Larry Penslinger on P2P and quantum physics
Larry Penslinger is an American author, of the legendary novel “The Moon at Hoa Binh“, and an expert on quantum physics and m-valued currencies, who lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand. His thought is complex, sometimes difficult to understand without philosophical and scientific grounding, and many people of my circle here in Chiang Mai, including myself, highly value his comments. Here’s a reaction to the P2P essay, which deals with the issue of the `parasitic’ nature of P2P (vis a vis the current abundance and the productive capacity of capitalism), and if it would survive a collapse of the natural environment. See the links below for an introduction to his writings, in particular the Chiang Mai Chronicles.
(I should add that I no longer stress the parasitic nature of P2P; rather I would argue now that cooperating minds are the primary productive process already and that capitalism is only the after-the-fact organizer of this. Since capital is using peer producton as an externality, it should fund it through the universal wage; I’ve also evolved on the abundance/scarcity issue. Natural resources are scare, productive capacity is abundant, and immaterial production is near infinite. Therefore we have to evolve to a type of society that abandons material growth, and allows a focus on immaterial growth)
William Penslinger:
“I can easily view this whole area of thought — involving “cooperative individualism”, participatory process, partnership-based models, and, indeed, P2P, itself — as continuation of the postmodernist attempt to save whatever can be saved of”simple identity” in face of quantum weirdness and m-valued logics. For instance, “distributed networks” as defined by Galloway rule out actual quantum processes of self-production (zero-point energy) and self-organization, for in such processes, for instance a holographic process, the information is not distributed; it has no locality spatially or temporally, and the identity of a “bit” does not exhibit selfsameness (as do cooperating individuals, participants, partners, peers). This is by no means to suggest that consensus quantum physicists are not postmodernists; they very definitely are, and probability interpretations and definition of q-bits in terms of binary logic instead of m-valued logics are clear indications of that.
Why is this important to attend to? “Because the fossil-fuel era is coming to an end and the “abundance-oriented” and “already existing social practice” of P2P can be regarded as symbiotic to, or parasitic upon,cheap-energy-dependent, market-organized, industrial and postindustrial capitalism.” The only way P2P could escape this status and begin the transformation you propose would be for it to solve cheap-energy dependence and overcome the limitations of externality-blind market as less-than-pan processor. Using the holographic example, information is distributed over a holographic plate because the experimental set up (quantum measurement problem) that created the plate was formulated on the basis of binary logic, which, by conventions of Aristotle’s syllogistic, rules out quantum non-locality (except as dissimulated as “probability amplitude”). Existing holograms are, thereby, something less than actually holographic; they are made to conform to the principles of heat engines. Cheap-energy dependence cannot be overcome within the purview of the thermodynamics of heat engines (linear-time-bound closed systems). I would argue only within time-independent, multiply-self-reentrant, non-orientable systems (not merely orientable open systems, wherein life is regarded as inherently, even by definition, multi-scaled as order is borrowed by the nested system from the nesting system). By choosing the distributed, non-quantum, account over the non-local quantum account of self-production and self-organization, the possibility of overcoming cheap-energy dependence, necessary to the transformation you propose, is nullified. This discussion is not exactly correct, illustrative only, so as to convey the basic idea. Noting the caveats would lead to details of many discussions.”
William L. Pensinger, Chiang Mai (reprinted from P2P News 96)
