Topic: Economic Devastation - page 14. (Read 504820 times)

If you know Gödel’s theorem, you know that all logical systems must rely on something outside the system. So according to Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, the Infidels cannot be correct. If the universe is logical, it has an outside cause.

I did note that he wrote "If the universe is logical..."  That might not be a good assumption.  It would also be hard to prove...

Order is more impossible to maintain over asymptotic time horizons because it requires synchrony (coordination) which eventually becomes gridlock.

Hopefully with a bitcoin can save the world economy from devastation. We all know, too much currency makes many problems in global trade, many countries that do not want to use another country's currency so that they use the strongest currencies.

Who needs God? Morality is a social construction

If morality is a social construction, then morality does not exist. Just because we call some things ‘good’ and others ‘evil’ doesn’t mean that good and evil refer to anything.
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If morality doesn’t exist for real, then neither can morality be a useful fiction. Something can only be useful (have extrinsic value) if the thing that it is useful for is actually valuable i.e., intrinsically valuable. If we say that the false belief in morality makes us happy and is therefore good, we are introducing a moral category again; the notion that anything that makes human beings happy is good and anything that makes us unhappy is bad. We arrive at the morally good and bad once again.

All people who think that morality is a social construction and is good/useful, have reintroduced moral realism; the notion that good and evil actually exist. This is a contradiction and therefore cannot be true. You cannot believe that morality is merely a social construction and in moral realism.

If you claim to believe that morality is a social construction, then you are a moral nihilist. All us adults know that Father Christmas doesn’t really exist and you’re effectively claiming that morality doesn’t either.

The Argument from Religion - A Transcendental Argument

Morality can’t be found from a scientific examination of nature. So if morality is not in nature it must be beyond nature – the supernatural.

Where does value come from? It’s not found in the world reduced to scientific facts. Nonetheless, it’s found in the world as we actually experience it. We find value in all sorts of things. We value our friendships, and hopefully at least some of our family members. We value certain books, films, projects, beautiful days, ‘nature,’ and music. So value exists. We experience it. A transcendental argument asks – what must the world be like for this experience to be possible? There must be more to the world than scientific facts. The value of the world that we discover must have its basis in something else.
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Morality is invisible to science because science cannot see value. Anything invisible to science must either not exist at all, or it must be nonphysical. Our name for the nonphysical aspects of reality is the spiritual, i.e., the divine, transcendent, God.
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There is remarkable agreement among those at the higher reaches of many world religions. High level Buddhists, Catholic monks, Kabbalists, Sufis, all describe ultimate reality in similar terms and much of what they say can be summed up in the cliché, ‘all is one.’

If all is one, then my treating you badly is really treating myself badly.
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God or Moral Nihilism

Your choices are God or moral nihilism. Social constructionism and Darwinian evolutionary theory can only allow you to say that we think and act like morality exists, not that morality does exist. Social construction and Darwinism certainly have nothing to say about the truth of morality. In fact, they suppose the opposite. In the first case, we just made it up, like Father Christmas. That’s called moral nihilism. The second case, Darwinians might try to say that morality is useful in promoting survival, but since they cannot establish that surviving has any intrinsic value, they cannot logically point to the extrinsic value of morality. Nothing has extrinsic value if nothing has intrinsic value and since the existence of intrinsic value is precisely what needs explaining in morality, Darwin and his followers have nothing interesting to say on the topic.

If you choose moral nihilism, just remember what you are choosing...If moral nihilism is true, then your life has no value and neither does anybody else’s.

The torturer will be right to start removing your fingers. Why? Because it’s fun and you can have nothing to say on the subject...The fact that you don’t want to die is only relevant if morality exists and morality requires another person to respect your wishes and desires. If you claim that your wishes and desires are nonetheless important, then you will be unable to say why my wishes and desires are not important too...we can go back to gassing the Jews, human sacrifice, and seeing how loud we can get torture victims to scream and any other psychotic things you can think of. If you must respect my wishes and desires, then you are behaving morally. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

CoinCube, I am becoming very pessimistic about finding any fundamental, universal truth about choices we can make.
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In 1931, the young mathematician Kurt Gödel made a landmark discovery, as powerful as anything Albert Einstein developed.

Gödel’s discovery not only applied to mathematics but literally all branches of science, logic and human knowledge. It has truly earth-shattering implications.

Oddly, few people know anything about it.

Allow me to tell you the story.

Mathematicians love proofs. They were hot and bothered for centuries, because they were unable to PROVE some of the things they knew were true.

So for example if you studied high school Geometry, you’ve done the exercises where you prove all kinds of things about triangles based on a list of theorems.

That high school geometry book is built on Euclid’s five postulates. Everyone knows the postulates are true, but in 2500 years nobody’s figured out a way to prove them.

Yes, it does seem perfectly reasonable that a line can be extended infinitely in both directions, but no one has been able to PROVE that. We can only demonstrate that they are a reasonable, and in fact necessary, set of 5 assumptions.

Towering mathematical geniuses were frustrated for 2000+ years because they couldn’t prove all their theorems. There were many things that were “obviously” true but nobody could figure out a way to prove them.

In the early 1900’s, however, a tremendous sense of optimism began to grow in mathematical circles. The most brilliant mathematicians in the world (like Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert and Ludwig Wittgenstein) were convinced that they were rapidly closing in on a final synthesis.

A unifying “Theory of Everything” that would finally nail down all the loose ends. Mathematics would be complete, bulletproof, airtight, triumphant.

In 1931 this young Austrian mathematician, Kurt Gödel, published a paper that once and for all PROVED that a single Theory Of Everything is actually impossible.

Gödel’s discovery was called “The Incompleteness Theorem.”

If you’ll give me just a few minutes, I’ll explain what it says, how Gödel discovered it, and what it means – in plain, simple English that anyone can understand.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem says:


You can draw a circle around all of the concepts in your high school geometry book. But they’re all built on Euclid’s 5 postulates which are clearly true but cannot be proven. Those 5 postulates are outside the book, outside the circle.

You can draw a circle around a bicycle but the existence of that bicycle relies on a factory that is outside that circle. The bicycle cannot explain itself.

Gödel proved that there are ALWAYS more things that are true than you can prove. Any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever came up with will always rest on at least a few unprovable assumptions.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies not just to math, but to everything that is subject to the laws of logic. Incompleteness is true in math; it’s equally true in science or language or philosophy.

And: If the universe is mathematical and logical, Incompleteness also applies to the universe.

Gödel created his proof by starting with “The Liar’s Paradox” — which is the statement


“I am lying” is self-contradictory, since if it’s true, I’m not a liar, and it’s false; and if it’s false, I am a liar, so it’s true.

So Gödel, in one of the most ingenious moves in the history of math, converted the Liar’s Paradox into a mathematical formula. He proved that any statement requires an external observer.

No statement alone can completely prove itself true.

His Incompleteness Theorem was a devastating blow to the “positivism” of the time. Gödel proved his theorem in black and white and nobody could argue with his logic.

Yet some of his fellow mathematicians went to their graves in denial, believing that somehow or another Gödel must surely be wrong.

He wasn’t wrong. It was really true. There are more things than are true than you can prove.

A “theory of everything” – whether in math, or physics, or philosophy – will never be found. Because it is impossible.

OK, so what does this really mean? Why is this super-important, and not just an interesting geek factoid?

Here’s what it means:

• Faith and Reason are not enemies. In fact, the exact opposite is true! One is absolutely necessary for the other to exist. All reasoning ultimately traces back to faith in something that you cannot prove.
• All closed systems depend on something outside the system.
• You can always draw a bigger circle but there will still be something outside the circle.

• Reasoning inward from a larger circle to a smaller circle is “deductive reasoning.”

Example of a deductive reasoning:
1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore Socrates is mortal

• Reasoning outward from a smaller circle to a larger circle is “inductive reasoning.”

Examples of inductive reasoning:
1. All the men I know are mortal
2. Therefore all men are mortal

1. When I let go of objects, they fall
2. Therefore there is a law of gravity that governs falling objects

Notice than when you move from the smaller circle to the larger circle, you have to make assumptions that you cannot 100% prove.

For example you cannot PROVE gravity will always be consistent at all times. You can only observe that it’s consistently true every time. You cannot prove that the universe is rational. You can only observe that mathematical formulas like E=MC^2 do seem to perfectly describe what the universe does.

Nearly all scientific laws are based on inductive reasoning. These laws rest on an assumption that the universe is logical and based on fixed discoverable laws.

You cannot PROVE this. (You can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow morning either.) You literally have to take it on faith. In fact most people don’t know that outside the science circle is a philosophy circle. Science is based on philosophical assumptions that you cannot scientifically prove. Actually, the scientific method cannot prove, it can only infer.

(Science originally came from the idea that God made an orderly universe which obeys fixed, discoverable laws.)

Now please consider what happens when we draw the biggest circle possibly can – around the whole universe. (If there are multiple universes, we’re drawing a circle around all of them too):

• There has to be something outside that circle. Something which we have to assume but cannot prove
• The universe as we know it is finite – finite matter, finite energy, finite space and 13.7 billion years time
• The universe is mathematical. Any physical system subjected to measurement performs arithmetic. (You don’t need to know math to do addition – you can use an abacus instead and it will give you the right answer every time.)
• The universe (all matter, energy, space and time) cannot explain itself
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is boundless. By definition it is not possible to draw a circle around it.
• If we draw a circle around all matter, energy, space and time and apply Gödel’s theorem, then we know what is outside that circle is not matter, is not energy, is not space and is not time. It’s immaterial.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is not a system – i.e. is not an assemblage of parts. Otherwise we could draw a circle around them. The thing outside the biggest circle is indivisible.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is an uncaused cause, because you can always draw a circle around an effect.

• In the history of the universe we also see the introduction of information, some 3.5 billion years ago. It came in the form of the Genetic code, which is symbolic and immaterial.
• The information appears to have come from the outside, since information is not known to be an inherent property of matter, energy, space or time
• All codes we know the origin of are designed by conscious beings.
• Therefore whatever is outside the largest circle is a conscious being.

My book Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design explores the Origin of Information question in depth.

When we add information to the equation, we conclude that not only is the thing outside the biggest circle infinite and immaterial, it is also conscious.

Isn’t it interesting how all these things sound suspiciously similar to how theologians have described God for thousands of years?

So it’s hardly surprising that 80-90% of the people in the world believe in some concept of God. Yes, it’s intuitive to most folks. But Gödel’s theorem indicates it’s also supremely logical. In fact it’s the only position one can take and stay in the realm of reason and logic.

The person who proudly proclaims, “You’re a man of faith, but I’m a man of science” doesn’t understand the roots of science or the nature of knowledge!

Interesting aside…

If you visit the world’s largest atheist website, Infidels, on the home page you will find the following statement:


If you know Gödel’s theorem, you know that all logical systems must rely on something outside the system. So according to Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, the Infidels cannot be correct. If the universe is logical, it has an outside cause.

Thus atheism violates the laws of reason and logic.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem definitively proves that science can never fill its own gaps. We have no choice but to look outside of science for answers.

The Incompleteness of the universe isn’t proof that God exists. But… it IS proof that in order to construct a rational, scientific model of the universe, belief in God is not just 100% logical… it’s necessary.

Euclid’s 5 postulates aren’t formally provable and God is not formally provable either. But… just as you cannot build a coherent system of geometry without Euclid’s 5 postulates, neither can you build a coherent description of the universe without a First Cause and a Source of order.

Thus faith and science are not enemies, but allies. It’s been true for hundreds of years, but in 1931 this skinny young Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved it.

No time in the history of mankind has faith in God been more reasonable, more logical, or more thoroughly supported by science and mathematics.

The inertia of opportunity costs are not insurmountable not even for "Leftist". When I started posting in the forum I was a liberal agnostic. I had not only voted for Obama in 2008 I actually donated a fair amount of money to his campaign. I viewed religious people as kind and well meaning but mostly as simpletons. I viewed collectivism as a definite good. Now I am a Trump voter who views collectivism as inherently dangerous and am spending my time writing posts on the merits of Ethical Monotheism.

If you had told me 4 years ago what my positions would be today I would have laughed it off as impossible. I was not "converted" or swept up in a movement and I am not a member of any religious group. The change was simply the result of discovering that when subject to the crucible of repeated debates (many with you) my prior conceptualisation had a faulty foundation.  

First of all, I want to explain why the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that energy must always disperse from a hot to a cold body, and not the reverse of a colder body giving up energy becoming colder and making the hot body hotter. This is because the equation for entropy of any system is maximized by having as many equiprobable possible states, i.e. the probability is very high that a hot body with its very highly probable collision of moving particles due to high kinetic energy will transfer some kinetic energy to the slower moving particles in the cold body because it maximizes the entropy of the combined system of hot and cold bodies together. But that is sort of a tautology. The point is that random events are unlikely to be able to keep a system highly ordered and concentrated, just as random twists on a Rubik's cube are unlikely to solve it. Since there can't exist any top-down omniscience in the universe, the probability of maintaining ordered systems trends towards zero on a large enough scale. This is why one can keep small things in order for a while, but large endeavors unravel more quickly. For the same reason, small things grow faster, such as a saplings grow to trees, but trees don't grow to the moon.

As if those who have a religion have any choice in the matter (and that includes yourself and myself). Sigh.

The inertia of society is not something that can be impacted with any activism or top-down organized education. Flies are attracted to honey. The natural economic opportunity costs determine which attitudes and ideas proliferate.

Meaning I think religion is just another artifact of the epoch, not a driver of the epoch. The Invisible Hand is in control.

The inertia of opportunity costs decides for us. Leftists can't convert because the opportunity cost is too high.

Religion and Metaphysics are relevant to the discussion if they play a significant role in increasing or decreasing freedom of choice which they do.

I realize you clowns can't comprehend the relevance of 1000s of years of repeating cyclical change, but any way I'll post this for those who have a functioning brain stem:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/bonds/bonds-climate-change/
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/nature/climate-change-history-the-fall-of-empires-come-when-warming-turns-of-cooling/

We can conclude that the governance system we get is fit to the technological and demographic economic realities.

It is really a mix of technology knowledge and the friction in the state transitions that is in the driver's seat.

Because mankind required collectivism to advance during those epochs, e.g. they primarily needed roads and roads require massive pooled capital. We simply did not have the technology knowledge for mankind to evolve decentralized at that time. Technology Knowledge is the driver.

Centralization exists because the technology for knowledge of individual empowerment and maximization of production is insufficient to overpower the benefits of the centralization.

Many more revolutions have been silent technology knowledge ones. We are experiencing one now with social media the victory of Durterte in Philippines and Trump in the USA in defiance of the elite's mass media.

Seriously CoinCube, how can you with a straight face tell me these leftists don't want to be culled:

Changes in the ideas/attitudes in the noosphere could not overcome the physical realities regardless, and were instead caused by the natural realities.

It is just the entropic force, nothing religious or metaphysical is required.

You are trying to misblame centralization when it is just an artifact of this natural development process that mankind is undergoing.

That centralization overshoots is irrelevant. Yes it does. So what.

You have your causality incorrectly transposed.

The economics of entropy depict the process by which the entrepreneur translates his idea into a practical form from the realms of imaginative creation. In those visionary realms, entropy is essentially infinite and unconstrained, and thus irrelevant to economic models. But to make the imagined practical, the entrepreneur must make specific choices among existing resources and strategic possibilities. Entropy here signifies his freedom of choice.

And you are too dumb to see the flaws in that document.

Lol, attributing the greater longevity in Japan versus USA to health care when the Japanese eat more fish and vegetables and the Americans eat more McFatUpSize, HighFrustoseCornSyrupFrankenFoods, and TripleCheeseNitratedMeatOverloadPizza.

I won't even bother to dispel the rest of the IMF's obfuscations.

You 'tards love your slave masters.

The rationing is real. Ask people who have tried to get surgery in the socialized health care systems. And it will get worse.

Eventually it will reach Hilter's solution of culling the herd of everyone with a preexisting health condition.

Mark my word. I am going to laughing you 'tards as you cull yourselves yet again.

As if he entirely missed the fact that 50 years is as relevant to climate as a grain of sand on the beach is relevant to the tides.

But please don't bother to wake them up from their leftist destiny. They really do want to cull themselves.

How can I have a discussion with idiots. Impossible. It is as possible as talking with a brick wall, because neither (the idiots nor the brick wall) can comprehend what is being conveyed.

And yes I am talking about all of you proponents who have posted in this thread. You guys are really dumb. Enjoy.

It is quite easy (i.e. blatantly obvious) to understand how leftists (aka the mindless, violent, mob) destroy themselves:

BOASTFUL IGNORANCE

We tried to warn you 10 years ago and you were so boastfully condescending. Merkel opened the floodgates for the RAPEFUGEES and you still assert your boastful ignorance. Analogous to the lurch from Socialist-Communist Wiemar Republic the socialist-fascist  Nazis, you fools will do another megadeath and then blame it on a pyschopath, never understanding your own culpability. Which will enable you to do it all over again. Megadeath over and over. Love you guys. It is better comedy than watching the circus.


Thanks for confirming you haven't even read my posts carefully and/or are incapable of comprehending them. But of course if you weren't so dumb, then you wouldn't be a leftist, so it is quite expected. Continue as you will.

I disagree with some of your economic analysis above. Human life may have been valued less than the value of the food they needed to sustain them but this was not due to division-of-labor issues but due to excesses of centralized control. Let’s look at the economies of various ancient societies specifically Egypt, Rome, and Medieval Europe from the perspective of top-down control.

The inevitable transitory trajectory of all top-down imposed order is towards excess centralization. While some limitations on freedom are necessary especially in a population that acts without moral restraint the Iron Law results leads to recurrent over concentrations of centralization. These prevent or at least slow knowledge formation. This process is a constant in all historic and current civilizations.
In ancient Egypt near absolute centralization of power under Pharaoh a “god” was achieved. The proper role of others in society was that of slave to Pharaoh. Exodus tells us that the Egyptians monitored the slaves and culled them if they grew too numerous ordering the deaths of baby boys at birth. This horrific policy is entirely rational one if one wishes to maintain absolute authority over an enslaved people. The Iron law in this case demands culling.

In Roman times the rapid expansion of the empire led to the acquisition of huge numbers of slaves. This oppression greatly accelerated the centralization of the Roman government leading to the eventual fall of the cessation of Rome as a Republic.  

In all cases the system of economics was in direct conflict with human freedom, however, the reason for this was not a lack of technology but the excessive centralization of top-down control. Increasing top-down control interferes with the maximization of division-of-labor thus societal progress to date has always required revolution sometimes violent sometimes not to reduce centralization to more optimal levels.

Yet despite the “Iron Law” freedom continues to advance. The masses at least in the west have gone from slavery, to serfdom, to a partial freedom. Thus there must be a force that overcoming the Iron Law.  You have called this the “entropic force” and referred to it abstractly as increasing degrees of freedom but this is an incomplete explanation for increasing freedom is not a given. See my post below.

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron-5.html
The leftism and socialism we have now is because most people are not ready for the Knowledge Age and thus they must first cull themselves, to make way for those of us who are ready to move forward to greater freedom and maximization of the division-of-labor.

I don't have free time to fully expound on this at this time.
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We don't need a God to tell us murder is wrong. When every human becomes unsubstitutable, we will all know that killing a productive member of society is a loss. There will be outrage and payback for those who murder.
God and moralism seems to be an outdated tool to keep the uneducated masses hypnotized and enslaved into a set of rules which retained cohesiveness for the family unit which was required during these prior epochs.
I think you have noted that soon reproduction can become entirely artificial.
I fear the moralism, God, and family are becoming antiquated.
I have more thinking and writing to do on this when I have more time to really dig in deep.

Nature knows nothing of good and evil. In nature there is one rule—survival of the fittest. There is no right, only might. If a creature is weak, kill it. Only human beings could have moral rules such as, "If it is weak, protect it." Only human beings can feel themselves ethically obligated to strangers.

Thus, nature worship is very dangerous. When people idolize nature, they can easily arrive at the ethics of Nazism. It was the law of nature that Adolf Hitler sought to emulate—the strong shall conquer the weak. Nazism and other ideologies that are hostile to ethical monotheism and venerate nature are very tempting. Nature allows you to act naturally, i.e., do only what you want you to do, without moral restraints; God does not. Nature lets you act naturally - and it is as natural to kill, rape, and enslave as it is to love.

In light of all this, it is alarming that many people today virtually venerate nature. It can only have terrible moral ramifications.
One of the vital elements in the ethical monotheist revolution was its repudiation of nature as god. The evolution of civilization and morality have depended in large part on desanctifying nature.

Civilizations that equated gods with nature—a characteristic of all primitive societies—or that worshipped nature did not evolve.
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One of ethical monotheism's greatest battles today is against the increasing deification of nature, movements that are generally led (as were most radical ideologies) by well educated, secularized individuals.

Society has organized as required by the economics and level of technology of the epoch. Moralism appears to be just one of the ways society has coped with a lack of degrees-of-freedom between the actors in the system (i.e. the people in the society). Moralism doesn't appear to be a end all solution, but rather just another an ephemeral bandaid akin to monarchy or other forms of social organization that were fit to the era.

I want you to think very deeply about how the (maximization of the) division-of-labor plays into this equation.
For example, in the Middle Ages there was an over supply of substitutable labor. Thus we required a Dark feudal age, because humans were worth less (in labor) than the value of the food they needed to consume. It required a plague to wipeout more than half of the population and advances in agricultural technology which lead to abundances which enabled the division-of-labor to progress so that humans could be worth more than the value of the food they consumed.

Before that epoch, the Romans financed with conquest the advance of a road network and other basic technological advances. This facilitated trade of goods and services which lead to greater prosperity. But then model was lacking of sufficient diversification away from the conquest financing model, so then the armies turned back and ransacked Rome in order to get paid the pensions and salaries promised to them.

Both agriculture and industry compete on massive economies-of-scale which drive down profit margins and so thus require insurance against bad seasons and changing consumer demand. These inflexible paradigms had very low degrees-of-freedom and thus required societies to organize in very rigid structures which could charge the risk of loss to the collective and keep labor consistent, substitutable, and cheap. You see the system of economics was in direct conflict with human freedom.

Power always seeks centralization. Thus the tendency of both of the dictatorship and the republic will be towards ever increasing centralization restricting freedom beyond that what is necessary and hobbling knowledge formation.

The crisis was caused by the widespread expansion of slavery undermining the ability of the middle class to productively work small farms or find gainful employment essentially forcing them into the ancient equivalent of welfare. This led to the first instance of violence over compromise in Roman politics.

peasants were the very bottom rung of medieval society, they were under the harsh authority of just about every other rung of society.  They had to work the land of the Lord who owned it and then pay rent for working and living on that land as well.  Peasants were required to swear an oath of allegiance to their Lord and to violate that Lord would bring harsh if not fatal punishments.  To fulfill that oath, peasants had to do just about every kind if difficult manual labor imaginable including plowing the fields, planting and caring for crops, harvesting corn and other produce, storing it in barns and cutting and storing wood for the winter for themselves and the Lords who owned the land they lived on.

The level that those in power exploited the peasant class during medieval times was truly appalling.  In addition to coping with staggering poverty, peasants had to pay stiff taxes to their Lord and to the church in the form of the “tithe”.  Often peasants had no money for their tithes so they paid them in the form of the produce they grew on the land they rented from their Lords.  The Catholic Church realized such huge returns on the tithes from the peasant class that they had to build massive barns to hold all of the product that the peasants paid in. Daily life for peasants was a constant struggle for the basics of health, water and comfort.  

What country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.  (Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 Nov. 1787)

The most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes—governments, monopolies, regulators, elite institutions, all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.

Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information itself is best defined as surprise: by what we cannot predict rather than by what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery. The economy grows not by manipulating greed and fear through bribes and punishments but by accumulating surprising knowledge through the conduct of the falsifiable experiments of free enterprises. Crucial to this learning process is the possibility of failure and bankruptcy. In this model, wealth is defined as knowledge, and growth is defined as learning.

Because the system is based more on ideas than on incentives, it is not a process changeable only over generations of Sisysphean effort. An economy is a noosphere (a mind-based system) and it can revive as fast as minds and policies can change.

That new economics—the information theory of capitalism—is already at work in disguise. Concealed behind an elaborate mathematical apparatus, sequestered by its creators in what is called information technology, the new theory drives the most powerful machines and networks of the era. Information theory treats human creations or communications as transmissions through a channel, whether a wire or the world, in the face of the power of noise, and gauges the outcomes by their news or surprise, defined as “entropy” and consummated as knowledge. Now it is ready to come out into the open and to transform economics as it has already transformed the world economy itself.

All information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. This is the fundamental axiom of information theory. Information is the change between what we knew before the transmission and what we know after it.

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as crucial elements of an environment for prosperity. Smith was right: An arena of disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise would drown the feats of creation that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed “informative disorder.”

Shannon defined information in terms of digital bits and measured it by the concept of information entropy: unexpected or surprising bits...Shannon’s entropy is governed by a logarithmic equation nearly identical to the thermodynamic equation of Rudolf Clausius that describes physical entropy. But the parallels between the two entropies conceal several pitfalls that have ensnared many. Physical entropy is maximized when all the molecules in a physical system are at an equal temperature (and thus cannot yield any more energy). Shannon entropy is maximized when all the bits in a message are equally improbable (and thus cannot be further compressed without loss of
information). These two identical equations point to a deeper affinity that MIT physicist Seth Lloyd identifies as the foundation of all material reality—at the beginning was the entropic bit.
...
The accomplishment of Information Theory was to create a rigorous mathematical discipline for the definition and measurement of the information in the message sent down the channel. Shannon entropy or surprisal defines and quantifies the information in a message. In close similarity with physical entropy, information entropy is always a positive number measured by minus the base two logarithm of its probability. Information in Shannon’s scheme is quantified in terms of a probability because Shannon interpreted the message as a selection or choice from a limited alphabet. Entropy is thus a measure of freedom of choice. In the simplest case of maximum entropy of equally probable elements, the uncertainty is merely the inverse of the number of elements or symbols.
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Linking innovation, surprise, and profit, learning and growth, Shannon entropy stands at the heart of the economics of information theory. Signaling the arrival of an invention or disruptive innovation is first its surprisal, then its yield beyond the interest rate—its profit, a further form of Shannon entropy. As a new item is absorbed by the market, however, its entropy declines until its margins converge with prevailing risk adjusted interest rates. The entrepreneur must move on to new surprises. The economics of entropy depict the process by which the entrepreneur translates his idea into a practical form from the realms of imaginative creation. In those visionary realms, entropy is essentially infinite and unconstrained, and thus irrelevant to economic models. But to make the imagined practical, the entrepreneur must make specific choices among existing resources and strategic possibilities. Entropy here signifies his freedom of choice.

As Shannon understood, the creation process itself escapes every logical and mathematical system. It springs not from secure knowledge but from falsifiable tests of commercial hypotheses. It is not an expression of past knowledge but of the fertility of consciousness, will, discipline, imagination, and art.