rigorousintuition.ca

Unfair, Chump. You're under some kind of internal pressure and finding external causes which are far apart from the real external and internal causes. One trick is not to identify with what you feel. Your feelings are a landscape you happen to exist within, full of signposts and briars relevant to you but not necessarily of your making nor the making of those around you, while you and they also contribute to that landscape. That's life.

Iamwhomiam, schizoid is what we do and what we are in this world we're making. How else to escape except through exploring contradiction? And yet while contradiction is an eternal problem, how we reconcile contradiction is the supreme art, one we're losing sight of.

chump wrote:made up money

Of course money is made up. It's not something that ever existed before humans invented it. A money-wish suffuses our consciousness, but we really only want it to buy, or have the potential to buy, goods and services, which money is neither.

I bet people get this funny idea about money—that money should somehow be something of "real" intrinsic value—mostly from television.

I think the point is, and one has to be very careful in saying this, that it is in the realms of possibility that those who create the money may get to control practically almost every facet of general day to day life for the working class. And that's fine if these money makers are benevolent, but it is in the realms of possibility they are not humble souls and do not have the best interests of the workers at heart. They are not elected, so in this case we would just have to make do with our lot until it is over.

BenDhyan wrote:I think the point is, and one has to be very careful in saying this, that it is in the realms of possibility that those who create the money may get to control practically almost every facet of general day to day life for the working class. And that's fine if these money makers are benevolent, but it is in the realms of possibility they are not humble souls and do not have the best interests of the workers at heart. They are not elected, so in this case we would just have to make do with our lot until it is over.

"Those who" create the money create as much as Congress tells them to create. It's not up to them.

If you're worried about Fed power to influence interest rates to "stabilize" the economy, I'm for changing that.

I can't blame anyone for being confused...



Since money was brought up, I'm pursuing it here because I think we should expand our consciousness of money.

(Feel free to swing by the MMT thread and discuss further.)

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

—J.K. Galbraith
"The United States" in New York magazine (1971-11-15)

Almost quoted Galbraith in this thread a little earlier than your post. Different quote, but interesting sync.

The real 'Mandela effect' is reconciliation.

Elvis » Tue Jun 25, 2019 5:20 am wrote:

chump wrote:made up money

Of course money is made up. It's not something that ever existed before humans invented it.

The reigning ontology treats money as if it were an exhaustible natural resource, and land as if it was money, a savings account with a fixed return. Money has to "come from somewhere." Where are you going to get it? Everything real appears as a money-value, if you have the money for it. When you throw it out, it disappears. Most experience is in disconnected fragments. All can be measured in units but narratives to give meaning are hard to sustain beyond individual fantasy or group frenzy. The stories most common and agreed between us are in the prices. Just saying a few obvious things that philosophers have been talking about for centuries and that shape perception and consciousness.

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." –Alan Watts[1]

Grizzly » Thu Jun 27, 2019 10:05 pm wrote:"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." –Alan Watts[1]

Brings to mind Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson.

"Grizzly » Fri Jun 28, 2019 7:05 am"]"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." –Alan Watts[1]

From there to the Zen position...."All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not of any colour and has neither form or appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of as in terms of time, past or future. It can't be described by any words or numbers for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces, and comparisons. It is that which you see before you -- begin to reason about it and you fall into error." - Huang Po

In the Zen understanding is that with enduring Zen practice, the aspirant becomes a greater expression of the One (Cosmic existence) than the secondary personality, ie., a Buddha.

Fwiw, from what I have learned from the brain's neuroplasticity wrt learning new or lost mental abilities, any prolonged repetitive mental practice will bring about changes in the mind, and I suspect that, if a universal mind is a given, the zen practice works to bring about some form of union.

I mentioned neuroplasticity wrt the brain, fwiw, here is an interesting talk on the subject...

Elvis » Tue Jun 25, 2019 5:36 pm wrote:

BenDhyan wrote:I think the point is, and one has to be very careful in saying this, that it is in the realms of possibility that those who create the money may get to control practically almost every facet of general day to day life for the working class. And that's fine if these money makers are benevolent, but it is in the realms of possibility they are not humble souls and do not have the best interests of the workers at heart. They are not elected, so in this case we would just have to make do with our lot until it is over.

"Those who" create the money create as much as Congress tells them to create. It's not up to them.

If you're worried about Fed power to influence interest rates to "stabilize" the economy, I'm for changing that.

I can't blame anyone for being confused...

The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which
complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Since money was brought up, I'm pursuing it here because I think we should expand our consciousness of money.

(Feel free to swing by the MMT thread and discuss further.)

How about consciousness as money? In a hypothetical post-singularity society where everyone has uploaded their minds the obvious choice for currency would be computational power, and more computational power would equal more mind.

Another brainfart: If the simulation hypothesis is correct, who's to say we're inside the simulation? How de we know we aren't the hardware?

DrEvil » Fri Jun 28, 2019 11:47 am wrote:How about consciousness as money? In a hypothetical post-singularity society where everyone has uploaded their minds the obvious choice for currency would be computational power, and more computational power would equal more mind.

Wow. Fucked up, but also irrelevant. Did you know the women in the award-winning Black Mirror episode "San Junipero" no longer existed at the end? That's my view, and I stick by it.

Another brainfart: If the simulation hypothesis is correct, who's to say we're inside the simulation? How de we know we aren't the hardware?

But this! Genuinely clever variation.

I actually haven't watched Black Mirror yet, except the very first episode. I'm saving it for a rainy day, so I have no clue what you're referring to. I do agree however that what I said is fucked up, but it is a pretty common idea on the crazy-ass end of the transhumanist / singularitarian spectrum. Everything will eventually run on computers so computation cycles will be the currency of choice. I have no idea how many times I've read some variation on that in scifi and Kurzweil-style futurism over the years.

It's one of the things that really bother me about a lot of science fiction: for some reason, no matter how advanced or strange our societies become capitalism is always part of the picture. It's like people are so wedded to the idea of buying and selling things and accumulating wealth that they can't conceive of a reality where that isn't the case. The rot goes so deep they treat it as an immutable law of nature, while zipping around in FTL ships.

As for the simulation hypothesis, 95% of the universe isn't made of the stuff we're made of, so if we are the computer we're probably just some low-key background process.