You are "lifted up out of the delusion of individuality"."
There is a very interesting parallel from the theory of monetary economics. Usually, interest is considered as a source of income, which is designed to increase the wealth of those who have enough money anyway. Vast quantities of investment advisers and other figures are engaged in convincing people to "invest" their earned money in any investments, so that those who have brokered the conclusion can henceforth earn a low-performing income. So here the ego of one is abused in order to feed the ego of the other. Whether it is unfair or not, it should be stated here that the decisive factor here is that money is used as a means of individual business activity, i.e. the ego defines the idea that exists about money, which then also determines the treatment and use of money. The results that a desolidarized society (the consequence of the ego) produces can now be viewed in a well-known country.
Now, of course, there is also a different point of view. "The practice of charging interest was vehemently opposed by Jesus and forbidden by the church all the way up until the time of the Renaissance." Now Jesus was not a money theorist, but was probably more oriented to the practice of the jubilee years, which were necessary to avoid the over-indebtedness of entire sections of the population. So it's easy to get the idea to ban the cause of it completely right away. This may have been correct against the background of the monetary system of the time, but that should not be of further interest here.
Rather, it is crucial that today the monetary system is linked to debt relationships, which ideally have a social character. This character arose with the Industrial Revolution and the associated need to finance labor (where capital ist nothing more than labor done in advance). The basic figure is that the financing of labor requires the sale of the product in order to recoup the costs of the product - plus an unfunded entrepreneur's wage. In a FIAT money system, all you need for financing is banks, because they can finance any project with the support of the Central Bank - if necessary also with the help of a consortium. It is important to understand that it is the debts incurred that lead entrepreneurs to sell produced goods for a practically worthless money - the legend that money is a right to goods has never been true.
Now banks find their justification for existence in the fact that they, as lenders, enable the investment volume that keeps an economy running. Since banks operate in a money economy environment, they - like all other companies - have to keep an eye on covering the costs with the current income. However, the depreciation from failed loans has the same effect as costs, as they reduce the annual profit in the income statement as well as personnel and material costs. The risk premium is therefore equivalent to an insurance premium that works analogously to the known risk insurances. With car insurance as the most well-known risk insurance, it is the case that the amount of the damage amount per year determines the amount of the premiums: if the damages increase, the premiums increase, the damages decrease, the premiums decrease. This pattern can be found in the banking industry, where the pattern looks like that in the case of positive expectations for the future (= low depreciation losses), interest rates have a tendency to decrease, while in economically difficult times (= high depreciation losses), bank interest rates have a tendency to increase, although from an economic theory point of view, just the opposite - namely, interest rate cuts - is considered necessary to "boost" the economy again.
Since banks now operate with the money issued by the Central Bank, there is no justification in itself for the fact that they receive an interest as an income element for money, but can only claim a risk premium that compensates for the default of loans. Then, for example, it is no longer justifiable for banks to charge a market interest rate for real estate financing, because the risk of loss default is largely eliminated by the collateral provided by the property and thus, from a risk point of view, a market interest rate is not justified. Perhaps one of the reasons for the broad-based campaign to declare banks as the "creators of money" is that it could turn out that charging a market interest rate will result in a non-performing income and their position as "benefactors" of society could be questioned. If people would understand that it is the central Bank from which the money comes, the popular reference to the "investors", who would have to be compensated for it, would also disappear. With money from the Central Bank, these claims are no more than lukewarm air.
All this means that money, understood as a medium of the social organization of production, is not a means to individually achieve a low-performing income, but to contribute to the sustainability of the provision of social services to ensure the survival of society over time. Once people have understood this, interest is a means to remove credit claims that are no longer faced by a productive project from the overall context of the debt relationships. By the way, the sole function of interest as risk compensation also prevents the accumulation of monetary assets, the disastrous effect of which was already clear to our ancestors thousands of years ago.
Money does not exist to service individual fortune but to secure the continuation of society over time. Unfortunately, this knowledge has been lost, but there is always the possibility to exhume it again.
You've hit the nail on the head with your observation of the fundamental tension between (1) the long-term sustainability of society versus (2) the hoarding of resources for the glorification of individual egos.
In The Republic, Plato put it in terms of "pleonexia" (πλεονεξία), or wealth addiction, versus "dikē" (δίκη), or justice (rhymes with "Nike").
As you've observed, monetary policy can either serve egos individually, or society collectively. It seems to me that tension between these dual uses of the monetary system has animated all of history, which notably includes the ministry of Jesus. It reflects our on-going struggle to subjugate individual egos and awaken as a super-organism. Therein lies the connection between religion and finance.
Thank you for the positive feedback. It is true that your comment about the "delusion of individuality" was the reason for my post. Thank you very much for that, especially because my descriptions are usually very overloaded with technical details that do not convey the ultimate message to the reader. But if the difference between external financing and financing for the sake of production is explained as the difference between ego and society, it really becomes clear what it is all about.
A small side note. You write: "Immortality comes from identifying as a progression of people instead of a single individual." That reminds me of a quote by Konrad Lorenz: "For natural reasons, humans cannot be loyal to an individual dog, but they can be loyal to their tribe. It is in the nature of nature that it values this more than the individual." An impressive coincidence. Another: "I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man: It is we."
I typed it out and hope the second loads. The first kept downloading before I could copy and paste the address, but you can figure out how to retrieve it.
Redshift as multi spectrum packets and threshold theory.
Would you have taken this road of discovery, if it hadn't been for the debt? Stepping outside the box becomes necessary when the box breaks.
A thought on how to get outside the ego, as well as many of the trappings of this reality, is to consider the point I made about time in yesterday's posting.
That as mobile organisms this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is the present going past to future, when it's activity and change turning future to past.
So there is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
The energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence. Creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past.
The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise. With the circulation system as feedback in the middle.
Suggesting consciousness functions as an energy.
Science has the same problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that it can only be defined in terms of the forms it manifests.
Yet once you really just sit back and not project your own energy, but start to sense how others project themselves, it all does become a sentient light show.
Those "floaters" flitting across your vision are others connecting to your bubble. The classic heart shape is a floater, glowing red, with a line running through it, pulling it. Cupid's arrow.
They tend to be most evident driving, as everyone focuses on the space in front of them.
I remember as a child, laying on the porch and watching this ant, when it stopped, like it sensed something. Then I saw this tiny cone of awareness waving around with its antennae.
Given galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in, there is a lot to develop here and you may find these two factors and the feedback between them, really do start to explain the dynamics of reality.
First of all, John, I see that just became a paid subscriber to System Failure. Thank you sincerely for that!
Second of all, your conception of time is very interesting. Have you ever heard Alan Watts' old canard about this? I think you'd like it.
We imagine that the present is the result of the past. That's certainly my default. But Watts' idea was that thinking of the present as the result of the past is like thinking that a ship's wake is propelling the ship.
Time is a big piece of the System Failure puzzle, so I'm going to have to meditate on this matter. I think I'll start by going back and rereading your last post.
At any rate, thank you for these incredible comments, John. Cheers!
The wake doesn't steer the boat, but it is residue and memory of the past consumed by the present.
The energy manifest in the fuel bunker is potential, the event of the ship is actual, the wake is both residual and the energy being distributed back into the environment, like the flap of the proverbial butterfly's wings.
So the energy is only presence, but goes past to future, because the patterns generated, the fuel, the state of the boat, the wake, are going future to past, like a wave rising and falling.
There are not many people out there willing to look too far under the surface, so I figured you deserve a boost and since I'm pretty much a hermit, a little cash will have to do.
Any ideas you want to run with, feel free.
If you get over to Medium, I mostly comment on others posts and try getting various balls rolling, though occasionally post articles.
One of the ones I cross posted to Substack is, The Webb is Cast.
Read that, then look up, "tiny red dots" at SciAm. They're seeing those galaxies outside the timeframe, but can't wrap their minds around anything outside the box.
Have you heard of the Delayed Choice Experiment, John? I'm guessing you probably have because you wrote here "the act of determination occurs as the present".
Essentially, it's a cosmic double slit experiment. In a normal double slit experiment, electrons flow through one of two apertures, and measuring which hole an electrons are flowing through collapses an interference pattern on a photo-sensitive screen beyond.
In the Delayed Choice Experiment, photons from a distant light source that bend around an intervening object by gravitational lensing can be made to act either as a particle or as a wave, depending on how they're measured here on Earth. Conventional wisdom suggests that those photons should have made their "choice" millions of years ago, as light takes time to reach Earth. But it seems the way we observe those photons in the present affects their past choice, reversing the flow of causality as we normally understand it.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. Thank you for all these amazing comments, John!
There is a lot to cover on that. Unfortunately the links I could post are not on my phone.
Carver Mead did an interview at American Spectator, getting into how particles are really just compact waves. From other sources, it's called a loading or threshold theory. That the quantization is an artifact of the detection.
I think I covered it a little bit in the essay on the Webb, that one way light does redshift over distance, is as multi spectrum packets, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster. Which would mean they are sampling a wave front, not detecting discreet photons that traveled billions of light years. My email is brodix at EarthLink dot net, if you want some links.
"So what happens when your ego is ... dissolved?
You are "lifted up out of the delusion of individuality"."
There is a very interesting parallel from the theory of monetary economics. Usually, interest is considered as a source of income, which is designed to increase the wealth of those who have enough money anyway. Vast quantities of investment advisers and other figures are engaged in convincing people to "invest" their earned money in any investments, so that those who have brokered the conclusion can henceforth earn a low-performing income. So here the ego of one is abused in order to feed the ego of the other. Whether it is unfair or not, it should be stated here that the decisive factor here is that money is used as a means of individual business activity, i.e. the ego defines the idea that exists about money, which then also determines the treatment and use of money. The results that a desolidarized society (the consequence of the ego) produces can now be viewed in a well-known country.
Now, of course, there is also a different point of view. "The practice of charging interest was vehemently opposed by Jesus and forbidden by the church all the way up until the time of the Renaissance." Now Jesus was not a money theorist, but was probably more oriented to the practice of the jubilee years, which were necessary to avoid the over-indebtedness of entire sections of the population. So it's easy to get the idea to ban the cause of it completely right away. This may have been correct against the background of the monetary system of the time, but that should not be of further interest here.
Rather, it is crucial that today the monetary system is linked to debt relationships, which ideally have a social character. This character arose with the Industrial Revolution and the associated need to finance labor (where capital ist nothing more than labor done in advance). The basic figure is that the financing of labor requires the sale of the product in order to recoup the costs of the product - plus an unfunded entrepreneur's wage. In a FIAT money system, all you need for financing is banks, because they can finance any project with the support of the Central Bank - if necessary also with the help of a consortium. It is important to understand that it is the debts incurred that lead entrepreneurs to sell produced goods for a practically worthless money - the legend that money is a right to goods has never been true.
Now banks find their justification for existence in the fact that they, as lenders, enable the investment volume that keeps an economy running. Since banks operate in a money economy environment, they - like all other companies - have to keep an eye on covering the costs with the current income. However, the depreciation from failed loans has the same effect as costs, as they reduce the annual profit in the income statement as well as personnel and material costs. The risk premium is therefore equivalent to an insurance premium that works analogously to the known risk insurances. With car insurance as the most well-known risk insurance, it is the case that the amount of the damage amount per year determines the amount of the premiums: if the damages increase, the premiums increase, the damages decrease, the premiums decrease. This pattern can be found in the banking industry, where the pattern looks like that in the case of positive expectations for the future (= low depreciation losses), interest rates have a tendency to decrease, while in economically difficult times (= high depreciation losses), bank interest rates have a tendency to increase, although from an economic theory point of view, just the opposite - namely, interest rate cuts - is considered necessary to "boost" the economy again.
Since banks now operate with the money issued by the Central Bank, there is no justification in itself for the fact that they receive an interest as an income element for money, but can only claim a risk premium that compensates for the default of loans. Then, for example, it is no longer justifiable for banks to charge a market interest rate for real estate financing, because the risk of loss default is largely eliminated by the collateral provided by the property and thus, from a risk point of view, a market interest rate is not justified. Perhaps one of the reasons for the broad-based campaign to declare banks as the "creators of money" is that it could turn out that charging a market interest rate will result in a non-performing income and their position as "benefactors" of society could be questioned. If people would understand that it is the central Bank from which the money comes, the popular reference to the "investors", who would have to be compensated for it, would also disappear. With money from the Central Bank, these claims are no more than lukewarm air.
All this means that money, understood as a medium of the social organization of production, is not a means to individually achieve a low-performing income, but to contribute to the sustainability of the provision of social services to ensure the survival of society over time. Once people have understood this, interest is a means to remove credit claims that are no longer faced by a productive project from the overall context of the debt relationships. By the way, the sole function of interest as risk compensation also prevents the accumulation of monetary assets, the disastrous effect of which was already clear to our ancestors thousands of years ago.
Money does not exist to service individual fortune but to secure the continuation of society over time. Unfortunately, this knowledge has been lost, but there is always the possibility to exhume it again.
Wow, what a comment! Bravo, Renée!
You've hit the nail on the head with your observation of the fundamental tension between (1) the long-term sustainability of society versus (2) the hoarding of resources for the glorification of individual egos.
In The Republic, Plato put it in terms of "pleonexia" (πλεονεξία), or wealth addiction, versus "dikē" (δίκη), or justice (rhymes with "Nike").
As you've observed, monetary policy can either serve egos individually, or society collectively. It seems to me that tension between these dual uses of the monetary system has animated all of history, which notably includes the ministry of Jesus. It reflects our on-going struggle to subjugate individual egos and awaken as a super-organism. Therein lies the connection between religion and finance.
Hi Nathan,
Thank you for the positive feedback. It is true that your comment about the "delusion of individuality" was the reason for my post. Thank you very much for that, especially because my descriptions are usually very overloaded with technical details that do not convey the ultimate message to the reader. But if the difference between external financing and financing for the sake of production is explained as the difference between ego and society, it really becomes clear what it is all about.
A small side note. You write: "Immortality comes from identifying as a progression of people instead of a single individual." That reminds me of a quote by Konrad Lorenz: "For natural reasons, humans cannot be loyal to an individual dog, but they can be loyal to their tribe. It is in the nature of nature that it values this more than the individual." An impressive coincidence. Another: "I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man: It is we."
Thank you again for this inspiration!
Wow. Those are some great quotes, Renée, that I'd not heard before. Thank you once again for chiming in!
Hi Nathan. I tried posting a response to your comment on the Webb article, but it didn't go through. Worried they connected my two addresses.
Well that seemed to work.
Yeah, science gets suck in the same sociological ruts as every other field.
When it's best to just observe, than beating the head against the wall.
Nathan,
Some links;
2008CChristov_WaveMotion_45_154_EvolutionWavePackets.pdf
http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Reiter_challange2.pdf
I typed it out and hope the second loads. The first kept downloading before I could copy and paste the address, but you can figure out how to retrieve it.
Redshift as multi spectrum packets and threshold theory.
Nathan,
Very interesting read.
Would you have taken this road of discovery, if it hadn't been for the debt? Stepping outside the box becomes necessary when the box breaks.
A thought on how to get outside the ego, as well as many of the trappings of this reality, is to consider the point I made about time in yesterday's posting.
That as mobile organisms this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is the present going past to future, when it's activity and change turning future to past.
So there is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
The energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence. Creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past.
The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise. With the circulation system as feedback in the middle.
Suggesting consciousness functions as an energy.
Science has the same problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that it can only be defined in terms of the forms it manifests.
Yet once you really just sit back and not project your own energy, but start to sense how others project themselves, it all does become a sentient light show.
Those "floaters" flitting across your vision are others connecting to your bubble. The classic heart shape is a floater, glowing red, with a line running through it, pulling it. Cupid's arrow.
They tend to be most evident driving, as everyone focuses on the space in front of them.
I remember as a child, laying on the porch and watching this ant, when it stopped, like it sensed something. Then I saw this tiny cone of awareness waving around with its antennae.
Given galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in, there is a lot to develop here and you may find these two factors and the feedback between them, really do start to explain the dynamics of reality.
First of all, John, I see that just became a paid subscriber to System Failure. Thank you sincerely for that!
Second of all, your conception of time is very interesting. Have you ever heard Alan Watts' old canard about this? I think you'd like it.
We imagine that the present is the result of the past. That's certainly my default. But Watts' idea was that thinking of the present as the result of the past is like thinking that a ship's wake is propelling the ship.
Time is a big piece of the System Failure puzzle, so I'm going to have to meditate on this matter. I think I'll start by going back and rereading your last post.
At any rate, thank you for these incredible comments, John. Cheers!
Late night thoughts on Alan's analogy;
The wake doesn't steer the boat, but it is residue and memory of the past consumed by the present.
The energy manifest in the fuel bunker is potential, the event of the ship is actual, the wake is both residual and the energy being distributed back into the environment, like the flap of the proverbial butterfly's wings.
So the energy is only presence, but goes past to future, because the patterns generated, the fuel, the state of the boat, the wake, are going future to past, like a wave rising and falling.
Nathan,
There are not many people out there willing to look too far under the surface, so I figured you deserve a boost and since I'm pretty much a hermit, a little cash will have to do.
Any ideas you want to run with, feel free.
If you get over to Medium, I mostly comment on others posts and try getting various balls rolling, though occasionally post articles.
One of the ones I cross posted to Substack is, The Webb is Cast.
Read that, then look up, "tiny red dots" at SciAm. They're seeing those galaxies outside the timeframe, but can't wrap their minds around anything outside the box.
I do remember that Alan Watts analogy.
There is a lot to be considered.
For one thing, the future is not pre-determined, because the act of determination occurs as the present.
The problem is that science and math tend to see their models as fundamental, rather than abstractions.
Epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our geocentric view, but the conclusions, crystalline spheres, were lousy physics.
Much of modern physics is currently tripping over the same fallacy.
An interesting person to look up is Carver Mead. He is a computer pioneer and having worked his whole life at the quantum level, is very heretical.
Have you heard of the Delayed Choice Experiment, John? I'm guessing you probably have because you wrote here "the act of determination occurs as the present".
Essentially, it's a cosmic double slit experiment. In a normal double slit experiment, electrons flow through one of two apertures, and measuring which hole an electrons are flowing through collapses an interference pattern on a photo-sensitive screen beyond.
In the Delayed Choice Experiment, photons from a distant light source that bend around an intervening object by gravitational lensing can be made to act either as a particle or as a wave, depending on how they're measured here on Earth. Conventional wisdom suggests that those photons should have made their "choice" millions of years ago, as light takes time to reach Earth. But it seems the way we observe those photons in the present affects their past choice, reversing the flow of causality as we normally understand it.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. Thank you for all these amazing comments, John!
There is a lot to cover on that. Unfortunately the links I could post are not on my phone.
Carver Mead did an interview at American Spectator, getting into how particles are really just compact waves. From other sources, it's called a loading or threshold theory. That the quantization is an artifact of the detection.
I think I covered it a little bit in the essay on the Webb, that one way light does redshift over distance, is as multi spectrum packets, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster. Which would mean they are sampling a wave front, not detecting discreet photons that traveled billions of light years. My email is brodix at EarthLink dot net, if you want some links.
I'm adding the Substack link too, because that allows me to read the entire piece:
https://johnmerryman.substack.com/p/the-webb-is-cast
Here are the links:
https://worrydream.com/refs/Mead_2001_-_Interview_(American_Spectator).html
https://medium.com/predict/the-webb-is-cast-72f2b8ab067d
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwsts-little-red-dots-offer-astronomers-the-universes-weirdest-puzzle/#:~:text=The%20infrared%20eyes%20of%20NASA's,odd%20and%20out%20of%20place.