Daniel Dennett’s “User Illusion”
Back when I was a materialist, I loved Daniel Dennett’s theory that consciousness was an evolutionarily driven “user illusion.” Gene Callahan actually pulled me out of that by asking the simple question: Who is the user being fooled?
Gene’s question was so poignant that it either was devastating (if you agree with him) or childish (if you disagree with him). That’s how those one-sentence put-downs work.
Well, I still like Gene’s critique, but how do you square it with this? I have had many dreams over the years in which I’m effectively watching a movie (or a TV show), and there’s a surprise ending. Most nightmares are like this, but it’s not just nightmares; I’ve “watched” really entertaining dreams with an ending I didn’t see coming.
So, what the heck is going on there? However you explain it, I think it makes Dennett’s theory of consciousness a lot more attractive, after all.
Yellen and the End of QE3
Although it has been dubbed “surprisingly hawkish” by the financial press, the Fed’s announcement today fulfilled its original plan to wind up QE3 asset purchases this month. Going forward, the Fed will continue to reinvest the principal on its maturing bonds, but it won’t add assets on net to its balance sheet.
In my view, if the Fed holds firm and doesn’t resume asset purchases, we will have a sharp drop in stock prices, as they have moved in lockstep with the Fed’s balance sheet since 2009:
Let me also remind readers of my analysis back in July, when I explained why I thought Janet Yellen was going to take one for the team:
==> Paul Volcker took over as Chair of the Fed in August 1979. A recession officially began five months later, in January 1980. The second “early 1980s” recession officially began in July 1981; the annual unemployment ratewas 9.7% in 1982. This was the worst recession since the Great Depression.
==> In August 1987 Alan Greenspan took over the Fed. Two months later “Black Monday” occurred on October 19, 1987, when the Dow dropped 22.6% that day alone–the worst one-day crash in history.
==> In February 2006 Ben Bernanke became Fed chair. The worst recession since the Great Depression officially began in December 2007, and you may recall there was some trouble in the financial markets in September 2008…
==> In January 2014 Janet Yellen became Fed chair. The US stock market crashed and slipped back into major recession on _____?
Of course, no one knows the future. But given that the people behind the curtain have to let a major crash happen sometime–they can’t repeal Austrian business cycle theory–why not do it when the first black president is in the White House and the first woman is at the helm of the Fed?
“Breaking Bad: Can Regulation Be Fixed?”
My latest article in the Freeman. An excerpt:
The whole schtick of the regulatory State is that we can trust a group of technocrats in Washington, DC, to guard the interests of the people by standing up to the greedy and soulless business tycoons who — left to their own devices — would lie, cheat, and kill in order to turn a profit. Yet, anyone with an open mind can see that this approach has, time and again, utterly failed in practice.
For example, Harry Markopolos had been writing the SEC since 1999 warning that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, yet the SEC (which had ties to Madoff and his family) ignored the obvious red flags. In the end, Madoff’s kids turned him in.
Or how about another classic example, where the federal government stands valiantly in the breach to protect Americans from the big, bad oil companies? The Minerals Management Service (MMS) was the previous name of a group inside the Interior Department. In a major scandal that caused it to change its name, MMS employees in Colorado were caught accepting drugs and sex from the companies they were supposed to be regulating, while MMS employees in Alaska got in trouble for throwing a party with a cake that said “Drill, Baby, Drill” on the frosting.
Focus on “Co-Benefits” Shows Flaw in Carbon Tax Case
My latest at IER. An excerpt:
First of all, consider the title of the new IMF study: “How Much Carbon Pricing is in Countries’ Own Interests? The Critical Role of Co-Benefits.”
I hope the reader’s Spidey Sense is tingling at this point. The IMF study’s entireraison d’étre is that without co-benefits—which we must remember, is a concept enjoying relatively recent attention from the carbon tax crowd—a large carbon tax is not in a given country’s own interest.
I Pity the Fool Who Thinks Money Measures Value
A follow-up post at Mises CA:
[L]et’s try a different thought experiment. As before, suppose the government locks in the dollar-price of gold, thinking that this will provide a “stable ruler of fixed length” by which people can measure market values. Yet a sudden resurgence of interest in Mr. T causes most Americans to want to wear more gold jewelry on their chests. If the government does nothing, then the dollar-price of gold would increase because of the heightened demand to use gold as jewelry. In order to keep the dollar-price fixed, therefore, the government has to suck dollars out of circulation. This keeps the dollar-price of gold stable, but causes a crash in the dollar-price of everything else. Far from providing a stable unit of value, it seems that locking in gold as the money allowed a sudden bout of “deflation,” at least in the way the public currently thinks of the term.
Murphy on Sound Money
I’ll be speaking at the Acton Institute next week (November 4) if you are in the Grand Rapids area and want to stop by…
Potpourri
==> Bill Kauffman has no love for the U.S. empire.
==> Martin Wolf writes in the FT that we’re trapped in a cycle of credit booms.
==> If you’re into Bitcoin, catch me in the second hour of this show or here again.
==> If you’re into the Mandelbrot Set (the cover image of my website), this tutorial is the best I’ve ever seen. Especially the end where it shows what’s going on when the computer fills it in with different colors.
==> As I said on Twitter, it’s even creepier for some reason when the CIA spies on the U.S. government.
==> Not sure if it’s worth getting into the weeds on this one, but I found Scott Sumner’s comparison of the Fed with classical gold standard to be filled with difficulty.
==> Tom Woods and I talk Ebola.
Well It May Be the Devil, Or It May Be the Lord
…but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Since I am relatively new to this stuff, I thought some of you–whether believers are not–would be interested to hear of it as well. As I’m sure you can imagine, I have a circle of friends/acquaintances who are Bible-believing Christians, and I have a circle who share my skepticism of the welfare/warfare State and ostensibly humanitarian organizations like the United Nations.
Generally speaking, the people from both groups wouldn’t get along. Although the people in my church, for example, are hardly fans of Barack Obama, they are extremely proud of the U.S. military and would probably be astonished at certain libertarian positions. On the other hand, many of the people who like my economic and political writings also think “the Church” is a malevolent institution just like “the State,” which exists to control people’s minds and convince them to send in money in order to avoid catastrophe.
However, there is a small intersection of the two groups, and that’s where things get really interesting. For people with that worldview–who understand the “secular” critique of the efforts to establish One World Government, etc., but who also believe in the book of Revelation–they will tell you that it’s obvious why all of these various organizations throughout history seem to be operating in a coordinated effort to take away our liberties. It’s not a coincidence, according to these people. No, it’s a conscious plan designed by the prince of this world.
As I say, I am quite new to this stuff. It was only a few years ago that I had even heard of, say, the Bilderberg Group and the other icons in the “conspiracy theory” toolbox.
What I’ve found as I explore this stuff is that at first, you hear the most (apparently) outrageous, absurd allegations. But then when you go and investigate it, you find evidence in support of the allegation that you wouldn’t have thought possible.
The most recent example that prompted today’s post, was someone mentioned to me that these elite, One World organizations were openly pledging their allegiance to the devil. He cited as an example the Lucis Trust, which is affiliated with the United Nations (though I can’t get a good idea of what that really means, apart from claims made in the obvious “conspiracy” websites).
Putting aside for a moment the issue of how much attention we should be paying to the Lucis Trust, there is no doubt about their origin. This is from their own website:
There are comments on the World Wide Web claiming that the Lucis Trust was once called the Lucifer Trust. Such was never the case. However, for a brief period of two or three years in the early 1920’s, when Alice and Foster Bailey were beginning to publish the books published under her name, they named their fledgling publishing company “Lucifer Publishing Company”. By 1925 the name was changed to Lucis Publishing Company and has remained so ever since. Both “Lucifer” and “Lucis” come from the same word root, lucis being the Latin generative case meaning of light. The Baileys’ reasons for choosing the original name are not known to us, but we can only surmise that they, like the great teacher H.P. Blavatsky, for whom they had enormous respect, sought to elicit a deeper understanding of the sacrifice made by Lucifer. Alice and Foster Bailey were serious students and teachers of Theosophy, a spiritual tradition which views Lucifer as one of the solar Angels, those advanced Beings Who Theosophy says descended (thus “the fall”) from Venus to our planet eons ago to bring the principle of mind to what was then animal-man. In the theosophical perspective, the descent of these solar Angels was not a fall into sin or disgrace but rather an act of great sacrifice, as is suggested in the name “Lucifer” which means light-bearer.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is mostly just to make you aware–in case you didn’t realize it–that in addition to people who openly revere God, there are those who openly revere Lucifer.
For one final remark, consider this: Even those of you who are agnostic/atheist can surely recognize that a genuine believer in the power of God might, in certain circumstances, be able to achieve things because of his faith. So by the same token, if there are people walking around out there who genuinely believe they’ve achieved their position of earthly power because they “made a deal with the devil”…you can expect atypical behavior from them. I submit that adding that feature to your mental model of powerful people might allow you to better explain the world we see.
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