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.. Epistemology
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Fake art

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General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

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National Debt.

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22 Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness defined
Correlation vs Causation
Dialectics and Evolution
Everything contains the seeds of it's own destruction
Free Will
Intentional Stance
Mental Telepathy
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Training vs learning
Validation
We cannot escape stories
What is a Vegetable?
Why Do We Like Pictures?

.. Evolution
Life is Amazing
Swarms
What is a Species?
Why are Tropical Birds So Colorful

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Philosophy
Amateur Philosophy

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Strikes
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Who Decides an Election?
Why Are So Many of Our Relationships Adversarial?

.. Science
The Sense of Balance

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Altruism
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Cut Energy Use
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Entropy and Life
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Jesus and the Money Changers
Merry Christmas
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Pay
Privacy
Red flags
Red Rover Red Rover
Religion in Schools
Reusable Bags
Sleeping in a tent
Social Media
The Myth of Leadership
We Live in Interesting Times
What is Wrong with Merry Christmas

.. teems
Cars made bicycles possible

... evolution
Philosophy of Plants

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Excellence is a Plateau
Is this picture real?
NonFungible Tokens
Public Art
Tearing Down Statues
Weave
What is Art?
Working With Reality

Cognition
Artificial Intelligence and the Collingridge Dilemma.
Bird Brains
Bounded Rationality
Competence Without Comprehension
Consciousness is More Like Fame Than Television
Developmental Processes
Emergence and Cognition
Gender dysphoria
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
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Incomplete Information and Stories
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Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
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On Affordances
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Reflective Equilibrium
Return of the Law of Forms
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Structures of Understanding
Superstition
Taking Things on Faith
The Hard Problem
The I Love You Gesture
The Imagined Order
The Phenomenology of Swim Bladders.
Thinking about medical procedures
Thinking About Risk
Underdetermination and Redundancy
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
What Does Google Know?
What is going on?

Economics
A Country Is Not Like A Company
Alternate ideas lying around waiting for disaster
Blood and Money
Can Capitalism Survive?
Do Our Minds Own Our Bodies?
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Invisible Hand
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Money is Different
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Profit Motive Fails
Rentier Capitalism
Social Wealth vs Surplus Value
Spending Money Into Existence
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Thinking about Money
Wealth is What Money Buys

Environmentalism
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Absolute Knowledge
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Exists
I do not know everything
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
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The Past and the Future.
Uncertainty and Unpredictability
Unpredictability
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Whatever happened to The Truth?

Epistmology
Dire Warnings

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Dr Malthus would be pleased
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Evolution is not Religion
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Networks
Omicron
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The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
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Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?
Wildlife

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HUM
10 Views of Landscape
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Dataism
I pay rent.
Listening to Corn
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What is Public Schooling For?

Levels of Abstraction
Levels of Abstraction and Minds
What is a newspaper?

Mathematics
As Much As Possible
Zipfs Law

Memetics
Emotional Plague
Memes: Imitated Behavior.
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What is a replicator?

Morality
Beyond Rules Based Morality
Freedom and Morality
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What do we owe animals?

pending
Police

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What is Going On?

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If It Walks Like a Duck
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A Job
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Society evolved
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The Collingridge Dilemma
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Thoughts on Justice
To the Moon
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What is to be said?
What made freedom a bad word?
Why is there a shortage of nurses?
Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.

UBI
Implications of Very Productive Technology
Modest Proposal
Problems with Universal Basic Income
Tormenting Unlucky People
Why there are oligarchs







Thinking about Money

It's Complicated.

We are all very familiar with money. We earn it and save it and spend it. But when you think about it, it's pretty weird. Who invented that? Nobody did. It evolved as people and human society did, in response to various selection pressures. The result is a pretty strange structure that works - sorta

It comes in a few forms: cash and checks and numbers written in various accounts. All forms share this characteristic: they are kinds of IOU's where somebody promises to pay the IOU when the bearer presents it to them. With cash, you have physical tokens. These days these are usually state issued banknotes and coins. But, many things have been used as those tokens, from seashells to IOU's run up by sailors in bars. Long ago states took the stance that taxes could only be paid in money the state itself issued. This clobbered other forms of tokens. Since money is physical and physically moves from buyer to seller the nature of the transaction is pretty obvious. At the end of the transaction the buyer has less money in their pocket and the seller has more. Presumably, the buyer gets something they value in exchange for the money that is worth as much to them as the money is. The idea is that the net worth of both buyer and seller remains constant but the transaction causes the proportion of cash to other values they possess to change for each. (It's actually quite a bit more complicated. What is a good worth in money? That is very hard to say and may be different for buyer and seller. But let's stick with the simple case for now and I'll look at that next week.)

Most of us have bank accounts and are familiar with the idea that some of the money we own is in the form of numbers in that bank account. When we take cash from our pocket and deposit it the number associated with the account gets bigger and it gets smaller when we withdraw cash and put in our pocket. Checks are a form of IOU. The check writer promises to transfer money to the receiver when the check is presented at the writer's bank. And I've used checks as money in that I could sign them over to someone and use that to pay for a good that they sell me.

When we do transactions there is always a buyer and a seller; somebody who's cash holdings goes down paired with somebody who's holdings increase the same amount. With a bank account this isn't completely obvious since you only see one side of the transaction. In book-keeping it is much more obvious. Each transaction needs to be explicitly informed about where the money came from and where it is going. In book-keeping, the goal is that the transaction balance. That is the loss or gain in one account has to be matched by the complementary loss or gain in another account.

If a person lends another person some money, then clearly the lender has less money at the end of the transaction and the borrower has more. If a bank was a lender like you or me they would have cash in an account that they would transfer to the borrower's account. That is the lender's account would decrease and the borrower's increase. With banks this gets modified. Many regulations are involved, but the take-away is that a bank can lend you money by just raising the amount in your account without diminishing any of their accounts by the same amount.

This is how money is made.

A borrower causes money to be created on the spot that is available for them to spend based on their promise to repay the loan from future earnings. When the loan is repaid then the money created is extinguished. The goal is that once that is all done, the result of the project will increase the net wealth of the individual and society by producing something of lasting value. I think this is called 'fiat money' because it is money created by fiat. It's not physical stuff that has to be found like gold. The problem with currencies based on any sort of base like gold runs into problems because the amount available is limited and can't accommodate a growing economy. The system of money that has evolved in our society is a strange thing to behold but it works quite well.

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.