Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe

 I proposed this question to my students.

Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe. Suppose for a moment that since the fifth century before the Christian Era (about 2,500 years ago), human beings had achieved gender equality. 

What science and what technology would we have today?

 

A possible answer. Gender equality implies class equality. Otherwise, a slave woman would not have gender equality in relation to a free man, nor would a slave man have gender equality in relation to a free woman. Since there is only one class in the world, there would be neither rich nor poor people. As there are neither rich nor poor, capital gains would not be generated based on slave labor or underpaid labor. The trade would be fair, with minimal margins of capital gains, the equivalent to whatever the average wage would be. Furthermore, human communities would not have capital gains to generate industries beyond non-slave handicrafts. By having equality worldwide, there would be no wars, we would not need war technology. The control and use of metals and raw materials based neither on trade nor on industry would generate a lower number of produced objects (much lower than those found, say, in Classical Antiquity itself). Our technology would not be anywhere near what we have today in the First World. On the material plane, we would have advanced very little, but our psychological and spiritual capacities would be much more developed than they are today. Neither algebra, linked to commerce, nor calculus, linked to the needs of exploration and conquest of the world, would have been developed. We would have much more artistic mathematics, in many points indistinguishable from what we now call music theory. And therefore, the sciences would be of a very different character. The ecological and population problems would not have occurred. The arts would be at the level of our psychological capacities, etc...

But all this is only on the basis that we have achieved gender equality and therefore human equality at all levels. This equilibrium is as desirable as it is highly unstable. Very little against it would make it collapse. It would be enough for someone to want to dominate someone, even at a very basic psychological level, to break down the whole house of cards. Like the small stone that falls on the mountain and produces the avalanche. The most probable thing is that in a couple of generations after reaching the goal of gender equality, somewhere on the planet that is less favored in resources, or after a famine, someone would start a revolt that would end in war, dragging the balance of all the others. And we would go back to something similar to what we have today.

With great probability, the parallel universe described in the question would end up converging on ours. The solution to our problems is much more difficult than we think. It is necessary to build a new society based on idealistic and egalitarian principles, yes, but perhaps we will have to accept submitting ourselves to a psychological change of greater depth than the one that our social system presents to us right now. Only by changing ourselves can technology change. How do we do that?

 

A Note on Psychology and Logic

 According to the proposed thesis of continuous rationality, or if you prefer the Life-Intelligence continuum, psychology cannot be a science in the contemporary sense of that word. Basic emotions provide the semantic basis for our U-L-Ü system of knowledge. Formal logic belongs to the Überlebenswelt, while psychology is rooted in the three subsystems, it belongs to the sphere of neurophysiological conditioning (Unterlebenswelt), to that of the world of life (Lebenswelt) and that of a formalized and specialized language on the set of human experience. All science stands on U-L and constitutes Ü. All science is only science (and not only in the contemporary sense for this word) insofar as it uses logic and is limited by it, by the principle of non-contradiction. The principle of contradiction is the result of a "mineral" type of thinking - if the metaphor may be permitted - with object identities not only perfectly defined in recursive terms, but also fixed and immutable. Science produces thoughts of form, concepts badly adapted to the study of the Subject, of the "I". Psychology, like Art, needs active, creative, fluid and versatile thinking. And only from such a thought can the conditions arise for the flow of the presence of wisdom.

Knowledge is an endomorphic fuzzy representation of the state of a system

As expressed in another entry:

"The world of the life of a historical community, the Lebenswelt (L) (in Habermas’ [2010] sense of the concept) is in a close connection with the realm of experience that today is under the scrutiny of life sciences. In the philosophical milieu, one is spontaneously drawn to consider such a realm exclusively under the scope of contemporary science, and therefore, systematically, but if we want to elucidate the concept of system, we should proceed more carefully, for the semantical actions which lead us to distinguish something as a system are conditioned by some automatic psycho-biological protocols which belong to a different realm, let us call it Unterlebenswelt (U). The acritical knowledge which constitute the communicative actions of L is the result of an evolutive process of communication and complexification which started beyond human grounds, in the communicative actions of U. Since communication is a social homeostatic tool, the basic semantics of L are predetermined in the emotional protocols[7] of U which enable the acritical character of the linguistic actions of L. In this sense, L and U define a socio-biological space without which the choices and distinctions which make something to be a system could never be understood. L-U, considered as symbolic actions of homeostatic valuation, are not only the conditions for the formalized symbolic constructions of science, but they are as well the linguistic core of social identity which renders scientific activity meaningful. Nonetheless, the formalized symbolic constructions of science are in turn conditions for those very same choices of the socio-biological space of L-U, in fact, we are talking of a three dimensional space U-L-Ü (calling Überlebenswelt the formalized linguistic constructions of science) for the constitution of the unifying cognitive principle from which we construct the concept of system.

In this sense, an exclusively mathematical characterization of the concept of system seems insufficient and the definitions carry some serious ontoepistemological problems that can heavily weigh upon the praxis of systems science. "

When we talk about knowledge we imply knowledge of an U-L-Ü system, and we mean the ability to form an endomorphic representation of such a system. Since U-L-Ü systems are necessary fuzzy, our knowledge representations express more or less fuzzy expressions of a particular state of the system. In this sense, the different between knowledge and opinion is a matter of degree of fuzziness, and not just a question of truth functions. Such representations can never be a subset of the system for the U-L part of the system operates with poorly defined sets or with manifolds that cannot be defined according to cleat properties.