An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
And British MSM is fake. I don't watch the news (as I don't watch TV) but if I catch a little bit of it I'm horrified by the propaganda. It reminds me of a totalitarian state. Everyday the British people are lied to. But the people who put the news together must know what's going on.
Its just produced to appeal to a target audience (market)
In Marketing, there is the concept of "Target Market"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_market
"A target market is a group of customers within a business's serviceable available market that the business has decided to aim its marketing efforts towards. Target markets consist of consumers who exhibit similar characteristics (such as age, location, income, and lifestyle) and are considered most likely to buy a business's product or service."
The news they are talking about is editorialized to appeal to the various network's Target Market...
So we have Fox which is targeted at the right/conservative/libertarian and the rest which are fighting it out and bloodying each other over the left/liberal/libertarian viewership markets...
It is a commercial industry... Associated Press, Reuters are mainly hard news ie not "fake"...
Associated Press, Reuters are mainly hard news ie not "fake"...
All perception/observation is filtered through brains that process the data and construct output based on sense data and many other factors including emotion.
There is no purely objective knowledge. The point of view of naive common sense assumes that minds are mirrors of reality. Cognitive science shows that this is not the case for a variety of reasons.
Knowledge is bounded by both the biological hardware and the instrumental software.
Humans have similar hardware but not identical, even over a lifetime, as people that have aged are acutely aware in terms of their own experience.
The neuro-software that humans use can be quite different depending on nurture, environment and types of experience to which exposed.
As a result commonality including agreement is usually in-group.
Science is possible owing to limitations placed on knowledge. Believing those limitations as defining reality is assuming (believing in) rationality, empiricism, positivism and utilitarianism as exclusive determinants.
Naturalism is appropriate as a methodological assumption in doing science, but materialism is an ontological (metaphysical) assumption that is not entailed by naturalism as a methodological assumption.
Naturalism is only one instrument, albeit a useful one. But humanity has arrived at its present state by using other methods, too. Reliance on naturalism alone excludes the dimension of quality, for example.
The appeal of quality is extremely influential. Quality is a combination of subjective and objective. Scientific method is designed to exclude quality as subjective, e.g., by reducing ethics to positive law (if it is legal is ethical") and morality to utilitarianism based on a calculus of pleasure and pain.
Tom's comment above should be (buffed up) on the welcome page of every blog and educational institution.
It does make me want to laugh: - how some of the most rigorous intellects in the land are 'true believers'. That's why it's a religion folks .... :-) !!
Tom c'mon there is certainly objective knowledge in material systems...
"Scientific method is designed to exclude quality as subjective,"
There is a whole field of Quality in material systems... Quality Assurance...
The main parameter there is MTBF 'Mean Time Between Failure"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_assurance
Now if you are talking "quality of life" or some non-material concept I cant help you...
Don't mix up the material and the non-material... we material trained people have got it covered we know what we are doing... ... dont know about the non-material side I never trained in that.... they are two different things...
You guys are not trained in material systems... so all of this look hard to you guys... its not that hard...
Matt - your material system these days is just a quantum field about which little is known. This includes you and I .... Material and non-material are just different states of the same thing. Cue consciousness ....
Tom c'mon there is certainly objective knowledge in material systems...Tom c'mon there is certainly objective knowledge in material systems...
The common wisdom is that science is based on observation. The reality is that science is based on measurement and there are many issues with measure.
I am not claiming that truth is relative and there there are no known truths. I am saying that truth is relative to criteria and that human knowing is bounded by the lack of absolute criteria.
Criteria are stipulated and they on apply in the system in which they serve as logical foundations.
There is a whole field of Quality in material systems... Quality Assurance...
The main parameter there is MTBF 'Mean Time Between Failure"...
There are several issues. First, in doing science one of the issues is parameter identification. That's wonkish, so I'll leave it with a reference.
Like most terms "quality" has many meanings. It has a defined meaning in terms of engineering, e.g., failure rate, conformity to specs, etc. Quality means a whole lot more than that, and in many cases there is no way to measure it.
Material systems, logic, math, STEM, etc., are very important instruments. But they are not sufficient for all of life. If they are taken as such, or are applied in inappropriately, e.g. excessively or out of context, life becomes poorer for it, both individually and socially.
There's been an ongoing age-old debate over foundational viewpoints, e.g. realism, idealism, pragmatism, positivism, empiricism, romanticism, etc., that appear to be in conflict. From the dialectical POV they are all true but partially. The truth is a whole in which all possible views are complementary. Holding these views simultaneously exceeds the bounds of human knowledge, so the the historical dialect results and goes on. Personal, group, and cultural difference are characterized in part by the mix of these views in the historical dialectic.
The dialectic is, in part, a conflict over whose "truth" is actually true. There are no absolute criteria spanning all viewpoints to settle this so the dialectic is ongoing in search of "truth." Many valuable things are forthcoming along the way, and many things that are not worth keeping are discarded.
"material system these days is just a quantum field about which little is known."
that is the view from Darwin biased people who then look at everything as stochastic based on their thinking they evolved from the apes by random chance...
their whole world view then becomes stochastic as they believe they owe their entire existence to a stochastic process...
Use of stochastics is a tip-off that we dont really know what we are talking about to a deterministic-functional level...
You dont subject the deterministic to the stochastic, you subject the stochastic to the deterministic... ie the deterministic is superior...
Just think about where we all would be by now materially if Darwin never existed...
Biology is not as key as physics and chemistry in scientific knowledge and its affect on humanity?
Evolutionary theory is fundamental to the life sciences. This is the big reason that scientists are so up in arms against attempts to prevent teaching evolution in schools.
"material system these days is just a quantum field about which little is known."
that is the view from Darwin biased people who then look at everything as stochastic based on their thinking they evolved from the apes by random chance...
Um, no. QM is stochastic. Albert Einstein never fully accepted this and continued to believe that the underlying determinism would eventually be discovered and expressed mathematically. He is famous for saying, "God doesn't roll dice." So far, no cigar.
The foundation of physical reality remains probabilistic rather than deterministic in physics. Determinism is a special case at the classical level of ordinary observation and experience.
Of course, this doesn't mean that human know "for sure" that reality is fundamentally stochastic rather than deterministic. It just says that as far as we know now, this is the best naturalistic explanation on the table, and science assumes methodological naturalism.
still say you guys are improperly combining what should be treated as separate ...
iow we have material systems and human (?) systems that should be treated separately...
I just responded in a long comment that got mangled so I deleted it. I'll summarize what I said briefly since I don't have time to go through it again.
Impossible or impractical to disentangle the material from the human in most life situations, especially those that involve self-interest.
"Full Employment: yes or no?" is not a material systems inquiry... its a human systems inquiry...
Most material systems inquiries that involve application involve human systems and issues. Again, disentangling them is either impossible or impractical.
Achieving full employment without incurring negative consequences like inflation is a material systems problem insofar as it is necessary to show (model) now this is possible. based on reasonable assumptions supported by data.
Whether full employment should be a high priority policy objective and why is a human issue.
Here the material and human are entangled in different ideologies.
Those who think that full employment is not a high priority will also argue that it is inherently inflationary and diss models that purport to show it is not, and vice versa.
I think the honest quantum theorists are saying (re chance v. determinism which question is just a reciprocating wave in the human mind-stuff) "I don't know". If you told them they were Darwinian they would roll around on the floor laughing and thank you for the comic relief.
What intrigues them is that all the laws of the natural world just disappeared over an energy horizon. It takes a fair amount of courage to contemplate: - are all the hours I spend at the stock market an illusion? Is my whole life spent in illusory pursuits? These guys through their pursuit of science are asking, despite the ferocity of accepted wisdom. For that I repect them.
Turning now to the Upanishads: "Mind is the slayer of the real". I wonder what that means?
The first is how determinism can emerge at a higher level (classical) from randomness at a lower level (quantum).
The second is how consciousness can emerge from matter.
There are many who think that this is not possible and better explanation is called for. which would means some sort of unified field theory as Einstein posited the need for and some explanation based on some sort of either panpsychism or neutral monism on the other.
Someone else would have discovered the same concept.
Actually, someone did around the same time as Darwin. Darwin supposedly rushed publication to be first. But now there is evidence that priority goes to Patrick Matthew.
Darwin and Alfred Wallace claimed to have discovered natural selection independently of Patrick Matthew. Matthew’s discovery of the ‘natural process of selection’ was published 27 years before Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were read before the Linnean Society in 1858. In 1861, in the third edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: ‘In 1831 Mr Patrick Matthew published his work on ‘Naval Timber and Arboriculture,’ in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr Wallace and myself in the ‘Linnean Journal,’ and as that enlarged on in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr Matthew himself drew attention to it in the ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ on April 7th, 1860.’ To date, there has been no hard evidence to prove that Darwin’s or Wallace’s work was influenced by Matthew. However, newly discovered literature reveals seven naturalists cited Matthew’s book before 1858. Three played key pre-1858 roles facilitating and influencing Darwin’s and Wallace’s published ideas on natural selection. They are: Loudon – who edited and published Blyth’s acknowledged influential articles on evolution; Chambers, author of the ‘Vestiges of Creation’ – which both Darwin and Wallace also acknowledged influenced their work; and Selby – who, in 1855, edited and published Wallace’s Sarawak paper. These new discoveries mean that Matthew now has full scientific priority for the theory natural selection.
I actually was aware of that. And that is in fact true about virtually every discovery in recorded history. People all over the globe were pondering all these things and arrived at various places at different times. Who gets the credit has less to do with who actually thought about it first or even who developed the concept the furthest but more about who was doing in a time and place where someone else could make note of it and record and spread the word.
I read somewhere where a lot of different farm implements through time were actually rigged by slaves in the field but the tool design was credited to the owner.
I read somewhere where a lot of different farm implements through time were actually rigged by slaves in the field but the tool design was credited to the owner.
Similar with a lot of intellectual property, which is invented by employees and owned by the firm.
"Associated Press, Reuters are mainly hard news ie not "fake""
Hard news? Operation Mockingbird isn't something that only happened in the past. These are propaganda outlets as evidenced by the astonishingly poor reporting in Syria and Ukraine. If you're informed solely by these "hard news" outlets, you are not informed.
“The first is how determinism can emerge at a higher level (classical) from randomness at a lower level (quantum).” Am not a philosopher but isn’t this cause and effect? An almost infinite chain of cause and effect cannot be traced back to ‘Nothing’.
”The second is how consciousness can emerge from matter.” Big assumption arising from a limited pool of awareness ....
For me, the brain is a transponder (two-way communication device). Damage the machinery and of course the mind will be handicapped. The consciousness imprints on the mind and the mind in its turn imprints on the brain; senses imprint on the brain, brain imprints mind, consciousness processes the mind. For consciousness, mind is an ‘eye’ into the lower world. First you have to know the difference between the ‘I’ and the self - but not just as a theory.
23 comments:
And British MSM is fake. I don't watch the news (as I don't watch TV) but if I catch a little bit of it I'm horrified by the propaganda. It reminds me of a totalitarian state. Everyday the British people are lied to. But the people who put the news together must know what's going on.
Its just produced to appeal to a target audience (market)
In Marketing, there is the concept of "Target Market"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_market
"A target market is a group of customers within a business's serviceable available market that the business has decided to aim its marketing efforts towards. Target markets consist of consumers who exhibit similar characteristics (such as age, location, income, and lifestyle) and are considered most likely to buy a business's product or service."
The news they are talking about is editorialized to appeal to the various network's Target Market...
So we have Fox which is targeted at the right/conservative/libertarian and the rest which are fighting it out and bloodying each other over the left/liberal/libertarian viewership markets...
It is a commercial industry... Associated Press, Reuters are mainly hard news ie not "fake"...
Associated Press, Reuters are mainly hard news ie not "fake"...
All perception/observation is filtered through brains that process the data and construct output based on sense data and many other factors including emotion.
There is no purely objective knowledge. The point of view of naive common sense assumes that minds are mirrors of reality. Cognitive science shows that this is not the case for a variety of reasons.
Knowledge is bounded by both the biological hardware and the instrumental software.
Humans have similar hardware but not identical, even over a lifetime, as people that have aged are acutely aware in terms of their own experience.
The neuro-software that humans use can be quite different depending on nurture, environment and types of experience to which exposed.
As a result commonality including agreement is usually in-group.
Science is possible owing to limitations placed on knowledge. Believing those limitations as defining reality is assuming (believing in) rationality, empiricism, positivism and utilitarianism as exclusive determinants.
Naturalism is appropriate as a methodological assumption in doing science, but materialism is an ontological (metaphysical) assumption that is not entailed by naturalism as a methodological assumption.
Naturalism is only one instrument, albeit a useful one. But humanity has arrived at its present state by using other methods, too. Reliance on naturalism alone excludes the dimension of quality, for example.
The appeal of quality is extremely influential. Quality is a combination of subjective and objective. Scientific method is designed to exclude quality as subjective, e.g., by reducing ethics to positive law (if it is legal is ethical") and morality to utilitarianism based on a calculus of pleasure and pain.
Tom's comment above should be (buffed up) on the welcome page of every blog and educational institution.
It does make me want to laugh: - how some of the most rigorous intellects in the land are 'true believers'. That's why it's a religion folks .... :-) !!
"There is no purely objective knowledge."
Tom c'mon there is certainly objective knowledge in material systems...
"Scientific method is designed to exclude quality as subjective,"
There is a whole field of Quality in material systems... Quality Assurance...
The main parameter there is MTBF 'Mean Time Between Failure"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_assurance
Now if you are talking "quality of life" or some non-material concept I cant help you...
Don't mix up the material and the non-material... we material trained people have got it covered we know what we are doing... ... dont know about the non-material side I never trained in that.... they are two different things...
You guys are not trained in material systems... so all of this look hard to you guys... its not that hard...
Ha ha!
Matt - your material system these days is just a quantum field about which little is known. This includes you and I .... Material and non-material are just different states of the same thing. Cue consciousness ....
AP is just as controlled as the rest and is in fact owned by its contributing newspapers and radio and television stations in the United States.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press#Governance
Tom c'mon there is certainly objective knowledge in material systems...Tom c'mon there is certainly objective knowledge in material systems...
The common wisdom is that science is based on observation. The reality is that science is based on measurement and there are many issues with measure.
I am not claiming that truth is relative and there there are no known truths. I am saying that truth is relative to criteria and that human knowing is bounded by the lack of absolute criteria.
Criteria are stipulated and they on apply in the system in which they serve as logical foundations.
There is a whole field of Quality in material systems... Quality Assurance...
The main parameter there is MTBF 'Mean Time Between Failure"...
There are several issues. First, in doing science one of the issues is parameter identification. That's wonkish, so I'll leave it with a reference.
Like most terms "quality" has many meanings. It has a defined meaning in terms of engineering, e.g., failure rate, conformity to specs, etc. Quality means a whole lot more than that, and in many cases there is no way to measure it.
Material systems, logic, math, STEM, etc., are very important instruments. But they are not sufficient for all of life. If they are taken as such, or are applied in inappropriately, e.g. excessively or out of context, life becomes poorer for it, both individually and socially.
There's been an ongoing age-old debate over foundational viewpoints, e.g. realism, idealism, pragmatism, positivism, empiricism, romanticism, etc., that appear to be in conflict. From the dialectical POV they are all true but partially. The truth is a whole in which all possible views are complementary. Holding these views simultaneously exceeds the bounds of human knowledge, so the the historical dialect results and goes on. Personal, group, and cultural difference are characterized in part by the mix of these views in the historical dialectic.
The dialectic is, in part, a conflict over whose "truth" is actually true. There are no absolute criteria spanning all viewpoints to settle this so the dialectic is ongoing in search of "truth." Many valuable things are forthcoming along the way, and many things that are not worth keeping are discarded.
I still say you guys are improperly combining what should be treated as separate ...
iow we have material systems and human (?) systems that should be treated separately...
"Full Employment: yes or no?" is not a material systems inquiry... its a human systems inquiry...
"material system these days is just a quantum field about which little is known."
that is the view from Darwin biased people who then look at everything as stochastic based on their thinking they evolved from the apes by random chance...
their whole world view then becomes stochastic as they believe they owe their entire existence to a stochastic process...
Use of stochastics is a tip-off that we dont really know what we are talking about to a deterministic-functional level...
You dont subject the deterministic to the stochastic, you subject the stochastic to the deterministic... ie the deterministic is superior...
Just think about where we all would be by now materially if Darwin never existed...
Just think about where we all would be by now materially if Darwin never existed...
Biology is not as key as physics and chemistry in scientific knowledge and its affect on humanity?
Evolutionary theory is fundamental to the life sciences. This is the big reason that scientists are so up in arms against attempts to prevent teaching evolution in schools.
"material system these days is just a quantum field about which little is known."
that is the view from Darwin biased people who then look at everything as stochastic based on their thinking they evolved from the apes by random chance...
Um, no. QM is stochastic. Albert Einstein never fully accepted this and continued to believe that the underlying determinism would eventually be discovered and expressed mathematically. He is famous for saying, "God doesn't roll dice." So far, no cigar.
The foundation of physical reality remains probabilistic rather than deterministic in physics. Determinism is a special case at the classical level of ordinary observation and experience.
Of course, this doesn't mean that human know "for sure" that reality is fundamentally stochastic rather than deterministic. It just says that as far as we know now, this is the best naturalistic explanation on the table, and science assumes methodological naturalism.
still say you guys are improperly combining what should be treated as separate ...
iow we have material systems and human (?) systems that should be treated separately...
I just responded in a long comment that got mangled so I deleted it. I'll summarize what I said briefly since I don't have time to go through it again.
Impossible or impractical to disentangle the material from the human in most life situations, especially those that involve self-interest.
"Full Employment: yes or no?" is not a material systems inquiry... its a human systems inquiry...
Most material systems inquiries that involve application involve human systems and issues. Again, disentangling them is either impossible or impractical.
Achieving full employment without incurring negative consequences like inflation is a material systems problem insofar as it is necessary to show (model) now this is possible. based on reasonable assumptions supported by data.
Whether full employment should be a high priority policy objective and why is a human issue.
Here the material and human are entangled in different ideologies.
Those who think that full employment is not a high priority will also argue that it is inherently inflationary and diss models that purport to show it is not, and vice versa.
This involves both politics and persuasion.
I think the honest quantum theorists are saying (re chance v. determinism which question is just a reciprocating wave in the human mind-stuff) "I don't know". If you told them they were Darwinian they would roll around on the floor laughing and thank you for the comic relief.
What intrigues them is that all the laws of the natural world just disappeared over an energy horizon. It takes a fair amount of courage to contemplate: - are all the hours I spend at the stock market an illusion? Is my whole life spent in illusory pursuits? These guys through their pursuit of science are asking, despite the ferocity of accepted wisdom. For that I repect them.
Turning now to the Upanishads: "Mind is the slayer of the real". I wonder what that means?
There are two hard problems.
The first is how determinism can emerge at a higher level (classical) from randomness at a lower level (quantum).
The second is how consciousness can emerge from matter.
There are many who think that this is not possible and better explanation is called for. which would means some sort of unified field theory as Einstein posited the need for and some explanation based on some sort of either panpsychism or neutral monism on the other.
"Just think about where we all would be by now materially if Darwin never existed..."
Someone else would have discovered the same concept..... maybe a great great grandfather of yours. You'd be hating on Frankoism today!!
BTW, how has Darwinism held us back materially?
Someone else would have discovered the same concept.
Actually, someone did around the same time as Darwin. Darwin supposedly rushed publication to be first. But now there is evidence that priority goes to Patrick Matthew.
A Bombshell for the History of Discovery and Priority in Science
Abstract
Darwin and Alfred Wallace claimed to have discovered natural selection independently of Patrick Matthew. Matthew’s discovery of the ‘natural process of selection’ was published 27 years before Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were read before the Linnean Society in 1858. In 1861, in the third edition of the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: ‘In 1831 Mr Patrick Matthew published his work on ‘Naval Timber and Arboriculture,’ in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr Wallace and myself in the ‘Linnean Journal,’ and as that enlarged on in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an Appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr Matthew himself drew attention to it in the ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ on April 7th, 1860.’ To date, there has been no hard evidence to prove that Darwin’s or Wallace’s work was influenced by Matthew. However, newly discovered literature reveals seven naturalists cited Matthew’s book before 1858. Three played key pre-1858 roles facilitating and influencing Darwin’s and Wallace’s published ideas on natural selection. They are: Loudon – who edited and published Blyth’s acknowledged influential articles on evolution; Chambers, author of the ‘Vestiges of Creation’ – which both Darwin and Wallace also acknowledged influenced their work; and Selby – who, in 1855, edited and published Wallace’s Sarawak paper. These new discoveries mean that Matthew now has full scientific priority for the theory natural selection.
Thanks Tom,
I actually was aware of that. And that is in fact true about virtually every discovery in recorded history. People all over the globe were pondering all these things and arrived at various places at different times. Who gets the credit has less to do with who actually thought about it first or even who developed the concept the furthest but more about who was doing in a time and place where someone else could make note of it and record and spread the word.
I read somewhere where a lot of different farm implements through time were actually rigged by slaves in the field but the tool design was credited to the owner.
I read somewhere where a lot of different farm implements through time were actually rigged by slaves in the field but the tool design was credited to the owner.
Similar with a lot of intellectual property, which is invented by employees and owned by the firm.
"Associated Press, Reuters are mainly hard news ie not "fake""
Hard news? Operation Mockingbird isn't something that only happened in the past. These are propaganda outlets as evidenced by the astonishingly poor reporting in Syria and Ukraine. If you're informed solely by these "hard news" outlets, you are not informed.
“The first is how determinism can emerge at a higher level (classical) from randomness at a lower level (quantum).”
Am not a philosopher but isn’t this cause and effect? An almost infinite chain of cause and effect cannot be traced back to ‘Nothing’.
”The second is how consciousness can emerge from matter.”
Big assumption arising from a limited pool of awareness ....
For me, the brain is a transponder (two-way communication device). Damage the machinery and of course the mind will be handicapped. The consciousness imprints on the mind and the mind in its turn imprints on the brain; senses imprint on the brain, brain imprints mind, consciousness processes the mind. For consciousness, mind is an ‘eye’ into the lower world. First you have to know the difference between the ‘I’ and the self - but not just as a theory.
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