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.