Below are the strategies I am pursuing to survive Economic Totalitarianism
1) Work to limit debt (easier said then done).
2) Avoid substantial property investments in cities with large numbers of impoverished or uneducated residents.
3) Own a small amount of gold and bitcoin.
I would instead suggest following Martin Armstrong and investing in the US stock market when he gives the go signal. Also buying corporate bonds as he is shouting now to do. Bitcoin and gold probably haven't bottomed yet. You are probably premature. Armstrong continues to hit every prediction exactly. I don't understand the skepticism. 4) Prioritize the education of children especially skills that facilitate independence from the state. For me this means Chinese lessons and coding lessons for all my children.
English will be the language of international business because we need a common language and it is the defacto default. Also the coding geeks are driving the global economy and we demand fluent English speakers. I don't know why anyone would want to adopt the Communist/conformist culture and language. Encouraging them to marry a Chinese man? I love my kids and are proud of them but I'd prefer not to have kids with an Asian again, because of the inferior IQ (at the right tail) and conformance to authority genes (there is a study where Asian babies don't have a strong gag reflex to right off having their nose covered, although my daughter seems to have in large part not inherited that or the filipinos may not carry that same trait). And I started off in life being anti-racist, and still am but I am also pragmatic about statistical facts.
5) Establish a strong moral foundation in your household (religion helps here).
With boys I'd prefer not to instill this religion delusion (but then that sort of makes it impossible to enforce on the girls if the men in the family also don't subscribe to the delusion), but with girls in the USA I can understand it is necessary to have an alternative structure to the their indoctrination via the media and public schools because females are typically incapable of long-range discernment on social indoctrination. I grew an atheist even though my grandparents wanted me to be a Baptist. Around 2006 I tried becoming a Christian. It destroyed my life because instead of taking responsibility for myself, I blamed everything on sin and God and entirely lost my moral compass (yes religion is an excuse to have no moral compass because we all will sin is what the Bible says). My life has been improving since I regained my rationality. Having said that, I don't spew venom against those who believe in a God. I can't falsify it. I do not dispute the fact that gold and bitcoin might be premature but they both essentially lack counterparty risks (especially gold). This is appealing to me even if they underperform the US stock market over the short or even medium term. I view both of these more as mechanisms of wealth preservation rather than investments. Chinese is useful because it allows one to market to and interact with what will become the largest global economy. I agree it should be prioritized below English or coding. Why do you think Asians have inferior IQ (at the right tail)? I have not looked into it in depth but the studies I have seen show that East Asians (Japanese, Chinese, Koreans) overall have a very high IQ. If you cannot falsify something then it is an error to call it a delusion for the term delusion implies logical or empirical falsifiability. I have written my thoughts on religion in Atheism and Health. I agree that not all religions are equally rational or equally healthy. Men are also indoctrinated via the media and public schools. |
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EDIT: Your five suggestions are all good. Our (one) kid is trilingual (Spanish & French), but fuggitaboutit teaching her Mandarin, or *shudder* coding...
Staying out of debt is (properly) at No. 1 on your list.
May large cities on the coasts in the USA have Chinese school which is essentially 2-4 hour Saturday school. There are options now for teaching your children coding for parents who like me are coding illiterate. Below is the one I am using. https://www.codingwithkids.com/#!/ |
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Below are the strategies I am pursuing to survive Economic Totalitarianism
1) Work to limit debt (easier said then done).
2) Avoid substantial property investments in cities with large numbers of impoverished or uneducated residents.
3) Own a small amount of gold and bitcoin.
4) Prioritize the education of children especially skills that facilitate independence from the state. For me this means Chinese lessons and coding lessons for all my children.
5) Establish a strong moral foundation in your household (religion helps here).
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... This thread is actually in honor of CoinCube (who started the very popular "Economic Devastation" thread).  But, that thread wanders into difficult philosophical terrain, and I am interested in hearing opinions (practical!) re what we can do about "Economic Totalitarianism": Ha ha you hit the nail on the head with this one. I standby my prior statement that a separate thread for practical solutions was a great and needed idea |
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As there is no coherent boundary dividing biology and not-biology all matter can essentially be viewed in this manner.
There is and it is "computation". in that sense computers are alive only of a different make. Nah Im more inclined to the software/hardware paradigm. Orch OR sound like treating conciousness as an iterated function over a State Monad universe, even with the quantum flavor it looks deterministic the simplest way to break determinism is getting a true random number generator as an input My understanding is that Orch OR is based on objective collapse theory which is indeterministic. There are competing theories of quantum mechanics like the pilot wave theory, however, that are deterministic. Computation as a dividing line is an interesting choice. However, that choice forces us to examine what forms of matter are capable of computation. In conventional views, the experiential qualities of conscious awareness are assumed to have emerged from complex neuronal computation at some point in evolution, whether recently in human brains, or at some earlier, but unspecified level of development. In these views, consciousness is an emergent property of complex computational activity. On the other hand, Orch OR follows the notion that OR events with primitive ‘experiential’ qualities have been occurring in the universe all along, in the reduction R of quantum superpositions to classical reality. Small superpositions lacking isolation would entangle directly with the random environment, rapidly reaching OR threshold by τ≈ħ/EG, resulting in non-orchestrated OR events. Each such event would lack cognition or any non-computational influence, but would be associated with an undifferentiated ‘proto-conscious’ experience, one without information or meaning. Such undifferentiated experiences are taken, in the Orch OR scheme, to be irreducible, fundamental features of ‘Planck scale geometry’, perhaps ultimately having a physical role as important to basic physics as those of mass, spin or charge.
...
What about Orch OR in non-biological systems? After all, τ≈ħ/EG happens everywhere. What kind of role might there be for it in consciousness elsewhere in the universe?
Very large masses can be involved in quantum superpositions, occurring in the universe in quantum-mechanical situations, for example in the cores of neutron stars. One might imagine that τ would then be ridiculously tiny. But EG could still be relatively small if the mass-displacement remains small owing to the uniformity of the material. But generally, by OR, such large-scale superpositions would reduce extremely quickly, and classically unreasonable superpositions would be rapidly eliminated. Whether such quantum systems could be orchestrated to have meaningful, cognitive Orch OR conscious moments is unknown
Here is another take from a the perspective of biology ORIGINS OF LIFE
An example is the question: What is life? – which is the title of that influential book by Schroedinger (1944). The current answer is, implicitly: that is ‘life’ which reproduces or replicates and is subject to natural selection.
But this answer includes viruses, phages and prions – which hardly seem to be ‘alive’ in that they lack a dynamic metabolism; and also some forms of crystal – which are usually regarded as certainly not-alive (Cairns-Smith, 1990). Furthermore, some economic theories and computational programmes explicitly use the mechanisms of natural selection - and these are not regarded as part of biology.
Strikingly, there has been no success in the attempts over sixty-plus years to create life in the laboratory under plausible ancestral earth conditions – not even the complex bio-molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. It has, indeed, been well-argued that this is impossible; and that ‘living life’ must therefore have evolved from an intermediate stage (or stages) of non-living but evolvable molecules such as crystals – perhaps clays (Cairns-Smith, 1987). But nobody has succeeded in doing that in the lab either, despite that artificial selection can be orders of magnitude faster than natural selection.
Since there is no acknowledged boundary dividing biology and not-biology, then it would seem that biology as currently understood has zero validity as a subject. What are the implications of our failure to divide the living from the non-living world: the failure to draw a line around the subject? Well, since there is no coherent boundary, then common sense leads us to infer in that case either everything is not-alive or everything is-alive. If nothing is-alive, not even ourselves, there seems to be no coherent possibility of us knowing that we ourselves are not-alive, or indeed of anything knowing anything – which, I take it, means we should reject that possibility as a reductio ad absurdum.
Alternatively, the implication is that if anything is-alive, then everything is-alive, including the mineral world – so we dwell in a wholly animated universe, all that there is being alive but – presumably – alive in very different degrees and with different qualities of life. This inference I intend to regard as valid: it will be my working metaphysical assumption, and is one to which we will return later.
While it may be true that the simplest way to break determinism is getting a true random number generator as an input that may not be the only way. |
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The Bohm pilot wave interpretation of quantum theory is the only consistent one that really works and shows us exactly the place of consciousness in the universe.
There are many interpretations of quantum theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theoryThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Quantum decoherence (Guido Bacciagaluppi, 2012) groups "approaches to quantum mechanics" into five groups, of which "pilot-wave theories" are one (the others being the Copenhagen interpretation, objective collapse theories, many-world interpretations and modal interpretations).
You claim that the pilot wave interpretations of quantum mechanics is the only one that works but this appear to be an unproved assertion. Upthread I highlighted the Orch OR theory of consciousness. This theory does not use the pilot wave interpretation it uses a competing model of objective collapse. I have a solid background in mathematics and science but this background does not include quantum mechanics. My understanding, however, is that all of the five "approaches to quantum mechanics" fit with the currently available experimental data making them all a possible but competing visions of reality. Pilot wave theory is deterministic. Objective collapse theory is indeterministic. I argued upthread that grounding consciousness in objective collapse theory makes consciousness itself indeterministic and provides a mechanism for free will. It does not appears that this argument can be made with a deterministic pilot wave theory. You appear to have rejected objective collapse theory as false. What is your reasoning for this conclusion? |
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The Bohm pilot wave interpretation of quantum theory is the only consistent one that really works and shows us exactly the place of consciousness in the universe.
There are many interpretations of quantum theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theoryThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Quantum decoherence (Guido Bacciagaluppi, 2012) groups "approaches to quantum mechanics" into five groups, of which "pilot-wave theories" are one (the others being the Copenhagen interpretation, objective collapse theories, many-world interpretations and modal interpretations).
You claim that the pilot wave interpretations of quantum mechanics is the only one that works but this appear to be an unproved assertion. Upthread I highlighted the Orch OR theory of consciousness. This theory does not use the pilot wave interpretation it uses a competing model of objective collapse. I have a solid background in mathematics and science but this background does not include quantum mechanics. My understanding, however, is that all of the five "approaches to quantum mechanics" fit with the currently available experimental data making them all a possible but competing visions of reality. Pilot wave theory is deterministic. Objective collapse theory is indeterministic. I argued upthread that grounding consciousness in objective collapse theory makes consciousness itself indeterministic and provides a mechanism for free will. It does not appears that this argument can be made with a deterministic pilot wave theory. You appear to have rejected objective collapse theory as false. What is your reasoning for this conclusion? |
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Hi can you answer my question, i am curious what your answer is: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg14317190#msg14317190
Tell me how can consciousness arise from the brain, if the consciousness experiences the outside world, including the brain... It's circular logic.
Ok I have a question for you because I see that you are pretty intelligent, here it goes: What you see with your eyes and interpret with your mind, is that the outside world or the inside world?
- You can answer outside, because its detached from your body, therefore it seems like it's the outside world, outside from your body
- You can answer inside, because you experience it with the mind ,therefore everything you experience is filtered through your mind, so what you see outside is actually inside your head
- You can't answer both, because that's illogical, can't be both at the same time
So which one is it? Think about it hard because it's a very tricky question, and if you find the right answer then you will instantly see what i`m talking about...
"What you see with your eyes and interpret with your mind, is that the outside world or the inside world?" My answer: It is neither the outside world nor the inside world for this is a false dichotomy. To view consciousness as arising from the brain is an oversimplification stemming from a flawed conceptualization. Instead the brain should be viewed as a medium or functional scaffolding for consciousness to propagate itself. As there is no coherent boundary dividing biology and not-biology all matter can essentially be viewed in this manner. Individual interaction with the world can thus be understood as consciousness propagating through one medium interacting with consciousness propagating through another medium. This interaction can be reinforcing or destructive. Instead of an inside or an outside world there is simply the propagation of consciousness interacting with itself in increasingly deep and complex ways. Orchestrated objective reduction’ (‘Orch OR’) proposes that consciousness consists of a sequence of discrete events, each being a moment of ‘objective reduction’ (OR) of a quantum state. The theory suggests conscious experience is intrinsically connected to the fine-scale structure of space–time geometry, and that consciousness may be deeply related to the operation of the laws of the universe. |
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Hi can you answer my question, i am curious what your answer is: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg14317190#msg14317190
Tell me how can consciousness arise from the brain, if the consciousness experiences the outside world, including the brain... It's circular logic.
Ok I have a question for you because I see that you are pretty intelligent, here it goes: What you see with your eyes and interpret with your mind, is that the outside world or the inside world?
- You can answer outside, because its detached from your body, therefore it seems like it's the outside world, outside from your body
- You can answer inside, because you experience it with the mind ,therefore everything you experience is filtered through your mind, so what you see outside is actually inside your head
- You can't answer both, because that's illogical, can't be both at the same time
So which one is it? Think about it hard because it's a very tricky question, and if you find the right answer then you will instantly see what i`m talking about...
"What you see with your eyes and interpret with your mind, is that the outside world or the inside world?" My answer: It is neither the outside world nor the inside world for this is a false dichotomy. To view consciousness as arising from the brain is an oversimplification stemming from a flawed conceptualization. Instead the brain should be viewed as a medium or functional scaffolding for consciousness to propagate itself. As there is no coherent boundary dividing biology and not-biology all matter can essentially be viewed in this manner. Individual interaction with the world can thus be understood as consciousness propagating through one medium interacting with consciousness propagating through another medium. This interaction can be reinforcing or destructive. Instead of an inside or an outside world there is simply the propagation of consciousness interacting with itself in increasingly deep and complex ways. Orchestrated objective reduction’ (‘Orch OR’) proposes that consciousness consists of a sequence of discrete events, each being a moment of ‘objective reduction’ (OR) of a quantum state. The theory suggests conscious experience is intrinsically connected to the fine-scale structure of space–time geometry, and that consciousness may be deeply related to the operation of the laws of the universe. |
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Are you still here?
Didn't you say that you were leaving?
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Jewish Rabbi on Slavery in the Old Testament http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/305549/jewish/Torah-Slavery-and-the-Jews.htmTorah comes from the Hebrew word for "law" and refers to the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Let's start simple:
Take an agrarian society surrounded by hostile nations. Go in there and forcefully abolish slavery. The result? War, bloodshed, hatred, prejudice, poverty and eventually, a return to slavery until the underlying conditions change. Which is pretty much what happened in the American South when the semi-industrialized North imposed their laws upon the agrarian South. And in Texas when Mexico attempted to abolish slavery among the Anglophones there.
Not a good idea. Better idea: Place humane restrictions upon the institution of indentured servitude. Yes, it's still ugly, but in the meantime, you'll teach people compassion and kindness. Educate. Make workshops. Go white-water rafting together. (Hey, why didn't Abe Lincoln think of white-water rafting?) Eventually, things change and slavery becomes an anachronism for such a society.
Which is pretty much what happened to Jewish society. Note this: At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.
Torah teaches us how to run a libertarian society--through education and participation. Elsewhere in the world, emperors and aristocracy knew only how to govern a mass of people through oppression. Look what happened to Rome.
Getting Real Change
So you can see where I'm getting to with the slavery thing. If G d would simply and explicitly declare all the rules, precisely as He wants His world to look and what we need to do about it, the Torah would never become real to us. No matter how much we would do and how good we would be, we would remain aliens to the process.
So, too, with slavery (and there are many other examples): In the beginning, the world starts off as a place where oppressing others is a no-qualms, perfectly acceptable practice. It's not just the practice Torah needs to deal with, it's the attitude. So Torah involves us in arriving at that attitude. To the point that we will say, "Even though the Torah lets us, we don't do things that way."
Which means that we've really learnt something. And now, we can teach it to others. Because those things you're just told, those you cannot teach. You can only teach that which you have discovered on your own.
History bears this out. Historically, it has been the Oral Torah, rather than the Written Torah, that has had the greatest impact on civilization. As much as Rome ruled over Judea, Jewish values deeply transformed Rome. One of the results was the legal privileges eventually granted to slaves and the gradual recognition of the value of human life.
... Christianity’s influence, in the west, set into motion the belief that man is accountable to God and that the law is the same regardless of status. http://crossandquill.com/journey/the-influence-of-christianity-on-western-civilization/Take the conflict between the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great and St. Ambrose. It happened in 300 A.D. when some in Thessalonica rioted and aroused the anger of the emperor who overreacted by slaughtering approximately seven thousand people, most of whom were innocent. Bishop Ambrose asked the emperor to repent and when Theodosius refused, the bishop excommunicated him. After a month Theodosius prostrated himself and repented in Ambrose’s cathedral.
Ambrose readmitted the emperor only after several months of penance and when he promoted a law, which in the case of death sentences would allow a thirty-day lag before the execution would be enforced. One can only speculate how many other massacres were avoided throughout history by the mitigating influence of a religion who's commandments include "Thou shalt not kill" |
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Hey, a testable prediction! Can you give us an estimate of when exactly you think Moloch's self-destruction will close in on him? I'd like to check it for accuracy.
Questions such as this one sometimes require observation over a few generations to decisively answer. I think you confuse, "Low Fertility", with choosing to not have lots of children...
...
Since when is having 1 child instead of 5 a bad thing? I don't even see how this is a negative trait
I could argue that fewer children is a good thing...
Intelligent parents have no need to produce dozens of brainwashed children...
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It is clear that a few posters are deeply angered by the original title of this post. As the goal of this post is not to attack or denigrate but to inform and share knowledge I have selected a new and less inflammatory title.
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Why do we "ground consciousness in quantum mechanics"? Is there some experiment that proves consciousness is a phenomenon affected more by quantum scale effects? I'm astonished - I didn't even know we were at the point that consciousness was that well understood.
If OTOH you're just putting forward a conjecture then until there is proof we cannot know whether or not free will exists.
I have provided metaphysics that define what is necessary for free will Kant's noumenal self outside of time. Such a self is free because it is causally undetermined. I have provided information on emperic and reproducable scientific experiments. Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments show that quantum phenomona can operate outside of what we traditionally think of as time and causal sequence. I have provided robust scientific theory (Orch objective reduction) that argues consciousness is grounded in these same quantum phenomona that have been shown to operate outside of traditional time and causality. Obviously from my stated conclusion I believe the Orch OR theory to be true. However this is not a question of metaphysics but one of science. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188the Orch OR scheme has so far stood the test of time better than most other schemes, and it is particularly distinguished from other proposals by the many scientifically tested, and potentially testable, ingredients that it depends upon. From this one can conclude that current emperic scientific theory supports the existance of Kant's noumenal self which is required for free will. Free will is thus entirely consistent with modern science and undeniably possible. If Orch OR theory holds up under further and in depth emperic testing I would argue that free will becomes overwhelmingly probable. |
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Why do we "ground consciousness in quantum mechanics"? Is there some experiment that proves consciousness is a phenomenon affected more by quantum scale effects? I'm astonished - I didn't even know we were at the point that consciousness was that well understood.
If OTOH you're just putting forward a conjecture then until there is proof we cannot know whether or not free will exists.
I have provided metaphysics that define what is necessary for free will Kant's noumenal self outside of time. Such a self is free because it is causally undetermined. I have provided information on emperic and reproducable scientific experiments. Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments show that quantum phenomona can operate outside of what we traditionally think of as time and causal sequence. I have provided robust scientific theory (Orch objective reduction) that argues consciousness is grounded in these same quantum phenomona that have been shown to operate outside of traditional time and causality. Obviously from my stated conclusion I believe the Orch OR theory to be true. However this is not a question of metaphysics but one of science. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188the Orch OR scheme has so far stood the test of time better than most other schemes, and it is particularly distinguished from other proposals by the many scientifically tested, and potentially testable, ingredients that it depends upon. From this one can conclude that current emperic scientific theory supports the existance of Kant's noumenal self which is required for free will. Free will is thus entirely consistent with modern science and undeniably possible. If Orch OR theory holds up under further and in depth emperic testing I would argue that free will becomes overwhelmingly probable. |
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Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments tell us that certain quantum phenomena operate outside of what we traditionally think of as time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraserDelayed choice experiments raise questions about time and time sequences, and thereby bring our usual ideas of time and causal sequence into question.[note 1] If events at D1, D2, D3, D4 determine outcomes at D0, then effect seems to precede cause. If the idler light paths were greatly extended so that a year goes by before a photon shows up at D1, D2, D3, or D4, then when a photon shows up in one of these detectors, it would cause a signal photon to have shown up in a certain mode a year earlier. Alternatively, knowledge of the future fate of the idler photon would determine the activity of the signal photon in its own present. Neither of these ideas conforms to the usual human expectation of causality.
• Orch OR theory posits that conscious arises from quantum computations in brain microtubules. • As noted by Kant in his model of a noumenal self free will requires a true self that is independent of time. • Grounding consciousness in quantum mechanics provides this independence. Therefore we have free will. |
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...
Christianity relies on free will. Without it people cannot ask for salivation, rendering Christianity false.
So take your pick:
1) We don't have free will. Thus Christainity is false.
2) We do have free will. Christainity could be true.
Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments tell us that certain quantum phenomena operate outside of what we traditionally think of as time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraserDelayed choice experiments raise questions about time and time sequences, and thereby bring our usual ideas of time and causal sequence into question.[note 1] If events at D1, D2, D3, D4 determine outcomes at D0, then effect seems to precede cause. If the idler light paths were greatly extended so that a year goes by before a photon shows up at D1, D2, D3, or D4, then when a photon shows up in one of these detectors, it would cause a signal photon to have shown up in a certain mode a year earlier. Alternatively, knowledge of the future fate of the idler photon would determine the activity of the signal photon in its own present. Neither of these ideas conforms to the usual human expectation of causality.
• Orch OR theory posits that conscious arises from quantum computations in brain microtubules. • As noted by Kant in his model of a noumenal self free will requires a true self that is independent of time. • Grounding consciousness in quantum mechanics provides this independence. Therefore we have free will. |
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