This continues my discussion of an analogy between the human situation and that of a bee. I contend that neither of us knows the most important fact about our existence, namely that we are embedded in a "hive". " Surfaces and Essences " reminds us that analogies underlie our thinking, but to watch out. Some analogies are better than others. Humans are not bees. For one thing, as far as the hive is concerned, the individual bee is expendable and interchangeable with any other bee. We are tempted to regard our enemies this way. Enemy soldiers are robots but ours are heroes with families back home. But the fact is that humans are far from interchangeable. Even if we have been exposed to the same environment and the same education, we manage to draw different lessons from it. It's also true that humans are not expendable, or at least they have different degrees of expandability. The skills of individuals often contribute to the fate of the "hive"...

(Originally posted in " The Zen of Value ") Discussions about how money originates often start with the assumption that it evolved to facilitate trade and "store value". Otherwise, so the story goes, you and I would simultaneously want something somebody else had (say, you have more fish than you need and I have extra sheep). There is scant evidence for "cash" arising out of this situation. Evidence for another narrative can be found in human behavior that naturally arises when "cash" is in short supply. Say, you go fishing and catch 5 nice big salmon. It would not be unusual at all for you to show up at my door and offer me a fresh salmon "for free". On the other hand, we would tacitly understand that this establishes a debt. Perhaps at some point, I'd mow your lawn or give you a basket of berries, or jam from my last berry picking trip. The math doesn't need to work out. If I'm in bad shape and have nothing to give in retu...

In a previous post , I wondered about how debt becomes the "civilized" mechanism to form the skeleton of a structure that recognizably similar to the kleptocracies documented in "Thieves of State". The theory is that over time (and a few political revolutions), "Western" societies settle into a way to suck the blood out of the poor "legally", eliminating the need for overt corruption such as bribes and kickbacks. In many of these "democracies", bribery continues to be important in the form of "dark" political contributions that constantly outweigh the desires of the general public. Money itself becomes a corrupting influence. But let's take a look at debt first - especially its connection to "capital" or "wealth" - the material goods of a society. Especially with the appearance of cryptocurrency, we find people believing the myth of "fiat currency" - the idea that the government can print piec...

Thieves of State " Thieves of State " is about a particular form of society - sadly perhaps the most common form of society - a kleptocracy. "Thieves" goes into a lot of detail about how individuals are drawn into (assimilated into) this form of society ("dragon"). The examples allow us to drill down to get a close-up view of how assimilation takes place, how it is almost inevitable and why it is so difficult to resist. It's hard to find an example of a social form that doesn't feature a "strongman" (usually but not always male) with built-in mechanisms that draw group resources to the strongman and his immediate family. This is as true of a Canadian "first nation" as it is of the Trump administration in the USA. Chayes describes how this phenomenon permeates the whole society in a kind of fractal structure, with layer upon layer of mini-strongmen paying up to the strongmen above them while extracting resources from humans below...

This essay is an " intuition pump ". The term was invented by Daniel Dennet. An intuition pump is a thought experiment designed to nudge us from our usual way of thinking to see the world in a new way. Bees have approximately one million neurons in 0.5 mm; humans have 100 billion neurons. And yet bees can learn, and understand abstract concepts,  and make complex decisions But does a bee know it's a bee? With a mere million neurons in a speck of a brain, it's not surprising that a bee doesn't have a lot of mental hardware for luxuries like "consciousness." Its brain is busy doing things like being a skillful a flight controller. It's not surprising that we don't have bee philosophers. But if we did, would they ask a similar question of us? Do we know we are human? Is it possible that I know less about what it is to be human than a bee knows about being a bee? But don't I know everything there is to know about the experience of b...

My long-standing rule with Trump is: whatever you think about him, the truth will turn out to be worse. Donald Trump is the godfather of an international criminal organization. His show business antics (some may say "malignant sociopathy") distracts us from the big picture of long-standing criminal activities of his immediate family and extended family of tyrants and criminals. He is systematically dismantling the rule of law in the US, resulting in staggering profits for the Trump family and criminal associates, such as Vladimir Putin and  his  criminal organization. I expect Trump and company to fall, if at all, as the result of an investigation of the activities of this group (family and friends) as an  organized crime family  conspiring to conduct such activities as fraud, bribery, obstruction of justice and money laundering. Eventually, the sprawling assets of this organization will be seized under the RICOH legislation as proceeds of crime. Alternatively, Trump...

I have a lot of time on my hands - perhaps too much. I read a lot, usually 2 serious books per week or maybe more if you count the books I check into and decide not to read or put on the back burner for later. In the "later" category is the emerging genre of books explaining all the details of Donald Trump's horrible personality and personal history. I get it. No further information required. There is a danger of being pulled into a rabbit hole, following "click bait" until starvation sets in. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing something similar on a larger scale, taking advantage of the cheap and easy access to books (Kindle) and general information (Google/YouTube). So here are, in theory, the "topics" I'm following. THE SELF & COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE This is a hold-over from the main thread in my "Christian Skeptic" blog. At the moment, it concerns questions about the nature of the self (aka, "soul"). I'm convinced ...

One intuitive obstacle to the idea of the super person is our own sense of being "one" person inside our skulls. While this is not directly relevant to the idea of the super person, it may help to think more clearly about how realistic this idea of the unitary self is. This leads us into he fascinating and controversial area of "consciousness". I usually consider this subject as overlapping with 2 others, namely "attention" and "working memory". Attention and working memory have the advantage that they can, in some sense, be located in the brain by fMRI scanning - correlating the areas of the brain that are active with reports or experiments on the subject. These studies suffer from the common assumption that the area of the brain that "lights up" is "responsible" for the function in question. It is more accurate to say that the area that lights up is involved in the function - part of a circuit or system that correlates with...

In everyday speech, "I" and "we" mean different things. but the boundaries can be fuzzy. To our ear, the "Royal We" is somewhat comical - the Queen seems to be bound by custom never to use "I". Yet, historically, the Crown is, in some sense, the personification of the state. The Queen is, in some sense, always plural. In everyday life, we are often presented with an individual claiming to represent something larger than themselves - sometimes an annoyingly vague group, as in " we don't allow blue jeans on the golf course". Many, if not most, of the important decisions in our lives are made in cooperation with some kind of "we". "We" decide to get married, hopefully to a person our respective families will accept into the family "we". On the job, we work with others in teams, often on jobs that are initiated behind closed doors by shady high-status individuals. If we serve in the military, our team work...

When we introduce a new type of living entity into our lexicon, there is a temptation to spread some scientific fairy dust over the idea with a discussion of evolution. I will resist the usual trope of explaining how groups are "adaptive" and how they arise in chimpanzees. To me, such discussions seem to use evolutionary ideas in a circular and ultimately uninformative way. Instead, let's just look at how groups compete, survive and spawn other groups. We will leave aside the issue of whether membership in a group is "natural" or "adaptive" to the human "component". In passing, I must observe that membership in particular groups (such as ISIS) can be very far from "adaptive" to the one who joins the group. He'd be wiser to stay home. Groups live and die by rules of their own. The structure of a group can be viewed as a "meme", which, according to [Dawson] has evolutionary tendencies of its own. For example, the structu...

Draft. I need to polish and add references to the books mentioned. This is offered to friends for commentary with apologies for its rough form. It was [corporation] that first impressed me with the idea that a group can and should be treated as a person. [] drew attention to the way the corporation exists only for its own benefit (profit) and, incredibly, shareholders can sue the board of directors or remove them if the board behaves in any other way. The corporation is a legal "person", able to own property, sue and be sued. Most people regard this as a "legal fiction" but [] drew my attention to the fact that, if the corporation were indeed a human being, that human would be a psychopath. Subsequently, I learned from mindfulness and Zen to question the naive idea of the "self". In this line of thought, some maintain that the self doesn't exist at all. It certainly can't be found on brain scans. Some notable public figures such as [Sam Harr...