libertarian socialism — Pfhorrest

Only a socialist talks about force and claims it isn't force. It's a matriarchal condition, like, "Do what I say, but tell me you like it."

Socialism isn't all state socialism. — Pfhorrest

Oh, you're a socialist.

Capital is a kind of property, in any case, and the only kind that really matters for macroeconomic purposes. Nobody cares about the distribution of toothbrushes or toys. It's the distribution of the things needed to live and work -- that's what capital is -- that matters. — Pfhorrest

Anything can be capital, and all capital can cease to be capital. One of Rothbard's examples was a chair in a hotel; if it were in your home it wouldn't be capital. Except now that you can rent your home out with Airbnb.

Are there degrees of capital? If some capital is 10x as productive as some other capital, is the former controlled 10x more by the state? Do see how arbitrary this is?

We should note that “Capitalism” was initially a snarl word used by socialists to disparage a sort of bogeyman. So I think a name change would be appropriate. — NOS4A2

I wanted to say something like this, minus the name change. Socialists are the ones who define certain types of property as capital because it gives them one more reason to believe people with wealth did not earn it. It was the "capital."

If you get rid of the consideration of capital, then you’re not even talking about capitalism anymore, but (probably) just about a free market, which is not the same thing. A free market where capital distribution is at most a negligible factor is market socialism, which is decidedly not capitalist. — Pfhorrest

You can't distribute capital if you don't differentiate between capital and property.

Absolutely. When you remove the floating abstractions (namely the concept of capital) it's pretty hard to argue against capitalism.

It's impossible to stop people from cooperating.

Interesting stuff. This is what I've thought for a while, being the most probable explanation for consciousness. I had never heard the terminologies before, of "societies" and "occasions of experience."

Does Whitehead leave room for an aspect of existence that is not experienced? Are occasions of experience everything, or are they just part of reality? If they are everything, he would be saying that there is nothing to experience but experience... which doesn't make sense.

About the compound individual, I think the emergence of this form is founded on memory. I see memory as "occasions of experience" acting as capacitors, rather than a direct connection.

"Whitehead describes corpuscular societies as “democracies.”" - Should say anarchy, not democracy.

I'd like clarification on the "occasions of experience" thing, because we can see what experience looks like from the third person by looking at the electrical impulses in a brain. Wouldn't that be an "occasion of experience" above all else? We have way more reason to believe that we are looking at is pure consciousness from the outside when we look inside a brain.

Science and business go hand in hand. Karl Popper's philosophy shaped the modern scientific method.

it should be intuitive enough to most of us how it is possible to enforce such conscription in bigotry and sexism, all it takes is persistent shaming and humiliation of those who violate the norm. — Gary M Washburn

Yep. Bigotry and sexism. The biggest problems in the Western World at the moment... And definitely the norm.

Thanks for posting the letter. People should read it.

Sure...

This giant statue on top Gellért-hegy in Budapest was a Soviet icon representing the close alliance of Hungary and the USSR. After the Soviets abandoned Hungary thirty years ago there were pleas to tear it down, as it represented oppression by a foreign power. However, cooler heads prevailed and instead of removing it, it was reinterpreted as "Goodbye to Russia!". It remains a beautiful tourist attraction. — jgill

There's two problems with this: 1. Hungary was not willfully part of the USSR. 2. Hungarians decided to keep the statue.

If Russians were the ones saying that the statue should stay up, while the Hungarians said it should come down, that would be different. If black southerners decided the confederate statues should stay up because they want the reminder of history, as a sort of "goodbye" to the confederacy, that would be different.

Do black southerners get to make that choice? No. So we'll never know. A lot of white people have spoken for them.

‘the narcissistic majority’ (the similar term is ‘the silent majority’) will survive and feel well enough even if the more significant restrictions of political correctness will be imposed. — Number2018

I think you misinterpreted me. I don't think the silent majority is narcissistic, not as it pertains to their political position. The mob is not the majority, but a relatively small and vocal minority. I say the mob is inherently exclusive because they must remain a minority to stand for change--this is also why they must always see themselves as an underdogs; if things need to change, then obviously the people who want them changed do not have enough power.

They are narcissists because they want to be the ones to fix the world. This is why peer pressure is also such a big factor in how the mob operates. Identity is the driving force on the individual level. They are creating their identity, and how they are perceived by their peers is the biggest part of that.

This frightens me greatly. Not just because of the mob, but because the entire corporate apparatus is behind it. If you're not woke you're ostracized and the very idea of free speech comes from privilege.

This is sick. This is a nightmare. Somebody talk me down, tell me this isn't happening. — fishfry

It's not maintainable. The mob is not organized enough or smart enough to control the majority, who are not in the mob and never will be because of the inherent exclusivity (narcissism).

Their MO is to tear down anyone with power. That precludes them from ever truly organizing, and has led to infighting as we've seen many times now.

You're acting like the people capitulating to the mob are great men who've been broken down... they're not, they're just cowards. There's plenty of people who already look at that letter as horseshit because they've already learned these people cannot be reasoned with.

As if anaesthetic did not exist. AS if one did not sleep. — Banno

Your implication here is that without memory experience cannot exist. We know the brain stays very active during sleep. We know we dream, and for the most part have no memory of what we experienced.

What you're doing is analogous to picking up a single piece of dirt and saying, "This is not a hill." No... it's not a hill, very good. And observing electrons orbiting a nucleus doesn't really give one the impression they can be used to boil water. "This thing on one end of the spectrum doesn't resemble this thing on the other end," is not good logic. We know there is a range of awareness at the top end; the extent of that range being largely subjective. We know animals with eyes can see.

So while some may look at the brain and think it's "just material," and potentially arrive at a determinist perspective, I think it's important to scrutinize the "just" part. If I was a determinist I wouldn't bother.

I don't see another more believable alternative. Like everything else in the universe, I don't think awareness is created or destroyed, but the form can change and it can be combined like atoms into molecules.

What evidence do you have that rocks are aware? — Banno

lol I never said rocks are aware. I did say I think insects are aware, and I don't think awareness is an emergent property... but we only acknowledge it as such when it crosses a certain threshold.

We are collections of atoms, yet our experience is singular. Either we are the atoms, or we are some magical observer that only experiences the information that the atoms produce. I am not a dualist, but perhaps you are. That would definitely be junk thinking.

Electrons are measurable, manipulable, adn calculable. The awareness of a rock, not so much. — Banno

We can't measure it, so it must not exist. Electrons are measurable, NOW, but there was a time not too long ago that they weren't. Amazing how the truth can change... None of these are good arguments. I'm assuming you accept that there are degrees to awareness/consciousness, although you keep strawmanning by saying "rocks aren't conscious," but you don't leave open any possibility that awareness could be on such a basic level that you can't relate to it.

I climb the hill, not the concept of the hill. — Banno

The point is whether you call it a hill or a collection of dirt it's the same thing. Consciousness could very well be a bottom-up phenomenon... a product of the collaboration of minimally aware particles.

Are rocks conscious?

If not, and yet people are, then at some stage between rocks and people, consciousness emerges. — Banno

And at some point a pile of dirt becomes a hill. Doesn't mean the hill "emerged," only the abstract concept. It would seem that electricity is an emergent property, but again, nothing is being created... only a concept.

Let's use "awareness," because consciousness is the ability to think. Awareness is simply the quality of experiencing. To use our level of consciousness as the standard to measure awareness is obviously not going to be effective. There's no reason to assume that a lack of intelligence signifies a lack of awareness.

Is anyone saying that consciousness is an emergent property going to deny that we can see a spectrum of consciousness at the top end? Can they explain their reasoning for thinking a dog has experiences, but an insect doesn't? What is the threshold that must be crossed for awareness to "emerge"?

That from one who quotes Rand... — Banno

Why don't you try to make an actual point? Otherwise why even comment?

So you want I should relate to a rock, and make the assumption that it is conscious. — Banno

You're really making me question your reading comprehension.

Metaphysics is where you make stuff up because you don't know what's going on. It's not compulsory. One can simply admit to not knowing. — Banno

Not true. There are things that are absolutely knowable, like the fact that existence exists and consciousness exists. We know that there is a difference between our consciousness and the rest of existence. This is a starting point. From here we can verify our sensory information, because it is not the product of our consciousness, but of the greater reality along with our physiology.

So how do you know other people are conscious? You relate to them, and make the assumption, right? So why isn't that valid when taken to simpler life forms? Of course you can relate to a dog less than you can relate to a chimp, and a mouse less than a dog. But we can deduce that the difference is mainly due to a difference in intelligence.

If consciousness depends on intelligence, but is not just intelligence, what is the rest? The awareness component... can that exist with zero intelligence? Why couldn't it?

I agree with your reply.

The only thing is that "consciousness" is used quite loosely depending on the source. The people who follow Eckart Tolle, or Buddhists in general, like to say things like "pure consciousness" to describe a state of awareness without thought. That is not a useful way of using the term for me, as to me consciousness is awareness + context (which depends on memory: short term, long term, and sensory).

At what level of consciousness is this observer produced? — Kev


I don't know. — Banno

Well if you have no feeling about the answer, how do you even know other people are conscious? Saying "I don't know," sounds like you're leaving the door open for solipsism.

Emergentism is the thesis that things doing what they do produces an observer. — Banno

At what level of consciousness is this observer produced? Is there an observer in the case of insects? This is only part of the argument, but you do admit there seems to be a range of degrees to consciousness/awareness?

And we know that consciousness depends on the coordination of a lot of divisible material. Theoretically we could remove any individual particle of your brain without destroying that observer.

Then we've got the fact that the observer interacts with the material, while none of that material is solely necessary for the production of the observer. This implies that there is a direct connection between the material and the observer. It is more than just a product of the material, it is inexorably linked to this material...

But then how can this combination of material be disrupted without changing the experience of the observer? It must be then that the observer is not limited, only the experience seems that way.

It's what happens in every political system that involves the public at all. Democracy moves towards anarchy because it's an easy sell; you're appealing to public opinion and what you're selling is power to the people.

I am having a hard time following your reasoning. When a gold mine is closed the businesses close, and then everything including real estate has no value. We recentedly experienced this in a big way when the banking/housing crisis crashed our economy. All that property lost its value. Lives and futures were destoyed. Now where is the happiness? — Athena

And before the gold mine was opened how much value did the real estate have? Your problem is not with the loss of value, your problem is with the change in value at all. You think it would be better if the gold was never mined?

The housing crisis was caused by central banking lowering interest rates and creating moral hazard. The property lost it's make-believe value because it was never real. Lives and futures were destroyed because the economy was recklessly manipulated under the pretenses of helping people. They proved that consumption based economic doesn't work. Now we're about to prove that a 2nd time and more-so.

Where is the happiness? Why are you asking me?

I doubt if anyone questions more what they think than I do and I am not interested in defending myself. — Athena

Do you even see the irony here? You doubt yourself so much that you strongly feel that you know that other people don't doubt themselves as much as you.

Perhaps a non-totalitarian communism has never been tried in practice because real grownups know that such a thing is really nothing more than a utopian fairy tale — charles ferraro

Basically the process of instating a communist system is to work towards anarchy until the old power structure is toppled. As soon as that power vacuum emerges the new regime takes its place. It's hilarious that some people think it's possible to have a million people on a ship, and a million captains. There will ALWAYS be a top-down hierarchy in any power structure, otherwise it would be too weak to hold its position.

These are dangerous times. People think awful stuff "couldn't happen here," but every bad thing that ever happened in the world happened in a place where the people thought it couldn't happen. — fishfry

None of the people with these authoritarian ideals would ever put themselves in danger to advance their agenda. The fact that Noam Chomsky is now alt-right is just hilarious, not scary.

There is violence ramping up in the States, but it's gang violence in places where the police have been neutered/walked out. Stay out of those places.

I mean, just replace "consciousness" in the quote with something else- say, flight, or sight. Is it true that flight or sight were present "at the very origin of things"? Of course not, the earliest organisms could not see nor fly. — Enai De A Lukal

So I am actually in agreement with the OP, although I don't like the terminology. "Consciousness" is what we have, and comes with the ability to think. The ability to think requires stored sensory information (memory, in the broadest sense of the word), and the ability to observe that stored information at will.

Animals are generally not conscious, except the more cognitively advanced ones. I differentiate between consciousness and awareness; awareness being a component of consciousness, but not necessitating the ability to think--only to experience. We can induce a difference in quality of consciousness between species, and also basic awareness that is clearly not conscious in lower level animals and species. I assume there is some level of awareness present in an ant, for example (it does, after all, have a brain). A simple pleasure/pain mechanism does not answer the whole question of how does the ant know whether pleasure is good or pain is bad? On a basic level, that seems to be the fundamental role of awareness: "this is good for me," vs "this is bad for me."

So why wouldn't that variance in levels of awareness go all the way down to the most basic organisms? We see the pattern at the top end, but when we get down to the atomic level, the resemblance to consciousness is entirely gone. But a level of awareness so simple wouldn't resemble consciousness anyway.

But this is not an entire argument, and I doubt a complete, scientifically based argument for "panpsychism" (I hate that nomenclature...) will be made any time soon. I do think there is a metaphysical argument that I can add, though, and it is the same one I use to refute determinism. That is that if causality is constant, and we truly are observers of a mind that is determined by external forces, we would not have self-awareness. We would have awareness of the illusory self, but not of the observer. Yet we do have that awareness, and therefore part of the determination is our own: we are, at least partly, self-determined. This means that both the mind and the physical self exist as they seem to and are connected. Consciousness is the product of material, and also interacts with that material. And since the locus of consciousness is not any one atom, and it seems to be a complex system of material even though it is experienced singularly, I deduce from this that the "observer" is not distinct from one experience to another: but there is no other way to experience being, say, a person, than for it to seem as if you are separate and distinct. The material, after all, is separate and distinct.

Man this guy's dangerous. He's an authoritarian globalist, not an alt-right or right-wing type.

Curious, what about this guy interests you? Can you summarize so I don't have to read it all? — fishfry

He's not authoritarian, he just stresses the importance of the problem "how do we get there from here?" He theorizes that there is no such thing as incremental progression towards a more ordered society. Occasionally that may happen, but it will always reverse afterwards. Recently I've heard him put the problem of the American government as a "power leak," which is how I imagined it as I read the Gentle Introduction.

I'd recommend you just start reading... because it will likely suck you in. Don't put too much stock in the wikipedia page about him, you'll probably disagree with what it says. His own ideals are not really important in his writing, it's more about how he gives the facts of history a new meaning as he provides more information that you probably didn't know was out there. You can stop at any time and still come out with some valuable insight.

We lived in a truly different culture than the one we have now. A career choice was about self fullment more based on being service to others than monetary reward. — Athena

We continue to learn about health and our nature. Embracing elements of the culture of the past is not an impossibility. I would even say it's a probability. Have you heard of the "trad" lifestyle? We are constantly looking for what helps us in life, and that process is possible because people have, to a large degree, free choice. What you are suggesting is that you know what is best for people, and they don't. Again, not saying you are 100% wrong, because I'm sure there are some things you could do better for some people than they could do for themselves, but a system where people cannot choose for themselves is deeply flawed.

I think technology that is extremely impersonal and prevents us from getting to a real human being, and putting a monetary value of everything has made our lives hell! — Athena

Those are two different things. But I have to point out that a society that does not quantify value (money) is going to be a much worse hell. We're not talking about the native tribe you wish you could live in, we're talking about a society with hundreds of millions of people.

The problems you have with other people's freedom is rooted in your problem with human nature. Human nature IS problematic because we are not designed to live in this world. This world is basically ideal relative a state of nature... and yet it comes with many new problems. Because we are not meant to achieve the ideal, only to strive for it. We are meant to have challenges that we don't have anymore, and our mechanisms for dealing with those problems have found other ways of occupying themselves. We used to need people to a much greater extent, and because we don't anymore our relationships have suffered, and the reality that our psychology depends on those relationships has become evident.

The most successful high tech industries followed the democratic model. — Athena

I really have no idea what this means. I've never heard of a successful company without a top-down hierarchy. There's never really been an effective group of people that didn't have clearly defined leadership roles. What is your statement based on?

It's interesting that the question presupposes the immorality of hurting others, without any justification. Why the double standard?

Obviously the immorality of self-harm is one that requires an individual's thought. The immorality of harming others is a belief that is forced on you by others. Most people who think it is immoral to hurt others have no working definition of morality... it's simply whatever reduces negative attention towards them.

Here: https://archive.org/details/limitsofpuredemo00mallrich/mode/2up

No democratic system has been tried either — paganarcher

Yes it has, Ancient Greece was a direct democracy. (The "Ancient" is for "no more/failed state").

Now, please try to convince me why such oppressive systems of government should be preferred to the democratic, free enterprise system of government of the United States of America. — charles ferraro

Get ready for some ignorant replies :P

Do you know what a non renewable resource is? I grew up in California and we went to ghost towns. Towns that were once thriving economies because of gold. Then there is oil. Have you heard of an oil well going dry? Do you know for awhile our national wealth depended mostly on being the world's supply of oil? The US was an exporter much more than it was an importer. Our national wealth was built on a labor intense industrial economy. I don't think there was anything not made in the US. What happened? — Athena

But civilization existed for thousands of years before that gold and oil was of any value? Why? Because nobody had done the work to find it, drill it/mine it, and transport it. Non-renewable resources are such only as long as they are 1. resources and 2. non-renewable. Like I said, the actual material does not disappear. We don't know if oil will ever be renewable, although it most likely won't be a resource by the time we had such technology. But when you pay for gold, you aren't just paying for a raw material. You are paying for all the work that went into delivering you that raw material.

Not that long ago I don't think anyone would have measured happiness monetarily. For sure hippies did not. In the past people thought happiness was about friends, family and social prestige that could be attained by entertaining people or volunteering. — Athena

Happiness is not measured monetarily, who would say such a thing? But does that mean you wouldn't spend money on something that makes you happy? You probably take trips/vacations that make you happy, and there is a lot of human labor, other than yours, that goes into that. Money represents human value, so you will trade value for value. Now if you disagree with what other people value, do your feelings dictate reality? Are you always correct? And I'm not saying that you're never correct, or that the trend you see isn't there. But you seem to be tracing back the causality to people's freedom to choose (money).

I don't have time for anymore right now, but I'll come back to this.

Could it have been any other way? If you put humans on a planet, does a secret global elite inevitably develop? Probably. — fishfry

It depends on how the power structure is set up. Here you can read a developed theory with a lot of primary sources on how the political structure is the determining factor in the trajectory of a society. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/ It's pretty long winded, but there's a lot of gems in there.

I do believe there's an interconnected web of very (very!) powerful people in the world who most certainly do get together to plan what they've got coming for the rest of us. — fishfry

This is what I thought you meant, and am just using the word entity to refer to the group as a whole.

Do you honestly think all those billionaires and world leaders DON'T conspire against the rest of us? On what evidence do you assert that claim? I would say that the evidence supports my view of things if you look at the transformation of the world over the past fifty years. Or look at how the establishment handled the banking crisis of 2008 and the banking crisis of 2020? — fishfry

No, I do believe there is plenty of conspiring going on. I just don't think that explains everything, though. And I don't think the absence of these conspirators would solve much (others would probably have taken that place). I think the conditions were set up to make such grand manipulations possible, but not by design. Good intentions have been acted on in the form of poor engineering. There was never a chance that the public would not have become corrupted.