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Old 04-18-2009, 07:24 PM   #153
zerospinboson
"Assume a can opener..."
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe View Post
I thought it was wrong. What does "deserve" mean in this context. This seem to be an entitlement argument again. Or a circular argument.
It's not circular. (or well, not viciously so.)
I don't know if you got the memo, but for a long time it was customary for people to die, and their ideas to die with them.
The only way people transfer knowledge from gen1 to gen2 is through learning. (this distinguishes us from most but not all other creatures)
Some time ago we invented writing. This made it possible to transfer knowledge between clever people, cutting out the telephone effect. This was a marvellous invention, that allowed us to greatly accelerate the speed at which we were improving ourselves and our culture.
Then, the printing press came along, and bookmaking became rather less arduous. So, after a while limited time copyright was invented, to offset the author's efforts.
Regardless of that, people still died. And the knowledge passed into the PD.
Skipping ahead a bit, the only reason we are the way we are now because of that body of accumulated culture (a specific form of knowledge transmission and encoding). As such, we are constituted through that knowledge, or, to turn that idea on its head, the only way for us to become human is by integrating that knowledge into ourselves in some way or other. To be human is to internalize some (if not all) of that inheritance.
i.e., our mode of being is entirely dependent on it (and v.v.)
Authors write stuff because of other things they encounter, and then other people read that again, and become fodder for someone else to write about.
This is where "entitlement" comes from, and it is not circular, it's spirally.
(And yes, this is an "entitlement argument", although I'm not really sure why that is bad.)
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