Boundary Violations vs Boundary Dissolution
While at Conceptual Boundaries Workshop, I realized that I had been conflating two different phenomena in my mind:
Actions that violate boundaries/membranes, and
Actions that kill or dissolve boundaries/membranes.
This distinction is important because, towards the goal of keeping agents safe, it’s more important to prevent dissolution than it is to prevent violations.
Examples of actions that merely violate boundaries:
Injecting harmless saline solution into someone else’s arm.
Stealing an object from someone else’s house.
Illegally entering a country with closed borders.
Examples of actions that dissolve boundaries:
Injecting deadly poison into someone else’s arm.
Burning down someone’s house.
Invading a country and overthrowing the government.
Violating boundaries about locally betraying the sovereignty of an agent over their boundary/membrane. But on the whole the boundary still stays alive.
However, dissolving boundaries about destroying the capacity for an agent to be sovereign. The boundary dies.
This also all relates to how I understand Andrew Critch’s boundary protocol idea. He hasn’t written about this online (yet?). But in talking to him about this I realized the distinction of this post.
Not sure how much importance I put on the metaphor of boundaries, but just to probe a bit: how do you evaluate actions that make boundaries irrelevant or harmful:
Convincing someone to allow you to inject a vaccine into their arm.
Entering someone’s house and eating their food because they invited you over to dinner.
Visiting a country as a tourist, with the intent to leave after some positive interactions.
Is it intent that matters, or degree of harm, or “feeling of safety” that is controlling how you frame things?
Membranes are filters, they let in admissible things and repel inadmissible things. When an agent manages a membrane, it both maintains its existence and configures the filtering. Manipulation or damage suffered by the agent can result in configuring a membrane to admit harmful things or in failing to maintain membrane’s existence. There are many membranes an agent may be involved in managing.
I discuss this in Protecting agent boundaries.
One thing to further ponder is the extent to which systematic or repeated boundary violations can effectively amount to a dissolution. Analogous examples:
Forcing someone to submit to multiple-times-daily injections, so far all of which have been harmless saline
Constantly stealing objects from someone’s house in a way that they don’t feel like they can meaningfully accumulate personal property
Entering a country with closed borders so frequently that its ability to enforce its immigration laws is effectively gummed up