On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 12:06 AM Bernard Baars, who founded the leading scientific ojurnal and series of conferences on consciousness, wrote:
I just KNEW I was getting into trouble with that post.
But of course, Paul, now you have to give me your definition of "money" to cure my ignorance...
Thank you, Bernie, for your calm reply to our accidental discussion of cryptocurrency and whatnot.
It is hard to know where to begin in discussing the subject of money, which everyone on this list thinks about but from different viewpoints. Logically, it DOES have a place within our "CH", Cosmos and History thread, because money has always been one of the key forces in the vast changes of past and future history. The word "money" itself has meant different things to different people. CHANGES in the world financial system are big and urgent here and now, as the world enters a post covid depression.
Where to begin?
In your post you began with a review of stuff like wampum and clam shells used as a medium of exchange, which was replaced over time by gold.
Back when I was an economics major at Harvard (AFTER having taken courses at Princeton and Penn I mention here at times on pure math and logic), paper currencies like the US dollar were linked to gold, under a complex system managed through the Federal Reserve. They would actually publish something like 16 different MEASURES or DEFINITIONS of what the money supply is, M1 to M16, and it was important to track all of them.
But in fact, the old gold standard was based on an arbitrary convention inherited from history. In a way, it was like the "social contracts" or "social norms" understood deeply by folks like Max eber, Locke and T.C. Schelling. Furthermore, back then I was a registered Republican of libertarian bent, and I could see every day in the New York Times how the gold standard favored the Soviet Union and South Africa, and weakened the US in efforts to balance out certain goals and powers of thos enations, in a very arbitrary way. I came up with an idea for how the gold standard might be replaced by a kind of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) system, under international institutions to move control form geology to humans. Most people had the usual reactive psychology ("that wampum was good enough for my caveman and monkey ancestors, so it would be heresy
and futile to try to replace it by mere decisions of modern humans"), but I found a ;professor at yale, named Triffin, who was interested. They even offered me admission at Yale Graduate School in economics, even though I had not applied, but I felt I should give priority to other things you could see at scholar.google.com. I certainly would have been richer if I had followed what came from that track, but there were other v aria bles in play.
In short, if you look up Triffin and SDR on the web, you will see a HUGE literature on the massive changes which were possible, were made, but are not the final story. Yesterday, Jelel recommended we again cite the more recent work by Stiglitz, who was indeed a ray of hope and insight back when UK decided to enter the EU, and back when we were trying to cope with the 2008 crash.
HERE AND NOW, Trump has announced that we should not worry about economic recovery in the US after covid, because "the Federal reserve controls all the money in the world, and qwe can spend whatever it takes on anything we please." Oops. I can hear my Russian friends saying "Learn your lessons about unintended consequences and good intentions." But no, Trump just does not understand how the new systems work, or what is coming next. There is a scary analogy between the situation of these 20's and the 1920's, back when Germany overestimated its role in world money supply, and got into enormous long-lasting trouble.
What kind of trouble?
To begin with, there are massive changes coming fast in the world internet system. Many global financial people have gotten used to the idea that the It sector, including the internet, is just one of the plots of land in THEIR vast territory. They will be in very deep trouble if they do not better understand that we are moving to the reverse situation, where "money", like consciousness itself, is just a set of patterns of information in an emerging new information system, which may even be growing to become a kind of brain in itself.
Last fall, the world president of IEEE arranged for me to give a kind of rerun of a talk I gave to him in Japan. I did not accept the travel and honoraria to the two big conferences in Japan and South Korea, for practical reasons, but agreed to give a technical overview of what the issues are by youtibe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
And so, my discussion with Amanda about money was an offshoot of a larger discussion with IT people about what kind of new arrangements would be possible IF HUMANS CHOOSE, sustainable in terms of money and other variables, in press at a company called TFIE.
My wife has shown me that a well-known popular author named Clancy
has shown remarkable predictions, based on what seems to be a combination of access to intelligence agencies and a ouch of real precognition. He died, but foresaw a need to continue that enterprise. And so, a few days ago, I saw what THEY know about what is coming (so much more real than the feel-good PR you see from the White House and other places lately): https://www.facebook.
I trust that about as much as I trust what Jack and the folks in Florida are saying about UFOs lately, but there are very real massive changes in process and their confusion about key aspects makes me more worried.
https://www.facebook.com/paul.
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P.S. I saved a lot of that early correspondence, including some of Triffin. I have a huge "scans" folder, also up on the cloud, on the :dark web."
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P.S. I saved a lot of that early correspondence, including some of Triffin. I have a huge "scans" folder, also up on the cloud, on the :dark web."
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