We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.  T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding I have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members.  These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears. The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The functio...

In this blog, I introduce two categories of "life" that may be regarded as controversial or "merely" a matter of definition. "Supermind" is at the "high" end. At the low, primitive, "old" end is "proto-life" - life before (or simply without) DNA ("before" being evolutionary speculation I avoid). Here is a good presentation on work on "proto-life". I'll try to add more examples as I come across them. Current work in this field can be regarded as an "existence proof": if there is any way we can make "life" out of non-living molecules, there may be others, one of which presumably actually happened. For my purposes, it's sufficient to see how such systems are possible, at least in theory. I leave the discovery of actual evolutionary processes to others. I avoid using "evolutionary fairy dust" to support the ideas put forward here. This blog does not put forward or support...

A "design" is an abstract concept. We can speak of the "design" of the human heart without expecting to find a blueprint somewhere. Even in cases where we know there was a human designer, the design of a human creation remains even if no documents or memory of the design exists. We see design where we see purpose. "Design" and "model" are closely related concepts and both may be seen to live in the same "space". DNA can be seen to embody the design of a life form, but the physical embodiment of the design in the DNA is not essential. In fact the non-essentiality is a characteristic of models/designs. We could imagine creating a process that would produce all the machinery of the cell by some other means - even such a simple means as switching the chemical structure but not the "meaning" of one of 4 letters of the genetic code. At the "mind" level of model and design, we know that our minds are somehow implemented in...

My thoughts about the four economies have emerged from thinking about money and debt. Some writers, especially Graeber  do a great job of sketching what money is (debt) and prying the concept away from "value". Graeber makes dire predictions about the fate of the world based solely on the nature of money. Graeber seems to think that, by the very nature of money, debt expands to choke the "real" economy - a phenomenon he calls "debt deflation". I think that Graeber's misunderstands the way that money works and its relationship to the other economies we live in, most obviously value (which is constantly being created and destroyed) and information (which mostly grows at an exponential rate, contributing to a growing percentage of the value of everything we buy). However, Graeber's analysis is helpful in pointing out that many transactions involving money and the creation of debt take place entirely in the "money universe" without inc...