RE: Tauchain and the privacy question (benefits of secret contracts and private knowledge)
Thanks for the reply. I think your reading of the term 'nature' is different than mine. I did a perhaps poor job of conveying it, and it's a less common use of the term (in English.) One way of thinking of it is the entire universe as an intelligent organism, or perhaps a monolithic brain.
I suppose the most similar idea in contemporary western intellectual consciousness would be pantheistic ways of conceiving of reality.
I am familiar with the concepts like panspermia for example but from what I know about physics all things are temporary. The privacy that existed for life in the past was based on the fact that a lifeform would eventually die and deteriorate to dust. The entropy is what I'm referring to in physics.
Written language changed this particularly for the human species. Very few species or perhaps we are the only species really which can record our history in stone so future generations can inherit our knowledge. Privacy in the sense that I think about it is that you can encode your knowledge in such a way that it lasts as long as you want it to last and is released when you want it to be released. In other words it is access control.
For sake of humanity I think most or perhaps even all knowledge should be released at some point. But some knowledge is better released after a person is dead which is why I state access control is really what privacy is about. If you're not alive to see it released then it will not matter for you and has no impact on your security. If you are alive then it could impact your security.
An example could be that you don't want your net worth to be known to the public until after you die. This is a matter of access control.
In humans, perhaps. Again I think we have diverging definitions of the term privacy. I see it as a somewhat spurious construct invented by the mind that is a byproduct of the emergence of sentience. It is useful for survival but a hindrance to knowledge.
My argument is it doesn't have to be. The world can get the release of all knowledge at some date in the future. The competitive advantage that comes from keeping knowledge private does not last forever and can be set to expire. So I agree if it's locked up forever it does society no good because we can't learn from it but then if it's not locked up for some period of time then it presents a different problem.
This is why I favor expiration dates. In fact, classified information typically has expiration dates. It's classified for some period of years and then it's declassified.
In physics I don't know what consciousness is. I don't know what sentience is or whether it's real because physics can't answer these questions. Science cannot answer these questions. So the natural debate if we go by physics and science, can't include consciousness or sentience. We can speak of computation but this isn't restricted to living beings. The universe computes.