Math was constructed from, and must, of necessity, consist of a series of operations. And consequently, all mathematics is reducible to a few simple operations. (Which is why computers can calculate.) In practice. everything we can think of can be reduced to adding or removing one, and the test of equality. (As an aside, this is why we can explain more possibilities with mathematics than the physical universe can demonstrate in reality: because the universe does not have this level of freedom due to the apparent complexity of its interacting forces.) The act of adding and subtracting the symbols we call numerals and positional numbers, is an obvious and common example of creating symbols to replace what would be tedious and incomprehensible repetitions. This necessity to use symbols to condense information into usable components (categories) is what our brains need to do. Imagine trying to do all operations by counting? It would be impossible. We could not function without these symbols. Furthermore, describing mathematical equations and proofs as operations is both verbally and syntactically burdensome. And since these operations are largely simple, and can be accurately reduced to symbols (named functions) there is little value in articulating them as operations. So mathematicians have developed a multitude of symbols and names for what are not extant objects, but names of functions (sets of operations) – just as every other discipline creates heavily loaded terms in order to allow informationally dense communication with fewer words. Most ‘numbers’ are anything but: they are names, glyphs and symbols, for functions that consist of large numbers of operations. “The natural numbers exist in nature, but all else is the work of man.” The reason for this complexity is that quantitative, and directional relationships are expressed as ratios, and while some ratios are reducible to numbers, others are not. Those that are not reducible must be expressed as functions. We have not invented a mathematical system that can circumvent this problem. It is possible such a thing cannot be done. Now aside from the practical utility of creating symbols, that obscure the operations, there is a practical value in using these names by disconnecting these names from their operations and from correspondence with any given scale. That is, that disconnection allows one to use the logic of mathematics independent of cause, correspondence and scale, to explore ONLY the properties of the relations between the entities in question. And this turns out to be extremely useful for deducing what causes we do not now. And this extraordinary utility has been responsible for the fact that the discipline has laundered time, causality and scale (precision) from the discipline. But one cannot say that a mathematical statement is true without correspondence with the real world. We can say it is internally consistent (a proof), but not that it is true (descriptive of reality via correspondence). Mathematics when ‘wrong’ most recently, with Cantor’s sets, in which he used imaginary objects, infinity, the excluded middle and the the axiom of choice, to preserve this syntactical convenience of names, and in doing so, completed the diversion of mathematics from a logic of truth (external correspondence), to one that is merely a logic of proof (internal consistency). Cantor’s work came at the expense of correspondence, and by consequence at the expense of truth. ie: mathematics does not determine truths, only proofs, because all correspondence has been removed by these ‘contrivances’, whose initial purpose was convenience, but whose accumulated errors have led to such (frankly, absurd) debates, . So the problem with mathematical platonism, which turns out to be fairly useful for the convenience of practitioners, is not so much a technical problem but a MORAL ONE. First, mathematicians, even the best, rarely grasp this concept. Second, since, because it is EASIER to construct mathematical proofs than any other form of logic, it is the gold standard for other forms of logic. And the envy of other disciplines. And as such mathematical platonism has ‘bled’ into other envious fields, the same way that Physics has bled into economics. Worse, this multi-axial new mysticism has been adopted by philosophers from Kant to the Frankfurt school to the postmodernists, to contemporary totalitarian humanists as a vehicle for reinserting arational mysticism into political debate – as a means of obtaining power. Quite contrary to academic opinion, all totalitarianism is, is catholicism restated in non-religious terms, with the academy replacing the church as the constructor of obscurant language. I suspect this fairly significant error is what has plagued the physics community, but we have found no alternative to current approaches. Albeit, I expect, that if we retrained mathematicians, physicists, and economists to require operational language in the expression of mathematical relations, that whatever error we are making in our understanding of physics would emerge within a generation. No infinity can exist. Because no operation can be performed infinitely. We can however, adjust the precision and scale of any proof to suit the context, since any mathematical expression, consists of ratios that, if correspond to reality, we can arbitrarily adjust for increasing precision. Mathematics cannot claim truth without correspondence. Correspondence in measures is a function of scale and the UTILITY of precision, in the CONTEXT of which the operation is calculated (limit). A language of mathematics that is described independent of scale in given context, can be correctly stated. It need not be magian. Fields can still be understood to be imaginary patterns. But the entire reason that we find such things interesting, is a folly of the mind, no different from the illusion of movement in a film. The real world exists. We are weak computers of property in pursuit of our reproduction and amusement. We developed many forms of instrumentalism to extend our weak abilities. We must use instruments and methods to reduce to analogies to experience, those things which we cannot directly do so. It’s just that simple. AGAINST THE PLATONIC (IMAGINARY) WORLD Why must we support imaginary objects, as extant? Especially when the constructive argument (intuitionist) in operational language, can provide equal explanatory power? Why must we rely on ZFC+AC when we have recursive math, or when we can explain all mathematics in operational language without loss of context, scale, precision and utility? Just ’cause it’s easier. But that complexity is a defense against obscurantism and platonism. So it is merely a matter of cost. I understand Popper as trying to solve a problem of meta ethics, rather than anything particularly scientific. And I see most of his work as doing the best he could for the purposes that I’ve stated. Anyone who disagrees with me would have to disagree with my premies and my argument, not rely on the existence of platonist entities (magic) in order to win such an argument. That this is impossible, is at least something that I understand if no one else yet does. I don’t so much need someone to agree with me as constantly improve my argument so that I can test and harden it until it is unassailable or defeated. I think that defeating this argument is going to be very, very, difficult. TIME AND OPERATIONS (ACTIONS) IN TIME One cannot state that abstract ideas can be constructed independent of time, or even that they could be identified without changes in state over time. Or that thought can occur without the passage of time. Or consciousness can occur without the passage of time. Whether I make one choice or another is not material. This question is not a matter of choice, it is a matter of possibility. I can make no choice without the passage of time. I think that the only certain knowledge consists of negations, and that all the rest is conjecture. This is the only moral position to take. And it is the only moral position since argument exists for the purpose of persuasion, and persuasion for cooperation. I keep seeing this sort of desire to promote the rather obvious idea that induction is nonsense – yet everyone uses it, as a tremendous diversion from the fact that induction is necessary for action in real time, whenever the cost of not acting is higher than the cost of acting. Description, deduction, induction, abduction, guessing and intuitive choice are just descriptions of the processes we must use given the amount of information at our disposal. Science has no urgency, and life threatening emergencies do. Popper (and CR-ists for that matter) seem to want to perpetuate either mysticism, or skepticism as religion, rather than make the very simple point that the demands for ‘truth’ increase and decrease given the necessity of acting in time. I guess that I could take a psychological detour into why people would want to do this. But I suspect that I am correct (as I stated in one of these posts) that popper was, as part of his era, trying to react against the use of science and academia to replace the coercive power of the church. So he restated skepticism by establishing very high criteria for scientific truth. And all the nonsense that continues to be written about his work seek to read into platonic tea leaves, when the facts are quite SIMPLE. (Back to Argumentation Ethics at this point.) The fact is that humans must act in real time and as the urgency of action increases so does the demand for truth. Conversely, as the demand for cooperation increases, the demand for truth increases. Finally at the top of the scale we have science, which in itself is an expensive pursuit, and as such one is forbidden to externalize costs to other scientists. (Although if we look at papers this doesn’t actually work that well except at the very top margin.) THE QUESTION IS ONE OF COOPERATION The problem is ECONOMIC AND COOPERATIVE AND MORAL, not scientific. It’s just that simple. We cannot disconnect argument from cooperation without entering the platonic. We cannot disconnect math from context without entering the platonic. We cannot disconnect numbers from identity without entering the platonic. Each form of logic constrains the other. But the logic that constrains them all, is action. Without action, we end up with the delusions we spend most of philosophical discourse on. It’s all nonsense. I understand the difference between the real and the unreal, and the necessity of our various logics as instruments for the reduction of that which we cannot comprehend (sympathize with) to analogies to experience that we can comprehend ( sympathize with). Which is profound if you grasp it. THE PROBLEM OF SYMBOLS AND ECONOMY OF LANGUAGE If you cannot describe something as human action, then you do not understand it. Operational language is the most important, and least articulated canon of science. I do not argue against the economy of language. I argue against the loss of causality and correspondence that accompanies repeated use of economizing terms. ( I am pretty sure I put a bullet in this topic along with apriorism in economics. ) MORAL STANDARDS OF TRUTH Requiring a higher standard of truth places a higher barrier on cooperation. This is most important in matters of involuntary transfer, such as taxation or social and moral norms. Religions place an impossible standard of truth. This is why they are used so effectively to resist the state. Religious doctrine reliant upon faith is argumentatively inviolable. As such, no cooperation can be asked or offered outside of their established terms. … It’s brilliant really. Its why religious groups can resist the predation of the state. I would prefer instead we relied upon a prohibition on obscurant language and the requisite illustration of involuntary transfers, such that exchanges were easily made possible, and discounts (thefts) made nearly impossible. This is, the correct criteria for CR, not the platonic one that is assumed. In this light CR looks correct in practice if incorrect in argument. (There. I did it. Took me a bit.) Curt Doolittle
Form: Full Essay
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THE ARISTOCRATIC ETHIC OF VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE. (BHL Part 2) (Draft: I have almost
THE ARISTOCRATIC ETHIC OF VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE. (BHL Part 2)
(Draft: I have almost got this worked out. Not quite. But almost)
If you believe that voluntary exchange is the test of moral action, then it’s only logical that you follow that reasoning through to its logical consequence: that property rights are obtained by exchanging them with one another; and that in order to exchange those rights, voluntarily, one must possess an incentive to do so – or at least, no disincentive not to.
Since property rights describe prohibitions on involuntary transfer of property on a scale from the very basic forms of: murder, violence, destruction and theft, to the more complex forms of theft by fraud, omission, obscurantism, impediment, externalization, free riding, rent seeking, corruption, conspiracy, and conquest – each of us can grant different people different rights as we choose. And we do. We generally grant friends, family and associates greater rights, and others lesser rights, and foes none at all.
The more dependent we are on members outside of the family and close relationships for our economic survival and prosperity, the more valuable is the extension of property rights to others, because those rights reduce transaction costs.
In a world of shop keepers and craftsmen producing complex goods for one another, everyone has equal incentives.
In a world of 50% unemployed poor 40% labor and clerical, 9% professional and executive, and 1% financial, it is very hard to see why the unemployed poor are not wiser to form some means of extraction from those with more. Trade is merely the best form of obtaining what we desire, but it is not the only.
I don’t see much difference between Walter Block’s ghetto ethic justification of blackmail and the Danegeld. None at all. I don’t see any difference between profiting from the tragedy of others, and organizing an extractive state.
That’s because there isn’t any difference.
To demand property rights from someone without compensation is in itself, an act of attempted theft. This is not because the demand violates some abstract concept of the common good. The only common good we know of is increasing cooperation in a division of knowledge and labor while constantly suppressing free riding on others.
Instead, it’s because (a) while in exchange, higher respect for property rights decreases transaction costs because it decreases risk, but also (b) the more divergent are our interests the higher the compensation each party must offer for the observation of property rights by the other. Conversely, the more identical are our interests, the lower the compensation each party must offer for the observation of property rights by the other.
That is, in practice, what we humans do. In every society we know of. Ever.
THE RATIONAL CHOICE TO COOPERATE
If I grant you respect for property rights, don’t know why I would do that if all I was buying was protection from violence fraud and theft, and not buying trust and therefore protection from blackmail, fraud by omission, fraud by obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking, because corruption, because only the very WEAK would do that, and only out of desperation. (People of the Ghetto) I don’t really understand why I would give up the opportunity to kill, steal, enslave, or otherwise entertain myself with you if I still had to worry about your behavior. Or inversely, why would it be rational for me to grant you property rights if that meant that you could lie, cheat, deceive, engage in corruption and engage in blackmail?
The assumption of humility necessary for us to abandon violence and enter into debate; or the necessary grace we must display in our homogenous polity most of which is an extended family, is, as Hoppe shows in Argumentation, based upon the prior assumption of the grant of property rights.
However, we should not assume that the consequence is the cause: we only grant each other the grace and humility because we have already agreed to put away our violence, deception and coercion.
But for what reason have we all, given our different talents, numbers, and tribal abilities, chosen to grant one another those rights in the first place?
Trust.
Trust reduces transaction costs and the velocity of production. The division of labor saves time an increases velocity. Trust saves time and therefore increases velocity. It is possible to possess a division of labor in a low trust society, but it’s velocity (wealth) will be limited. Whereas, if one increases trust and reduces transaction costs and that group will outcompete all other groups with less trust. We have freed up man from physical labor.
POLITICS: EXTENDING IN-GROUP SUPPRESSION TO OUT-GROUP MEMBERS
The problem of politics, is providing an institutional means by which to accomplish this goal while preserving the low transaction costs of the high trust society. The problem for human’s evolutionary psychology was the balance between free riding and cooperation. The problem we face in our institutions is conducting that balance between free riding and cooperation.
ALL our advances in cooperation: morality, the division of labor, law, money, prices, contracts, interest, accounting – all of them – are extensions of our ability to cooperate in larger numbers while sensing and perceiving free riding.
So if we no longer have common interests in the preservation of property rights against the monopoly state, we must purchase that common interest in the preservation of property rights and diminishing the monopoly state, by paying those who have LESS interest in preserving those rights to police those rights. Depriving those who do not respect or police property of that payment. And forcing restitution, punishing, ostracizing, and if necessary, exterminating those people who persist in violating property rights.
That payment is moral, because it is a voluntary exchange. Asking those with no rational interest in liberty to choose self deprivation rather than engaging in statism is not only irrational, and immoral, but it’s a use of obscurant language to conduct theft by fraud.
We can either break into a multitude of small communities with heterogenous sets of property rights, or we can pay large communities (large markets) to participate in the formation and preservation of property rights. But we must abandon the obscurantist, fraudulent, parasitic lie of Rothbardian ghetto ethics to do it.
The source of liberty is the organized application of violence by a minority willing to pay the high price of suppressing all free riding in all its forms from a population in exchange for property rights. What remains at the end of that suppression is some system of property rights. The highest form of suppression eliminates the need for the state entirely. But it requires we suppress every single means of involuntary extraction from others.
THE EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VALUE OF INDIVIDUALS
In a heterogeneous polity that makes use of natural sources of energy to replace labor, and that uses technology to replace clerical work, the vast majority of people serve only three functions:
1) as consumers;
2) as police of property in all its forms;
3) to provide care of the commons;
4) to provide care and service for others.
The work of production has increasingly fallen to a minority. But the organization of voluntary and dynamic production, and the constitution of liberty, cannot be obtained without paying them for their services, since they no longer have the opportunity to engage in worthwhile production as compensation for their policing of property, care of the commons, and service of others.
If any member of the population chooses to police, care, and serve then they are due dividends from production. Otherwise they are merely slaves.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-11 04:09:00 UTC
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DRAFT: UNIVERSAL, DESCRIPTIVE AND PRESCRIPTIVE ETHICS : ETHICAL REALISM (ethics)
DRAFT: UNIVERSAL, DESCRIPTIVE AND PRESCRIPTIVE ETHICS : ETHICAL REALISM
(ethics) (this is a very tight logical box and I will make it tighter yet)
PART 1 : UNIVERSAL, DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS
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I. All moral rules in all cultures are possible to translate into prohibitions that attempt to solve the fundamental problem of cooperation: the suppression of free riding; the involuntary transfer, extraction, or destruction of assets, while at the same time facilitating all cooperation that functions as a multiplier of productivity – leading to the division of knowledge and labor, and the constant reduction of costs from that division. We are not superior to cave men. We have just made everything infinitely cheaper through the division of knowledge and labor and the application of a host of technologies.
II. Humans accumulate and defend many things, and they resent loss of them. They do so because they either must (life and kin) or because they have invested time, opportunity and effort in accumulating them. Cooperative Life cannot persist without these prohibitions.
1) Life (time)
2) Kin and Mates
3) Relationships
4) Territory
5) Material Inventory
6) Status
7) Commons
8) Norms, Myths, traditions, institutions.
9) Plans, Beliefs, Recipes.
III. Humans demonstrate vehement reaction to and prohibition of the following categories of involuntary deprivation of their assets:
1) Criminal Prohibitions (Murder, harm, destruction, theft – physical extraction)
2) Ethical Prohibitions (fraud, omission, interference – asymmetry of knowledge)
3) Moral Prohibitions (privatization, socialization, free riding – absence of knowledge)
4) Conspiratorial Prohibitions (rent seeking, corruption, extortion, protection, taxation)
5) Conquest Prohibitions (war, displacement, immigration, religious conversion, cultural competition)
IV. Variations in those moral rules are determined by a compromise between the following problems:
1) the reproductive strategy of the gender, class and group.
2) the structure of production (the economy).
3) the structure of the family unit necessary in any given structure of production.
4) the inheritance pattern once assets can be accumulated.
5) the degree of outbreeding in the polity (the extent of the taboo on inbreeding)
6) the metaphysical value judgements between man and nature that were determined during the formation of cultural norms out of feast celebrations in the ‘great transformation’ era.
7) the genetic and cultural homogeneity or diversity of the local economy (Islands vs borders vs unlanded/diasporic vs gypsy/pastoral).
V. ***All moral sentiments, in all societies, are reactions to the perception of changes in state of those assets as determined by the criminal, ethical and moral prohibitions. In all humans, in all cultures, in all civilizations.***
PART 2: UNIVERSAL, PRESCRIPTIVE ETHICS
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I. Given that moral rules consist of the prohibition of criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial and conquest behavior, what remains is voluntary exchange of assets according to the group’s portfolio of moral and ethical rules.
II. Trust. (undone)
1) (transaction cost and velocity)
2) Low trust societies prohibit only crime, high trust societies prohibit unethical and immoral transfers, and currently no cultures persist in prohibiting conspiratorial behavior since it is a consequence state function, and as yet we have no technology for suppressing state monopoly bureaucracy and corruption while preserving the state’s use in suppressing criminal, unethical and immoral behavior.
III. Humans rely upon these necessary reductions in transaction costs to continue to expand productivity.
1) Humans Signal their moral commitment with manners, language, and consumption (dress, possessions, etc).
2) Humans demonstrate preference for association with those who use the same signals because those signals communicate lower transaction costs.
3) Status Signals are cheaper with higher return in-group than out-group except at the extreme margins.
(… more on transaction costs…)
4) Urbanization appears to both decrease opportunity costs, and increase productivity by 15-20% (and all the bad things too) with every doubling of the population. People in urban areas move, as under the european monarchies, into neighborhoods ‘with their own’. This appears to ostracize the middle class to the suburbs.
IV. Moral rules reflect necessary group evolutionary strategies.
1) the group cannot survive local competition (not to mention, guns germs and steel) without a successful evolutionary strategy.
2) Groups demonstrate that they are materially different in their abilities, in the distribution of abilities, particularly verbal and spatial intelligence.
3) Groups demonstrate that they are materially different in the distribution of desirability for mating (symmetry, proportion and thickness of skin.)
4) Groups demonstrate significant differences in the distribution of impulsivity and ‘malleability’. (Appears to be testosterone)
5) Aggressiveness (Appears to be more complex than just testosterone).
6) The distribution of verbal intelligence appears to heavily determine three factors:
a) Morality since it rapidly declines under 95IQ.
b) Trust and therefore economic performance for the same reason.
c) Sufficient distribution over ~105IQ to concentrate productive capital a Pareto distribution (80/20) in the hands of those who can make use of property for group benefit.
V. It is impossible to rationally adjudicate conflicts across different moral codes. (Which is why America is ‘coming apart’.) But it is ALSO necessary for groups to follow different in-group evolutionary strategies. Therefore it is not possible to morally construct large scale societies that consist of high trust economies. (As we see the Nordic states are small homogenous absolute nuclear family states that are highly outbred). It would have been possible in American had we not destroyed the Absolute Nuclear Family as a normative requirement for citizenship, political participation, and economic survival. But since we have the only solution is fragmentation or tyranny.
However, if it is not possible to adjudicate moral rules across heterogeneous polities, without committing genocide, it is possible to adjudicate commercial exchanges between heterogeneous polities with different moral codes, since commerce between disconnected polities is constrained only by violence, theft and fraud, as well as prohibitions on conquest. While local polities and local interactions are ADDITIONALLY constrained by manners, ethics, morals, and prohibitions on corruption and conquest. And those local polities must be otherwise they would be rendered economically immobile by high transaction costs (Somalia).
VI. Meritocratic societies (that suppress free riding) that practice assortative mating and the nuclear family appear to produce sufficiently eugenic reproduction that it is possible to keep ahead of malthusian constraints and genetic regression toward the mean. While equalitarian societies (with pervasive free riding) whether they practice assortative mating in extended families or not, and particularly if they practice inbreeding, cannot appear to defeat Malthus nor the pressure of regression towards the mean.
VII. THEREFORE
Assuming that dysgenic reproduction is undesirable (and I admit that this is a preference, but certainly a scientifically and evolutionarily arguable one), the purpose of political institutions is:
1) To facilitate cooperation between groups for on means, but not ends, where the market cannot satisfy means or ends, because competition or privatization of commons would result in extraction from the commons or free riding on the commons.
2) To facilitate redistribution for consumption but not for reproduction.
3) To encourage a multitude of small populations with heterogeneous moral codes suitable to their reproductive and evolutionary strategies – each of whom can negotiate trade, and thereby compensate for their differences in ability and preference.
4) To construct a single universal commercial code (which the anglo civilization has been doing by force of arms for 500 years) that enforces prohibitions on violence theft and fraud regardless of in-group preferences.
5) To replace the natural corruption of political representation, monopoly bureaucracy, and arbitrary legislation, with rule of law, contract, insurer of last resort, and private provision of public goods via competing insurance providers.
6) To facilitate relative equality WITHIN groups with the same evolutionary strategy (if they so desire it) but not ACROSS groups with different evolutionary strategies.
AND IT FOLLOWS
When you interfere with manners, ethics, morals, family structure, and production, if you are not INCREASING the suppression of free riding, you are damaging someone’s reproductive strategy and status.
PART III : ETHICAL RULES
PART IV : LANGUAGE (undone)
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( analogy to experience, operational statements, loading, framing)
( problem of complexity and necessity of compression)
( the difference between the necessary honesty of law and exchange and the utility of literary loading and framing)
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-05 19:43:00 UTC
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BITCOIN IN STANDARD FINANCIAL TERMINOLOGY AND WITHOUT THE SPIN Bitcoin is a nove
BITCOIN IN STANDARD FINANCIAL TERMINOLOGY AND WITHOUT THE SPIN
Bitcoin is a novel monetary technology because it combines the properties of various other financial instruments to create a uniquely self financing substitute for money.
Those instruments are:
1) Token Money (like when you buy tickets at an amusement park)
2) Stock Certificate (like when you buy a public company)
3) Title Registry (like when you research to title to your house, or register the title to your car)
(You can use wikipedia if you need to learn more about each term.)
THE BLOCKCHAIN SHARES THE PROPERTIES OF A TITLE REGISTRY, NOT A LEDGER.
Financial ledgers pool quantities – they ‘roll up transactions’. The Blockchain does not pool quantities. When you pool quantities into aggregates, you launder causality from the data. BTC are not laundered at all by aggregation. Just the opposite. They are anonymous, or at least marginally so, but the are not laundered into aggregates.
A title registry contains records of the transfer of ownership, so that your ownership is verifiable in the event of a transaction. No history is laundered through aggregation. Each change in fractional ownership is recored.
The block chain does not perform as a financial ‘ledger’ as much as it functions as a title registry – registration of changes in ownership: like when you buy a home, you buy insurance that the title is clear, and the government owns the title registry (but is unreliable) so you have to get insurance that the seller actually owns the thing before you buy it. A ledger records transactions. A registry records transactions and ownership. The block chain maintains ownership.
The difference between BTC Shares and ordinary shares, is that while you can’t infinitely divide your home, you CAN to some degree divide up your farmland. BTC title registry operates just like a land registry. Each time you divide your land into smaller plots you register the title of the new plot with the local registry of titles.
The block chain is a very simple title registry for an almost infinitely divisible bit of property: the Bitcoin share – out to eight decimal places.
It is a title registry for shares of Bitcoin stock. A Bitcoin entry in the blockchan represents a change in ownership of a share of stock in the Bitcoin Network. Every BTC owner, does own a fraction of the Bitcoin network. When that share is issued it is placed on the title registry. All transactions related to that title are recorded in the registry. Unlike shares of stock which are indivisible, Bitcoins are divisible – out to eight decimal places.
The Bitcoin registry is public and because of encryption, trustworthy, so we don’t need to pay for INSURANCE when we conduct exchanges.
MONTARY FACTS
1) BTC are NOT classifiable as Money Proper (commodity money, backed by natural universal demand)
2) BTC are NOT classifiable as Fiat Money Proper (backed by a corporation called the state)
3) BTC are NOT classifiable as a money substitute (backed by a deposit of money, a physical commodity, or a government monopoly.)
4) BTC ARE classifiable as Fiduciary media (claims not backed by a deposit of money.)
5) BTC ARE classifiable as Token Money because they are limited in acceptance to other BTC network shareholders where they function as an intermediary money substitute between Fiat Money Proper, Commodity Money Proper, Fiduciary Media, and other Money Substitutes.
6) BTC ARE classifiable as claims of ownership of shares of stock in the BTC network. They are issued in exchange for computational work. The appreciation of these shares provides the incentive for network members to construct the network and advance the networks interests.
7) The financial innovations BTC provides, besides the obvious use of public infrastructure to eliminate costs (the internet);
(a) the use of token money as shares with which to finance the construction of the network.
(b) extraordinary divisibility of shares of stock into new tokens.
(c) the use of a nearly inviolable title registry for the ownership of those tokens.
(d) the near absence of transaction costs.
MICRO ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF BITCOIN
(1) If Bitcoin becomes both popular enough to produce a stable price, then it it will function as a store of value. It is not stable enough now. If it was stable enough there would be no incentive for miners. And no value in speculatively purchasing them. So BTC is financed as a share stock in the BTC network, purchased by earning those shares using computing power. By the time BTC becomes stable the value of BTC in the network is so high, that self interest drives perpetuation of the network.
(2) If Bitcoin evolves such that they’re widely accepted, it will not lose its status as token money. Token money is something you buy to use to purchase something else, but is externally dependent upon some association (the BTC network). Just like tickets at an amusement park. Some of the value of your purchase is captured by the amusement park. Some of the value of your purchase of btc is captured by others as both appreciation and fees for mining coins.
(3) As long as the current incentives for miners remain such that no one can monopolize the mining process or alter the chance of creating BTC, then no one can cheat the purchasing power of BTC without a self harm.
(4) Fees are not currently necessary because it is unnecessary to finance the float needed to manage currency exchanges (although you must inventory BTC by pre-purchasing them in addition to your other currencies which may or may not eradicate most of the advantage of not paying interest.)
(5) Unless regulated by threats from government, no one can impose unnecessary transaction costs on any of your transactions. And competition guarantees at least some access to transaction approvals. (History suggests that eventually, fees will be small but universal.)
So far, no other medium has effectively free transaction costs, because every other medium IS somehow backed, even if only vaguely, and therefore the transaction must compete against other uses of money in the form of fees that compete with interest rates.
MACRO ECONOMIC, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL BENEFITS OF BTC
1) Ease and speed in reconciliation of the exchange different currencies encourages free trade, especially for information and entertainment media.
2) Restoration of our power to save, since the government cannot dilute the value of BTC, by constantly redistributing from savers to spenders.
3) Disempowerment of the privileged, gate keeping, financial system from extracting fees. In effect BTC eliminates upward redistribution.
4) Disempowerment of the government to tax or charge fees. In effect depriving the state of the ability to govern us using money.
5) Disempowerment of the government to inventory our wealth, and the restoration of financial privacy.
6) Disempowerment of the government to seize our assets.
WEAKNESSES OF THE CURRENT GENERATION OF BTC
1) It is very hard to understand how BTC can function as a common medium of exchange if it takes more than 10- seconds to process a common retail transaction, and 30 seconds to process less common transactions.
2) It is very hard to understand how BTC will not become regulated and ‘taxed’, since it remains necessary to purchase BTC using the existing financial system.
3) It is very hard to understand how BTC will not be abused by major miners once the initial wave of appreciation is over.
4) It is hard to predict what transaction costs will be charged in the future – and I cannot understand why they wouldn’t be charged.
5) It is very hard to understand how BTC will function at scale without the ability to federate (split up) the block chain, and archive portions of it.
6) It seems that there is no way of consolidating BTC fragments, and it’s unclear if that would be necessary or beneficial. But without doing so it seems that we cannot maintain the long term viability of the block chain.
Hopefully this frame of reference will be useful to someone. 🙂 Writing it has been useful for me.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 09:36:00 UTC
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THE NAP IS INSUFFICIENT FOR SUPPRESSION OF DEMAND FOR THE STATE. IN FACT, THE NA
THE NAP IS INSUFFICIENT FOR SUPPRESSION OF DEMAND FOR THE STATE. IN FACT, THE NAP IS “UNETHICAL” BY DEFINITION
(I wanted to thank Jason Maher for very intelligent comments. But also to respond to criticisms, and perhaps to fill a few gaps.)
This post is part of a discussion on Argumentation Ethics.
1) In that thread, my purpose was to illustrate that neither AE, nor performative contradiction, are causal arguments. However, since both correctly assume self ownership is a necessity, then that the single assumption is sufficient to deduce all of the institutional solutions that Hoppe addressed in his work. It’s weak causal argumentative support, but it demonstrates internal consistency. And, in both logic and mathematics, whenever we construct a proof, we require internal consistency. Internal consistency does not determine external correspondence. And external correspondence is the only test of ‘truth’. But his arguments are internally consistent, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very often in ethics.
2) The rest of my post (and most of my work) is designed to articulate the universally DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS demonstrated by man, and to argue how, given such a descriptive ethics, liberty can be achieved as a system of NORMATIVE ETHICS.
3) The reason this construction is necessary is to correct the FAILURE of libertarian arguments to gain political support – or even to constrain the state. Or more simply: if we have better rational and economic arguments, then why do conservatives succeed in resisting the state, but libertarians fail to resist the state?
The answer is that humans vote and act, morally, not rationally. (And it’s necessary for them to do so for many reasons, not the least of which is limited cognitive ability in real time, combined with fragmentary knowledge and living in an environment surrounded by others who are engaged in limited theft and violence, but pervasive deception, fraud, obscurantism, free riding, rent seeking and conspiracy.
So the purpose of my work is to attempt to correct libertarian ethics such that the failed effort to gain popular support can either be corrected by improvements to libertarian ethics such that they are preferable to a political majority, or to alter the libertarian strategy such that we abandon both the attempt to obtain a political majority (or even an effective resistance), and attempt a separate solution.
The various means which I’ve attempted to suggest are too long for this forum.
NOW, TO JASON’S INSIGHTFUL COMMENTS
–“An interesting conceptual division of methods to nick what belongs to someone else. Mr. Doolittle’s principle argument is the the Non Aggression Principle can only deal with #1 and part of #4, but is completely powerless against #2 and #3. Specifically, he speaks of the NAP lacking a mechanism for dealing with classes 2 and 3, and even encourages them…”–
You are correct. Yes.
–“”Private property is contrary [to] the female reproductive strategy””–
This fact may seem humorous to you but the consequences explain why the introduction of women into the voting pool has driven us consistently toward a redistributive society, despite the fact that none of such would have occurred without the introduction of women in the voting pool. (I can’t vouch for Australia because I don’t know the data, But it’s true in the states and Canada. In Canada, without the French vote, the mix would be as conservative as the united states. Which is why conservative Canadians want Quebec to secede.)
The female reproductive strategy is not monogamous, but polyamorous for support and protection, but to capture the better genes she can run across from those multiple encounters. And then to retain the burden of care, but to place the burden of upkeep on the tribe.
Wherever monogamous marriage (the nuclear family, or the northern european absolute nuclear family) declines women return to this strategy via proxy of the state.
Property rights that accompanied animal husbandry and agrarian settlement, inverted matrilineal reproductive control, and placed reproductive control in the hands of males – something the marxists have argued against since Engels wrote his tome on it.
I can go into this at depth but lets just say that the evidence is that women cause the change in property rights policy and that they demonstrate a return to community property in their voting patterns.
–“NAP covers externalities easily… complete allocation of private property rights to avoid “tragedy of the commons” and then allowing people to sue for damage to their property.”–
–“NAP covers fraud too since it is basically theft through breach of contract.”–
–“NAP doesn’t cover asymmetric information to the degree that it simply means two different people have different information. But having different information isn’t a property rights violation and is simply the state of nature. It is impossible and absurd to talk about all people in the world having identical information.”–
Individual contracts place an extremely high transaction cost on all exchanges. So if you are one of the owners of an enormous shopping mall, and you rent space for stores to merchants, and you want to maximize your revenue, will you, or will you not, want to decrease transaction costs?
People are entirely cognizant of transaction costs. The high trust society eliminates them, by a normative prohibition on all involuntary transfers, not just those transfers that constitute aggression.
Further, no society exists that has property rights and liberty as we know it EXCEPT where there has been a near prohibition on all involuntary transfers – because it is the only way to reduce demand for the state: demand for the mall owners so to speak, to reduce transaction costs.
We must remember that for humans, loss aversion, and altruistic punishment are MORE ACTIVATING (we are more passionate about them) than self interest. So all our decisions are asymmetrically weighted against risk.
So the libertarian errors are those of incorrect attribution of praxeological analysis to transactions. And the reason for that praxeological error is that mises and rothbard both made the error of using commodity purchases and ordinal preferences, where commodity purchases are marginally indifferent except on price, and where human differences are not ordinal but a network, and where that network demonstrates necessary biases against risk and necessary cooperative biases that punish offenders>
Think of it this way. If we did not operate by such rules, then transaction costs would be infinite, and we would not exist.
It is not possible for humans to function without these prohibitions.
It is non logical for libertarians to rely on the NAP, which structurally contains errors that are impossible for humans to cooperate using.
I am aware that it is quite unlikely that you will, at first reading, drop your high investment in rothbardian and misesian logic. And I suspect that this one argument is insufficient to convince you. But you will have a very hard time both rationally and empirically circumventing that logic.
So it is not that I err, or fail to grasp, or have not made sufficient efforts in this area of inquiry. It is that I am not trying to JUSTIFY liberty, but instead am trying to explain how to obtain it as a preference, because it is not justifiable. and it is not justifiable because while liberty is in our reproductive interests. It is not in the reproductive interests of all. Or even the majority.
—“And perhaps more importantly, the NAP is not the only basis for anarchy. David Friedman is one of the most famous living anarchists and he (and I) argue based on consequences, not NAP.”—
Well, I never made that statement. I’m making the statement that NAP is insufficient for DESCRIBING what people do. And that the weakness of the NAP explains why we fail to understand why even those people who prefer government out of their lives, demonstrate a demand for government under conditions that the NAP prescribes.
The NAP only prohibits crime. It does not prohibit unethical or immoral conduct. To obtain voluntary participation you must forbid both unethical and immoral conduct, otherwise individuals will demand intervention to prohibit it. By having the state, a population trades free riding, theft, unethical and immoral conduct that they cannot avoid for rent seeking and corruption that they can avoid. You cannot eliminate rent seeking and corruption via the state without also retaining the prohibition on unethical and immoral actions suppressed by the state.
Its non logical.
I am trying to reform libertarianism to repair the errors in Rothbardian ethics in order to explain why we lose. And the NAP is one of the reasons that we lose: because it prohibits criminality but not unethical or immoral behavior.
And if the NAP fails to prohibit unethical and immoral behavior, and If we claim to have a lock on ethics, then what is the basis for that claim?
If we have a lock on ethics, then why do we fail? Are humans naturally unethical? That would mean that natural law was a false basis for liberty.
This is because aggression is not the test of the ethics of property. It is only the test of criminality. Ethical constraint and moral constraint are place higher demands on property rights.
Blackmail, as Rothbard argues, is not a violation of the NAP. It is a voluntary exchange. What is it about blackmail that we can say is moral or ethical?
It should be clear at this point that the NAP is not a test of ethical or moral behavior, but only of criminal behavior.
THE NAP IS LESS OF A REASON FOR A VOLUNTARY SOCIETY
The NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society if we merely exchange free riding, rent seeking and corruption via the state, which we can both avoid and which we rarely experience, for unethical and immoral behavior which is pervasive in society, and we cannot avoid or fail to experience.
Praxeology demands that we attribute rational choice to individuals. It’s non-praxeological to assert that the exchange of pervasive and daily thefts is preferable to infrequent and invisible thefts. If only for the transaction costs to each of us.
So no, the NAP is LESS of a reason to prefer a voluntary society. People see the state, rationally, as the lesser evil between pervasive criminality, unethical behavior, and immoral behavior. They willingly trade rent seeking and corruption that they cannot see for criminality, unethical, and immoral behavior. And they are rightly rational to do so.
So what is the means by which we eliminate the state’s free riding, rent seeking and corruption, while also prohibiting the criminal, unethical, and immoral? What is the basis for property rights if we must prohibit the criminal, unethical, immoral, AND the CORRUPT?
NAP does not tell us this. Our reliance on the argumentative value of the NAP is the reason we fail. The NAP is in fact a RECIPE FOR FAILURE, because it is an unethical and immoral standard for the construction of property rights, norms and the common law.
THE NAP IS ONE OF THE REAONS WE FAIL.
Without prior promise of constraint of blackmail, we cannot reduce demand for the state. Private Property only developed where unethical and immoral conduct was suppressed at every possible level.
The EVIDENCE is that the demand for private property only exists in the suppression of immoral and unethical conduct. Criminality is insufficient. So it’s not RATIONAL to argue that the NAP is sufficient. The trust necessary for private property must exist PRIOR to the demand for private property, and the reduction of demand for the state. Further, it’s not evident (it’s contrary to the evidence) that the market suppresses unethical and immoral behavior. Just the opposite. The expansion of the market INCREASES opportunity for immoral and unethical behavior. Immoral and unethical behavior is cheaper than honest ethical and moral behavior, which imposes costs on the participants. Property rights are a cost. Every time they are respected. Forgoing those opportunities requires trust. The result of forgoing opportunities and TRUST creates property rights. Not the other way around. Private property does not create trust. Once you suppress criminal, unethical and immoral behavior, the only POSSIBLE means of interaction is via private property.
We cannot confuse cause and consequence.
TRUST FIRST. PROPERTY SECOND. STATE LAST.
So, again, trust (willingness to take risks / low transaction cost exchange) requires the suppression of criminal, unethical and immoral behavior. And the trust that appears to be sufficient for demand for private property requires near total suppression of unethical behavior.
We must suppress even MORE unethical and rent seeking and corrupt behavior in order to reduce demand for the state. If we are to define property rights as the basis of a moral and peaceful society, then what is the definition of property rights that prohibits not only criminal behavior (the NAP) but also unethical, immoral, as well as free riding, rent seeking, and corruption?
I think that it looks like the state would be the natural means of transforming criminal, unethical, immoral behavior into free riding, rent seeking and corruption in an effort to decrease transaction costs. Now, how do we FURTHER suppress free riding, rent seeking and corruption without the state? Privatization. But for privatization we must have a set of property rights that increase suppression of free riding, rent seeking and corruption, without sacrificing the reason for the state: suppression of unethical and immoral behavior.
It’s non logical to ask people to yet bear again that which they have rid themselves of, by clear and demonstrated preference, almost universally. People have already demonstrated that they are willing to trade unethical and immoral behavior, for corrupt and rent seeking behavior. And they were rational to do so. You cannot tell them that they are gaining something by simply reverting them to a previous state that they have already rejected.
We can only offer them something BETTER. Which is to ALSO prohibit rent seeking and corruption AS WELL as unethical and immoral behavior.
So no. The NAP was a terrible mistake for the liberty movement. It was tragic. I understand why they resorted to ghetto ethics, because they didn’t understand where liberty and the high trust society came from.
But now that we do (or at least I do) we must base any argument that we deem ethically superior on a set of property rights that is a net gain, not a net loss, for the population.
This is very difficult for Rothbardians to swallow, but pride and personal investment in a failed ideology are less important than the achievement of freedom.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-20 07:38:00 UTC
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REALITY IS MORE LIMITED THAN IMAGINATION: THE MORAL NATURE OF TRUTH IN THE LOGIC
REALITY IS MORE LIMITED THAN IMAGINATION: THE MORAL NATURE OF TRUTH IN THE LOGICS AND SCIENCES
1) We can mathematically represent more relations than can exist in reality.
And we can state more things than we can demonstrate correspond with reality. And we can suggest more means and ends of cooperation than can be organized in reality.
2) Set theoretic axioms assist us in making internally consistent statements. But they may or may not correspond to reality.
3) Tests of internal consistency reduce error. But since truth means and must mean correspondence, only external consistency (correspondence) is a test of truth.
4) The value of our imagination, followed by our logical systems is in reducing the cost of testing our ideas about reality.
5) The comparative value (goodness or less good, or even badness) of our spectrum of different logical systems, from:
i) the functionally descriptive, to
ii) the logically descriptive to
iii) the historically descriptive to;
iv) the mythically allegorical, and finally to;
v) the mystically allegorical;
– is the degree with which those systems reduce the cost of exploration by increasing degrees of correspondence. The error we make is in placing greater value on the network effect of existing logical networks (paradigms), than on the possibility of new correspondence with reality.
6) The comparative MORALITY of different logical systems is in the degree to which they pose restraints upon the externalization of costs to those form whom exploration is involuntary, versus the externalizations of benefits to those for whom exploration is involuntary.
HIERARCHY OF TRUTH
That is, unless we state, that we must create a hierarchy of truth:
AXIS 1:
(i) that which is complete (reality) but the completeness of which is unknowable,
(ii) that which is incomplete but correspondent (action/science)
(iii) that which is incomplete but internally consistent (logics)
(iv) that which is incomplete, for which correspondence is unknown, and for which internal consistency is unknown. (theory)
(v) that which we are unaware of. (ignorance)
(I am not settled on the order of (ii) and (iii) since as far as I can tell, our arguments to internal consistency are verbal justification that merely improve our theory, while our actions are demonstrated preferences in favor of our theory.)
And the praxeological test of our confidence in our statements (our WARRANTY) for making true statements:
AXIS 2:
i) That which we do not know
ii) That which we intuit we can to act upon
iii) That which we we desire we can act upon
iiv) That which we can argue we rationally can act upon.
v) That which it is non rational to argue against.
vi) That which is self evident.
Error in science may be a privilege of rank. Science is largely outside of the market. Error in cooperation is not outside the market, and constitutes the market, and is necessity. My voluntary action requires only that I have confidence, since I warranty my own actions by necessity. But as we move from voluntary exchange, to corporate cooperation, to state monopoly corporation, the standard of truth increases, since others pay for any error. The only solution is that those who desire pay, and those that do not, do not.
Therefore, we also understand, that the prohibition on error in science is immaterial if unspoken and constrained to the self. But if science or any other discipline, makes public claims, we require a higher standard.
This prohibition is a MORAL one, because lower standards of truth in science externalize costs on to other scientists.
The standard of truth is inseparable from the moral impact that any statement will have.
I am not free to make any statement. We are not free to make any statement. We are free only to make true statements without punishment of some kind – even if it is just to be ignored and therefore boycotted. In many civilizations one is even prohibited from making true statements if they cause discomfort. In science we reverse this social intuition, and state that we specifically SEEK criticism, rather than confirmation.
If we take this argument all the way down to the very meaning of ‘debate’, we will grasp that the only reason we yield our opportunity for theft and violence, is on the presumption of honest discourse. (argumentation ethics). It is this sacrifice of violence, and grant of peerage in exchange for the cooperative pursuit of truth, that was the unique development of western civilization. And it is this one axiom that led to all of western science and reason. And why no other civilization developed it.
The only reason to argue against the requirement for moral public statements adhering to increasing standards of truth, is that one wishes to externalize costs onto others, or to not be held accountable for the externalization of costs onto others.
In other words, because one is an immoral individual, the definition of which is to externalize costs to the anonymous.
One can say, that like free speech in politics, we insure each other against ignorance and error. And some might say we insure each other against loading and framing. And some might say we insure each other against fraud by omission. And some might say that we insure each other against fraud by deception.
But insurance then, is limited to the willingness of others to pay for it. And our contract for this insurance in public debate has been dramatically loosened by the courts (by the left wing) such that we tolerate (insure) obscurant, immoral, deceptive and plainly fraudulent discourse, as well as eliminate the prior prohibition on libel and slander.
Insurance in any body cannot pay out more than it takes in. And in this case we are already paying out more than we take in.
So the policy must change so to speak.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-16 08:16:00 UTC
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REFORMING LIBERTARIAN ETHICS FAIR WARNING (I dont engage in justification. I try
REFORMING LIBERTARIAN ETHICS
FAIR WARNING
(I dont engage in justification. I try to determine the truth. And so if you manage to get through this little essay, you might not emerge with your high investment in rothbardian libertarianism intact.)
PART 1
THE AXIOM OF SELF OWNERSHIP
Regarding: “…the self-ownership axiom is the only one of those under consideration that is sound…”
Ethical statements cannot be ‘sound’ since that’s an allegorical and untestable statement. The testable term is ‘internally consistent’. However internal consistency (error free construction) doesn’t tell us anything about external correspondence (truth).
Instead, ethical statements must adhere to a higher standard of argument than the internally consistent: Ethical arguments must be:
a) preferable (to their absence)
b) necessary
c) sufficient
d) possible
e) durable (survivable over time)
How does the self ownership Axiom survive this test?
a) The S.O. axiom Is probably preferable (I can’t imagine a rational creature for whom it wouldn’t be preferable. I think it’s a precondition of autonomous sentience. So I have to stipulate that while I can’t determine the preferences of others, that it is hard for me to understand how it isn’t preferable for any being for whom action in real time is necessary for survival.)
b) it may or may not be sufficient;
c) it is certainly possible since it’s demonstrably extant;
d) it is rationally, praxeologically, and demonstrably durable.
Self Ownership and the NAP are very hard to argue with, except with regard to sufficiency. Are Self Ownership, Private Property, and NAP sufficient? They are sufficient for the purposes that Hoppe has put them to: which is the ability solve (almost) all problems of human cooperation while relying on self ownership, private property, and NAP.
The questions are:
a) whether the these rules are sufficient to obtain sufficient voluntary adoption and adherence such that this libertarian state of affairs are possible?
b) is there an alternative axiom or set of axioms that permits the deduction of the various solutions to voluntary cooperation?
c) is there a superior alternative axiom or set of axioms that permit the deduction of the various solutions to the problem of liberty (voluntary cooperation).
It would be unscientific to suggest that no other argument exists other than {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. (Self ownership, Private Property, Homesteading, Voluntary Exchange and Non Aggression). It is also pretty hard to imagine something more compact with the same explanatory power.
Why? Because these three statements:
1) Metaphysics: Self Ownership:(Existence);
2) Epistemology: Private Property with Homesteading and Voluntary Exchange :(Scope);
3) Ethics: NonAggressionPrinciple:(Test);
…are pretty narrow requirements for an axiomatic system. In fact, one statement per major domain of philosophy is so compact that it’s pretty hard to argue that it can be improved upon. Instead, it’s actually kind of awe-inspiring that all of the philosophy of human cooperation can be reduced to just these three statements.
Even better, technically all five philosophical domains are answered by SO,PP+H+VE,NAP:
4) Politics: Politics is solved by market, anarchy and voluntary insurance organizations.
5) Aesthetics: Aesthetics is satisfied by the fact that we stipulate that liberty is desirable.
So, if you’re asking the question, ‘how can we cooperate peacefully and voluntarily?’ and Hoppe has demonstrated that from these simple axioms we can cooperate peacefully and voluntarily, then it isn’t NECESSARY to devise an alternative axiomatic system. (I”m not even sure it’s helpful)
It may be accurate to state that we not claim (actually, that **HE** not claim) no other set of statements would be superior (even if it is improbable) . But that is not to say that it is necessary, since he has demonstrated them to be sufficient for the deduction of all the institutions formal and informal for a voluntary system of cooperation.
WEAKNESSES? SUFFICIENCY.
(Now, lest you assume I am an apologist, I’ll take this a little farther.)
“BUT” (and it’s a big but) is the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} sufficient for voluntary and therefore preferential adoption of such set, either empirically (historically) or rationally (praxeologically)?
And I think that is probably where it fails to sustain scrutiny, because we can demonstrate that the demand for external intervention (the state) does not decrease sufficiently in any population, to permit the rational and praxeologically testable, preferential and demonstrably voluntary, adoption of anarchy, in any population by other than by a tiny minority – at least as it stands.
So while {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} may be sufficient for the DEDUCTION of all means of voluntary cooperation, it does not provide sufficient INCENTIVE to reduce demand for external (state) intervention by a sufficient body of the population such that the a self-interested monopoly bureaucracy is not necessary for either:
(a) the systematic enforcement, of private property for the prevention of free riding, theft and violence, or;
(b) necessary for the systematic violation of private property to compensate for predation, as well as preventing theft and violence.
Again, it appears that {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is sufficient for deduction of the informal and formal institutions of voluntary cooperation, but provides an insufficient incentive for the voluntary adoption of informal and informal institutions of voluntary cooperation.
In that case, if the incentives are insufficient, then we have two possible means of constructing anarchy under {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}:
(i) involuntary coercion under threat of boycott, ostracization, and/or threat of violence.
(ii) improvement of incentives such that anarchy is voluntarily adoptable (praxeologically possible).
(iii) A combination of both.
So, let us see if either or both solutions are possible or necessary.
HISTORY
History tells us that liberty only exists where nearly all involuntary transfers of property are prohibited – including those which are not visible or known of.
And the few circumstances where all involuntary transfers of property were prohibited was limited to european warriors who granted each other prohibition on involuntary transfer (property rights) in exchange for military service. Property rights were a ‘right’ that was obtained in a contract for voluntary exchange. The incentive to gain access to the privilege of private property was one that was both materially, and reproductively advantageous.
These property rights were an artifact of the accumulation of wealth first in simple goods, cattle and horses, later in land and built capital. Fighters who took risks, kept their winnings. Later, all free men kept their property.
Later under manorialism and agrarian farming, a married couple was needed for the rental of land. This delayed marriage, and forced the absolute nuclear family that we understand today.
When the church sought to break up the large landholders they interfered with inheritance rights, which are the source of the family structure, and consequently, the source of moral code variation, throughout the world. To break up the families they prohibited inbreeding out to as many as eight or even twelve generations, and granted women property rights.
The combination of property rights for all, the near elimination of free riding, even by family members (offspring), and the persistence of the militia as a fighting force, created the high trust universal social order we call the protestant ethic.
The enlightenment’s intellectual effort was an experiment in both justifying the middle class seizure of political power, and transferring the rights of the upper and ‘middle’ classes (small business owners : ie: farmers) to all land holders.
The culmination of this experiment was the near prohibition on involuntary transfers that was embodied in the American Constitution. The aristocracy of everyone who had a stake in the preservation of property rights.
(Unfortunately, that experiment has shown that universal enfranchisement, especially the enfranchisement of women, was incompatible with liberty, because participatory government by those whose interest is to seek rents and free riding, is an organized means of disempowering armed property owners, and systematically removing their property rights. Thereby returning us to the consanguineous or serial-marriage family structure in corporate (state) form.
LIBERTARIAN ETHICS: NECESSITY. BUT SUFFICIENCY?
It’s kind of hard to disagree with libertarian ethics as stated in {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. If only because they’re necessary, and the alternative to disagreeing with libertarian ethics, is demonstrably, a nearly universally undesirable state of affairs involving constant property violations (theft and violence) that make cooperation in a division of labor all but impossible – even among members of a consanguineous community of primitive hunter gatherers it may be beneficial.
Lets look at classes of involuntary transfers of property as people demonstrate them:
(1) Criminal statements are those that involve violence and theft.
(2) Ethical statements are those which prohibit involuntary transfer of property by asymmetry of information between those internal to the action.
(3) Moral statements are those which by definition apply to unknown persons external to the action: anonymous involuntary transfers of property.
(4) Conspiratorial Statements: Statements of Political Morality (conspiracy) are those which prevent the organized and systemic involuntary transfer of property, whether criminal, ethical, or moral.
The NAP only has a mechanism for fairly simple, obvious property violations: criminal violence and theft of class (1)
The NAP has no mechanism for any of class (2) or class (3), and arguably sanctions and encourages these involuntary transfers by NOT preventing them.
The NAP prevents class (1) PORTIONS of class (4), but it does not prohibit class (2) and (3) portions of class (4).
Now, if you are a member of the majority tribe, you will suppress (1) to increase trust and therefore productivity. But if you are an extractive minority tribe without political power, you may in fact prefer to preserve (1) as a means of competing with and draining the majority of resources.
We libertarians tend to laud intersubjectively verifiable actions. But again, those actions that are intersubjectively verifiable may be visible, they may be verifiable. But they are trivially primitive in scope because they are limited to merely theft and violence – and only to fraud where it is specifically defended against by written warranty in advance.
As such intersubjective verifiability is, like the NAP too simple a test for the suppression of ethical and moral violations that are required for the development of sufficient trust that liberty can exist by voluntary adoption, because the demand for a third party to prevent these transgressions by way of law-making, and institutional formation, is all but eliminated.
The NAP is insufficient criteria for the suppression of sufficient involuntary transfers of property to counter the demonstrated universal human disdain for ‘cheating’.
This is because private property open to intersubjective verifiability is insufficient a description for the types of property people demonstrate that they TREAT as their property.
So it is one thing to state that we can deduce all necessary formal and informal institutions for the support of private property from the {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. It is another to state that we can either deduce sufficient institutions formal and informal, or create sufficient incentives for the voluntary adoption of those institutions, from {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}.
Just as it is demonstrable both rationally and empirically that socialism is impossible because of the impossibility of twin problems of economic calculation, and the absence of incentives, we also must observe that the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is demonstrably impossible because of the impossibility of suppressing sufficient cheating that people will possess the rational incentives, because planning and organizing are higher risk and more expensive under a low trust ethic, to adopt {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}.
This is a very damning criticism of the sufficiency of {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. Or correctly stated, it is a just as damning and inescapable criticism of the NAP, as economic calculation and incentives were for the socialist means of production.
Once you understand this you will realize that {SO,PP+H+VE} survive, but that {NAP} is as great a logical failure as was the socialist means of production. It is non rational to ask humans to adopt the NAP since it suppresses crime, but not ethical, moral, and arguably, not even conspiratorial, violations of one’s property rights, as people demonstrate their understanding of property rights by their behavior.
PART 2:
THE RESISTANCE TO LIBERTY: GENDERS, RACES, CLASSES, AND AGES: VOLUNTARY COOPERATION, COMPETITIVENESS AND PROPORTIONALITY.
(undone)
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POST SCRIPT 1
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(a) the market cannot suppress sufficient ‘cheating’ that property rights will be willingly given in exchange (respected) by masses of individuals; nor that the demand for third party intervention (government) will be suppressed as a substitute for failure to suppress ‘cheating’. Nor that those who specialize in organizing against the market will forgo their opportunity to exploit this demand for intervention.
(b) the source of property rights (and liberty as we know it) was not natural, was the product of a combination of the organized application of violence to both concentrate capital, and to suppress all forms of theft, cheating and free riding; as well as certain rare genetic biases in the west, the fertility and water availability of land, the hostile winters, and forcible destruction of familialism and tribalism by the church, so that it could interfere with inheritance practices and purchase land from the large land holders.
(c) Given the diversity of reproductive strategies, and the different capabilities of the classes, private property is undesirable and poses a threat to many of their reproductive abilities.
We are no longer equal enough, as we were under agrarianism and animal husbandry, that the marginal difference in our abilities is neutralized by mental and emotional discipline. While most humans can be disciplined and tamed for farm labor, not all humans can be taught to calculate using abstract concepts. As such the division of knowledge and labor provides sufficiently asymmetric rewards that the incentive to conform to property rights is non-rational for most actors.
(d) Hoppe correctly deduced that from the institution of private property we can in fact solve all institutional problems necessary for cooperation at scale in a complex division of knowledge and labor. Unfortunately, this state of affairs is undesirable by a majority of the population whose reproductive strategies rely on tactics outside of voluntary cooperation in the market, for success.
(e) Private property is contrary the the female reproductive strategy. Nuclear marriage is the optimum compromise between male and female reproductive differences.
(f) Therefore it is praxeologically non-rational, and anti-scientific, to suggest that liberty will be willingly adopted without the forcible suppression of the reproductive ability of the lower classes, and the ability of women to return to their natural reproductive bias, by restoring communal property via the state.
(g) As such, there are three options available to those of us who desire liberty, that we may employ one or all of:
i) forcible application of organize violence to re-obtain our liberty.
ii) modification of the ethics of liberty to suppress sufficient means of ‘cheating’ that demand for third party intervention (the state) will be diminished.
iii) extension of the hoppeian model of competing private institutions to preserve his solution to the problem of monopoly bureaucracy, yet permit the resolution of reproductive differences between classes which cannot be solved by individual action in the market, and only collective action via organizational proxies.
At my present level of skill I believe this is about as simply as I can articulate the idea.
Rothbard used the low trust of the ghetto, and it was a failure because, regardless of rothbard’s arguments, any person from a high trust society will reject rothbardian ethics as immoral. Hoppe used the high trust of the homogenous polity to restore the city state, but did not answer the problem of incentives in the absence of the absolute nuclear family. My solution is to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the polity and to attempt to offer ethical and institutional solutions to the problem of cooperation in heterogeneous polities.
Because what we are doing demonstrably hasn’t succeeded, and with what we have learnd over the past twenty years about human cognitive and gentic biases, it is non-rational to think that we have provided sufficient incentives for the voluntary adoption of property rights (and in particular, high trust property rights, not the low trust property rights of rothbard).
Pretty damning criticism I think.
But we need to keep advancing our philosophy until we find an answer. My answer might not be right, but it is likely to be less wrong.
Cheers.
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POST SCRIPT 2
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One last simple fact: people demonstrate that they are willing to pay something like twice as much to punish a cheater as they are desirous of personal gain. (at least in-group). This means that decisions of rational actors are morally non-netural, and this further erodes the misesian and rothbardian ordinality of preferences, as well as the value of prices, as well as the argument to indifference in all transactions. Prices are less important than signals and far less important than the suppression of cheating. If you combine this with both differences in reproductive strategies and the different abilities of the classes, then the argument that prices (and economics) are more material than morals falls. People will act morally if you suppress immorality well enough. but since their dislike of immorality is higher than their desire for other satisfactions, you must suppress far more than rothbard’s ghetto ethics if you want the obtain even basic private property rights. And you must suppress nearly all cheating if you want to eliminate the demand for government. As far as we know, this level of suppression of cheating can only be accomplished in a small homogenous outbred polity. (scandinavia). And it is possible that it is a genetic bias (I am not sold on that).
(I think I went to far again too fast with that bit… sorry.)
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POST SCRIPT 3
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One more try at the elevator speech.
To reduce the demand for intervention, and obtain property right voluntarily, the standard of etics must be far and above those of the NAP. They must extend to all involuntary transfers, of all kinds, under all circumstances. and as far as I can tell, that requires the right of ostracization (exclusion).
Hoppe was right so far as he took it. On everything. His generation did not have the science, so they had to rely on deduction alone. We have science. So I use it.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-15 18:48:00 UTC
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Well, if Stephan isn’t going to take this on, I”ll make a couple of points from
Well, if Stephan isn’t going to take this on, I”ll make a couple of points from the ratio-scientific point of view (my means of argument) instead of the ratio-moral point of view (the rothbardian and anarcho-capitalist means of argument.)
FAIR WARNING
(I dont engage in justification. I try to determine the truth. And so if you manage to get through this little essay, you might not emerge with your high investment in rothbardian libertarianism intact.)
PART 1
THE AXIOM OF SELF OWNERSHIP
Regarding: “…the self-ownership axiom is the only one of those under consideration that is sound…”
Ethical statements cannot be ‘sound’ since that’s an allegorical and untestable statement. The testable term is ‘internally consistent’. However internal consistency (error free construction) doesn’t tell us anything about external correspondence (truth).
Instead, ethical statements must adhere to a higher standard of argument than the internally consistent: Ethical arguments must be:
a) preferable (to their absence)
b) necessary
c) sufficient
d) possible
e) durable (survivable over time)
How does the self ownership Axiom survive this test?
a) The S.O. axiom Is probably preferable (I can’t imagine a rational creature for whom it wouldn’t be preferable. I think it’s a precondition of autonomous sentience. So I have to stipulate that while I can’t determine the preferences of others, that it is hard for me to understand how it isn’t preferable for any being for whom action in real time is necessary for survival.)
b) it may or may not be sufficient;
c) it is certainly possible since it’s demonstrably extant;
d) it is rationally, praxeologically, and demonstrably durable.
Self Ownership and the NAP are very hard to argue with, except with regard to sufficiency. Are Self Ownership, Private Property, and NAP sufficient? They are sufficient for the purposes that Hoppe has put them to: which is the ability solve (almost) all problems of human cooperation while relying on self ownership, private property, and NAP.
The questions are:
a) whether the these rules are sufficient to obtain sufficient voluntary adoption and adherence such that this libertarian state of affairs are possible?
b) is there an alternative axiom or set of axioms that permits the deduction of the various solutions to voluntary cooperation?
c) is there a superior alternative axiom or set of axioms that permit the deduction of the various solutions to the problem of liberty (voluntary cooperation).
It would be unscientific to suggest that no other argument exists other than {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. (Self ownership, Private Property, Homesteading, Voluntary Exchange and Non Aggression). It is also pretty hard to imagine something more compact with the same explanatory power.
Why? Because these three statements:
1) Metaphysics: Self Ownership:(Existence);
2) Epistemology: Private Property with Homesteading and Voluntary Exchange :(Scope);
3) Ethics: NonAggressionPrinciple:(Test);
…are pretty narrow requirements for an axiomatic system. In fact, one statement per major domain of philosophy is so compact that it’s pretty hard to argue that it can be improved upon. Instead, it’s actually kind of awe-inspiring that all of the philosophy of human cooperation can be reduced to just these three statements.
Even better, technically all five philosophical domains are answered by SO,PP+H+VE,NAP:
4) Politics: Politics is solved by market, anarchy and voluntary insurance organizations.
5) Aesthetics: Aesthetics is satisfied by the fact that we stipulate that liberty is desirable.
So, if you’re asking the question, ‘how can we cooperate peacefully and voluntarily?’ and Hoppe has demonstrated that from these simple axioms we can cooperate peacefully and voluntarily, then it isn’t NECESSARY to devise an alternative axiomatic system. (I”m not even sure it’s helpful)
It may be accurate to state that we not claim (actually, that **HE** not claim) no other set of statements would be superior (even if it is improbable) . But that is not to say that it is necessary, since he has demonstrated them to be sufficient for the deduction of all the institutions formal and informal for a voluntary system of cooperation.
WEAKNESSES? SUFFICIENCY.
(Now, lest you assume I am an apologist, I’ll take this a little farther.)
“BUT” (and it’s a big but) is the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} sufficient for voluntary and therefore preferential adoption of such set, either empirically (historically) or rationally (praxeologically)?
And I think that is probably where it fails to sustain scrutiny, because we can demonstrate that the demand for external intervention (the state) does not decrease sufficiently in any population, to permit the rational and praxeologically testable, preferential and demonstrably voluntary, adoption of anarchy, in any population by other than by a tiny minority – at least as it stands.
So while {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} may be sufficient for the DEDUCTION of all means of voluntary cooperation, it does not provide sufficient INCENTIVE to reduce demand for external (state) intervention by a sufficient body of the population such that the a self-interested monopoly bureaucracy is not necessary for either:
(a) the systematic enforcement, of private property for the prevention of free riding, theft and violence, or;
(b) necessary for the systematic violation of private property to compensate for predation, as well as preventing theft and violence.
Again, it appears that {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is sufficient for deduction of the informal and formal institutions of voluntary cooperation, but provides an insufficient incentive for the voluntary adoption of informal and informal institutions of voluntary cooperation.
In that case, if the incentives are insufficient, then we have two possible means of constructing anarchy under {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}:
(i) involuntary coercion under threat of boycott, ostracization, and/or threat of violence.
(ii) improvement of incentives such that anarchy is voluntarily adoptable (praxeologically possible).
(iii) A combination of both.
So, let us see if either or both solutions are possible or necessary.
HISTORY
History tells us that liberty only exists where nearly all involuntary transfers of property are prohibited – including those which are not visible or known of.
And the few circumstances where all involuntary transfers of property were prohibited was limited to european warriors who granted each other prohibition on involuntary transfer (property rights) in exchange for military service. Property rights were a ‘right’ that was obtained in a contract for voluntary exchange. The incentive to gain access to the privilege of private property was one that was both materially, and reproductively advantageous.
These property rights were an artifact of the accumulation of wealth first in simple goods, cattle and horses, later in land and built capital. Fighters who took risks, kept their winnings. Later, all free men kept their property.
Later under manorialism and agrarian farming, a married couple was needed for the rental of land. This delayed marriage, and forced the absolute nuclear family that we understand today.
When the church sought to break up the large landholders they interfered with inheritance rights, which are the source of the family structure, and consequently, the source of moral code variation, throughout the world. To break up the families they prohibited inbreeding out to as many as eight or even twelve generations, and granted women property rights.
The combination of property rights for all, the near elimination of free riding, even by family members (offspring), and the persistence of the militia as a fighting force, created the high trust universal social order we call the protestant ethic.
The enlightenment’s intellectual effort was an experiment in both justifying the middle class seizure of political power, and transferring the rights of the upper and ‘middle’ classes (small business owners : ie: farmers) to all land holders.
The culmination of this experiment was the near prohibition on involuntary transfers that was embodied in the American Constitution. The aristocracy of everyone who had a stake in the preservation of property rights.
(Unfortunately, that experiment has shown that universal enfranchisement, especially the enfranchisement of women, was incompatible with liberty, because participatory government by those whose interest is to seek rents and free riding, is an organized means of disempowering armed property owners, and systematically removing their property rights. Thereby returning us to the consanguineous or serial-marriage family structure in corporate (state) form.
LIBERTARIAN ETHICS: NECESSITY. BUT SUFFICIENCY?
It’s kind of hard to disagree with libertarian ethics as stated in {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. If only because they’re necessary, and the alternative to disagreeing with libertarian ethics, is demonstrably, a nearly universally undesirable state of affairs involving constant property violations (theft and violence) that make cooperation in a division of labor all but impossible – even among members of a consanguineous community of primitive hunter gatherers it may be beneficial.
Lets look at classes of involuntary transfers of property as people demonstrate them:
(1) Criminal statements are those that involve violence and theft.
(2) Ethical statements are those which prohibit involuntary transfer of property by asymmetry of information between those internal to the action.
(3) Moral statements are those which by definition apply to unknown persons external to the action: anonymous involuntary transfers of property.
(4) Conspiratorial Statements: Statements of Political Morality (conspiracy) are those which prevent the organized and systemic involuntary transfer of property, whether criminal, ethical, or moral.
The NAP only has a mechanism for fairly simple, obvious property violations: criminal violence and theft of class (1)
The NAP has no mechanism for any of class (2) or class (3), and arguably sanctions and encourages these involuntary transfers by NOT preventing them.
The NAP prevents class (1) PORTIONS of class (4), but it does not prohibit class (2) and (3) portions of class (4).
Now, if you are a member of the majority tribe, you will suppress (1) to increase trust and therefore productivity. But if you are an extractive minority tribe without political power, you may in fact prefer to preserve (1) as a means of competing with and draining the majority of resources.
We libertarians tend to laud intersubjectively verifiable actions. But again, those actions that are intersubjectively verifiable may be visible, they may be verifiable. But they are trivially primitive in scope because they are limited to merely theft and violence – and only to fraud where it is specifically defended against by written warranty in advance.
As such intersubjective verifiability is, like the NAP too simple a test for the suppression of ethical and moral violations that are required for the development of sufficient trust that liberty can exist by voluntary adoption, because the demand for a third party to prevent these transgressions by way of law-making, and institutional formation, is all but eliminated.
The NAP is insufficient criteria for the suppression of sufficient involuntary transfers of property to counter the demonstrated universal human disdain for ‘cheating’.
This is because private property open to intersubjective verifiability is insufficient a description for the types of property people demonstrate that they TREAT as their property.
So it is one thing to state that we can deduce all necessary formal and informal institutions for the support of private property from the {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. It is another to state that we can either deduce sufficient institutions formal and informal, or create sufficient incentives for the voluntary adoption of those institutions, from {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}.
Just as it is demonstrable both rationally and empirically that socialism is impossible because of the impossibility of twin problems of economic calculation, and the absence of incentives, we also must observe that the set {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP} is demonstrably impossible because of the impossibility of suppressing sufficient cheating that people will possess the rational incentives, because planning and organizing are higher risk and more expensive under a low trust ethic, to adopt {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}.
This is a very damning criticism of the sufficiency of {SO,PP+H+VE,NAP}. Or correctly stated, it is a just as damning and inescapable criticism of the NAP, as economic calculation and incentives were for the socialist means of production.
Once you understand this you will realize that {SO,PP+H+VE} survive, but that {NAP} is as great a logical failure as was the socialist means of production. It is non rational to ask humans to adopt the NAP since it suppresses crime, but not ethical, moral, and arguably, not even conspiratorial, violations of one’s property rights, as people demonstrate their understanding of property rights by their behavior.
PART 2:
THE RESISTANCE TO LIBERTY: GENDERS, RACES, CLASSES, AND AGES: VOLUNTARY COOPERATION, COMPETITIVENESS AND PROPORTIONALITY.
(Going have to wait on this. It’s 2am.) 🙁
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-14 19:14:00 UTC
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PROHIBITING MAGICAL, SOCIALIST, POSTMODERN, AND PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS AS IM
PROHIBITING MAGICAL, SOCIALIST, POSTMODERN, AND PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS AS IMMORAL DECEPTIONS
(This is profound, and a lot to grasp. I have copied it here from elsewhere.)
While one might say that ‘it does not matter what we do, that discipline over there, is none of our concern, because whether true or not, this technique is useful to us’. The fact is that such a statement is arbitrary and preferential and not ‘true’ remains.
If instead of placing higher value on one’s personal utility in an isolated domain, one places higher value on suppressing immoral political speech such that freedom is possible, one might reach a different conclusion.
Just as high trust ethics are possible by the suppression of additional immoral actions over low trust ethics, higher trust ethics are possibly by the suppression of further immoral actions.
In low trust ethics, asymmetric knowledge is an ethical means of profit. In high trust ethics profit from asymmetric knowledge is immoral.
In ‘higher trust ethics’ (In propertarianism) we place a greater ethical constraint, such that profit from obscurantism, mysticism, and platonism are prohibited.
If operational language will allow you to express an idea and serves the needs of one’s function, then it is immoral to rely on platonic argument.
If symmetrical knowledge will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral to express your thoughts in asymmetric terms. (incomplete information).
If telling the truth will allow you to cooperate with another then it is immoral and unethical to express your thoughts in fraudulent terms.
If voluntarily cooperating with someone such that you can obtain something without stealing, then it is immoral to steal from them.
If is possible to cooperate with someone such that you can both survive then it is immoral to kill them.
So, we must, in order to suppress increasingly complex forms of crime, ethical violation and immoral violation, we must forgo opportunities for self benefit by restraint, then to suppress the use of obscurant, mystical, platonic deceptions requires that we refrain, even at cost, from obscurant, mystical, and platonic statements.
That this is in fact, what is required of Science (to make statements in operant language), then why is it that we cannot require this level of TRUTH in all other disciplines – especially if it prevents criminal, unethical, and immoral behavior, and enables as great a leap in cooperation as the high trust ethic did over the low trust ethic?
Again, I believe I have solved the problem. But it may be just too much to ask for someone else to understand unless I am able to either condense it to a Confucian riddle, or extend it to a Hayekian narrative, or a Darwinian exposition of cases.
ETHICAL BEHAVIOR COMES AT A HIGH COST.
Ergo:
If you want a politically ethical society we must pay this cost: the abandonment of the convenience of imaginary objects and confusing the utility of a conceptual tool with the existence and truth of that tool as a construction.
This is how to make politics ‘scientific.’
We outlawed violence.
We outlawed theft.
We outlawed fraud.
We suppressed fraud-by-omission with warranty.
We suppressed free riding with marital structure and property rights.
We tried to suppress corruption with the constitution, but it failed. It failed because the constitution was not precise enough – in no small part because it should have specified original intent.
We have failed to suppress mysticism, monotheism, marxian obscurantism, and Hegelian and postmodern conflation of mysticism and obscurantism.
The requirement for scientific speech makes such arguments impossible. It means that public discourse is a property-commons, and one may not free ride or privatize it for one’s own convenience.
Because it is immoral to do so.
This is pretty profound. But again, it may be that such a profound statement is not of interest to you. But to me, as someone who has tried to solve the problem of ethics in an ethically and morally heterogeneious polity and to protect us from another dark age of ignorance and mysticism that Marx, Freud and Cantor have tried to drive us into, it is of a greater priority, and it is entirely worthy of the cost.
-Cheers
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END NOTES FOR LATER REFERENCE
1) If i say that the square root if two is the name for a function but is not reducible to a number, and cannot be demonstrated to be possible, that does not in fact prevent me from using the name of that function as a symbol in deduction, because in no circumstance is infinite precision applicable.
2) (Lest we lose sight of the source of my argument here, I am trying to define extensions of political morality such that we can create institutions that permit the cooperation of individuals and groups holding heterogeneous moral codes, each of which reflects a different reproductive strategy. If you are going to create a means of resolving differences between moral codes, what constraints does one place upon the formation of argument, procedure, policy, and law, such that suppression of discounts would be possible, and theft by obscurant means would be impossible.
How do we prevent the use of deception via various forms of obscurantism in a polity consisting of morally and ethically heterogeneous individuals and groups?
If, as I’m arguing, mathematics is justificationary, but need not be, and need not be without sacrifice of functionality, and if it can be such that mathematicians (or members of this group) can be fooled into justificationary positions, then how would we prevent the ‘leakage’ from either this group’s ideology or the platonism of mathematics, (or that of socialists and totalitarians) into law?
3) limits solve the problem of arbitrary precision (general rules) when in physics, correspondence with reality provides the ‘limit’ of precision. This is the difference between math (the study of pure relations independent of context) and the study of reality (relations within context).
But that does not mean that when we make a reference to any mathematical object, we are naming a function (label for the result of operations) not naming an extant entity.
That by definition a number system can be used to construct the rules for any n dimensional construct deterministically because of the constancy of relations, we should not confuse the determinacy we have ourselves described in constant relations, with existence.
I cannot speak something into material existence other than the vibrations caused with my voice.
I actually find this subject fascinating because it sort of renders most of the world ‘childish’.
4) what good does a personal philosophy of ethical (interpersonal) action, and moral (political) action do you when the others do not share a marginally indifferent ethic and moral code?
So, for example, what good does it do you if the vast majority economically, politically, or physically deprive you of any ability to act on this code?
Politics is a contract, not a personal philosophy. And you might say that you will offer others these terms that you prefer. But if you must construct a contract (constitution) what terms must exist in this contract to make your personal philosophy both ethical and moral, possible to act upon?
5) a) Empirical means “observable”, not quantifiable: “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.” Which is of course, the difference between the motion of planets vs unicorns (and infinity). That which is empirical is different from that which is imaginary. It is observable in time. (Very common mistake btw. You are not alone.)
b) So, again, existence is different from utility. I can tell a fable with a unicorn, and I can imitate arbitrary precision with infinity. But that is different from saying such a thing exists scientifically (empirically). When you say that something is infinite, you are in fact, RELYING ON INDUCTION. (Ouch. I know.)
c) God, and magic for that matter, are ‘older’ old hat. And they well served the purpose of their authors. Just as does infinity.
d) Why is it that we need the ‘concept of limits’ (a form of justification)? It’s arbitrary precision instead of contextual precision – general rules independent of context versus precision determined by context. Why is it that we can use boolean logic (boolean algebra) for computation? (see Turing) And what utility does the function limit() serve in transforming contextual precision into arbitrary precision (general rule)?
e) Constructivist, Intuitive, computational, operational, empirical, natural – all are expressions in math, logic, philosophy and science of attempts to circumvent the problem of reliance on justification.
Departmental math, is justificationary.
f) So, again, given that the difference is unnecessary and justificationary, and imaginary, while if stated operationally, math is descriptive, deductive, natural and ‘real’, and that the necessity of this conversation is DEMONSTRATION of the very problem of justificationary logic, even among people who assert that they deny the existence of justification, it should be somewhat obvious by now that there exists in fact the problem of externalizing immoral, unreal, illogical, platonism that is exported by justificationary departmental mathematics.
g) Given that mathematical platonism is, like divine intervention, the hand of god, or some other magical mater of existence, ‘correctable’ without sacrifice of functionality in mathematics, then I will return to my asserted thesis that it is immoral to use non-operational, non-constructivist argument in public discourse (the export through obscurant language of error), because the institution of politics, exists for the purpose of transfer of wealth. Further, that we can, by placing the reuqirement for constructivist, operational, language on public discourse, we can (at least in theory) prohibit organized theft, corruption and immorality via justificationary psuedoscience, magic, or the pretense that mathematics can be used to describe phenomenon that is absent of constant relations (economics).
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-14 07:54:00 UTC
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(MORE RETIREMENTS) 1) That there can be no science of art. 2) Addiction. THERE C
(MORE RETIREMENTS)
1) That there can be no science of art.
2) Addiction.
THERE CAN BE NO SCIENCE OF ART
Jonathan Gottschall.
JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL
US academic and author who specialises in literature and evolution and teaches at Washington & Jefferson College, Pennsylvania
Fifteen thousand years ago in France, a sculptor swam and slithered almost a kilometre down into a mountain cave. Using clay, the artist shaped a big bull rearing up to mount a cow, and then left his creation in the bowels of the earth. The two bison of the Tuc D’Audoubert caves sat undisturbed for many thousands of years until they were rediscovered by spelunking boys [cavers] in 1912. The discovery of the clay bison was one of many shocking 20th-century discoveries of sophisticated cave art stretching back tens of thousands of years. The discoveries overturned our sense of what our caveman ancestors were like. They were not furry, grunting troglodytes. They had artistic souls. They showed us that humans are – by nature, not just by culture – art-making, art-consuming, art-addicted apes.
But why? Why did the sculptor burrow into the earth, make art, and leave it there in the dark? And why does art exist in the first place? Scholars have spun a lot of stories in answer to such questions, but the truth is that we really don’t know. And here’s one reason why: science is lying down on the job.
A long time ago someone proclaimed that art could not be studied scientifically, and for some reason almost everyone believed it. The humanities and sciences constituted, as Stephen Jay Gould might have proclaimed, separate, non-overlapping magisteria – that the tools of the one are radically unsuited to the other.
The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France
The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France: ‘Our caveman ancestors had artistic souls.’
Science has mostly bought into this. How else can we explain its neglect of the arts? People live in art. We read stories, and watch them on TV, and listen to them in song. We make paintings and gaze at them on walls. We beautify our homes like bowerbirds adorning nests. We demand beauty in the products we buy, which explains the gleam of our automobiles and the sleek modernist aesthetic of our iPhones. We make art out of our own bodies: sculpting them through diet and exercise; festooning them with jewellery and colourful garments; using our skins as living canvas for the display of tattoos. And so it is the world over. As the late Denis Dutton argued in The Art Instinct, underneath the cultural variations, “all human beings have essentially the same art”.
Our curious love affair with art sets our species apart as much as our sapience or our language or our use of tools. And yet we understand so little about art. We don’t know why art exists in the first place. We don’t know why we crave beauty. We don’t know how art produces its effects in our brains – why one arrangement of sound or colour pleases while another cloys. We don’t know very much about the precursors of art in other species, and we don’t know when humans became creatures of art. (According to one influential theory, art arrived 50,000 years ago with a kind of creative big bang. If that’s true, how did that happen?) We don’t even have a good definition, in truth, of what art is. In short, there is nothing so central to human life that is so incompletely understood.
Recent years have seen more use of scientific tools and methods in humanities subjects. Neuroscientists can show us what’s happening in the brain when we enjoy a song or study a painting. Psychologists are studying the ways novels and TV shows shape our politics and our morality. Evolutionary psychologists and literary scholars are teaming up to explore narrative’s Darwinian origins. And other literary scholars are developing a “digital humanities” using algorithms to extract big data from digitised literature. But scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It does not constitute a research programme.
If we want better answers to fundamental questions about art, science must jump in the game with both feet. Going it alone, humanities scholars can tell intriguing stories about the origins and significance of art, but they don’t have the tools to patiently winnow the field of competing ideas. That’s what the scientific method is for: separating the stories that are more accurate, from the stories that are less accurate. But make no mistake, a strong science of art will require both the thick, granular expertise of humanities scholars and the clever hypothesis testing of scientists. I’m not calling for a scientific takeover of the arts. I’m calling for a partnership.
This partnership faces great obstacles. There’s the unexamined assumption that something in art makes it science-proof. There’s a widespread, if usually unspoken, belief that art is just a frill in human life – relatively unimportant compared with the weighty stuff of science. And there’s the weird idea that science necessarily destroys the beauty it seeks to explain (as though a learned astronomer really could dull the star shine). But the Delphic admonition “know thyself” still rings out as the great prime directive of intellectual inquiry, and there will always be a gaping hole in human self-knowledge until we develop a science of art.
ADDICTION
Helen Fisher.
HELEN FISHER
Biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, New Jersey and author of Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love
“If an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it,” Einstein reportedly said. I would like to broaden the definition of addiction and retire the scientific idea that all addictions are pathological and harmful. Since the beginning of formal diagnostics more than 50 years ago, the compulsive pursuit of gambling, food, and sex (known as non-substance rewards) have not been regarded as addictions; only abuse of alcohol, opioids, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis, heroin and nicotine have been formally regarded as addictions. This categorisation rests largely on the fact that substances activate basic “reward pathways” in the brain associated with craving and obsession, and produce pathological behaviours. Psychiatrists work within this world of psychopathology – that which is abnormal and makes you ill.
As an anthropologist, they appear limited by this view. Scientists have now shown that food, sex and gambling compulsions employ many of the same brain pathways activated by substance abuse. Indeed, the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) has finally acknowledged that at least one form of non-substance abuse can be regarded as an addiction: gambling. The abuse of sex and food were not included. Neither was romantic love. I shall propose that love addiction is just as real as any other addiction, in terms of its behaviour patterns and brain mechanisms. Moreover, it’s often a positive addiction.
Scientists and laymen have long regarded romantic love as part of the supernatural, or as a social invention of the troubadours in 12th-century France. Evidence does not support these notions. Love songs, poems, stories, operas, ballets, novels, myths and legends, love magic, love charms, love suicides and homicides: evidence of romantic love has now been found in more than 200 societies ranging over thousands of years. Around the world men and women pine for love, live for love, kill for love and die for love. Human romantic love, also known as passionate love or “being in love” is regularly regarded as a human universal.
Moreover, love-besotted men and women show all of the basic symptoms of addiction. Foremost, the lover is stiletto-focused on his/her drug of choice: the love object. They think obsessively about “him” or “her” (intrusive thinking), and often compulsively call, write, or appear, to stay in touch. Paramount to this experience is intense motivation to win their sweetheart, not unlike the substance abuser fixated on his/her drug. Impassioned lovers also distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, experience personality changes (affect disturbance), and sometimes do inappropriate or risky things to impress this special other. Many are willing to sacrifice, even die for “him” or “her”. The lover craves emotional and physical union with their beloved too (dependence). And like the addict who suffers when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved (separation anxiety). Adversity and social barriers even heighten this longing (frustration attraction).
In fact, besotted lovers express all four of the basic traits of addiction: craving; tolerance; withdrawal; and relapse. They feel a “rush” of exhilaration when with their beloved (intoxication). As their tolerance builds, the lover seeks to interact with the beloved more and more (intensification). If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hypersomnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to win back the beloved. And lovers relapse the way drug addicts do: long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs or other external cues associated with their abandoning sweetheart can trigger memories and renewed craving.
Of the many indications that romantic love is an addiction, however, perhaps none is more convincing than the growing data from neuroscience. Using brain scanning (functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI), several scientists have now shown that feelings of intense romantic love engage regions of the brain’s “reward system,” specifically dopamine pathways associated with energy, focus, motivation, ecstasy, despair and craving – including primary regions associated with substance (and non-substance) addictions. In fact, our group has found activity in the nucleus accumbens – the core brain factory associated with all addictions – in our rejected lovers. Moreover, some of our newest (unpublished) results suggest correlations between activities of the nucleus accumbens and feelings of romantic passion among lovers who were wildly, happily in love.
Nobel laureate Eric Kandel recently said: “Brain studies will ultimately tell us what it is like to be human.” Knowing what we now know about the brain, my brain-scanning partner, Lucy Brown, has suggested that romantic love is a natural addiction; and I have maintained that this natural addiction evolved from mammalian antecedents some 4.4m years ago among our first hominid ancestors, in conjunction with the evolution of (serial, social) monogamy – a hallmark of humankind. Its purpose: to motivate our forebears to focus their mating time and metabolic energy on a single partner at a time, thus initiating the formation of a pair-bond to rear their young (at least through infancy) together as a team. The sooner we embrace what brain science is telling us – and use this information to upgrade the concept of addiction – the better we will understand ourselves and all the billions of others on this planet who revel in the ecstasy and struggle with the sorrow of this profoundly powerful, natural, often positive addiction: romantic love.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-12 15:52:00 UTC