Deliberation and experiment

The fewer participants you include in a deliberative process, the simpler the process can be. A solitary mind, thinking alone about personal experiences can come to a resolution pretty quickly most of the time.

Each person you include complicates the deliberative process exponentially. Now there is a wider range of experiences, thinking styles, values, emphases and goals that must be considered and satisfied.

When you start including non-human actors in the deliberative process, which means adding experimentation to the mix — now you have something incredibly complex. If the group is trying to understand non-human actors, we now have something like a scientific community. If the question is broadened to include both humans and non-humans combined, we have something a lot more complicated: a society.

And if you try to include all humans and all non-humans, you are now in the realm of the impossible. But it is probably a worthy impossibility.

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