I have had some fun imagining a perfect world but, following  HG's methods , I have constrained my imagination to a world containing real people living in a real physical world. Also following HG, I have imagined myself living in that world (ignoring the practical problems of living for another 200 years). Such constraints have a way of making things far more interesting. As it turns out, this exercise in imagination has been so much fun I've decided to give it its own blog, which you are reading now. First, I need to skip over a few current problems which will take (I imagine) perhaps 200 years. Following HG's methods, I allow one slightly implausible assumption and then see how things go. I must, therefore, picture myself to somehow live that long to see it all. So, here's a quick summary of the world in 2220: I assume that climate change will have a severe impact over the next 200 years but that we will rise to the challenge. For example, as the ocean swall...

Some thoughts about the super-obscure " Modern Utopia ," by HG Wells. This is almost free (99 cents) from Kindle. It's well worth reading for the money, and I encourage people to give it a look. For one thing, it's a literary tour de force - a totally unique way of dealing with a subject. HG sets a task for himself that's worth noting for those of us who "live in our heads". Thinking about Utopia is a special kind of meditation. What would be a perfect world? HG takes due note of other efforts going all the way back to Plato's Republic  and Thomas Mores' Utopia . HG says you need to jump into this perfect world yourself and imagine this world to be populated by people you recognize as humans like yourself and people unlike yourself. Perhaps imagine a Utopia that doesn't boil down to a world governed by people like you according to your values. Given HG's example, I have found this to be good advice - even a roadmap to encourage us to...

My adventures in literature lead me to " A Short History of Europe " and then a side road to Thomas More's " Utopia ". Then to HG Wells' " A Modern Utopia " and, returning to a book that was waiting for all this, " Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberation " and the " Federalist Papers ". The two Utopias and the Papers (as commented on by Deliberation) are about the same subject: what would be the perfect society -- the Utopia that should replace the repressive rule of English kings? There is a progression from More to the US Constitution of 1787. Most people imagine that the Constitution magically popped into existence as soon as the States declared independence in 1776. In fact, many confuse the stirring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution. It took over 10 years for the colonies to establish anything like functioning government. They fought a war with the world's most powerful nation without a f...

Rene Descartes 1596-1650 Descartes took it for granted that "mind" or "soul" existed in different universes. He wondered about how these universes communicated. Specifically, he wondered how "spirit" can move "matter". There are many who still take the idea of the spirit world seriously. They imagine the "soul" can be separated from the body and migrates on to some other universe (heaven) at death or somehow migrate to another body. Let's put this belief system to one side. From here on, I will speak to those who don't take this idea seriously. These days, those of us who are scientifically inclined imagine the "mind" to be a phenomenon that somehow happens in the Universe that is governed by physical law (and perhaps other laws so far undiscovered). Exactly how this happens is a live debate and a key area of investigation in the new university departments of "Cognitive Studies". These same departmen...

In " What Money Can't Buy ," Michael J. Sandel attacks the value issue as a philosopher. Ideally, the job of a philosopher is to make us think more clearly about critical issues. As a philosopher, Sandel doesn't offer definitive answers. His business is to ask the right questions, clarify the terminology and provide "edge cases." If  you watch Sandel's lectures on Justice , you will get a taste of his process: A "Socratic" moderation of discussions about what is right and why. Sandel looks for "edge cases" and questions our vocabulary. The result is penetrating insight into the subject that pushes aside much of the discussion that assumes that justice can be achieved by tweaking the economy. Economics, especially since it embraced the concept of "incentives" has abandoned the pretense of moral neutrality. Specifically, economics is seen in the light of political philosophy. Economic theories are thinly veiled  poli...

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019, at 7:30 PM Len Bruton <...> wrote: There seems little doubt that science looks for explanations by seeking out those physical objects within brains that may yield a closer appreciation of how minds function and maybe just where they are to be found!!  Following your very different approach, my thought experiment is to ask whether Earthly minds and whether Earthly consciousness existed 100 million years ago?  Is it then a valid question to ask whether reality existed prior to minds This question can send us spiraling down an infinite regress. There seem to be two ways of stopping this. Either accept the reality of "mind" or accept the reality of "the world". Otherwise, you have a problem of reality being something in the mind, which is itself in reality, or a model of reality and so forth ... Wayne Brown <chillyfinger@gmail.com> to Len Given that we have a mind, it also makes sense if other living things have a mind or someth...

Bitcoin is not a currency. Very few people, from Nobel Prize Winning economists to the "man on the street" understand money and value. The phenomenon of cryptocurrency is a case in point. I highly recommend the little horror story of Gerald Cotton and Quadriga  as background to my comments here. Not wanting to trust their money with any "central authority", Quadriga's customers handed over their life savings to a trusted criminal and they vanished with him when he died. Marketplaces in of any scale require an underlying currency to function. At the very least, such currency must have a more or less stable value on the day the market takes place. In practice, such currencies become stable in larger territories over longer time periods, usually backed by the agreed-to value of some particular good, such as gold or silver or the promise to pay gold or silver.  Unlike in the imagination of crypto believers, the "government" is just another play...

The modern discussion of consciousness is over-concerned with what goes on inside the brain. Inevitably, this leads to some vague "computational" metaphor that imagines the brain to be some kind of computer. clearly an "object" in the world, like a toaster only more complicated. Putting aside the objection that most writers who use this analogy are less than experts on computers or the actual brain, the problem is that they ignore the most amazing and obvious nature of mind, which is literally right before their eyes. As the saying goes, they are fish that can never discover water. Let's suppose that some future technology wires up my brain to provide complete information on the changing status of every neuron and synapse along with every connection in the brain, along with the most sophisticated interpretation of all this data in real time. Needless to say, such technology is far in the future and may not even be remotely possible.  Nonetheless, let'...

I'm a career computer systems analyst, with a special love for "OOA-object-oriented analysis". OOA is particularly attractive since it comes very close to the way we think in a categorical way. After reading a few books on the economy, especially the " Value of Everything ". Here are some of the key objects in this model: Resources, such as corn, fish, wood, fuel. Each of these resources has its own profile as to how much "work" is required to obtain the resource, how much is available etc. The Market. This turned out to be the most complex thing to specify. How do you model trades between people? This question is at the heart of economic theory, such as, How does money evolve? The Person. Resources are owned and consumed by persons. To make the model work, we'd need thousands of these persons with different "policies" regarding consumption and trade. The environment. This object "owns" resources, but also knows about th...

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Most people shy away from simple math. In fact, publishers demand that no equations, however simply don't appear in popular books. From this perspective, the simple graphs and equations that appear in introductory textbooks appear sophisticated. In particular, these tools have a hard time presenting anything but a super simple, static picture of the world. If you approach the same situation with different tools, a very different picture emerges. Even simple computer simulations can show complex behavior that can't be reduced to equations of any sort. I played around with this idea a bit but abandoned it because it would have involved an unrealistic effort to implement it. However, even while simply drawing up a specification, you can see the kind of things a model could address. Most important is the question of stability or even a stable pattern of oscillation. Model specifications seem t...

WHAT ABOUT THE INVISIBLE HAND? The capitalist gospel includes myth of the " Invisible Hand " - the idea that the marketplace will magically balance out personal motives to create goods and services with optimum efficiency. This is more of an axiom than a sensible economic doctrine. Without a shred of evidence, conservatives believe that any attempt to interfere with the "free market" will produce inefficiencies. "Government" is regarded as a  cost  to be minimized. Even though the idea of the "invisible hand" was dead on arrival (Adam Smith himself hardly mentioned it and never in the context it is used today), it is  core   current economic wisdom - accepted as an obvious truth. Adam Smith first introduced the concept in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, written in 1759, invoking it in reference to income distribution. In this work, however, the idea of the market is not discussed, and the word "capitalism" is never used. Wiki...

Koestler was a master of analogies. He talked about magnetic storms, where everyone's "moral compass" swerves from "True North" without us realizing it. The visual image of this led me to think of humanity as a bunch of iron filings around a magnet.  One of the striking things in this image is the fibers of filings - the way they bunch up and line up head to toe under the influence of the magnetic field. Looking closely, you see that each fiber has its own little magnetic field, resulting in the textured pattern. I've given a lot of thought to the way humans "click" together, usually in "pseudo-persons" like corporations. This image invited me to consider another kind of alignment, the 'head to toe" relationship being the way people are connected, especially "transactional". A special case is a network of "perverse incentives" created by the social environment itself. Here's an example: We don'...