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Elvis: You may have hit on a good analogy. It is true that the idea of money IS money -- at least once the idea has sufficient consensus; nothing can be money unless the idea of it has sufficient consensus. Money literally is money because we think it is.
However, unlike information in information realism, money is not already a complete universe in itself. You still need the things to be exchanged. That is why an idea for how to exchange them is devised. Money is still a map of a universe of external values that are measured in money-units.
Of course, as we have seen, the exchanged
things in turn can be abstracted through seemingly unlimited layers of securitization and derivitization, until these too seem not to exist in any material sense, and become equivalent to their exchange-values as measured in money. All that is solid melts into air. Yet as soon as too many people think that has become perfectly the case (that there is no longer an underlying material asset, it's only information), it goes poof! And crash!
So money is still clearly an invented convention to facilitate exchange, and the things being exchanged are only valuable for exchange because we think so (often however proceeding from the not-so-dubious idea that we should eat stuff).
In information realism it seems the laws of how matter-energy behaves, once putatively understood, become its creators. I find that suspicious.
From their point of view, such a counterintuitive conclusion is an implication of theory, not a conspicuously narcissistic and self-defeating proposition.
Why can't it be both? A lot of things that can be read as implied don't turn out to be so. A lot of conspicuously narcissistic and self-defeating propositions aren't obviously so to those who suffer from them. This seems to confuse the money for the thing exchanged. On paper, the money is the thing, operations on the money imply operations on the thing. The thing's existence asserts itself elsewhere, sooner or later.
And is this idea really counterintuitive? I'm not sure what that word even means, here. It's clearly an idea that people love. People love thinking that mind creates matter, or that mind is the only real thing and matter is illusion, or that they are part of the mind that creates the matter, or that they know something of the mind that creates the matter. So what's counterintuitive about this idea we seem primed to believe? It's often a very useful idea: assuming ourselves as the creators of things often helps us understand them. One example is reverse engineering.
I wonder whether something that's easy for people to imagine, and that people like to imagine, is being reconceived as a daring, courageous leap.
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