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...
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...
I am unimpressed with Buddhist metaphysics. In spite of the claim often heard that Buddhism is not a religion, I never seem to get very far into Buddhist doctrine without running into its metaphysics. Most recently, I was charmed by the idea of "samsara" -- which seemed to me a useful concept -- all the distractions of the world that keep us from enlightenment. However, any discussion I can find of the subject is all about the wheel of life and reincarnation. I'm also impressed by the idea that our suffering is self-imposed and that we can escape suffering by changing the way we think about our lives. This is a pretty obvious idea, really but the Buddhists seem to wrap it up in religious practice and doctrine. Not all of our problems can be solved this way and certainly not even the problems that arise solely in our minds can be solved this way. There are, after all, strong claims of modern medicine to address genuine illnesses, "chemical imbalances", injuries a...
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