“In this deepening crisis, what is being tested is not simply the resilience of capitalism, but the character of a people.”
MindBody: Mirror Neurons And The Notion of Souls
Thanks to Leslie Marsh of Sussex University for a video at his highly-recommended site, manwithoutqualities, for this passage by neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandra, Mirror Neurons and The Brain In the Vat:
“Iaccomo Rizzolati and Vittorio Gallasse discovered mirror neurons. They found that neurons in the ventral premotor area of macaque monkeys will fire anytime a monkey performs a complex action such as reaching for a peanut, pulling a lever, pushing a door, etc. (different neurons fire for different actions). Most of these neurons control motor skill (originally discovered by Vernon Mountcastle in the 60’s), but a subset of them, the Italians found, will fire even when the monkey watches another monkey perform the same action. In essence, the neuron is part of a network that allows you to see the world “from the other persons point of view,” hence the name “mirror neuron.”……….Dissolving the “self vs. other” barrier is the basis of many ethical systems, especially eastern philosophical and mystical traditions. This research implies that mirror neurons can be used to provide rational rather than religious grounds for ethics (although we must be careful not to commit the is/ought fallacy)……
Intriguingly, in 2000, Eric Altschuller, Jamie Pineda and I were able to show (using EEG recordings) that autistic children lack the mirror neuron system……
Mirror neurons also deal a deathblow to the “nature vs. nurture ” debate (I like Matt Ridley’s suggested replacement “Nature via Nurture”) for it shows how human nature depends crucially on learnability that is partly facilitated by these very circuits. They are also an effective antidote to sociobiology and pop evolutionary psychology; the assertion that the human brain is a bundle of instincts selected and fine-tuned by natural selection when our ape-like ancestors roamed the savannahs…… But, the notion that human talents and follies are governed mainly by instincts hard-wired by genes is ludicrous.
Thanks to mirror neurons the human brain became specialized for culture, it became the organ of cultural diversity par excellence. It is for this reason (rather than moral reasons or political correctness) that we need to cherish and celebrate cultural diversity. To be culturally diverse is to be human…..
I will conclude with a metaphysical question that cannot be answered by science. I cannot decide whether the question is utterly trivial or profound. I call it the “vantage point” problem foreshadowed by the Upanishads, ancient Indian philosophical texts composed in the second millennium BC, and by Erwin Schrödinger. I am referring to the fundamental asymmetry in the universe between the “subjective” private worldview vs. the objective world of physics………
…… It’s a fair assumption that the identity of your conscious experience (including your “I”) depends on the information content of your brain, “software” representing millions of years of accumulated evolutionary wisdom, your cultural milieu, and your personal memories; not on the particular atoms that currently constitute your brain…… [Lila: atoms that are replaced regularly]
Now imagine speeding up this replacement process so that I destroy your present brain and replace it with a replica/simulacrum with identical information. There would be no reason to believe your conscious experience would not continue in that other brain…..
….The possibility of multiple “minds” in a single brain is not as bizarre as it sounds. It often happens in dreams. I remember having a dream once in which another guy told me a joke and I laughed heartily even though the “other guy” was my mental invention, so I must have already known the joke all along!
The question of whether “you” would continue in multiple parallel brain vats raises issues that come perilously close to the theological notion of souls, but I see no simple way out of the conundrum. Perhaps we need to remain open to the Upanishadic doctrine that the ordinary rules of numerosity and arithmetic, of “one vs. many”, or indeed of two-valued, binary yes/no logic, simply doesn’t apply to minds — the very notion of a separate “you ” or “I” is an illusion, like the passage of time itself.
We are all merely many reflections in a hall of mirrors of a single cosmic reality (Brahman or “paramatman”). If you find all this too much to swallow just consider the that as you grow older and memories start to fade you may have less in common with, and be less “informationally coupled”, to your own youthful self, the chap you once were, than with someone who is now your close personal friend. This is especially true if you consider the barrier-dissolving nature of mirror neurons. There is certain grandeur in this view of life, this enlarged conception of reality, for it is the closest that we humans can come to taking a sip from the well of immortality….
Will you choose the vat or the real you? This exercise might not provide an obvious answer, but fortunately none in this generation or the next will have to confront this choice. For those in the future who are forced to answer, I hope they make the “right” choice, whatever “right” means….”
NB: Again, apologies for a bit of splicing and reduction of the original passage in the interests of clarity. No meaning is altered by it, and the original is easily compared from the link.
Von Mises On Marxist Dogma
“Marxism gives philosophers before Hegel about the same place which Christianity gives to the prophets, and grants Hegel the same position which Christianity assigns to the Baptist in relation to the Redeemer. Since the appearance of Marx, however, all truth is with the Marxist, and everything else is lies, deception, and capitalist apologetics.
III.21.9
This is a very simple and clear philosophy, and in the hands of Marx’s successors it becomes still simpler and clearer. To them science and Marxian Socialism are identical. Science is the exegesis of the words of Marx and Engels. Proofs are demonstrated by the quotation and interpretation of these words. The protagonists exchange accusations of ignorance of the “Writ.” Thus a real cult of the proletariat arises. Engels says: “Only in the working class does the German theoretic mind persist unstunted. Here it is not to be exterminated. Here no regard is paid to career, profit-making, gracious patronage from above. On the contrary, the more regardlessly and disinterestedly science proceeds the more it finds itself in unison with the workers’ interests and strivings.”*104 According to Tönnies “only the proletariat, i.e. its literary spokesmen and leaders,” suscribe, “on principle, to the unscientific view and all its consequences.”*105
III.21.10
To reveal these presumptuous assertions in their proper light we have only to recall the socialist attitude towards all scientific achievements during recent decades. When about a quarter of a century ago, a number of Marxian writers tried to cleanse the party doctrine of its grossest errors, a heresy hunt was instituted to preserve the purity of the system. Revisionism succumbed to Orthodoxy. Within Marxism there is no place for free thought….”
Von Mises in “Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.”
Comment:
Von Mises is a little unfair to Marxism here, it sounds to me. But then maybe it was true at the time he was writing. More to think about.
Von Mises On Time
“Time for man is not a homogenous substance of which only length counts. It is not a more or a less in dimension. . . . It is an irreversible flux the fractions of which appear in different perspective according to whether they are nearer to or remoter from the instant of valuation and decision.” – Human Action
Keynes Wanted Laissez Faire But Not Laissez Passer
“Had Keynes (really) spoken of the end of laissez faire et laissez passer, then he could not have failed to see that the world today is sick precisely because, for decades, things have not been regulated by this maxim. He who rejoices that peoples are turning away from liberalism, should not forget that war and revolution, misery and unemployment for the masses, tyranny and dictatorship are not accidental companions, but are necessary results of the antiliberalism that now rules the world.”
Geithner’s New New Plan
“Geithner’s new plan is meant to attack what is widely viewed as the major failure of the bailout program so far: the inability to rid banks of a mountain of soured loans and troubled mortgage-backed securities.”
More at MSNC
Comment
“The inability to rid banks of a mountain of soured loans” is a major failure? It’s the whole point of the exercise, so if that isn’t working, the entire business is a diddle.
Cato Thinks Taxation of Bonuses Is Unconstitutional
“The rule of law requires that like people be treated alike and that people know what the law is so that they can plan their lives in accord with the law. In this case, a law is being passed to impose taxes on a particular, politically unpopular group. That is a tyrannical abuse of Congress’s powers. And in addition, it is retroactive legislation, changing the law upon which AIG and its employees had relied. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 62, “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws . . . undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”Selective taxation is tyranny. Ex post facto legislation violates the spirit of the liberal order, even if a particular piece of legislation can be “structured” to pass constitutional muster.”
David Boaz at the Cato Institute web-page
On the other hand, Lawrence Tribe, at The Atlantic, who is on President Obama’s legal team, thinks the taxation can be structured so as to avoid constitutional objections (challenges as a violation of due process and a bill of attainder).
Comment:
Are they serious?
The rule of law requires that like people be treated alike and that people know what the law is so that they can plan their lives in accordance.
This same Congress has just dumped the follies, fraud, and recklessness of the entire financial industry on the laps of the population, regardless of whether they had anything to do with it, hustling the whole thing through with propaganda and distortion at every turn, has destroyed the economy, continues down the same path of redistributing the wealth of the public (present and future) to the very people most responsible for destroying it, with nary a thought for the constitution and now, lo and behold, niceties of law are an insuperable objection.
Fine. Under law, interpreted constitutionally, one could as well say the entire financial industry turned fraudulent in the past few decades and was acting criminally, so no contracts from the period are valid to begin with, let alone bonuses.
Rather than taxes, call it a penalty or fine.
The Societal Underpinnings of Bull Markets
“It is easy to fall for the aesthetic gyrations of the stock market. Their stylized cycles make them look natural. They “revert to mean,” as Francis Galton would have it. They oscillate within fairly clear boundaries. Their ups and downs seem almost automatic (at least in retrospect). Their regularities are so neat many are tempted to forget David Hume and extrapolate the past into the future.
And here lies the problem. The long-term cycles of the stock market, no matter how stylized and regular they seem, are not self-generating. They don’t just happen on their own. Each cycle has a reason, and that reason is deeply social and historically unique.
Note that, during the twentieth century, every oscillation from a bear to a bull market was accompanied by a systemic societal transformation:
- The crisis of 1905–1920 marked the closing of the American Frontier, the shift from robber-baron capitalism to large-scale business enterprise and the beginning of synchronized finance.
- The crisis of 1928–1948 signaled the end of “unregulated” capitalism and the emergence of large governments and the welfare-warfare state.
- The crisis of 1968–1981 marked the closing of the Keynesian era, the resumption of worldwide capital flow and the onset of neoliberal globalization.
Furthermore, none of these transformations were “in the cards.” Most observers in the 1900s didn’t expect managerial capitalism to take hold; few in the 1920s anticipated the welfare-warfare state; and not too many in the 1960s predicted neoliberal regulation. All three transformations involved a complex set of conflicts, their trajectories were all fuzzy, and their outcomes were all but impossible to anticipate.
In other words, underneath the seemingly repetitive long-term patterns of the market lies an open-ended and inherently unpredictable reordering of the entire political economy. Although past bear markets have always given way to long bull runs, these transitions were never automatic. Each and every one of them reflected a profound transformation of the underlying social structure. And in our view, this correspondence still holds. In order for the current crisis to end and a new upswing to begin, something very big has to happen: the social structure must change.
The precise nature of this transformation—assuming it occurs—is likely to remain opaque until the process is well under way. But one thing seems clear enough. A new upswing means the rekindling of accumulation, and if we are to understand what this upswing might entail, we need to go back to the beginning and start from the entity that matters most: capital.
For more on that issue, stay tuned for the next installment in our series….”
Thieving Theocrats: The Righteous Left-Wing Press Steals From Its Own
“The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’
The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for the wars in the Middle East.
Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost ‘as is,’ from our own work. The primary source is ‘The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ a 71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL (Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more recent papers, including ‘It’s All About Oil’ (2003), ‘Clash of Civilization or Capital Accumulation?’ (2004), ‘Beyond Neoliberalism’ (2004) and ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ (2004).
In their paper, the Retort group credits us for having coined the term ‘Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition’ – but dismiss our ‘precise calibration of the oil/war nexus’ as ‘perfunctory.’ This dismissal does not prevent them from freely appropriating, wholesale fashion, our concepts, ideas and theories – including, among others, the ‘era of free flow,’ the ‘era of limited flow,’ ‘energy conflicts,’ the ‘commercialization of arms exports,’ the ‘politicization of oil’ and the critique of the ‘scarcity thesis.’ Nowhere in their article do the authors mention the source of these concepts, ideas and theories…..”
More at the website of Nitzan and Bichler.
The theocrats I refer to in my post title are the leftist ideologues (state socialists) who never met a fact they couldn’t twist into a socialist pretzel.
Karl Denninger On Our Fraudulent Market
“I love the whining about “contract law”. Where were those complaining about this when AIG wrote CDS against no capital? Contract law calls that fraud folks – intentionally inducing someone into an agreement that you have no intention or ability to perform on. Further, we can do fraudulent concealment too, which is what the law calls it when you hide the fact that you’re functionally insolvent for more than six months as it becomes apparent to you that you won’t be able to perform, and while you know this, you draft “retention bonuses” for the very people that put your company in this position.”
That’s Karl Denninger on Brad Sherman’s (D) sensible idea to tax the bonuses that were wrongfully given (Update: I’ve had some second thoughts about it since but main point is that the whole business of bonuses is an idle distraction considering the rest of what’s happened with AIG and its counterparties).
Comment
A contract entered into with the fore-knowledge that you don’t intend to perform on it, is a fraudulent contract. A contract where you give misleading information is fraudulent. A contract where one person has asked specifically for information and the other person has given wrong information intentionally is fraudulent. And when someone later uses their powerful position and contacts to create false paper trails, cover up the evidence of wrong-doing, and pretend that the victim was actually in the wrong (think Bill Clinton), that’s another form of criminal behavior.
Folks, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and the rest are not anomalies. This is Standard Operating Procedure for many corporations, especially those with government and CIA links, with powerful billionaires backing them. That’s how the so-called free market, the agora, to give it the Greek name beloved of anarchist groups, works today. Unless we fight back, we’ll never get the real agora, which is the only way free people can live.
Massive socialism (what we have today, albeit with fascist features) is collectivism.*
You don’t need to have a Swedish-style social net for socialism to exist. And mind you, we do have a huge welfare state as well. But the problem is not the welfare alone. That’s where right libertarians are mistaken. The welfare only counterbalances the relentless growth of state intervention at every level and the relentless anti-market pressure of mega corporations, mega banks, mega insurance companies. Which must inevitably lead to the authoritarianism-with-a-happy face we have. It’s not democracy. It’s mass control. It’s Madison Avenue totalitarianism
Collectivism is simply the bureaucratic expression of hierarchical, authoritarian systems, masquerading as equality.
Yes, equality for everyone, except the managers and beneficiaries of the state. Go back and read Orwell. The pigs are in power. Big Brother is watching your computer screen as you watch it (the two-way screen). There’s doublespeak: saying you hate Christianity makes you thoughtful and a humanitarian, and saying you hate Zionism makes you racist slime. The media have their “two-minute hate”: “Islamo- terrorists are coming…” (on the right) and “the fundies are out to get you….” (on the left).
People who don’t think the official way (outside the two-party discourse) are evil, are unpersons.
I might have been on my way to becoming an unperson too, but I’m not so easy to get rid of.
Why? Very simple. I’m battling with a different manual in my hand.
And no, it’s not the Bible or the Torah or the Upanishads or the Lotus Sutra or the Koran, although I love all of them. It’s what the Hermeticists called Liber Naturalis (The Book of Nature).
If you read the book wrong, which you are certain to when you don’t even know it exists, then, of course, you won’t be able to see things that are clearly visible.
*It’s not the existence of massive levels of government aid or intervention alone that defines the degree of socialism. It’s the degree of totalitarian control evidenced in the technology – even when it’s not fully used…..