Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 108. (Read 288375 times)

Cool. I'll wait and I hope to be answered there.

I'm cool with everything but the bold parts:


Will I be given access to anything I want too or just what my body needs to survive?
Who is going to give me free access to those resources?


I don't think so. What free market? Do we live in a free market?
You think on money as a form of coercion and that's why you think it will just disappear, but money doesn't have to be necessarily coercing.
As I told you before, I don't completely agree with the austrian view. I think the structure of most moneys is flawed. Even sound money like gold or bitcoin. Their scarcity and everlastingness lead to interest, the real flaw of capitalism and not the free market.
I guess asking you about Gesell is too much. Although if you read long texts with the ease you refer them, you should definitely read his book. If you're interested in a critique of capitalism from a free market perspective, there's plenty of links in the post linked from my sign.
Gesell attacked money's everlastingness but you can also defeat interest with non-scarce moneys such as LETS or Ripple.
Maybe TZM can mention bitcoin or ripple as less coercive or transitory moneys to substitute the current ones before the coming extinction of money.

I address both issues on the video I'm editing right now, so the proper answer will come with that.

Generally speaking, the movement doesn't "reject" anything: you have to understand that this is not a coercive process. Nothing is outlawed, nor imposed, but we work in order to reduce the conditions that generate negative retroactions. So, trade would be acceptable in and RBE, it just wouldn't make much sense because you'll be given access to what you need. Still, if you want to trade, no problem, go ahead and do it.

What I think is missing is the central point of the whole RBE argument: we need to find a way to live sustainably on the planet in a peaceful, non coercive manner. The free market clearly fails in such regards, as do the socialists regimes, so there is a need for different system. We're trying to figure out the best way to do it with an open discussion, that's all.

So you agree with my definition of freedom?
Can you answer to this post?
LightRider's answers didn't told me much.

I agree, in fact I didn't say that. I presented the evidence of the neurological studies, and Hawking has read them too, that's why he said so in his book. I cited Hawking because maybe he has a better grasp of quantum mechanics than, say, our lovely Findeton. 

No, he says:

The introduction of stochasticism would appear to eliminate determinism. However there are three additional points that need to be addressed here. The first point is that, at least in some instances, what at first glance may appear to be stochastic might simply reflect microenvironmental differences and may not be the direct consequence of some inherent stochastic property of atomic particles. The second point is that some physicists, for example ’t Hooft (14), do not necessarily accept the apparent unpredictability associated with the quantum mechanical view of matter (It was concern about this unpredictability that prompted Einstein to offer the viewpoint that “God does not play dice”). Finally, even if the properties of matter are confirmed to be inherently stochastic, although this may remove the bugbear of determinism, it would do little to support the notion of free will: I cannot be held responsible for my genes and my environment; similarly, I can hardly be held responsible for any stochastic process that may influence my behavior!

In any case, I agree with jtimon

Going back to your point, I still don't see what your problems is. I asked you to list the logical fallacies behind an RBE, I answered them, and all you could say was that "science can't tell you what to choose between nuclear and solar energy".

Of course, if you know how the application of the scientific method for social concern work, you'll soon find out that it does, I am preparing a video to explain how that works if you are unfamiliar with the process.

Anything else substantial, beside the usual "you're a cult, your a cult! YOUR A CULT, damnit!"? 

I don't like the concept of free will because I do believe in determinism. But saying that determinism is a scientific fact because Hawking said so is a fallacy. Also I don't like Hawking.

The absence of free will does not legitimate coercion (the opposite of freedom as defined by some people) so there's no point in finding out in this thread if there's free will or not. I like that definition of freedom. If you don't like it, maybe we can find one we all like, but if you propose "It's just a word that people use when they try to control others" I will prefer to look for another word that you allow me to use to express "the absence of coercion by other individuals". No free will involved in that definition.

Listen, even Cashmore says that "the only “wild card” that allows any room for maneuvering outside of genetics and one’s environment is the inherent uncertainty of the physical properties of matter". So even him has to accept my reasoning.

And as I said before, it doesn't matter. Free will exists, as a potent illusion or as a fact, but it exists.

Listen, I try to be reasonable with you. I read what you write and answer accordingly, providing scientific papers that you can check and read.

However, if you keep writing whatever you believe without ever checking the scientific literature, you will never learn anything new, and the discussion will never move forward. If you don't have access to the papers, you can always check in your local library or university and download them for free.

I know it's easier to just read the first 5 lines of a post or keep repeating over and over like a broken record what you might have have studies at college for an exam or two, but if you want to argue about something you need to have an open mind, read the scientific literature and check it for yourself.

It looks like it's a great book indeed.


We might be a bag of chemicals, but chemical reactions obey Heisenberg uncertainy principle. I mean, you cannot predict the behaviour of a bacteria in the far future just like you cannot predict the behaviour of anything in the far future because we don't know with infinite precision the position and velocity of anything.

In the end we don't know if free will exists because we just don't know the inner works of the tiniest particles.

In any case, the subject of free will came up not just as a ontological argument, but talking about morality and how that affects our actions.

The notion of free will is irrelevant when talking about "moral actions", I invite you to read Harris' post as well, and a bit more carefully than how you read the quantum mechanical implications of free will.

The two things are not correlated. Judging from the rapidity of your answer, I take it you didn't bother to read the scientific papers I gave you.

Cashmore explains why it is so, and why free will is an illusion. Read it, you might learn something.

Read the Black Swan yet? Great book (has nothing to do with the movie)
Some things are simply beyond our understanding and the things we will never understand infinitely outnumber all the things we will ever know squared. We don't even know what we might or might not be able to understand.

I don't care what Hawking BELIEVES, just what he scientifically discovers. Do we live in a deterministic and causal world or not?  We don't know because of Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Yes we have a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles regardless of whether or not free will exists, that's the whole point: what we have is a probabilistic approach to reality; we don't know the inner works of particles, we just know probability. So still we don't know if our world is deterministic and causal and therefore we don't know whether fate or free will (under the actual definition) exists.

Of course. If free will is just an illusion, it's the greatest and strongest illusion ever. I mean, freedom will anyways exist, it will just change it's definition.

I guess a team of high qualified world psychologists must decide what we all should want then. Very scary. Not only it would be an attack against freedom but also against cultural diversity.
Somebody talked about evolution. Species evolve with diversity and the same happens with human culture.


I think we should defend freedom even if there's no free will, even if someones proves the Heisenberg principle to be wrong.

The laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles regardless of whether or not free will exists. Physicist Steven Hawking supports this idea in his book, The Grand Design. He says that humans are therefore complicated biological machines. Hawking adds that although our behavior is impossible to predict perfectly in practice, "free will is just an illusion."

So, before you dispense cheap "knowledge" about your interpretation of quantum mechanics and tell us what you believe, you might want to check the scientific evidence and the published literature.

Thanks to the advancements of neuroscience, it has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making process at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain (in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential caused and preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet's W time.

Libet found that the unconscious brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to subjects' movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move.

Even in biology it is a very well known and established fact. Since there is no scientific evidence for the existence of free will, there is in fact, evidence that there is no such a thing, believing in it is a bit like believing in Santa Claus or the Spaghetti Monster. You are "free" do to do, but it doesn't make it real.

When Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania Anthony Cashmore claims that the concept of free will is an illusion, he's not breaking any new ground. At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how humans seem to have the ability to make their own personal decisions in a manner lacking any causal component other than their desire to "will" something.

In a recent study, Cashmore has argued that a belief in free will is akin to religious beliefs, since neither complies with the laws of the physical world. One of the basic premises of biology and biochemistry is that biological systems are nothing more than a bag of chemicals that obey chemical and physical laws. Generally, we have no problem with the “bag of chemicals” notion when it comes to bacteria, plants, and similar entities. So why is it so difficult to say the same about humans or other “higher level” species, when we’re all governed by the same laws?

More information: Anthony R. Cashmore. “The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Doi:10.1073/pnas.0915161107 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0915161107

The notion that if people know that they don't have free will will act irresponsibly is pure idiocy. You can have a morality even without any free will at all (http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/morality-without-free-will/)

Many people seem to believe that morality depends for its existence on a metaphysical quantity called “free will.” This conviction is occasionally expressed—often with great impatience, smugness, or piety—with the words, “ought implies can.” Like much else in philosophy that is too easily remembered (e.g. “you can’t get an ought from an is.”), this phrase has become an impediment to clear thinking.

In fact, the concept of free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically. There is simply no description of mental and physical causation that allows for this freedom that we habitually claim for ourselves and ascribe to others. Understanding this would alter our view of morality in some respects, but it wouldn’t destroy the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil.
The following post has been adapted from my discussion of this topic in The Moral Landscape (pp. 102-110):
****

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment. While we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. In fact, by merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your internal states and motivations than you are. And yet most of us still feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will—thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view—and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t—and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.

There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, of course, but it does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). The former are associated with felt intentions (desires, goals, expectations, etc.) while the latter are not. All of the conventional distinctions we like to make between degrees of intent—from the bizarre neurological complaint of alien hand syndrome to the premeditated actions of a sniper—can be maintained: for they simply describe what else was arising in the mind at the time an action occurred. A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, while an involuntary action isn’t. Where our intentions themselves come from, however, and what determines their character in every instant, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will arises from a failure to appreciate this fact: we do not know what we will intend to do until the intention itself arises. To see this is to realize that you are not the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. This insight does not make social and political freedom any less important, however. The freedom to do what one intends, and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was.

While all of this can sound very abstract, it is important to realize that the question of free will is no mere curio of philosophy seminars. A belief in free will underwrites both the religious notion of “sin” and our enduring commitment to retributive justice. The Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior in question.
The great worry is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of human behavior seems to erode the notion of moral responsibility. If we view people as neuronal weather patterns, how can we coherently speak about morality? And if we remain committed to seeing people as people, some who can be reasoned with and some who cannot, it seems that we must find some notion of personal responsibility that fits the facts.

Happily, we can. What does it really mean to take responsibility for an action? For instance, yesterday I went to the market; as it turns out, I was fully clothed, did not steal anything, and did not buy anchovies. To say that I was responsible for my behavior is simply to say that what I did was sufficiently in keeping with my thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and desires to be considered an extension of them. If, on the other hand, I had found myself standing in the market naked, intent upon stealing as many tins of anchovies as I could carry, this behavior would be totally out of character; I would feel that I was not in my right mind, or that I was otherwise not responsible for my actions. Judgments of responsibility, therefore, depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect.

Consider the following examples of human violence:

• A four-year-old boy was playing with his father’s gun and killed a young woman. The gun had been kept loaded and unsecured in a dresser drawer.
• A twelve-year-old boy, who had been the victim of continuous physical and emotional abuse, took his father’s gun and intentionally shot and killed a young woman because she was teasing him.
• A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been the victim of continuous abuse as a child, intentionally shot and killed his girlfriend because she left him for another man.
• A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.”
• A twenty-five-year-old man, who had been raised by wonderful parents and never abused, intentionally shot and killed a young woman he had never met “just for the fun of it.” An MRI of the man’s brain revealed a tumor the size of a golf ball in his medial prefrontal cortex (a region responsible for the control of emotion and behavioral impulses).

In each case a young woman has died, and in each case her death was the result of events arising in the brain of another human being. The degree of moral outrage we feel clearly depends on the background conditions described in each case. We suspect that a four-year-old child cannot truly intend to kill someone and that the intentions of a twelve-year-old do not run as deep as those of an adult. In both cases 1 and 2, we know that the brain of the killer has not fully matured and that all the responsibilities of personhood have not yet been conferred. The history of abuse and precipitating cause in example 3 seem to mitigate the man’s guilt: this was a crime of passion committed by a person who had himself suffered at the hands of others. In 4, we have no abuse, and the motive brands the perpetrator a psychopath. In 5, we appear to have the same psychopathic behavior and motive, but a brain tumor somehow changes the moral calculus entirely: given its location, it seems to divest the killer of all responsibility. How can we make sense of these gradations of moral blame when brains and their background influences are, in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?

It seems to me that we need not have any illusions about a causal agent living within the human mind to condemn such a mind as unethical, negligent, or even evil, and therefore liable to occasion further harm. What we condemn in another person is the intention to do harm—and thus any condition or circumstance (e.g., accident, mental illness, youth) that makes it unlikely that a person could harbor such an intention would mitigate guilt, without any recourse to notions of free will. Likewise, degrees of guilt could be judged, as they are now, by reference to the facts of the case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed intentions with regard to the victim, etc. If a person’s actions seem to have been entirely out of character, this will influence our sense of the risk he now poses to others. If the accused appears unrepentant and anxious to kill again, we need entertain no notions of free will to consider him a danger to society.
Why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly blameworthy? Because consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our intentions become available to us. What we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc. If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then killing the king really reflects the sort of person you are.
While viewing human beings as forces of nature does not prevent us from thinking in terms of moral responsibility, it does call the logic of retribution into question. Clearly, we need to build prisons for people who are intent upon harming others. But if we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well. The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck—which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout life. Our system of justice should reflect our understanding that each of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.

Consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that every relevant change in the human brain can be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. The cure for psychopathy can be put directly into the food supply like vitamin D. Evil is now nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.

If we imagine that a cure for evil exists, we can see that our retributive impulse is ethically flawed. Consider, for instance, the prospect of withholding the cure for evil from a murderer as part of his punishment. Would this make any sense at all? What could it possibly mean to say that a person deserves to have this treatment withheld? What if the treatment had been available prior to his crime? Would he still be responsible for his actions? It seems far more likely that those who had been aware of his case would be indicted for negligence. Would it make any sense at all to deny surgery to the man in example 5 as a punishment if we knew the brain tumor was the proximate cause of his violence? Of course not. The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.

Despite our attachment to notions of free will, most us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity—and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics. Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. And yet one of the fears surrounding our progress in neuroscience is that this knowledge will dehumanize us.

Could thinking about the mind as the product of the physical brain diminish our compassion for one another? While it is reasonable to ask this question, it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. The moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. Many people do not feel the same way about regulating mood with antidepressants (for reasons that appear quite distinct from any concern about potential side effects). If this bias has diminished in recent years, it has been because of an increased appreciation of the brain as a physical organ.

However, the issue of retribution is a genuinely tricky one. In a fascinating article in The New Yorker, Jared Diamond writes of the high price we often pay for leaving vengeance to the state.  He compares the experience of his friend Daniel, a New Guinea highlander, who avenged the death of a paternal uncle and felt exquisite relief, to the tragic experience of his late father-in-law, who had the opportunity to kill the man who murdered his family during the Holocaust but opted instead to turn him over to the police. After spending only a year in jail, the killer was released, and Diamond’s father-in-law spent the last sixty years of his life “tormented by regret and guilt.” While there is much to be said against the vendetta culture of the New Guinea Highlands, it is clear that the practice of taking vengeance answers to a common psychological need.

We are deeply disposed to perceive people as the authors of their actions, to hold them responsible for the wrongs they do us, and to feel that these debts must be repaid. Often, the only compensation that seems appropriate requires that the perpetrator of a crime suffer or forfeit his life. It remains to be seen how the best system of justice would steward these impulses. Clearly, a full account of the causes of human behavior should undermine our natural response to injustice, at least to some degree. It seems doubtful, for instance, that Diamond’s father-in- law would have suffered the same pangs of unrequited vengeance if his family had been trampled by an elephant or laid low by cholera. Similarly, we can expect that his regret would have been significantly eased if he had learned that his family’s killer had lived a flawlessly moral life until a virus began ravaging his medial prefrontal cortex.

It may be that a sham form of retribution could still be moral, if it led people to behave far better than they otherwise would. Whether it is useful to emphasize the punishment of certain criminals—rather than their containment or rehabilitation—is a question for social and psychological science. But it seems clear that a desire for retribution, based upon the idea that each person is the free author of his thoughts and actions, rests on a cognitive and emotional illusion—and perpetuates a moral one.

Economic data over the last 300 years disagrees with you. We have had incredible growth in options, daily income, caloric intake, you name it. Individuals might do better when they take society into consideration but society definitely does better if it allows individual freedom. I am also against the current forms of intellectual property and I agree 100% that the current legal framework does little but protect established interests.

Pricing is however not part of the problem but part of the solution. If you do not allow both freedom and sound money then resources will be miss-allocated in most shocking ways.

I know you believe this but again, my question is the same. Will you force me or anyone else or approve of force against someone so that they co-operate with the plan if a version of the Venus project ever takes off or will all work be 100% voluntary?

"Scientists", of course.

(His explanation is that everything is objective and there's no need to or only one morality) = Sect.

That's why I repeat that the argument "there's no free will" must be scientifically sound (not just philosophically sound), which of course it isn't as I explained because of Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Yes, not scientifically, just philosophically. And I agree with him in that. But the fact that we live in a deterministic world (something that can never be proven right or wrong), doesn't mean that we don't have to pay attention to freedom when designing political/economic systems. The statement "there's no free will" is just not relevant to the conversation. My decisions depend on what I have lived in the past, but that doesn't mean someone else has the right to coerce me.
There's no rights. Agreed too. But there's no such thing as distorted values neither. There's not even "an optimal use of resources". There's just an optimal use of resources to attain certain goal.
Who is going to decide the goals of a RBE society?