see' people again. You will be judging them on far more than 'cognitive and communicative components (hello, HotOrNot? .com). So long as we are still embodied in physical forms and sexually reproducing, I think this phrase is going way too far.

-- JohnPowerHely - 10 Dec 2008