Since, then, the now is a beginning and end of a time, and the point a beginning and end of a line; and since the beginning of anything is not continuous with its end, but they have an interval between them; it follows that neither nows nor points can be continuous with one another. – On Indivisible Lines, Pseudoaristotlean Treatise (I have my doubts, but it is an interesting quote, presaging Galileo)

For neither the definition of line, nor that of straight line, will apply to the indivisible line, since the latter is not between any terminal points, and does not possess a middle. – On Indivisible Lines, Pseudoaristotlean Treatise

The latter quote, is what I have been doing with my continuum models. I think that statement is true, as it is a curve.

page 162, The Geometry of Nature

Written long before it was discovered that the genetic code is much smaller than it was originally guessed to be. Obvious on the face of it.

Let no one ignorant of geometry come under my roof. - inscription reportedly over Plato’s Academy door

Since, then, the now is a beginning and end of a time, and the point a beginning and end of a line; and since the beginning of anything is not continuous with its end, but they have an interval between them; it follows that neither nows nor points can be continuous with one another. – On Indivisible Lines, Pseudoaristotlean Treatise (I have my doubts, but it is an interesting quote, presaging Galileo)

For neither the definition of line, nor that of straight line, will apply to the indivisible line, since the latter is not between any terminal points, and does not possess a middle. – On Indivisible Lines, Pseudoaristotlean Treatise

Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either if it does not expel the suffering of the mind. - Epicurus

Find the path, enter the path, travel the path, become the path. (Taoist saying)

To enter the spiritual path, you must begin to understand your own mental attitude and how your mind perceives things. If you’re all caught up in attachment to tiny atoms, your limited, craving mind will make it impossible for you to enjoy life’s pleasures. External energy is so incredibly limited that if you allow yourself to be bound by it, your mind itself will become just as limited. When your mind is narrow, small things easily agitate you. Make your mind an ocean. - Lama Thubten Yeshe

Yet although the Logos is common, most men live as if they had their own private understanding. – Heraclitus

This Logos holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this Logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep. – Heraclitus

The wise is to know how that all things are governed through all things - Heraclitus

All things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. – Richard Feynman

“Elementary” means that very little is required to know ahead of time in order to understand it, except to have an infinite amount of intelligence. - Richard Feynman in his Lost Lecture “The Motion of Planets around the Sun”

There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true. - Niels Bohr

I have diverse definitions for the straight line. The straight line is a curve, any part of which is similar to the whole, and it alone has this property, not only among curves but among sets.” – Gottfried Leibniz

I had a scheme, which I still use to-day when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem… As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something that fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) – disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally, they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, “False!” – Richard Feynman

We have life interacting with no-life all the time. – Ilya Prigogine

The random assumption is a way of throwing up one’s hands, a null hypothesis in the absence of any information. – Steven Strogatz

I have universally observed among all those who make a profession of portraying faces from life, that he who paints the best likeness is the worst of all composers of narrative painting. – Leonardo da Vinci

The Swineherd then gave orders to his men: “Bring in our best pig for a stranger’s dinner. A feast will do our hearts good, too; we know grief and pain, hard scrabbling with our swine, while the outsiders live on our labor.” – from Homer’s Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald translation

Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that’s in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that’s in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it. – John Siracusa in “Hypercritical”

Knowing what’s wrong with something (or thinking that you do, which, for the purposes of this discussion, should be considered the same thing) does a fat lot of good if you lack the skills to correct it. – John Siracusa in “Hypercritical”

Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew they were nearly all deaf, and that, to conceal their infirmity, they set to work to clap vigorously as soon as ever they saw one or two persons applauding? And what would he say if he got to know that those one or two persons had often taken bribes to secure the loudest applause for the poorest player! – Arthur Schopenhauer, from the Wisdom of Life

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world – Michael Crichton

We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched – Lord Byron

I don’t use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough – M. C. Escher

… all men, all women resemble each other: no love resists the effects of sane reflection. – the Marquis de Sade

Your mind is your religion. – Lama Thubten Yeshe

All that has a form is an illusive existence. When it is perceived that all form is
no−form, the Tathagata is recognized. – Buddha, in The Diamond Sutra (Tathagata means one who has thus gone and one who has thus come, and a reference to Buddha when referring to himself)

Meditation in the midst of activity is a thousand times superior to meditation in stillness – Hakuin Ekaku

No pleasure is bad per se: but the causes of some pleasures produce stresses many times greater than the pleasures.  Epicurus

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. – Albert Einstein

There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion – Edgar Allan Poe (who credits Francis Bacon)

The pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it – Umberto Eco

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots. – Jaron Lanier

Cantor is overwhelmed by amazement at his own findings, and slips from German to French to exclaim that “to see is not to believe” (“je le vois, mai je ne le crois pas”) And, as if on cue, mathematics seeks to avoid being misled by the graven images of monsters. … The wide and uncritical acceptance of this view has become destructive. In particular, in the theory of fractals, “to see is to believe” - Benoit Mandelbrot

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry. - Charles S. Peirce

The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them.  - Abu Ali al-Hasan-ibn al-Haytham

The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make an enemy of all that he reads, and applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examinations of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. - Abu Ali al-Hasan-ibn al-Haytham

…beware of mathematicians (astrologers) and all those who make empty prophesies. - Aurelius Augustinus, Bishop of Hippo

Divine determination depends on the life of a man, and not his life upon the determination. - St. Theophan the Recluse

So I say to you –
This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:

Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.

Buddha, in The Diamond Sutra

–
From Alice in Wonderland (Charles Dodgson)

“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”

“I suppose so,” said Alice.

“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see, a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”

“I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.

“Call it what you like,” said the Cat.

μηδέ σ᾽ ἔθος πολύπειρον ὁδὸν κατὰ τήνδε βιάσθω νωμα̂ν ἄσκοπον ὄμμα καὶ ἠχήεσσαν ἀκουὴν καὶ γλω̂σσαν, κρι̂ναι δὲ λόγῳ πολύδηριν ἔλεγχον.

Parmenides, Diogenes Laertius, Book IX, 6

Can Sam Harris see the nose in front of his face? Is Sam Harris really so cheeky to inadvertently call a significant chunk of English grammar “an illusion”? Does he really hate modal and deontic logic, or worse: not realise it exists? Will modal verbs magically disappear from English with a wave of the neuroscientist wand? Nasty habit they have implying we have “freedom” of the will!

Or in other words, the is/ought problem, which should be more properly called the is/can/may/shall/should/will/must/has to/ought spectrum of English modal verb usage. In addition, I’ve added “to do” which seems to imply consequentialism. I am not a grammarian, but I’ll take my level best stab at it! Critique of my speculation is welcomed.

There are a few points where I agree with Sam Harris, in how fundamentalist religious belief can be destructive, although I personally believe he is far too rigid on religion for my taste. I’m of the opinion that mainstream religion is largely a positive force in society, and that the discovery of a religion-free method of moral reasoning will strengthen faith and help secular society at the same time.

To be clear, I am only dealing with Hume’s Is/Ought problem, not the Open Question argument.

Quoting David Hume, from the Treatise of Human Nature:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

First of all, the is/ought problem is really an English language and logic puzzle, and the is/ought “moral puzzle” of Hume is both explainable and solvable within the context of English grammar without the need for esoteric modal and deontic logic (though that has been done too – not accessible reading for mere mortals, however). Common usage of English modal verbs can give intuitive hints to easily solve the problem related to is/ought. I do not use deduction from “is” to reach an “ought”, but the simple art of decision making – using teleological reasoning – an end goal. Hume is absolutely correct that you cannot use deduction to derive an ought from an is.

“Is” statements are not all the same. Some uses of “to be” are actually a “copula”, and some are not. Quoting Hume, “copulations of propositions”, he means exactly these copula statements. A copula is a linking verb that connects subject and predicate. The copula statements are what I assert to be impossible to derive a moral statement from. More broadly, is/ought is a logical problem specific to Indo-European languages – not all languages have a copula or the variety of modal verbs available in English. But English is David Hume’s language, so that’s where to start.

Ought statements, “normative propositions” as they are called by the philosophy establishment, which I prefer to call “ideal actions”, are related to goal-directed, teleological reasoning, and describe the ideal action to reach the goal. I see ought statements as unmoving “ideals” – ideal descriptions of end goals. The reality of the situation is seen as ought and ought not can only modify an infinitive verb. (to be, to qualify, etc). These statements are intransitive if in conjunction with the copula “to be”, unable to take a direct object. They are unable to act on anything in the present, or to act at all in conjunction with the copula, and ought statements describe unreal or future situations, or expressions of probability. This is why I term these statements as “ideal”.

While “is” copula statements are equally unmoving, they are descriptions of the present. They are also intransitive, same as ought statements. But unlike the expression of ideals in ought statements, copula statements are descriptions of real situations. There is no way to derive an “ought” from a statement using a copula on these grounds, but their similarity is why a copula can be so easily confused with an ought. Neither sentences are “moving” towards each other, or can move at all. A better alternative is to use can/ought statements, which do entail action towards a goal.

So the correct view of the logical is/ought fallacy, in my view and to my understanding of Hume’s problem, consists of mistaking a copula “is” present statement directly for an ought “normative” ideal goal.

Example 1 – fallacious is/ought

The girl is poor. (fact)
The girl ought to be poor. (ideal moral goal)

or in the negative

The girl ought not to be poor.

The first example clearly looks silly, but both examples are still fallacious as no explanation exists for why the girl is poor. No questions have been asked, no information gathering has taken place, no causes or reasons given. The positive ought statement makes her poverty seem like an ideal moral situation, when the reason for the situation is completely unclear. Indeed, the poor are often considered more moral in ethical philosophies both secular and religious, probably due to this very confusion. I’ve noticed many an argument where descriptions of a situation were mistaken for the ideal moral situation. This is the heart of the naturalistic fallacy, and may be related to moral relativism.

The five W’s (and a How) are helpful for information gathering and using this method to ask questions helps to discover causes, which imply reasons and goals in which to act upon:

Who? Who was involved?
What? What happened? What’s the problem?
Where? Where did it take place?
When? When did it take place?
Why? Why did it happen?
How? How did it happen?

Now a slightly more complex problem, with empirical reasons which suggest how to solve it.

Example 2

What is the problem? The girl is poor because she is unqualified for a well paying job. Why? She has not gone to school to get an education.

So I’ve got the problem determined. I am assuming that jobs can be easily found, of course, but I’m keeping the example deliberately simple. I’m sticking to a short-term goal that is easily reached, such as one which can fit in one sentence examples!

Notice that a passive verb construction has snuck in for the dependent clause of the first sentence, and a conditional statement has arrived for the second sentence. I think this is an important change – the sentences are no longer pure copula statements. They imply potential action to take. The passive verb construction places emphasis on what the subject did, which points towards a course of action.

Next, to answer Hume. A set of steps to reason from is to ought.

Four Steps to the Goal, or how to reason from Point Is to Point Ought in Hume’s Is/Ought problem.

Determine the Problem: The girl (who?) is poor (what?).

Discover the Causes of the Problem: The girl (who?) is poor (what?), because (why?) she is unemployed . She has not gone to school (where?), therefore unqualified for a well-paying job. (therefore/consequently implies how?)

Plan to Solve the Problem: The girl (who?) will (when?)go to school (where) to get an education (what?), so she can be qualified (how?) for a well paying job. (might be more than one possible plan, which!)

Decide on the Action to Reach the Goal: Choose plan. (DECIDE)  Go to school to get an education. (do!)

Now move through the positive modal verbs, using the plan and the actions to reach the goal, all the way to “ought”.

The girl can go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (possible to reach the goal)

The girl may go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (permission to reach the goal)

The girl shall go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (predestined to reach the goal)

The girl should go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (obligation/duty to reach the goal)

The girl will go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job.  (plan to reach the goal)

The girl must go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (necessary to reach the goal)

The girl ought to go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (ideal action to reach the goal)

The girl has to go to school to get an eduction, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (requirement to reach the goal)

The girl does go to school to get an education, so she can be qualified for a well-paying job. (consequences of action to reach the goal)

I can also treat the modals in negative, by negating the action, and in the second set of examples to negate the plan. (shades of the Ten Commandments!) Notice that negation of modals doesn’t always result in the opposite of the positive meaning.

The girl cannot go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (impossible to reach the goal)

The girl may not go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (no permission to reach the goal)

The girl shall not go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (predestined to miss the goal)

The girl should not go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (obligation/duty to avoid the goal)

The girl will not go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job.  (refusal to reach the goal)

The girl must not go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (necessary to avoid the goal)

The girl ought not to go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (ideal avoidance of the goal)

The girl doesn’t have to go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (possible to miss the goal)

The girl does not go to school to get an education, so she cannot be qualified for a well-paying job. (consequences of lack of action to reach the goal)

Now to swap the modal negative from the action to the plan, which makes for interesting reading in some sentences. Instead of the use of a “so” conjunction, I have used an “if” with the auxiliary verb “to do”. I’m sure other conjunctions will yield other interesting results.

The girl cannot qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (impossible to reach the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl may not qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (uncertain to reach the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl shall not qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (predestined to deny the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl should not qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (obligation/duty to deny the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl will not qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (future denial of the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl must not qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (necessary denial of the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl ought not qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (ideal action when failing the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl doesn’t have to qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (no requirement to perform the action to reach the goal, if this action is chosen.)

The girl does not qualify for a well-paying job, if she does not go to school to get an education. (consequences of lack of action to reach the goal, if this action is chosen.)

This leaves me with a new set of puzzles: how to determine if a factual statement actually is a moral problem, and how to discover accurate causes for moral problems, set moral goals to solve those problems, and decide on moral actions. All the while, making the process easily understood and usable by average people with “commonsense” intuition without philosophical training. Hume addressed problems in reasoning too, most famously induction, but not in the context of the is/ought problem.

Continuing to speculate briefly, I pleasantly observe how the reasoning of goal-directed behavior dovetails with Aristotle’s thought, most especially his four causes. The Final Cause seems to suggest an “ideal goal” which would be a candidate for reasoning out an “ought”. I highly suspect that Aristotle’s teleology is also based in grammar.

I would also suggest that teleological “goal-directed” reasoning applies more generally, as my examples do not show how anyone can evaluate if the moral values that derive from it are “good” or “bad”. To be fair to Hume, his puzzle doesn’t actually deal with morality but with logical deduction and compatibilism (a philosophical position I hold). Hume’s Is/Ought problem seems more appropriate to the reasoning involved with “free will”, the existence of human agency to make decisions, which people are then responsible for the consequences of. I prefer to call “free will” human agency, as I don’t believe an unrestricted “libertarian free will” separate from brain states can actually exist. While one can debate if there is some level of lawless freedom in brain states (which I suspend judgement on – it could be true, so I admit it as a possibility), Cartesian dualism always left a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, defending human agency would be an alien idea to someone like Sam Harris, who insists that “free will” is an illusion, too.

However, I simply can’t see how anyone can derive the “do” required for consequences to occur, without the ability to decide on a course of action to do anything. Human beings are not like marbles set in eternal random motion, nor are they like billiard balls knocked around by a prime mover. The ability to make a decision appears to be at the root of human agency, and it may even be a requirement to be moral at all.

My random thought is aesthetics, our subjective experience of sense perception, and our emotions (qualia) may also be related to our moral reasoning, in how we decide on what goals are good and bad, and how we evaluate the morality of our actions to reach them. This doesn’t put moral reasoning beyond the purview of science, as I think qualia is tractable by psychology and neuroscience – but possibly outside of the mental paradigm of “qualiaphobes” who go too far to deny the important role of subjective experience in everyday life.

Of course for the religious, they can still say that morals are handed down by God. I’m not quite sure that is true in every instance though, as many a madman has claimed a direct communication with God. The method for an average person to discriminate if a moral action is a decree from God or from the human use of human beings still seems unclear to me.

Any idea that seeks to enable or restrain human choices, is a rule. Rules have existence, most notably in ethical, legal and religious systems. All beliefs in religions and philosophies include at their core, a belief in rules. Belief in rules is generally regarded as good, however rules must be chosen wisely.

Rules can be measured as beneficial or pleasurable, conversely harmful or painful, but they cannot be proved “false”.

If it is simply an idea with no possible ability to falsify or verify, that cannot be acted upon like a rule, is irrational. Examples of irrational ideas that are subjective are values and ethics such as good, evil, beauty, and ugly. Objective and irrational ideas would be of deities, demons, or ghosts, for example. You either believe in them, you do not believe in them, or you suspend judgement. The only good way to decide how to make any of these choices is to listen to your gut instinct and trust in what it tells you. If an irrational idea moves you to happiness and causes no harm to others, there is no harm in believing in any of these things. If it brings pleasure to others with no ill effects, even the better.

Rules derive their ultimate worth from what effect they create when putting them into practice. Deities and other irrational ideas are not valueless, as these ideas can be acted upon through worship, abstinence and practice. However, right understanding towards these ideas means everything, for we must measure how much good or harm such an idea can create through our actions in this world.

Pleasure and pain are the only two objective measures of good and evil. Actions can be measured by how much harm or good they bring to others, so while we cannot prove or deny an idea of deities either way through science, we can measure how much pleasure or pain is caused by a particular action relating to the rules of the deity to a population, and therefore rate the value of that deity objectively.

What may be pleasurable or painful for one person may not be pleasurable for a group of people. If the pleasure is only benefitting a small group, and the effects have measurable damage for the whole of the group, it is a bad idea. “Your freedom ends where the freedom of others begins”.

A good deity does not seek to harm or reward us in a special way. These things are due to the randomness in the world. As deities are irrational ideas, they must observe their own rules, and we cannot “know” the mind of the deity in any sort of objective way. The rules can be measured for their value, but claims of divine sanction are valueless. The minds of deities are hidden from us.

A deity or perhaps number of deities can be seen as rulegivers through a process of revealed knowledge through images or thoughts in a meditative state. I cannot dismiss this possibility, as it has been verified that people can have such thoughts and images and the existence of the deity cannot be proven false. Again the rule must be observed: if the knowledge revealed is a rule that causes harm or pain to others, it may be dismissed as a bad rule and the person who gives this rule may be regarded with extreme suspicion, as they may be acting in pure selfish interest without any thought to others. A comparison must be made however. Some rules are meant to provide instruction, so acting upon them may simply be the hard painful work involved in completing a goal. So not all harm and pain is an evil, and thus the decision is one that must be made with care.

But even if one is an agnostic or atheist, an understanding of the need for rules and the measure of good works can still be followed. An atheist can take this same teaching and listen and apply and test a rule revealed to them through the same process of mental images and thought from observation of the world.

People who seek to harm us, have no access to justice or injustice, as they do not seek to follow the rules to neither harm or be harmed. For these rules can only be extended to others who follow them.

If we do not put our thought and awareness into action to reason out the effects of our actions from rules we follow, we are no better than wild animals, and thus have abandoned our civilisation and freedom to gamble with disaster and chance, and chance is what rules our lives when we are unable to exercise the freedom to make decisions or reason the value of the rules we choose to follow. It is undesirable to let rules control us without judgement for their effects, for we then have no freedom to discriminate possible effects of our actions and discern our errors, and thus chance and fatalism have ruled the day.

The messages of rules may be expressed through any kind of art, but the expression of rules through art is not the rule itself. The rule is the message, the art is the thing. Mistaking this rule can lead to idolatry, to confuse the physical representation of a rule with the rule itself. This basic separation between the material thing and the immaterial idea must always be taught.

Laws are iron rules that cannot be broken through freedom of choice, due to the fact they are part of the fabric of the world. The laws of physics for example.

Some further aesthetic thoughts.

If your art has nothing that truly moves your body completely to express to others, it’s probably not good art.

In art, there is no difference between communication and expression. In beauty and ugliness in art, there is no standard except your subjective gut feeling about what is beautiful or ugly. Beauty belongs to the irrational senses and cannot be given objective moral value. Beauty in nature is created this way as well. While it can be judged beautiful or ugly, this decision can never be objectively rational. Again, this does not mean it is good or bad. It only means it is irrational.

The Canon, the Measure, is the scaffold of these ideas, that braid the matter of daily life into the strong ropes of civilisation.

Never in my whole time in Second Life, have I felt as demoralised about the Company as I feel right now. Content creation is the backbone that allows the land model to thrive in Second Life, yet I see that the service provider is hopelessly blinkered by their overconfidence in their overarching “vision” for corporations and education. Like the White Star Line’s hubris when they caused the sinking of the Titanic, the captain is encouraged to plow their “unsinkable” flagship luxury cruise liner full speed ahead into a field of randomly floating icebergs.

It is now trivial to copy avatars and items in Second Life, for any average resident who wishes to do it, with an opensource viewer. It is no longer something that requires any significant technical experience to do. This development was inevitable, and it is here today. This genie is not going back in the bottle. But it does not have to be all doom and gloom.

Nobody seems to understand at Linden Lab, that unfettered copying is only feasable if there is no unfettered selling and mass distribution capabilities. This is how the real World Wide Web works, because it works with Real Money Transactions regulated by governments and banks concerned with a maze of laws and the real need to limit their risk. File sharing sites are cracked down upon. Many attempts at microtransaction economies have been tried, but all microtransactions with “token” currency, are equal to the chips received in a casino, and are high risk ventures due to lack of oversight. Sometimes, the market doesn’t work like you’d want.

MMOs are games worlds and not sandbox worlds like Second Life. They limit their risk by not making the currency officially tradeable, not allowing user-generated content, or any actual rights to the graphics in the game. Rather a subscription fee is paid. Works for Blizzard with Worlds of Warcraft, and a host of others to keep the Feds and Interpol away from their office doors. Sure third-parties trade it, that’s not the point. The point is keeping their business running and their core customers, the gamers, happy.

Merchant accounts on the net are dear and hard to acquire, and not everyone trusts Paypal. (with good reason)

The microtransaction tokens model, in combination with good distribution paths for all content in Second LIfe, regardless if its legitimate or copied, allows even the casual user to turn copying into cold hard cash with ease. The fact that legitimate content cannot be differentiated from copied content, that likely reputable merchants cannot be told apart on first glance from likely dodgy ones, is also hurting Second Life content business, with confusion of goods.

Linden Lab apparantly has no idea how the token money in their economy is actually changing hands. I sat in horror watching the Metanomics webcast about virtual goods, as CorpoHippies described their inworld money transactions as happening in a fog. I bet it was just a drunken Gaussian stupor. Yeah, I am sure the Secret Service and Interpol will enjoy hearing *that*! Great way to provide opportunity for money laundering and profit opportunities for organized crime and terror organisations. This can prove to be more fun than the ageplay, gambling and banking bans, and more damaging than the adult content fiasco ever was.

Wait, what?

Yes, losing the whole microtransactions model in Second Life is possibly at stake, here.

No individual content creator can stand up to the current level of wholesale content theft in Second Life. We neither have the support of the company, nor the tools of the platform to maximise our gains and limit our losses like any normal retail business would do, and the game is drunkenly rigged in favor of wholesale corruption. The only option is to form “media companies” to protect our rights via lawsuits under the DMCA, and we all know how those go in Real Life. I’m rooting for Stroker Serpentine and Munchflower Zaius, but I know this road will be deeply difficult for them. Long term, it’s not a solution for virtual worlds to go this route: I’m sure they agree. We need something better than class action lawsuits. But it’s all the merchants can do, who rely on Second Life for their income, to limit their losses. It’s impossible for most of them; too expensive and time consuming.

A good example. Walt Disney formed his own company and invented Mickey Mouse, after his character “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” was legally stolen from him by another media company he was working with,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Oswald_the_Lucky_Rabbit

Now Walt’s company uses contracts that can harm individual artists rights with work-for-hire agreements, slanted in favor of the corporation. The artist trades a bit of job security for trading in all their copyright interests. Disney actively lobbies  for laws that will keep Mickey Mouse under the company copyright forever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Which has a twist, because the heirs of the artist can eventually file to reclaim these copyrights.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/in-wake-of-disney-marvel-deal-cartoonists-heirs-seek-to-reclaim-rights/

The artists during their lifetimes have given up all copyrights to their work to the corporations through the work for hire agreements. But after they are dead, heirs can eventually sue the company for the control of the rights that the artists never got to enjoy. Oddly enough, letting the copyright expire fairly to the public domain in a reasonable period of time would have benefitted the corporation more, as trademark law can cover the business rights in these properties. Trademarks expire when they are not used, unlike copyrights.

While Walt Disney may have done well for himself by founding a corporation, this path hasn’t improved the situation of artists. This casino is rigged for the house. Even if you play the “found a company to protect myself” game to win for yourself, the house still wins every time. IANAL – I am not a lawyer, but I feel reasonably sure-footed, that laws slanted in corporations favor are of no real use to the little guy. And that’s trying to use the DMCA in Second Life – useless for artists unless they have unlimited money for lawyers and courts. They do not have the time or the cash.

I’m also reminded of how I felt when Metacreations imploded their key product offerings, selling all its real products, such as Poser, Bryce, and Painter, opting instead for restructuring into a “dot com” biz. Their products are relegated to the dustbin of spyware filters, while their original products are still selling and developed by other companies. This is Linden Lab ignoring the backbone of their business to “restructure” to appeal to corporate and educational customers playing “office” in virtual worlds. Someone else will take their original business.

Ask Fujitsu how well virtual corporate office went, Linden Lab! The corps and edus for the most part, didn’t go for playing “office” in Worldsaway, because better and far cheaper tools existed for offices even in 1996, comparatively speaking. Second Life is not *that much better* than Worldsaway was in this area, to change the majority of those conservative minds. They think that employees are playing a game on company time.

Meanwhile, we content creators are thrown to the thieves and crooks who take advantage of the platform for whatever nefarious srs bzns they are doing. What original content might have been sold at a living wage, is quickly devalued by these people to nearly free, sometimes in the space of hours after release.

Reading Interpol’s Intellectual Property Crimes description was something of a wakeup call, a final one in a series of wakeup calls.

http://www.interpol.int/Public/FinancialCrime/IntellectualProperty/Default.asp

“There is general agreement that IP crime is a high-profit, low-risk crime, which inevitably motivates criminals to engage in this type of activity. It is clear paramilitary terrorist organizations have traded in counterfeit and pirated goods to maintain their organizations and fund their activities. In light of this, INTERPOL remains concerned about the possibility that some other terrorist groups would seize the opportunity to finance their activities through IP crime.”

I can’t protect myself against these people by suing them under the DMCA. The DMCA gives them my personal information if I file, so they can come and make my life miserable both online and off. This is why I don’t file DMCA’s. If its organised crime, and I suspect a good deal of the endemic content theft to resale market is related to real-life crime. Given the stories I hear from many other content creators, it’s only a matter of time before the Feds and Interpol show up in Second Life, demanding where the L$ money trail goes.

L$ IN THE FOG!

Second Life content creators, the more they do for this platform, the more they benefit the corrupt users who may be engaging in other crimes in real life, various sorts of organised crime such as drugs, terrorism and money laundering. Lately “Protection” seems to be getting added to the list. Shut up about our rip bzns or they’ll grief and bot you to poverty. These are chilling effects on the Second Life economy, and no self-respecting corporation will want that kind of embarrassing blowout anywhere near their branding.

Linden Lab merrily skims off the transactions and enjoys the tier paid by these illicit businesses, in flagrant disregard for the fact that they can lose their safe harbor defence by profiting from sales of pirated content. Plus it destabilises the backbone of the legitimate businesses on Second Life, just like they did with “investment banking”, “securities trading”, gambling and ageplay, while satisfying their desire to have limitless “almost free” content to lure in corporate business, and a constant flow of people to rent sims at exhorbitant prices. The piece de resistance is that the hardware has gotten exponentially better, yet LL is not passing the savings on to the customers in the form of tier savings. No, they just lower and raise the “setup fees” in ways that harm those who have bought the sims already. But that goes back to my other rant on CorpoHippies blundering around with the Mainland.

Now, this might seem like a conspiracy, but I believe deeply it’s not a conspiracy at all. Never explain by conspiracy what is better ascribed to sheer stupidity.

I believe this is all unintentional random blundering around by a company with no compass for its corporate direction. Without good leadership at the helm, their blunders take the form of the drunkards walk — many people may be familiar with Brownian motion from statistics or physics classes. Linden Lab is actually just treading water with no idea where they are going, and that’s how they think the money is behaving, too. CorpoHippies drunk at the helm of the ship, floating seemingly nowhere fast.

Real Life doesn’t actually operate this way. Drunks do not just sail around in circles, heading for nowhere. That’s a computer simulation.

Drunks eventually crash the ship into something else.

Yet, they refuse to stop steering the ship while intoxicated. They are going to crash into a random iceberg, eventually. Or run this ship ashore like the Exxon Valdez, ruining Second Life for everyone.

Thinking about my own, existing Second Life content. It’s not really worth doing anything about the content I have made already. I’ll keep selling to benefit those golden souls who understand what doing the right thing means. But I can do more to legally protect the content I have not released yet. I am sure to do so, Linden Lab. I must protect myself from CorpoHippie blundering drunk habits, because you are drunkenly bumping into me too, and I’m afraid you are going to run me over with your ship. CorpoHippies all might wander around in what they perceive as a drunken fog, but I don’t. I want to achieve enough distance to be out of danger of CorpoHippie blundering drunk habits.

I don’t work for Linden Lab, and I am done doing things for Linden Lab for free, right now. Since when was I supposed to work for free in Second Life, when I am certain to have little to show for it but heartache and abuse? I’ve been down this road already: No thanks, LL.

Did it ever occur to these CorpoHippies, that average corporations and serious educational institutions don’t like IP theft, and have a serious attitude about trademarks? Because they have their own investments and content in this area to protect? That they want to buy content that also respects these laws? Not only that, they want to import their own content and they expect to be protected by these laws and by the platform sold to them?

So the LL CorpoHippies cynically took the easy way out. They devised a system that protects corporate customers like Fort Freaking Knox, while leaving the little guy out in the cold? But it doesn’t really help the corps or edus who may find a virtual world useful, because what most of them want is a multiuser immersive simulation (think 3d WEB SITE) that allows an audience that can scale (SITE VISITORS, LL!) over the Internet, and they want people to come visit, minus the phallus rezzing griefers and copybotters, and secure enough to keep out sim defacing hackers.

So instead of dealing with that problem, it was easier to simply not allow a regular Second Life audience to come visit with all their stuff securely tucked in their own inventories, believing the corps and edus would be happy shivering out on their cold and lonely standalone Second Life inna OfficeBox? Shutting out the mass audience, just to be free of a few hackers, griefers and copybotters? How about devising tools to deal with hacking, griefing and copying across the whole platform instead?

Nor can these corporate clients buy content from the majority of Second Life content creators either? Only from “approved sellers” who sell a certain volume and then hand over stuff “opensource” with just a license? Which is fine if they wanted to buy fully licensed content, but it doesn’t address the need for an audience, who will want to wear *their* stuff that they bought, and their content rightly won’t have a license for the corporate customer to use.

Was it too difficult to devise an asset server system that allowed an avatar to still be connected to the LL Inventory system, without transferring assets over to the Corporate Grid they are visiting? Did it ever occur to devise a system that simply made the issue of copying largely irrelevant?

Didn’t anyone tell LL CorpoHippies that selling a certain amount of merchandise does nothing to guarantee quality of content? It only insures that its inexpensive? So corporate customers can still really, only go through “authorised developers” to get custom content, or use their inhouse people? Why can’t corporations make their own choices on who to buy from?

How not to be forked as the Content Creator Chicken Main Course

I feel for the decent working Joes and Janes who work for Linden Lab, the many talented developers whose work has also gone into creating this platform. My screeds aren’t aimed at them. I have much love for all of these talented people. They’re just “doing a job” and they love the company that they work for, and want to see it thrive and prosper. Actually, so do I.

I’m talking straight to the CorpoHippie suits who pay their salaries. I’ve made some suggestions to these CorpoHippies on the JIRA to avert their course as they sail the Second Life luxury cruise liner into the icebergs, and the steering wheel is in their drunk hands.

Here’s a short list that summarizes how the plan against the copying of content should be reading. I call it:

“The Four Prongs in Forking Copied Content.”

Making the copying issue irrelevant is the answer to the problem.

1. Make it easy to buy high quality legitimate content.

2. Make it easy to find infringing content and remove it

3. Limit the ability to widely distribute copied content

4. Make it difficult to profit from copied content

1. Make it easy to buy high quality legitimate content.

Currently there are not easily recognisable channels in SL in which to buy good legitimate content. Search sucks, Xstreet is a corrupt pile of dodgy crap mainly lifted from other 3d content communities, the Web, and other Second Life residents. People mainly rely on word of mouth for good content creators, or use inworld groups.

Make it clearly obvious the difference between legitimate content and that which isn’t. When I talk about making it clear about legitimate content, I want to see it clear not just for high end content creators like myself, but also for full perms resellers, so they have confidence in their products getting sold to and used by legitimate users. Legitimate users of their products can benefit a lot by having some way of making it clear that they are.

So this should really trickle down to the bottom, to the average seller of derivative goods made from items created by other merchants. (the ubiquitous seller of 50 linden “screw me” heels). They need a way to mark themselves as legitimate and derivative goods, to differentiate themselves as better than the copies competing with them.

Quite frankly, its this user who drives the land market the most, and if they close down shop because they feel like they can’t continue easily in the face of others who just rip content to compete with them, we are all losers.

I have suggested other ideas on the JIRA, such as my ratings system, which in conjunction with content authentication can go a long way to creating a profitable trade in legitimate goods, giving corporate customers a tool to filter content coming into their sims, both on the Main Grid and off. This is the carrot, without which none of the sticks one uses against content theft will ever work. Linden Lab must outconvenience piracy and instill trust at all levels of the content creation selling and creation process.

Mesh import and other advanced Second Life tools that allow industry standard programs will help a lot for the corporate customers and high end Second Life users alike, and mesh building supplies will certainly be a trade once it appears in Second Life. It can overall improve content quality, if implemented well. But in order to have good results, and not a gianormous clusterfuck of uploading existing meshes from all over the Internet, Linden Lab needs to take an overarching approach to the issue of unauthorised resale and distribution of copied content.

2. Make it easy to find infringing content and remove it

This one’s important too, especially to drive home to retards that buying, selling, and distributing copied content doesn’t pay. Authentication can help with this one, too. Efficient processes to deal with those who try to slip through the cracks of the legitimate content trade have to be dealt with.

3. Limit the ability to widely distribute copied content

Important, but not working by itself, it needs support from the other prongs of this fork in order to work well. I suggested limiting transfer on unverified accounts, that will halt a good bit of the casual distribution of copied assets inworld. If one was to translate this to Opensim, just devise an inventory system which doesn’t transfer assets to the sim you are visiting, but remains either the property of the user or even of an online store. Sure users on a sim other than yours, can copy what you rez on your body, but as long as it sits in your inventory, they can’t touch it. Your avatar should behave as if it were a sim. “The Theatre of the Avatar”, but that is a topic for another discussion.

4. Make it difficult to profit from copied content

By limiting transfer on unverifieds, can end brutally reselling them through microtransactions by those accounts. Content control with legitimate goods will erect barriers against copied content as well. Opensim can simply do this by adopting the iTunes type model. The store is the ultimate arbiter of uploaded content. Works for the 3d communities, too.

This might even save the Second Life microtransactions model, before law enforcement agencies start to wonder about what other illegal purposes its getting used for. When or if that happens, and its more likely a when than an if, we can all call Second Life, “game over”.

But I think all my suggestions are a pipedream, that Linden Lab will never act upon anything I have suggested. However, its a plan for those who have walled garden grids, many on OpenSim already have similar models to Second Life, and I write my ideas for them, too.

I hope developers still have a job after the ethics-free CorpoHippies are done wrecking Second Life, and sadly this is something I doubt longterm too. Because CorpoHippies will just as happily crash into the developers and other employees to the wall as they smile vapidly in their brainfog, same as they do the rest of us unwashed “residents”.

Try calling the residents CUSTOMERS for a change!

The damage to some people could be great; those who are dependent on the money to pay their bills, those who are highly invested in land in some aspect of their business, or work for the company directly. The “end of the world” will likely *not* come to pass anytime soon. The LL CorpoHippies cynically know this much as they stumble around trying to steer the ship in their mental FOG, but I am doing my duty from the lighthouse, and warning people that there’s danger in these waters.

Icebergs ahead! Watch out for the shore! Pay attention to the lights and the foghorns!

I feel deeply for my fellow creators, honest estate owners, LL employees and the responsible customers of Second Life businesses who find themselves caught in the middle with no good options. For myself personally, I find that I actually do have a few options, all of which I can do simultaneously, and I will detail the list here.

1. Keep on having fun in Second Life, and don’t do Second Life content creation as srs bzns.

Priority no. 1! Support the content creators and estate owners you care about, anyway. Some of them don’t have the luxury to leave Second Life srs bzns content creation or estate rental biz, and deserve support and empathy. The ball is out of our court here. I will simply not make more stuff as srs bzns in Second Life, however. Not unless I see srs chng (and I doubt I will ever see it). I am taking my chickens to sell through other venues, to other 3d communities with me. If I make anything else for Second Life, its because I wanted to have fun with a few friends. That’s payment enough. I might sell a bit, I might not.

2. Concentrate on Blue Mars content creation. (only suitable for those going after the mid-high end)

Avatar Reality is far more enlightened about the image many corps and edus want to be associated with, and the need for easy access of an audience to their worlds while maintaining security for these clients. No CorpoHippies running the place at AR, I like that. Corporate through and through, just like many of the customers they aim to reach. Still early days yet for the platform, but I feel optimistic. It will *not* be a replacement for Second Life, nor is it even intended to be this, but I find it exciting in its own unique way. Long time ago (1996 when I was just playing Worldsaway on Compuserve), I predicted first person shooter game engines would be used to create virtual worlds; I am delighted to be part of this seachange in their usage. If you are a talented 3d artist, you should be checking out Blue Mars. Keep the suggestions for improvements to it coming. It will only get better.

3. Help Opensim turn into viable competition to Second Life at the low and midrange, by donating and selling worktime to create real business opportunity for myself and others, with basic graphic assets for others to use in its content creation.

OpenSim is a failsafe place for hardcore Second Life folks to go. Even more so if Linden Lab finally commits a suicide of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts while drunk on the spiked Kool-aid. Longterm, if Opensim is turned towards a real money transaction model, it could be a good platform for serious 3d artists, much the same as Turbosquid, Renderosity, and DAZ3d are for the many programs that 3d content is made for and with. This trade will trickle down to those who have less technical skill in 3d, just as it does on those sites. On 3d content sites, there are many divisions of labor of content creators – some texture artists, some modellers, some animators, some programmers, some folks just making renders for fun, etc. This needs more fostering. Fostering it will sell lots of inexpensive Opensims.

OpenSim and Second Life are really like a 3d rendering program where you can pose and animate your virtual dolls and build 3d environments, similar in most ways to a 3d rendering program such as Poser and DAZ Studio, while at the same time you can invite all your friends, in a giant Sim sketchpad to do anything you want to do. It is clear that content creation drives the rental of Opensims, which are far cheaper than Second Life Sims. If a viable economy emerges, there may be something approaching a thriving 3d web.

Christmas Feast Day at CorpoHippie Farms

At some point, the Second Life Chickens will become cruelly aware of the reality of CorpoHippie Farms. Eventually, all of the Chickens, including the Estate Owning Chickens and the Employee Chickens, will join their cousins, the Content Creator Chickens, at the CorpoHippie Farm. The sim will be Damage Enabled. Rotisserie Chicken is the main course and all will be chased down in a drunken attempt by the CorpoHippies to skewer all the Chickens to the Rotisserie grill for the massive, one time ever CorpoHippie Christmas Chicken Feast. Only CorpoHippies have a good chance of getting out of the farm, alive.

The site of the feast is high atop the Golden Feed Silos. All the CorpoHippies shall be force teleported to the Silver Lining Chicken Cage Restaurant for the final Christmas Feast Bacchanalia. Then merriment, drunken antics and loose women will prevail for a time, dressed in botted Nomine outfits bouncing on copied Sexgen beds.

The only way down is to swandive from the top of the silo towers, after copying to inventory with full permissions, exquisite golden parachutes embroidered with ivory chickens. All textures uploaded from Deviant Art, naturally, and the parachutes genuinely copybotted from Cubey Terra’s Aerodrome using a freebie opensource script.

The glide down to Earth may be quite dangerous for those suffering from foggy vision. Some of the CorpoHippies are sure to drop with an unopened parachute, too drunk from spiked Kool-aid to pull the release string. Others may nab greedily more than one parachute to ensure a safer sail to the terrain below. And some may have simply eaten too much Chicken while Intoxicated, puking into the parachute all the way down.

Watch your Dixie cups.

No CorpoHippies or Chickens were harmed in the Reenactment, as they were safely Teleported out of Second Life upon Time of Death.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Postscript.

This article is Parrhesiastic, sometimes engaging in Black Dry Humor, Sarcastic throughout, and meant to be so. For an Epicurean has failed her friends truly, if she does not offer frank criticism. Still, there is a sense of the absurd, as anything I try to do for my fellow Second Lifers, is all in the end, utterly pointless.

Be excellent to each other.

—

Postscript, 15.3.2011

I never expected it to go down like this… going over this posting, so much has changed. The massive layoffs I predicted, the end of the enterprise product, the ability to remove copied content by content creators. Some sad, some good… all painful.

But now, the criminal angle has appeared.

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/56364-redzone-2-electric-boogaloo.html

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/56056-notes-zf-redzone-disclosure-secondlife.html

But it seems I nailed it right here, wow… I never thought it would come out like this. People were targeted with copybotting, their products confiscated with a prim animation tool that phoned home, blatantly sold copybotted merchandise of people to force them to buy a protection device, said protection device designed to compromise the security of every person who visited the land of the content creator who owned it (even their neighbors), and lastly targeted the passwords of the content creators themselves by setting up a website.

Someone should be going to jail, but I will believe it when I see it.

I like to maintain flexibility on copyright. When I first released a set of UVmapped meshes for sculptie making in Wings, I was asked and asked if people can use my free meshes for making items. That touched me, but I knew they were the vanishing minority.

I put those items out as public domain. Yes, public domain! Not even a credit was due me. It was nice that so many thought of asking me, but I had my reasons for putting these items out as free.

They are part of what I call “methods and tools”. I have a strong feeling that the world is a better place if more people learn how to create art, and have easy access to simple tools in which to create with in order to learn the basics. These UVmapped meshes were part of the “tools” for people to do this.

Eventually once they outgrew the free programs, I would expect them to graduate to more powerful copyrighted software. But I feel strongly that people should support the independents, and not support the pirated software if one can avoid it. So my prims were OBJ files that were geared to use in Carrara and Wings. Carrara being an inexpensive 3d program, and Wings being outright free.

I could have used a Creative Commons license – but I felt that on something as basic as a uvmapped sphere, plane or torus, it was nothing that took me a long time to do. Less than a minute, actually. Slightly longer than rezzing a prim in Second Life. So I made them completely and utterly free.

Surprisingly not many people know how to make even the basic uvmapping for a sculpt, because they don’t know how to use 3d programs. UVMapping is not always an easy subject for people.

I consider giving away tools and methods as related to the ideas of memetics when Daniel Dennett says – Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. They are the infinitely copiable fishing rod.

Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain.

The profession of teaching passes on our tools and methods, keeping them alive long after us. While I also support the rights of those to get paid for teaching, and the right to get paid for your fishing rods, the basic methods need to be free for all to teach them to fish, to make the fishing rod.

So this is why I am pretty steadfastly opposed to things like software patents, because most of these are too basic to claim “creative property” in. Manufacturing I can understand, as it costs real effort to create something that is material – but for immaterial methods in the digital world, that argument gets a bit thin.

Copyright is a whole other ball of wax – it is the protection of creative works. Not methods. And as I hope to explain, conflating patent and copyright is a dangerous thing to do. Because, the fish and the fishing rod are similar in that they are both creative works, and belong under copyright. Copyright protects your creative works, patent tries to protect how you do the work.

A digital creative work is a fish, even if it is an infinitely copiable fish, or even if it is an infinitely copiable fishing rod.

A software patent is teaching someone how to fish or making a fishing rod, and you can teach as many people to catch that virtual fish as you have fish to catch. You can teach people how to make a fishing rod to infinity.

Software is a fishing rod, even if it is an infinitely copiable fishing rod, and it requires the methods to fish to be free to make these fishing rods. Even though you can teach someone how to fish infinitely, each fish took time to catch, each rod took time to make. I believe in the spread of good ideas – they can only help people to fish better.

Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. Confucius was a wise man.

Now on to the fish – my occasional freebie “fishes” – items I have given away for free in SL.

I have given away some freebies as a kind of advertising and to some extent for others to critique my work – such as my Minoan octopus flask which was a set of textures I made for a model when I was first learning 3d. It is still free in Second Life, however with no-mod and no-transfer permissions.

It is sometimes nice to make something for free, and give it to the world, and there is nothing wrong with this.

What is wrong though, is when people expect you to make all your creative work for free. They want all your fish, not only that – they never want to learn how to fish. Most of them don’t even want to take up learning how to use the fishing rods. They just take the fishing rods and resell them, too. And some come to SL thinking they can take all your fish and your fishing rods and resell them, like an infinite money machine of fishing.

This just isn’t sustainable. It is not fair to ask someone to do all your fishing for you for nothing. We artists have to eat and pay our tier – it may seem noble to some of you that we starve… but there’s no nobility in being poor. If you’ve ever been hungry and on the street (and its happened to me), I suppose maybe then people would understand the whole “indignity” of it all. Though, I doubt it.

I’ll continue to be perplexed how some people in Second Life think that content creators are somehow part of the “corporate menace” and they are justified in stealing their fish and their fishing rods, and reselling it. Especially those of us who mostly just work for our own pleasure so we can pay our tier, and many of us don’t even make enough to pay for that. I’m not making any big profit in Second Life, I usually have to pay tier every month because my sales don’t cover it.

And lately, I wonder more and more why I continue to. I adore Caledon, really if it weren’t for living in Caledon – I’d probably be long gone by now. By now, it’s just the people who make me stay in Second Life, and if the people move, so will I.