Saturday, November 3, 2018

Personality and the Coherent Volition Regimen: A Summary

This blog ends my eight year experiment in writing a blog and promoting it on social media. Although I have at times managed a significant readership, the social media companies don't particularly like what I'm doing. Apparently it doesn't translate into the kind of data that can be monetized.
A niche does exist today for a serious site dedicated to discovery with an interactive interface. It would, however, run counter to the massive data harvesting that characterizes social media. It would not be well understood.
Now to the summary of the previous four blogs. First, humans, animals, and smart machines all possess a coherent volition regimen (CVR), a consistent idiosyncratic manner of perception, cognition, volition, and action with feedback describing reliable patterns of cultivated behavior. This cultivated behavior, together with a priori elements, we call personality, that which makes a human a person. Dogs and robots do not, by definition, have a personality. They cannot be a person. They do have a CVR.
Essential to human social existence is the concept, the role, of moral agent, the ability to estimate and codify a successful value system and behave to it. This is beyond the capabilities of dogs and, at this point, artificial intelligence. Humans as persons are moral agents. They are alone in creation in that.
Structurally, the whole of human social existence revolves around humans as legal persons. While groups of persons, a corporation, may be treated as a legal person, no animal, no algorithm can be so considered. No robot, however capable, can be anything but a mechanical working animal, kept or owned and very likely licensed.
What dogs, humans, and smart machines are, as a common classification, are players. They game as a metaphor for social existence. They can all play games to a set of rules. They are players.
While the thought developed and expressed in these five blogs and the previous two on volition is not particularly rigorous, it has been a difficult logical puzzle to solve in a reasonable fashion. I think that I have done that and derived a common reference that differentiates among humans, animals, and robots adequately. It may prove to be valuable.
Do Well and Be Well