I understand and agree with your logic (and, incidentally, would find it
hilarious if this made me guilty of Masterminding Being a Bad Space Captain),
but I have a brief question that occurred to me yesterday about Rule 2519,
which says:
A person gives consent (syn. consents) to an action when e, acting
as emself, publicly states that e agrees to the action.
This seems to imply that it is possible for someone to act on behalf of someone
else to "publicly state" something, and explicitly excludes that ability. This
is almost the same as the language used in the Ribbons rule ("publicly
acknowledged the fact [that it is Agora's Birthday]").
Does this mean that the "acting as emself" clause in R2519 is simply
unnecessary? Or is "stating" something different from "sending a message that
states" something?
-twg
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Thursday, January 17, 2019 7:10 PM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@uw.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On 1/16/2019 5:37 AM, D. Margaux wrote:>
>
> > > On Jan 16, 2019, at 4:10 AM, Timon Walshe-Grey m...@timon.red wrote:
>
> > > If the original attempt failed at all, I would have expected it to be
>
> > > because of R2466's prohibition of sending-messages-on-behalf. I realise
>
> > > that contradicts CFJ 3649 but to be honest I'm not 100% certain, in
>
> > > hindsight, that that judgement was correct anyway.
>
> >
>
> > I agree that CFJ 3649 is poorly reasoned and probably shouldn’t be
>
> > followed. It’s not obvious that the judge of that CFJ knew of the
>
> > prohibition against sending messages when “acting on behalf.”
>
> I remember disagreeing with 3649 it at the time, can't remember if I
> attempted to file a Motion or just discussed it a bit and let it pass. In
> any case, here's my take on Tenhigitsune's case (proto-judgement):
>
> tl;dr you can't "communicate to" someone on behalf of a zombie because you
> can't send messages on their behalf.
>
> In general, in Agora, we abstract a lot of things (real currencies become
> virtual currencies, etc.) However, we are grounded in some baseline
> realities. Of course, some of those "realities", such as whether free will
> exists, are deep philosophical questions - over time, Agora has built up
> some precedents around those.
>
> One such precedent is in CFJ 1895 (a discussion of free will and
> Aristotelian causality). This found that a "baseline axiom" in Agora is
> that the game is played by discrete, identifiable agents of free will -
> i.e. "natural persons". The assumption is that "personhood" is absolute -
> you can create a legal construct that accepts one person's actions on
> behalf of another, but the agent never "becomes" the other person.
>
> This fundamental assumption extents to the concept of "knowledge". Because
> each person's knowledge is fundamentally independent, an actor cannot "pass
> on a principal's knowledge" (i.e. "communicate to") a third party. Again,
> we could put in Rules-language to create a legal fiction that allows it,
> but such communication cannot happen naturally.
>
> Currently, the R2466 explicitly forbids the legal fiction that an actor can
> act on behalf of a principal to "send a message". While the context of
> "send a message" is generally "send an email", in this case it should be
> taken colloquially and broadly - one can "send a message" in a variety of
> ways. So in the broader context, "sending a message" is simply to
> "communicate" to someone, whether via email, in-person, or a horse's head
> in someone's bed.
>
> So an actor cannot communicate with anyone on-behalf-of a principal. In
> R2466 this is explicit, but even without the prohibition in R2466, it is
> impossible: as per CFJ 1895 "Every assumed act of free will can be traced
> to a particular person's desire. Thus, as final cause and intention, this
> intention, and free will is, also non-transferable, in the most fundamental
> sense." The "act of communicating" is fundamentally an act of free will,
> an act traceable to a particular person's desire. And that person is the
> actor, not the principal[].
> The Rule "Space Battles" states that a certain action is accomplished by
> communicating to another party - the communication is the action. The Rule
> is Power-1. R2466 is power-3, so this trumps any ability that might be
> implied in lower-powered rules, and as discussed above, there's no
> "natural" ability for an actor to communicate on behalf of a principal[**].
> Therefore, a person CANNOT act on behalf of another to communicate the
> required information.
> [] This is specific to cases where the actor "originated" the originalthought
> (i.e. the origin of the message was the actor's free will, not the
> principal's). For example, if the Principal (of eir own accord) sends a
> message to a private party, and the private party forwards the message to a
> forum, it's possible to find that the Principal communicated with the forum
> "via the private party". But this is only true if the Principal, as an
> agent of free will, originated the content of the message.
>
> [**] This discussion of what may happen "naturally" is necessary because
> it's physically impossible to block two free agents from communicating: a
> rule that says "two people CANNOT communicate about X" would have no
> meaning when the two people actually did so, which is why we use SHALL NOT
> to control acts of communication between free agents. So if R2466 were
> purporting to invalidate communications between free agents, it would fail
> due to physical reality.
