Hegel 2

Hegel

1. Consciousness is subjective (criterion is for-itself)
2. But the criterion references the in-itself.

Contra Hegel, truth does not reference the agent of truth. Subjectivity as contingent, because the form within which it is is not given within the criteria of the in-itself. Truths for us reference the agent, for example those in social studies or quantum mechanics, but these are contingent facts which are not generalizable relations between truth and subject. The criterion for truth for consciousness is for-itself, but this does not free the truth for consciousness from the criteria of the truth in-itself.

Reply: Perspectivism vs subjectivity. Irreducible epistemic perspectivism. Subjectivity as the agent of perspectival truth. But contra that, truth is constituted by the underlying content within which something is framed. Truth lies behind the conscious framed perspectival truth. The act of framing is the act of standing outside of the truth to represent it to the mind, so it can be used, verified etc.

So what constitutes the criteria of for-itself is not for-itself per se. And what is the for-itself is framed truth which is not itself the truth to which it refers; therefore, learning is the reverse act of coverting the for-itself of framed truth into the in-itself of truth. In this way, the in-itself of truth can be repurposed into other contexts of the for-itself of framed truth.

In fact, the concept of knowledge rests on this distinction. Hence it cannot be that a fact can bridge a conceptual distinction.

Gift

Your gift to the world is to spread your love of a thing, to express and share it.

Note 95

Freedom is negation, a constant stepping outside of the frame of meaning of an activity. Thought is one of the products of freedom, of which the source is a nothingness which holds something before it, but which lies beyond it. The thought may be used to bring forward the dialectic, or to negate it. In bringing the dialectic forward, the source of freedom, the negation itself, is incorporated into the process and it's actuality.

Hegel 1

Hegel's task is the reconciliation of substance and subject, and being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Teleology is the thread through which the for-itself overcomes its necessary subjectivity and unites with the in-itself by being contained within the moments of the in-itself. This applies to objects, as well as the reflexive individual.

But by providing an account of truth as an event, he answers not the question of what is truth, but of what truth is. This is properly the realm of meta-history, or science, not philosophy.

***
In existence, the field of othering, which is the field in which something is said to exist, is itself created by the subject identifying itself as content, that is to say, self-identical determinateness.

***
There are two kinds of negation: internal self-othering and external negation.

***
Concept incorporating Being, and Being incorporating Concept, in a logical necessity, as the world. In incorporating the specific content of the world into forms of knowledge, the Notion is grasped.

Two World Trends

Two world trends: Convergence and multipolarity

Materialism drives industrialisation, which drives education, which drives value convergence. Every country is now subordinate to the global commons because of this value convergence within their electorates. States which do not follow this necessity eventually become irrelevant to the global order. Trade and Technology-driven power necessitates the primacy of the influence of this developmental dynamic. Convergence also implies that the technological gap between emerging and advanced economies will narrow in the long run.

Multipolarity is driven by the desire of emerging countries to free-ride on the developed countries for global public good provision until the latter can no longer afford them. World leadership will then evolve into multipolarity and regionalism as US cost-benefit calculation tilts in favour of self-interest, and its position subsides, without equivalent replacements. Strategic allocation of resources by the US would matter, but the ability of the polity to do so is in doubt. Perhaps some form of fee for safety and protection will be provided, as the US commercialises it's military advantage to serve as global policeman.

Note 94

The transcendence of space is possible if you understand that we are information, not things. Perception is just a process in which information is being used to interpret other information. Experience is determined by the way you perceive and interpret information, by the ways in which information interacts with other information.

Note 93

One of the most important issues in applied social science is understanding the correct level of analysis. Academics tend to speak in dangerously misleading generalities. This means that what they do is tangentially useful to the real world. The practitioner's job is to connect the many tangents within the current context. It is about identifying the appropriate level of analysis to the situation, and weighing the factors. This is an exercise in judgement, which is the ability to piece together key facts in a roughly right way in the presence of incomplete information.

Note 92

As the productivity of production grows while the productivity of consumption remains stagnant, and working hours remain fixed, demand lags production, and deflation ensues.

So what we need as a society is a flexible work schedule. Unemployment is an ineffective adjustment mechanism that occurs due the fundamental inability of society to develop work processes and structures that work around employment frictions. That is the task that economists, management scientist and unions have failed to set themselves. Adapting the efficiencies promoted by the gig economy while preventing the downsides is a useful step forward that policymakers at present can pursue.

Note 91

If you feel naked, weak and exposed in the shifting sea of men and ideas, that is exactly where you should be, not the dull comforting conformity of a cog in a machine.

Note 90

It is the specific characteristic of human development that negative freedom co-evolves with positive freedom. Negative freedom enables positive freedom to develop, which creates transcendence of a greater set of conditions, generating greater negative freedoms and more positive ones, and so on. More specifically, this happens not just in the physical dimension, but in the mental realm of ideas. So one could imagine a new utopia of transcendence through awareness- a radical incorporation of consciousness into the hard facts of life.

The strange miracle of existence

The reason why people feel lost is that they are looking for meaning in life which doesn't exist.

Life is like a spinning top; let it go round. When it drops, you wouldn't even know it was possible.

How do we enjoy life, when we have pressed ourselves into so many trellises of it, and are trapped in the infinite munificence of this maze?

Time is not real, it is just a way of identifying linearity in our perceptions of change. Because of this, we understand change, and know that life must end.

So we dance in this vast sea, mites in the universe, allotted our share of wonder, to witness the strange unknowable miracle of existence.

Bach

What does Bach teach us? To never give up on the soul.

Note 89

Consciousness is meta awareness - awareness of awareness. This is a kind, not a fact.

Solipsism

Solipsism is the form of mental constructs. The mind creates the world within which truths are assessed. Truths are only as real as the mind which creates them. Without mind, there is no truth. Mind constitutes the forms within which subcategories of truths are externalised and assessed. So what we mean by "God" is really an implicit recognition of the constitution of the forms of being by mind.

In other words, there has to be a coherence of principles within a framework for correspondence of objects to each other within that framework to be possible, which gives rise to what we might call "truth". A principle has to be applied within a field outside of itself in order to generate truth conditions.

In the case of existence, that framework is constituted by the coherence of being and mind, which is solipsistic in form. Hence mind and being are closely intertwined.

***
Subjective and objective are pairs within a frame. When there is no objectivity to compare subjectivity to, or when what we refer to as subjective is an experience and objective as an idea, then our talk becomes meaningless, for the question becomes whether there are objective experiences or subjective ideas.

Why Singapore feels/is sterile

Singapore is a top down country, where the state determines the forms that interactions between state and society, and state and economy takes. The state determines the parameters of society. Society does not know what it is; its functioning and purposes is interfered with by the state; there is an absence of the art of living; and without the ability to determine the forms that societal interactions take, there is no collective sense of the space of possibilities for the evolution of society. Without empowerment, there is no possibility of the development of institutional forms and principles for the energy of its people to latch onto, or to apply itself upon; no spirit; sterile.

Democracy is a continuous meta conversation, not just of the role of government, but the scope of government, within the space of interaction between state, society, and market mechanisms.

This is not to say that the system as it has evolved into its current state is not the best under the circumstances, although it is too early to tell ex ante what the best form is, involving a good deal of unknowables and luck. Good in such cases is so conditional as to be meaningless. The key question is if the combination of mechanisms and characteristics are optimising the energies and capabilities of a people at any point in time, as well as creating the incentives to do so across time, and if existing institutions are generating the balance between stability and discovery in the right ways. And if the essentially totalitarian system is antifragile.

There are 3 goals of government: law and order; empowerment of citizens to change state and society; risk pooling and intergenerational contracting.

***

Society consists of the building blocks of institutions and the ideologies that underlie them.

The life of a society is the embodiment of the continual philosophical conversations that it engages in to determine ends and means.

Sterility is the absence of philosophy due to the predetermination of values and actions and the institutions used to achieve them - namely, wealth creation.

That is the weakness of ossified societies - the predetermination, rather than the dynamic flux, of values.

In short, Singapore is a society of Last Men.

Note 88

The most important decisions are made not at the moment of conscious choice, but through the unintended effects of previous unconscious actions. Choice is just the surface culmination of these factors, which have been sedimented over time. Defining freedom through choice is hence empirically erroneous. Real freedom lies in the interstice of habits and tendencies.

Note 87

Existence is an infinite question. Laws govern laws. Do we lack the faculty for understanding the origin of laws? The problem is the limits in this form of thought.

Freedom

Freedom is set within an unfree world. The interplay gives rise to the fabric of life.

The only source of freedom is freedom from desires. But without desire, freedom has no value.

East or West

East or West:

Do you want to live in a culture where ideas are an instrument to well-being, or where life is instrumental to ideas, for only that can make life meaningful?

At the level of values, the trade off is between social freedom and individual well-being. But the mode of valuation differs, between valuing an idea and valuing an experience.

This is why "pragmatism" comes much more easily to policymakers in Asia, which is not for want of the ability of those in the liberal west to distinguish the proper place of ends and means (to have values and then to find the most effective means of achieving them), but because the idea itself constitutes the experience.

Millenials

Humans in society are but animals in a farm. What Millennials essentially demand is this: a new lifestyle that recognises the need for freedom; greater room for creative expression within a new form of work and life. The job hopping and drifting is a reflection of this search for optimal form, not optimal content.

This requires a new social contract, one based generationally less on the values of accumulation and tilted towards the search for autonomy and authenticity.

Sanders is a manifestation of that demand, and the rest of the politicians are conservatives. However, the US is unlikely to be the vanguard, because the state is insolvent. Also because of the distrust toward the state, forged in a context of a contest between different modes of production many years ago.

Note 86

Inauthenticity is the hallmark of a decadent society. Cynicism is its corollary, a revolution in embryo.

Note 85

Is knowledge contextual in form or expression? Depends on whether the relation in the language game constitutes knowledge, or the criteria underlying the use of the knowledge game constitute knowledge.

Language games do not identify contexts, but determine their form. The application of a language game requires a criteria outside of the game itself.

Note 84

The relation between policy, biology and culture must be studied for a full understanding of the development of societies.

This can only be done without repercussions if researchers (as well as society at large) understand and step outside their value frameworks and normative assumptions which define what the good life and the goals of social development (both at the collective and individual level) are. Similarly, society has to be pluralistic and robust enough to incorporate diversities of value frameworks without breaking down under the weight of contradictions and conflicts.

The potential of this is there; but it may take many decades, or centuries to reach this point. Perhaps when AI has rendered the scarcity value of intelligence to 0 can we have a matured and balanced conversation on human values (much like the history of the spice trade).

Intellectuals

Intellectuals are dangerous because they privilege the evolution and development of ideas through society above all other governmental or societal objectives. Because of this, they are the representatives of progress through sacrifice, and must be put down by society, for the sake of a stable inertia.

Note 83

What is the regulative principle through which the virtues of states are addressed? Warfare is no longer the force of creative destruction of obsolete or suboptimal processes, because the benefits of military power are no longer the source of a good life. Utilitarianism is the death of war.

What can secure the good life? It is the combination of wants and needs, identity, utility, material goods, social and spiritual needs, and freedom to choose one's course in life. The state can no longer secure the multiplicity of wants within the current framework, because it is itself a politicization of a sense of identity which is becoming increasingly fluid, as well as the guarantor, the source, and the outdated kernel of the notion of identity that exists at a previous point in time, that sets the parameters for the evolution of the operations that will render them redundant. In short, state mechanisms can no longer contain the tensions which have been drawn out by circumstances between national and transnational identities.

In response to conditions, identities form, ossify, institutionalise, generate regulative principles which affect their internal and external relations, affect a change in values and behaviours, create contradictions, adapt or collapse, depending on the relation to the regulative principles, and repeat the identities through the new set of conditions and actions which arise, endlessly.

Note 82

1. Existence is constituted by relation.
2. Relation cannot be to nothing but something.
3. Relation of the totality of existence has to be to itself.
4. Subject-object is the form of the relation of the totality of existence to itself.
5. Divinity is the embodiment of the entire scope of possibilities within the subject-object relation.

Note 81

The chief problem in the actuality of forms is not perspectivism, which is a way of constructing knowledge atop these principles, but the ontology of forms, and their relation to the necessary contingency of reality.

China and East Asia

The region is for China to own as a benign hegemon. Two obstacles stand in the way: entrenched American presence, and norms of interstate relations in the region. Hence, Chinese actions are caught between a rock and a hard place. The Chinese are caught in a Chinese finger trap. To sidestep this: China needs to evolve a liberal Confucianism, and to become an American "partner". Second, it needs to gain buy-in from countries in the region. Third, it needs to become the key facilitating node in the service economy in Asia, with its associated economic, socio-cultural, and people-to-people flows. This is not easy.

It's hegemony will not be absolute. This is not how the region works and it knows this.

China must avoid conflict at all costs. This would upend everything it should seek in the region. America's presence in the region would probably scale down over the long term, if its currency loses reserve status. But it's influence will not be critically predicated on American military presence, but on Chinese political, economic, institutional and cultural evolution and it's corresponding soft power in the region. This will legitimate its structural power. In short, Chinese diplomacy is best served by focusing on internal development. That is the only way out of its finger trap.

***

Of course, China would probably find it easier to work within existing systems and institutions, such as international law and UN, while gradually tilting them, alongside other multilateral frameworks, to its interests.

Note 80

Why something not nothing is a question nothing asks of something. The answer cannot be found in something, but within nothing itself. But something cannot come out of nothing. The answer cannot be thought, but is implied in the question; but even though it is implied in the question, it cannot be answered.

Why something not nothing, and why nothing not something to begin with, arise from the same problem of defining the relation between something and nothing.

Note 79

Sadhguru in a sentence: to hell with externalizations!

Note 78

The self is of no relevance. It is the form of humanity, or the transcendence of it, that avails the significance of existence. Dharma is hence the expression of universal form.

Quotes 12

"Central banking can be successful only if central bankers know how the institutional structure behaves and correctly assess how changes affect the system. Central bankers have to steer the evolution of the financial structure." - Hyman Minsky

The same could be said of policymakers more generally.

Also of note is the constant cycle of reform, restructuring, growth, and fragility.

Note 77

Understanding:
Understanding capacities, not resolutions. Principles not facts.

Economic policy:
Conditions (demographic, cultural, capacities) - structures (profit models, institutions) - processes (policy, relationships between variables)

Note 76

The self is the totality of the relation to the cosmos. If you see that, then you see that you do not have full ownership of the self, that it belongs to the cosmos too.

Note 75

Globalisation is stuck, but not in reverse. This should be noted upfront.

But why so? Because the liberal elites driving globalisation failed at the start to develop a cosmopolitan liberalism which is essentially complementary to existing national cultures which continue to dominate political and social life. They mistakenly saw them as opposed, and were undone by the belief in that opposition which meant that they ignored it, rather than incorporated it.

Once again, philosophical oppositions do not entail political polarity and the inability of western political culture to separate philosophy from politics has undone their work. Over historical time, means do not define ends because they can change the conditions in which ends can be achieved.

Singapore, which has done so by sublimating this opposition into pragmatic ideology, presents an alternative to western politics. Of course there are institutional vulnerabilities and disruptive regime change due politics being unable to incorporate ideological positions at a deeper level, but it represents a smarter form of politics, a wider range of the possible to incorporate oppositions.

Note 74

For Nietzsche, the inadequacy of metaphysics lies in its inability to incorporate life. Hence his metaphysics is fundamentally aimed at the breaking down the categorical barriers that distinguish and separate the two; that is, being in its totality, and idea.

Note 73

No social systems are perfect. Therefore it is incumbent on good leadership to identify and understand the blind spots of any system and to provide discretionary measures to moderate its excesses. Here, ideological blinders are dangerous. Ideology is the business of the intellectual and institutional design, and good sense the business of the agent. By placing ideology over judgement through partisan politics, democracy trades off good judgement and representativeness of values. The severity of this tradeoff is path-dependent, and relies heavily on generations of responsible stewardship to preserve.

Note on power

The core drivers of power in the race for global dominance:

1. Economic power - consumers, skills, organizational know-how, innovation
2. Political power - military strength/reach/capacity, security cooperation frameworks, Authority/Legitimacy
3. Ideas/cultural/soft power - universality of ideals/values, Use, manipulation of institutions/images/communications, connectivity
4. Financial power - capital, networks, reputation/trust

Note on Trump

Trump is the symptom of 2 trends: The decay of public morality (which is the dialectic frame within which for and against are set); and the disruption of the nation state as a political and cultural layer of unity within a world where economic and information flows polarise different community of values.

The breakdown of public morality is due to the monoculture of neoliberalism as the dominant essential principle governing social and political relations, and the overextension of market morality to social domains. In particular, the loss of concepts of political virtue and stewardship, the breakdown of collective social institutions highlighted by Putnam, skewed incentive structures to capitalise on market structures, and individualism without individual wisdom or responsibility, has led to a failing public life.

On the disruption of the nation state, what is required in the long term is a structural review of the functions of the nation state and the terms which define its boundaries. What is needed in the short term is an institutional mechanism of pooling sovereignty over issue areas where global management is required without infringing on the areas where sovereignty is to be retained. This is a delicate task as communities are bound by total value systems as issue area bears consequences on another which may require sovereign control to preserve them. However the key mistake was that policymakers were unable to foresee the dislocations caused by globalised flows and to create global coordination tools to manage them. This was due in part to lack of convergence which makes common goals difficult, however tools of compromise was not created as they might have been. The goal for the medium term is to facilitate convergence in social conditions that enable global norms over a wider set of issue areas.

Note 72

The paradox of identity: to be and not to be.

Notes from Minsky 2

The high and pro-cyclical elasticity of money supply means that the financial markets for investment are non-equilibrating. Interest rates do not adjust to enable market equilibriums between capitalized expected profit and supply costs of investment. Hence financial markets are dominated by positive, disequilibrating feedbacks between asset prices and balance sheets, and money supply and demand.

This elasticity arises from 3 factors: the intangible nature of credit, the money multiplier, and the expectational climate of bankers and businessmen, which is procyclical, contains biases and moral hazards, and is short term.

Note 71: On Time

Past, present, future is an illusion. There is only present, and the structures that relate them to each other.

***

What is time?

One, it is a frame of experience, within which change is experienced.

There is no flow of time, just as there is no objective right.

Our determination of its flow as a forward movement from past to future is a result of our experience of change, and the causal characteristics associated with it, which enables us to attribute properties to the relations between different points in time.

However, this is not inherent to the frame of time itself. Time as a frame of experience does not determine the qualities of its contents, hence it is false to speak of past/present/future, for this is a function of process, which is change and causation; not time, which is structure.

Halloween

What is Halloween?

A microcosm of life: fun, scary, and ephemeral.

Note 70

Underlying property-derived interpretations, facts.

One, underlying all possible interpretations.

Two, underlying the relations between observer and observed that give rise to coherence of interpretive frameworks.

Facts cannot be given within frameworks. Or it would not be a fact, but an interpretation.

Note 69

Power is the ability to allocate the functions, and define the interactions, of various political mechanisms in society. The relation of various political mechanisms define the power complex of a society, which in turn determines the evolution of the dynamics of these political mechanisms, in relation to the interplay of its substantive contents, in relation to the themes, issues, agents, values, preferences, ideologies and technological contexts in that society.

Note 68

Love on the surface
Embracing a
Category I could not reach
As I stepped towards the
Precipice
And fell into a dream
Of a world occupied
With its own embrace
Upon itself enslaved
And upon itself made free
To fall into enslavement again
In search
Of the transcendence pie.

Note 67

What the consideration of mind leads to is not property materialism or dualism but multimodalism, the presence of intermediate epistemic frames between material and mind which are discontinuous with both.

Discontinuity exists because the properties cannot be broken down into constituents which link up with others. The frames do not match. What is required is a third frame which reconcieves of what matter and mind is, and yet encapsulates both aspects and properties of matter and mind to understand their interaction. That is, one has to speak outside of matter or of mind to reconcile them.

Note 66

Qualities govern interactions. Emergent properties create new kinds of interactions and hence new principles governing interactions. New systems are constituted by the interaction of the properties relating to the system, as well as those relating to their constituent systems, which govern their interaction.

Does this mean that properties are ontic units? And contingent?

Note 65

Nothingness is the unity in which everything is. It is the vessel.

So God is the paradox of everything out of nothing.

Work

Work is the way of linking production to consumption. This depends on technology, capacity, and preferences. These change through time, and so work also changes. Because of this, work will not be displaced by machines. Only some kinds of work will.

Note 64

The flaw of modern philosophy - existence vs non-existence.

Note 63

What is time? Subjective and scientific time.

Time only exists insofar as it is used. It is the frame through which the progression of events is measured.

In science, it is a dimension of physical theory. It underlies the conception of physical systems as intelligible, time bound systems. It is both frame (as flow) and object (the relative speed of its flow).

In subjective thinking, time does not exist, but is inferred. It is the essence of the situational meaning of the concept of change itself. That is, there is no way of framing change except through time, at least in our imagination, and in our experience. Time just is a way of representing change.

Hence the idea of constant, whether identities, or substance, etc, depends on the kind of change that is envisioned. Identities are built as ways to conceive of change, and are constituted alongside the change which it is possible to envision them as underlying.

The specific forms which identity and change (time, mathematical operations) takes are mirror constructs, and the form which identities take are limited to what doesn't change, which is a negation of what changes, and hence can be envisioned to change. In other words, meaning lies in the change nexus, not the identity and its forms.

Note 62

Tractatus: Intelligible negation is the test of sense of a proposition.

Only propositions with sense should be discussed.

Propositions without intelligible negation should not be discussed.

Picture theory: both the proposition and its negation are supposed to describe a possibility, otherwise the status of a proposition is other than that of a significant.

The difference between incomplete and insignificant propositions. Is it possible to negate possibilities which cannot be conceived, but which are not insignificant when negated?

The relational, as opposed to the substantive content of propositions, and the role of negative propositions within value networks of meaning.

Multiple negation? Comparative negation: coffee without milk vs coffee without cream.

Circular reasoning: the picture is not meaningful because I am unable to picture it.

Picture as content. What is content? It cannot be picture because content is what the picture is of, not the picture itself.

Note 61

Culture as semiotic systems that regulate the internal and external forms of communication. I understand the references of culture because I can identify the markers that arise out of collective lived experience within spatial or interactive boundaries, and because I am identified with the features of these experiences.

Note 60

It is precisely the nothingness of subjectivity that makes negation possible, which gives rise to the possibility of identity, and from identity applied to a myriad of frames, meaning.

Pat Metheny Quote

What I have learned is that all you really know is what you love—and that can be the only compass that one should use to guide oneself. As soon as you give the aesthetic reins of power to an audience, other musicians, a critic, the guy sitting in the third row, your girlfriend, your boss—you have crossed a line that is difficult to recover from. This is not to say that you remain stubborn and isolated in your "vision" because your vision has to be pliable and malleable to the reality of the conditions that you are actively participating in at a given moment.

Hive Mind

What if the self is the enabling mode through which the hive mind perceives itself?

What if reality itself is the imagining of the hive mind?

So in the Matrix, there is a scene in which Neo pulls himself free from the glass tank in which he is encased, and recognises his true condition. From the perspective of the individual, he is plugged into hive mind against his will. But from the perspective of hive mind, that realisation is self-realisation. Going out of one level of hive mind, he finds himself encased in another level of reality constituted by hive mind.

The locus of subjectivity of space and time then rests not in the individual mind, but the hive mind. Individualized subjectivity is the enabling perspective which identifies a thing within space and time, and provides a reference outside of space and time from which to point to it as it seems. However, the hive mind is the constituent of individualized subjectivity, just as the totality of individualized subjectivity constitutes hive mind.

Subjectivity, then is the specific modality of negation, or the vessel, through which the hive mind identifies itself. In perception, it represents itself in an external way. In meaning, it is the ability to think logically. In action, it manifests in volition, which gives rise to ethics.

Note 59

Negation of what it is not is the primary relationship in ontological being.

Insofar as being is being within relationships, it is defined as the negation of what it is not, as the constitutive aspect of its identity.

But because it is constituted by that negation, it contains within what it is, what it is not. Hence it is at the same time a specific form of what it is not.

Hence the definition of what it is is limitless. Or rather, it is limited by the specific frames which we apply to it.

Thoughts on Brexit

Brexit should trigger soul searching within Britain, however unlikely it is to do so. It is the culmination of a broken economy and broken society that is unable to cope with the pressures of globalisation. In that world, systems are strained and the weakest buckles.

This is partly due to the arrogance and incompetence of EU bureaucrats and UK politicians, in their failure to understand the effects of immigration on wages of the low skilled. But this begs the question of the existing structure of the economy. Years of socialism, followed by Thatcherism, hollowed out the manufacturing economy and created an underclass of low wage service workers. This was ripe for disruption by an influx of migrant workers that brought real wages in this sector down. And it will continue to be ripe for disruption by automation and other technological developments.

Brexit was also the result of a contentious political culture that could no longer generate a national consensus partly as a result of the accumulation of economic mismanagement over decades. This polarisation is supported by a toxic class culture which normalizes inequalities, not just economic but social and between communities, which would be unacceptable elsewhere in Europe. The breakdown of social trust and the political centre is evident, and is a repeat of the 1930s.

In this case, democracy has become a destabilising force which reflects the polarisation of society - south vs north, rich vs poor. Political groups have been talking past each other for decades. This is not new, and similar problems occurred in the 1930s. Yet only monetary economics has seemed to learn much from that episode, and no new policy innovations, in Britain or elsewhere, have been made in the last 20 years to deal with the distributional effects of globalisation on individuals and communities which theory clearly predicts. Hence the only solution is to limit migration. This is partly due to the failure of supranational institutions and the state of international policy coordination, which are inadequate to the tasks at hand.

At the more immediate level, Brexit was the result of an alliance of centre right and far right British nationalists, who are unable or unwilling to define a British cosmopolitanism that includes a role for European foreigners. Some believe that the gains from policy flexibility and sovereignty outweigh the loss of access to Europe, brain drains and the diminished reach of its institutions. This has a long history in a culture which defines itself against Europe. However, in the Darwinian race, culture itself is a shackle, and Britain will pay for its inflexibility in dollars and influence.

Note 58

"Because they cannot be known, they can only be described." - Lao Zu

Just as the content of music must be given in its relation to silences, so the meaning of statements must be given in relation to the unspoken meaning behind it, pertaining to both the possibilities within which it is conceived, as well as the contexts though which it is understood.

***

So the content and structure of meaning is given through expressing it's relation to the totality of what it is not, as well as what is not thinkable. By thinking the unthinkable, we can understand thought.

Less pessimistically, our use of thought contains within it an understanding of the unthinkable.

***

A finite conception of the totality of these possibilities is contained within culture, which expresses a view of what these might consist. Hence paradigm shifts may occur that rejig the notion of these possibilities.

From a philosophical standpoint, culture constitutes a way of contextualising epistemic possibilities in relation to our current understanding of the world.

Note 57

The essence of meaning are the relations between concepts which it picks out. It picks out both context (what is implied, both about the world and about the relation to it) and representation (the specific thing to which it refers).

By picking out specific contexts, it embodies assumptions about underlying structures governing context, within which contextualization is posssible. The way it organizes information is itself information, but which cannot be given in terms of representation. 

By picking out representations, it also embodies assumptions about the structural content of representations, and about possible relations between representation and context.

***

When we say we mean something, what we mean is how the objects relate to other objects within contexts, or represented contexts relating to other contexts.

***

Relationships require limits. Limits are not real. Or rather, they are only as real as they are taken as such from within the network of relationships.

Hence the absolute, or that which is not relatedness, cannot be thought.

Note 56

The greatest cultures are those which articulate and advance the frontiers of the human condition, in their unique ways. They are divorced from the ethnicity from which they originate,  and seed ideas in other cultures in ways which extend their influence beyond the survival of the civilisation itself.

Note 55

Subjectivity is composed of two parts, relativity and representativeness.

By asserting relativity, the argument from representativeness at the meta-level breaks down. This is due to the hierarchies of truth being maintained at that level. Hence there is no argued basis for relativity due to representativeness.

Hence, it either asserts non-representativeness at the meta-level, or denies representativeness as the basis for relativity.

Frame-coherantism is one such alternative. This epistemic notion may be paired with an ontological reality-pluralism which asserts that there are multiple frames of truth, none of which invalidates or overrides the other.

However, the determination of what constitutes a frame is itself a search for a founding principle, a foundational frame. Hence it transcendentally presupposes that which it categorically denies. 

Alternatively, one might be left with a radical undecidability between opposing frames for the sake of meta-consistency, which cannot even be said. This Wittgensteinian anti-theory would deny the validity of the question within which it is framed. Frame just is use.

Note 54

A characteristic of modernity, and Asian modernity in particular, is the determination of social structures and institutions by economic values. 

Hence by altering economic imperatives, the changing operative modality of technologically embedded living will disrupt existing social arrangements. The means of change rests on the question of the flexibility of institutions to adapt.

In particular, the shift to large scale automation will require a lifestyle and social welfare alteration towards pursuit of creative comparative advantages. 

The success in generating potential growth, as well as preventing violent change, rests on the speed of cultural change.

Note 53

Societies function in a general equilibrium within evolutionary stable sets of mutually reciprocating factor conditions. The combination of norms, institutions and ideology, as well as the interaction of the emergent properties and the relationships themselves, constitutes that which Hegel idealizes and calls Geist.

Linkages between components of Geist evolve over time, according to the hierarchy of principles which order the collective decisions of society. Being humans, these principles are embodied in actual historical events and actions, rather than implemented from the top-down.

Use

Use is frame. Meaning is not use. Use is the way in which meaning is used.

So form does not precondition content, but is given in the relation of content to other content.

Expressed through content, it exists in a categorical relation to content.

Use is not the precondition of meaning, but arises out of the condition of meaning  through its content. The necessity of its content is called form. It's necessity is contingent on the kind of content that is evoked.

Quotes 11

"What differentiates a leader from a manager, research tells us, is the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to get there. Recruiting stakeholders, lining up allies and sympathizers, diagnosing the political landscape, and brokering conversations among unconnected parties are all part of a leader’s job. As they step up to the leadership transition, some managers accept their growing dependence on others and seek to transform it into mutual influence. Others dismiss such work as “political” and, as a result, undermine their ability to advance their goals.

The key to a good strategic network is leverage: the ability to marshal information, support, and resources from one sector of a network to achieve results in another. Strategic networkers use indirect influence, convincing one person in the network to get someone else, who is not in the network, to take a needed action. Moreover, strategic networkers don’t just influence their relational environment; they shape it in their own image by moving and hiring subordinates, changing suppliers and sources of financing, lobbying to place allies in peer positions, and even restructuring their boards to create networks favorable to their business goals."

Ibarra and Hunter at HBR

Note 52

The relative is understood within the frame of the absolute. The absolute functions as the frame (or category) and object (to which the relative is the negation).

Absoluteness functions both as frame and possibility in the discussion on the Absoluteness of truth. The nature of the assertion is a contingent one, set within an absolute frame.

The refutation of absolute truth is a contingent refutation of a possibility. But a contingent refutation cannot refute an absolute. It can only refute the possibility of an absolute. On the other hand, if it was an absolute refutation, it would be an absolute truth. It then becomes that which it refutes. It is a meta Paradox. It remains a necessity at the level of the transcendental possibility.

So it is with god. It's existence is given through its non-existence. It is the necessary frame through which it's non-existence is made god again. At the transcendental level, it is the negation of the concept of the existence of god.

Note 51

The primary function of society is to harness the energies of the individual for collective ends. 

The philosophies through which they point back to the individual, and the way that individuals acquiesce to it, determines the social compact, and the social features that flow from it. 

Insofar as the individual identifies with the collective ends, he is imbued with a notion of purpose and progress. Ideology is primarily a means of generating identifications and hence teleological constructs that align self with society. However, the loss of identification generates alienation. 

Modern progress is thus a means of generating ideological legitimacy through inclusion. The terms by which inclusion is measured is generated within the ideology itself. 

But legitimacy referred to here is short term legitimacy, not long term legitimacy. That must be provided through philosophical incorporation, the evolution of ideology.

This applies not only to modern institutions, but also to development as such. For example, the religious tolerance of Ottomans as examples of development of a civilization.

Institutions are the embodiment of the interactions between the trinity of culture, ideology, and political ideas. The ability to judge the relative importance of different frames in the assessment of events is crucial to understanding the world.

Note 50

Meaning is contextual; context is specific to a perspective; perspective is grounded in categorical frames; categorical frames are given to a species; hence meaning is sited within a form of life.

Underlying this is the assumption of representation constituting the ground of meaning on the basis of its appearing to. But in what sense?

But what is referred to is represented meaning; which by definition requires representation. 

But the ground of represented meaning, by inaccessibility, cannot be represented. Hence it cannot be constituted by representation. And represented meaning cannot be groundless.

Note 49

Naturalism is the reductionism of moral categories to natural categories. This is absurd, categories are not reducible to another, for if it were, it is not a category. Categories are the terms which define the frames in which they are understood, which cannot be re-framed into another, because they cannot be said.

Gardner argues that the analytic philosophy is naturalistic, and that it denies the reality of moral and spiritual categories, hence is fundamentally irreconcilable with Hegel. This is incorrect. There is no reality of categories. This conflates reality with meaningfulness. Verificationists deny the meaningfulness of these categories because they cannot be parsed in terms of empirically verifiable statements. But that is not to say that they are not real. In fact the naturalistic philosophy would have to deny abstract reality, as it is meaningless in that sense.

Note 48

Dharma as general equilibrium over states of the world. Dharma can punish, and it can bring abundance. But it is essentially pragmatic, not ideal in character. There is no absolute dharma.

Does form imply essence?

The objects of a frame are given within a frame, but are not implied within it. Frame is form, so the constellation of frames, or a particular arrangement of the relationships between frames, defines the context. The object itself, and the verbs, adjectives etc. are then use: the particularities to cohere and orientate the relations within a context.

A universal description of anything is by definition self-referential and paradoxical. Hence it is not representation, or cannot be said.

Notes from Minsky 1

Wage market equilibrium w/p=MPL
Investment savings equilibrium r=mec
Money markets equilibrium M/p=L(I,O)

Supply side determined by equilibrium in supply side markets which determine output.

Output feeds into IS-LM, giving interest rates. But the economy can also attain higher investment rates and an hence higher output through lower interest rates and higher price, and hence higher output, lower productivity supply side equilibriums.

Bifurcation of short and long run. Cyclical accelerators work when y in quantity of money equation is unfixed. In the long run they affect prices only.

"In the IS-LM model with a Keynesian labour market, income and the interest rate are determined by the dominant simultaneous satisfaction of the equilibrium conditions in the commodity and money markets, the income so determined yields the amount of labour employed [via the employment function], and given the productivity of labour and the wage rate, yields the price level."

Money has an unemployment rate. The employment rate of money serves to equilibrate the marginal efficiency of capital with the implicit returns to holding money - which is also the discount rate on future consumption. The lower the MEC, the higher the uncertainty, or the higher the deflation rate, the higher the unemployment rate of money.

Return= yield - carrying cost + liquidity premium

Velocity of money determines changes in liquidity premiums, which determine the relative price of liquid and non liquid assets.

In booms, liquidity premiums are low, so less liquid assets eg, property price increase. In contracting credit, liquidity premiums rise, so cash (deflation) and gold increase in price, while stocks and property face sudden reversals.

Of course, credit fueled investment changes the real yield on assets over the longer term, and the yields reflected in prices are expected yields. Hence the beneficiaries of a boom are mostly the investors during the subsequent bust, with the liquidity premium reversals, or 'reverse yield arbitrages'.

3 slips and spreads between lip (printing money) and cup (higher investment): 1) liquidity and interest rates due to liquidity traps 2) Debt interest rates and the marginal efficiency of capital due to fluctuating capitalization factor, or equity risk premiums 3) the marginal efficiency of capital, or required earnings yield, and the prospective yield on capital assets.

In booms, net demand for liquidity increases, while net return in capital falls, which creates an inherently unstable dynamic. Interaction effects with the real economy, and monetary policy to manage liquidity conditions, may sustain the boom.

In busts, negative feedback between tightening credit and liquidity conditions, asset prices, demand for investment, consumption and employment. Recursive debt-income deflationary process could be triggered, including unemployment, depression and deflation.

Note 47

"Experience" is the framework through which the subjective experience of objectivity is reclassified and understood as the objective description of subjectivity. Hence "experience" is not a thing to be experienced - it is a manner of speaking.

Through "experience", experience itself is made into an object. The coincidence of thought and experience?

It is informative as it's use implies knowledge about what this relationship between the 2 categories consists. But it is information that only relates to the way in which it is used. Is it possible to understand why it is used in this way? What would that question consist in?

In being used this way, the object which is material is not the object being referred to in experience. It becomes the experienced object.

The application of that categorization to reality presupposes that it fits that description.

***

The oxymoron of relation being subjective - without anything to relate to.

And of objectivity being the relation of fact to itself, and the negation of a relation.

Self-Quotes 1

Cash is the best antidote to ignorance.

The possibility of meaningful negation marks the representation of a category, and hence the starting point of philosophy.

Reality is like water; it cannot be sliced. Theory is like ice, malleable but static.

Thoughts on Singapore

In Singapore, the core cultural and the operational principles are pragmatic, but the form of political organization is authoritarian. Therefore free market principles are embedded within a heavily centralized form of political organization, which is socialist in some respects and liberal in others.

The political economy is market and externally driven. The constellated organization of social and political institutions are centrally controlled, bound together by developmental imperatives and social compacts grounded in culturally-sourced perspectives - pragmatism over ideals, merit over participation, and the emphasis of the individual in private over public spheres. The social system has been particularly effective in establishing merit over social class in the determination of social mobility.

The moral authority of the state remains absolute and unquestioned, as the state remains the vanguard; it determines the identity of the nation; which is constitutively pluralist, syncretic and porous to external influence - a major virtue in an open port city with a large migrant population.

Social control is exercised through a variety of state mechanisms backed by legislature and force; including the education system, national service, the mainstream media and civil rules against public disorder. This is backed by social norms which are in alignment with democracy-negating principles, which exist in a mutually conditioning relationship with the state.

The success of subtler forms of control open the space for greater freedoms within the boundary conditions established by the functioning of the state. There is freedom of movement; economic freedom; freedom of religion; freedom for political debate within non-ideological parameters; and positive freedoms of access to services and excellent public goods delivered by a clean and competent state.

What is traded off, then, is the flourishing of the individual in public life, as well as the celebration of individual initiative and inventiveness in the broader social and cultural life of the country - the concept of a society in collaboration with the advancement of human frontiers through an expanding life.

Thoughts from Rumelt & Soros

Stay with the uncertainty.

Useful Work comes from embodying fundamental insights through a refactoring of perception. Specialize in work where the ability to produce re-combinations to develop new systems and frameworks is optimal; combinations create value, and re-combinations sustain it.

Imagine doing the work everyday. What would you thrive in?

Understanding of a business is in essence an understanding of the ways in which the product adds value to the value chain of the customer. Effective FCF businesses are about competitive strategies (built around competitive advantages) to optimise the business process and the product around the buyers criterion of value. Moats are created by low cost, differentiation, or focus (segmentation).

At the Industry level, axis of segmentation, axis of competition and innovative disruptions mutually condition each other to give rise to operating environments for businesses. Businesses with durable competitive advantages build chain links, relationships, hard to replicate products and processes that confer cost or value advantages.

4 axis of business positioning: cost, quality, time, ease of access. A business can be profiled in terms of its location within these 4 axis.

***

Reflexivity: a paradox

Market prices are determined by expectations.

Yet the expectations themselves are reflected in prices which creates a new set of expectations based on these prices.

This is due to two reasons:

1) uncertainty creates reliance on collective expectations as a reference point for the formation of expectations

2) price influence the fundamentals by changing real economic activity, and hence the conditions in which the expectations are played out

Hence a proper set of expectations would endogenize the effect of the change in expectations on the fundamentals and the expectations.
Through backward induction, a uniquely determined convergence point may be found.

Fundamentals > expectations > expectations > fundamentals > etc.

3) the paradox of uncertainty (random events which cannot be represented through a probability distribution): expectations depend on the future, but the future is uncertain

Note 46

Development is driven by the needs, aspirations and abilities of human capital; the producer is the vanguard of development.

We embody a society where the producer consumes as a function of the developments required to unleash the productive capacity, the development of a community of producers as consumers.

In a static society, that is, a society which consists of non producers, where the fundamental driving force is not the will to produce as a living creator, yield and interest rates would tend toward zero, as capital is accumulated and demographic and productivity growth stagnates.

The high savings rate, the manifestation of an actual example of social organisation, results in a high capital asset, low yield economy.

Macroeconomic imbalances are society's way of adjusting the conditions of supply and demand to each other, and therein a given form of social organization. The adjustment process is the macroeconomic system.

Global imbalances renders the domestic mechanism - the macroeconomy as a tool of social adjustment - impotent. It exacerbates domestic systems of social organization that creates global imbalances. These are not inherently unhealthy, but a fundamental tension is created, which is resolved one way or the other.

What is required are more opportunities for social and political change and arbitrage, a more diverse and flexible kind of domestic society and its institutions, in order to preserve the society as a unit.

Note 45

The problem with productivity.

The problem of productivity is the problem of value accounting.

Output is measured by total market value of output, adjusted by a GDP deflator.

However, the market is an arbitrary determiner of value. Eg, an Apple Ipod with less features and lower audio quality than a Sony Mp3 player.

The premise of market efficiency may not hold, such that a unit of spending on an equivalent product might produce different welfare benefits due to a) different product quality due to imperfect markets eg. watermelon juice in Vietnam vs watermelon juice in Singapore b) differing choice sets.

Producer value cannot be measured simply in monetary terms either. Eg, the ATM, which does not show up in GDP.

Social value in exchange cannot be commoditized either.

The presence of externalities, etc.

Note 44

Speech is an act. Political and psychological; and an idea is a process in it's development. An identification expresses a motivation to transcend the categories which have given rise to the identification.

The context in which words are embedded transcends the words themselves. Development is the unfolding of context, not of words. Words are the residuals, not the ideas. Identifications are steps in the trajectory of the transcendence of the categories which give rise to those identities.

For instance, at the mention of the concept of God, (as a representative for the politicization of the relation between subject and object) one has already laid the framework for the possibility of the transcendence of this category of relation, and for radical freedom, and so on. Hence it is a negation, and a temporary absence of another set of principles. But in doing so, one recognised the fundamental bottleneck - the schism between subject and object, or better, freedom and truth. The point is that these underlying dualities remain insofar as the conditions that give rise to the contradiction, or tradeoffs, of the prescriptions of the two remain. The advent of the reconciliation is the advent of a new set of problems with their own tradeoffs, and so on.

One understands the problem by understanding the context which gave rise to this problem. To say that something is true is to adopt a representational approach. It expresses the possibility not only of the truth being untrue, but of the epistemic conditions of truth telling being variable (but also the absence of an alternative). Freedom, then, is but the context which forms an assumption of the context in which the problem is expressed. In doing so, it is playing it's part in a language game. Freedom<>structure of representation<>truth.

The space of conceptual possibility is continually expanding, due to the development of mental and material possibilities, and a society and it's institutions and structures will attempt to incorporate effectively the ideas available for use according to it's internally defined mandates, ie, its values.

But note that this is an explanation of things as they are, not things as they could possibly be. That is, a thing which cannot be thought is, while a thing which can be thought, cannot be, for it lies within its possibilities (which is self-negating, and seeks self-transcendence), not within itself.

Note 43

"Capitalists earn what they spend; workers spend what they earn."
Kaldor

The value of money is the value of consumption through time. The nominal value of money is the rate of exchange of total money supply with that value. If the value of consumption through time decreases, the nominal value of money increases (inflation). This is because there is more money supply per value.

Now the nominal value of money in the asset markets have been increasing. This is an inflation valve. By increasing asset consumption, the fed can keep interest rates low without risking baseline inflation, at the cost of increased financial volatility. Doing so also increases baseline nominal growth as a function of asset transaction volumes. The economy essentially profits from churning. Asset churning prevents deflation in a low growth economy.

Scarcity-adjusted marginal utility of consumption goods converge to unity, while prices and marginal utility adjusts, according to relative scarcity and hence elasticities (given elasticity of substitutions from consumption patterns).

***

The problem is to take the human out of the equation.

Asset values are claims to future consumption.

If a person saves more than he consumes now, he must consume more than he saves later. The economy must balance. Asset Ownership is trade of future consumption.

Hoarding occurs when the claims to future consumption increase. But the rate of future consumption, or the rate of consumption, remains constant. Total real value of future consumption increases, relative to present, and the real interest rate falls. When the real rate falls below zero, a depression sets in.

A depression is unavoidable when the real yield on assets fall below zero; when all the possibilities of filling up future consumption for the purpose of maximising present income has been exhausted, for a given rate of demographic growth. In such a case, present and future consumption is satiated, and Japanese style deflation sets in.

There are two ways to correct the imbalance: war or tax. War is destruction of assets and productive capacity. It solves the deflationary tendency caused by tendency to excess savings in a growing economy.(think china) It also solves the problem of excess labour and capital, when the habits of labour would be to create excess savings in an economy.

Tax forces asset prices down, allowing consumption to be forwarded to the present. It offsets the tendency of the economy to produce more than it can consume, thereby smoothing the business cycle. A tax on asset values also forces a consumption to income ratio that sustains healthy and correct growth rates.

***

An excess of savings causes a similar fall in prices and a fall in interest rates. The price of money rises in relation to the price of goods.

So the correct adjustment only happens if the combination of falling prices and falling rates offsets the tendency to hoard, and to save. If the natural rate is below zero, the adverse money effects kick in, so the natural rate falls even further.

Marginal efficiency of investment = Marginal efficiency of consumption => Natural rate of interest (given by this equilibrium relation)

What about money? Dynamic, income effects and price effects

Note 42

The root of all psychological dysfunction is the mistaking of models with reality.

That is, the inability to retain the level of judgement required to distinguish models from the case remains the crucial blind spot of applied decision making. It also creates openings for collective fantasies, herd behaviors etc. so the problem is not necessarily bad information, or bad models, but bad information processing at a subjective level. Society as a whole will attempt to circumvent this subjective problem with more accurate models, especially through data processing, moving forward. Therefore the act of judgement is increasingly outsourced towards common knowledge use of better models. This will create the conformist trend towards specific data processing solutions. While creating greater opportunities for profit for people who retain the ability to spot the differences between models and reality.

But that is the paradox of the realist: the real is a principle - of which the case is an instantiation - which itself cannot be parsed or verified and which is set against other instantiations of the principle.

That is, at the same time as one posits the real as the foundation of applicable truth to non self evident statements one denies the possibility of going beyond the real to epistemologize it's application, or to ontologize it's properties.

So, as Lao Tzu might have said, once thinking occurs, the possibility of real thinking ends, ergo, one thinks by not thinking, and ceases to think as one thinks.

Note 41

To identify an object in a graph, we define the dimensions of the object, then we define the coordinate system used, then we identify the object along the coordinates of the system.

Similarly, in the use of language, we have to define the sources of all possible meaningful utterances, then to define the language game used, and then to identify the contextual application through referring to a specific situation.

There is no given that these steps can be explained by a single theory.

These steps may or may not be sequential, or one of narrowing, and may feed into each other. The same act might require the use of several steps.

But they are philosophically separable, in that they have to be explained differently, because they refer to different things.

***

Meaning-making is refracted contextually, and the understanding of the steps are necessarily refracted; but the concepts which are investigated must be defined in terms of its possibility (in relation to its negation), not its representation (in relation to conditions of its application). While the latter is necessary for the former to be meaningful, true philosophy is the former in the context of the latter.

Note 40 (Thoughts on Hegel Intro)

The concept of an "I" is the failure of self-referentiality; it is the (non)-thing that cannot be identified.

The subject is an object which does not exist.

This is the starting point of freedom, which is the non-identification of a (non)-thing, as well as of desire, which is the process of identification.

The pathway of self-identification, as well as the philosophy of history, relates to the interaction of four key groups of parameters, that which can and cannot be known, and that which can and cannot be made conscious.

Social acts are essentially the interplay of values; values are the modality of identification of the self and the collective. Social forms, such as discourse, norms, and institutions, are channels for this interplay, which may be dialectical, evolutionary or otherwise.

Note 39

All relationships among elements of different language games are metaphorical. Hence the application of truths to a contextualized model of reality, composing of elements of different dimensions, each governed through its own language games, is metaphorical, although the logic of the categories underlying the language games, and the ways they are applied (though not understood) are not, if such a description is to be possible.

Quotes 10

The game played between the state and the market economy takes place on a field on which two systems for organizing power to allocate resources and to distribute the costs and benefits of their production and consumption coexist and coevolve. A rough historical rhythm is discernible as the losers from one dispensation appeal to - or invent - the other in search of redress [See also M Ramesh on pragmatic evolution, or problem solving of issues raised by overdominance of one pole, for another driver of the process]...deepening globalization of markets intensifies the conflict to the point of calling into question the simultaneous maintenance of both democracy and the autonomous nation-state [given global markets].

- William Janaway

Quote 9

"Nietzsche’s work relentlessly undermines the elevation of ‘literal’ over ‘metaphorical’ truth. He argues that we cannot privilege literal or ‘pure’ truth over metaphor because truth is itself a metaphor that has been invented to lend authority to particular forms of thought and styles of living. He argues repeatedly, for example, that the ‘truths’ of religious teaching are really dominant perspectives upon the meaning of human experience employed to establish the prestige of a community’s way of life (Spinks, 2003)." - Ruwan Jayatunge on The Nation

Context is truth in relation to itself, that is, meaning.

Truth is the duality of category and context, in which each can be defined through the other, ie. ontological duality as per Lao Tzu.

Existence

Existence is that which closes off possibilities. It exists because existence is itself.

But the existence of an existence cannot be given within existence itself: it must be given through a set of criteria which defines the terms of existence, and the conditions of existence.

The terms of existence define that which may be said to exist, while the conditions of existence defines that which exists.

Existence is the concretization of the conditions of existence in relation to the terms of existence.

In being that concretization, it identifies (or gives content to) the conditions of existence.

But in order to do so, existence is necessarily in the state of existing to which the concretization refers.

But, in being both the concretized condition of existence, as well as the state of existing, existence relates itself to itself.

Therefore existence is paradox and duality: condition and existence. It is infinite duality.

In other words, when we speak of existence, we refer to the possibility of the conceptualization of the actuality, as well as the actuality through which the possibility of the conceptualization is made meaningful. We have no other examples. But even if we had, we would not call it existence.

So an applied conception of existence creates dualities, depending on the role which the concept performs.

Hence we get absurdities: idealism and materialism are both sides of the same coin, so to speak.

This is the problem engendered in Hegel's quote: All identification is self-identity.

More: all manifested ideas are identified, hence all manifested ideas are self-identifying.

In this sense, duality comes about through the identification process of a concept.

***

We could have many universes. Each universe would be a fact referring itself to itself, as a minimum condition.

The world is fundamentally unity, as a necessary condition of its existence, its referring of itself to itself.

Existence is relative when applied, but absolute in conception.

A possible solution to the brain in a vat.

Facts are referred to other facts. A universe of facts is the world of inter-referring facts.

Existence is the act of something referring itself to itself.

It refers the terms of its own existence to the state of its being.

The state of its being is constitutively self-referring.

downward elasticity of prices on consumption > downward elasticity of interest rates on investment => deflation + zero lower bound

Assuming a cointegrating relationship in interest rates and prices

Repeat

To repeat oneself:

Existence is self-definition. Hence, to exist, one must define oneself in relation to oneself.

Spirit 1

Spirit is by nature self-interpretation in its own process of unfolding.

Existence is the act of something referring itself to itself.

Because it embodies itself through its interpretation of itself, it becomes inevitable through that unfolding, because the idea itself, in embodying itself, is conditioned by that interpretation.

An important post

On value investing:

A stock tends towards it's attractor state, which is it's intrinsic value. Price is an illusion.

So likewise life tends towards it's attractor state, which are the ideas contained in it's being. The march of events, or history, is an illusion.

On governance:

Governance is a kind of model to deal with the problem of the orderly and stable distribution of authority over a territory, within a system of States, and wider economic systems. Things like social compacts and forms of contracting are endogenized within the model of governance. These models are very unique to each country.

The change of models happen once in a very long time, and real revolutions are very rare. Most so called revolutions preserve the same model of governance within new institutions.

Every state, through it's existing model of governance, implies the form of violence it can accommodate, before the coordinates of society itself breaks down. Failed states, perhaps, are the only seeds of new models of governance.

On jobs:

What is your ideal job? Its the job which has you as you are as it's ideal.

On art:

Art without spirituality is like science without mathematics. Hence modern art is a waste of time. In music, modern refers to anything after the Baroque era.

Fate

1) Irony

The knowledge of fate allows you to take responsibility in actualizing it.

My lack of freedom to determine my destiny gives rise to the responsibility to bring it about. The freedom to self-determine the specifics of the destiny gives rise to the responsibility.

Freedom is exercised through choice, and choice is the result of the interactions of the conditions which limit our freedom with those that allow it.

2) Persons

Persons are the unfolding of ideas in the world. People are just embodiments of ideas that are unfolding in the world of ideas.

The world is just the artifact of ideas, interacting with the progression of ideas.

The world of things are just historical artefacts of the things that are thought and brought into existence by persons, who become themselves as ideas through the chanelling process.

It is the receptacle of the potentiality of ideas, as the residual of that process of incorporation.

Becoming what one is = Embodying the idea that one is

The world supports this process of embodiment because it is itself idea; and the process of that embodiment is itself idea.

The phenomenology of idea-unfolding is just the historical world itself, that is, agency is the relation of the active idea to the systemic totality of ideas.

Problem: Defoundationalization of the systemic totality. How do we reconceptualize it, and therefore our relations to it?

Eg. I will not be an asset manager because I do not embody the idea of one. But I will be a philosopher because I am the idea of philosophy in person; I am philosophy itself.

The primary function of man is to embody the idea that they are in the world.

In so doing, they create their own religion.

In this sense, there are two types of persons: those who create their own religion, and those who follow the creations of others. Other distinctions are irrelevant.

Self-Advice 1

1) The optimal strategy to deal with the factor of randomness in life:

Curb your greed and learn to be opportunistic.

Greed is the desire and action to grab that which is not given to you by the universe.

Opportunism is the ability to seize the windows of opportunity for gain that are periodically handed to you.

One must learn to tell the difference between an act of opportunity and an act of greed or folly.

To do that, one must know enough (ie, know what you are doing), and be enough (ie, to know oneself).

2) On asymmetric volatility:

In a bull market, greed is more reliable than fear: buy calls.

In a bear market, fear is more reliable than greed: buy puts.

Pragmatic Thought (Chain 1)

Evolution of Forms vs Development of Forms.

The mutually conditioning nature is exemplified by ideal science (empirics and ideas).

Use is itself an evolved use of prior use.
+
Successive evolution of 'terms of use'.

These parameterize the conditions in which future things are made useful.

A dynamic process, whereby the conditions in which knowledge is developed and applied is 'brought along' in the specific terms in which it has been developed (to the exclusion of other possible paths) through successive 'use of use' (recursivity).

(Statements about things, identified in a verbal way follows this general pattern).

The parameters are useful because they are useful, but they are useful because they have created the conditions in which the things which are useful are useful (within those parameters), have themselves created/affected the conditions in which the usefulness of the parameters are made useful. (retroactivity)

This retroactive mutual conditioning of usefulness is the starting point of dynamic stability, which is necessary for the reproduction of things in time.

Of course, there is necessarily (at least) a third criterion, to which the usefulness of the parameter is referenced.

But the the forward movement of time itself, ie, forward movement itself, is the product of usefulness. The retroactivity of certain underlying conditions gave rise to the usefulness of this forward movement.

What are these conditions? (and what are their use?)

Quotes 9

"The argument, in short, is that in a world of uncertainty, where probabilistic calculus is ruled out, rules, norms and institutions play a functional role in providing a basis for decision-making, expectation, and belief. Without these 'rigidities', without social routine and habit to reproduce them, and without institutionally conditioned conceptual frameworks, an uncertain world would present a chaos of sense data in which it would be impossible for the agent to make sensible decisions and act". Hodgson (1988:205)

Hello World 1

To be the world, to which the subject, which is now the object, is being put.

To be is subjective, not objective.

Paradoxically, only by subjectivising being in the world can the subject be objectivised.

Thought Mind 1

The mind processes across commonly used circuits.

Some circuits are more easily accessed than others.

The depth of the circuit defines the way content is processed.

The several circuits are not independent.

Activating these circuits require resetting the chain of electrical movement.

The best circuits allow for resets while retaining working memory.

This involves having developed thought forms that combine several circuits, exploiting principled similarities.

In this sense, the content is important.

How the content is perceived enables the circuitry to come into motion.

Shared Environments

All collectively functioning social environments work along an operationally handy, and definitive, set of mental-constructs (eg, values, associative perspectives, ideas of relations between things), which hides the underlying absurdity (psychologically-speaking), and keeps it going. That is, it is the means by which it identifies itself as existing - an operationalizing principle that directs its efforts in a cogent and coordinated way. (That is the necessity of philosophy & ethics, to units in a social system). It defines action as (necessarily, presuming reflexivity & teleology) reaction, and reaction as progress, according to metaphysical and epistemic ideals.

Underlying cause-effect conditions serve as common convergences of values, but the terms by which they are endogenously interpreted by these perspectives are non-systematic - by virtue of the subject/object gap. Because this systemic complexity, they are more arbitrary, even idealistic-chaotic (ie, animal spirits), than the presence of institutions seem to suggest - for they direct them, not the other way round. Because values are themselves changing, and difficult to profile collectively, the role of information constraints are much less binding, than in systems of exchange of information with well-defined ends.

The point to note is that these definitions of (social science) real are wildly inaccurate depictions of reality, which is dynamic and indefinable. (Think of it as a consciousness.) They are used because they 1) create statistically modellable coherences of references to so-called reality along the broadest distinctions, made possible by sample sizes, and testable, 2) allow sub-units of a social system to cohere, but many important causal facts are themselves determined not through an individualist perspective, which is endogenous within the system (and therefore determines its coherence, and the well-working of parts) but collectively, as a system, or as layers of quickly forming and dissoluting systems, in reaction to external causes upon the system, one of which is individuality itself.