Discourse on Intercourse: Difference between revisions

“If [[determinism]] is true,” he reasoned, “then everything is already [[known]] — or may be extrapolated from what is already known — and is therefore, is ''[[Constructive|constructively]]'' known. Now since all as-yet undeliberated outcomes can be deduced without having to go through the bother of actually deliberating them, and as a conference call is in its very essence a “deliberating thing” — a ''res deliberans''<ref>{{Buchstein}} seems, ''ad hoc'', to have assigned conference calls their own ''[[a priori]]'' [[ontology]] or even personhood here. There is no plausible justification for this, other than that he was very, very ill.</ref> — and ''only'' a “deliberating thing”, no conference call has any ontologically essential purpose and can be dispensed with.”  

This was, for a while, a moment of great joy, notwithstanding the self-contradiction within the confines of a single, laboured, sentence.

Therein, a [[paradox]], because the original logical inference generated by his theory — that conference calls produce deliberated outcomes — generates a different value ''if the call is not actually held''. The holding, or not holding, of the conference call is part of the factual configuration of the universe from which one determines the outcome.   

That is, the information content of a deliberation is path-dependent. If the conference call happens, it has one value. If the it does not, it has another value. This is a sort of Schrödinger’s cat sort of affair. [[Büchstein]] dubbed this the “[[substrate]]-ambivalence” of the conference call. It remained a genuine mystery in management theory until the impish German jurist [[Dilbert’s programme|Havid Dilbert]] established that, whether you hold them or not, the informational value of a conference call for participants, observers, and indeed that remainder of the outside world who remains blessedly oblivious to them, is the same: ''zero''.  

Thus, {{Buchstein}}’s paradox melted away with his sanity in that Mandalayan asylum, only to be replaced by a more intractable conundrum, with which Dilbert wrestled fecklessly for the rest of his life. It remains with us to this day: