pengstrom

Isn't all money "after tax" though? It all goes around. The exception would maybe be the treasury minting loans.

Everything is unfair. The housing crisis is unfair. Young families struggling to afford a family home is unfair. Having to pay into a pension system you'll never get to use is unfair. Land and housing is different from personal property. There's only so much to go around and we'll have to share. A property tax is one tool to incentivize efficient allocation, and to drive prices down.

I'd say these attempts at arguments (for either position) is how we make progress understanding consciousness.

I think politicians are right to be afraid. Surveillance of this magnitude isn't a ballot-box-level grievance. It's a Guy Fawkes/V-level injustice. They're stepping into territory where the very people they're supposed to stop might instead turn justified.

The part about history perspectives sounds interesting. I haven't noticed this. Please post any concrete/specific examples you've encountered!

When you run out of things to occupy yourself with you end up thinking about thinking

I've never gotten the impression an animal was aware it could change me. Sure it'd make its wants clear until it got what it wanted or got bored, but that's a very primitive form of conduct. The cat clearly knows I can get it more foods between meals. The communication is limited, but I've never seen him come up with a better argument than that he really really wants more food. Dogs are stranger and clearly has a concept of social structure that cats don't. Both from their background as pack animals and deliberate domestication for assisting humans in work.

Strange. My knowledge of the fundamentals and processes in humans still makes me jelous of the apparent ease others fare in social situations. Clearly there's more to it than it seems. I'd be wary of equating bottom-up and top-down as principally equivalent.

Does it assume life, or are the qualities that makes an organism act in spite of us, and agency, one and the same?

I'm more optimistic but cynical. Everybody has the capacity, but can't be bothered for your sake specifically. A highly intelligent person can casually entertain several theoretical notions. A lesser can too, but it requires more effort. Effort that might be better spent elsewhere, or effort that makes social interaction awkward.

My stab:

2: implicit world. Reacts to but not modeled. 3: explicit world and your separation from it. 4: Model that includes other intelligences of level 3 that you have to take into consideration. World resources can be shared or competes for. 5: Language. Model of others as yourself, their model include yours too. Mutual recursion. Information can be transmitted mind-to mind.

I think the fact that the initial _size_ of the recursion can be arbitrarily large is where infinity comes in. No matter your resources, there might be (must be?) a recision problem that's too large, that requires too many steps.

Jesus. I couldn't finish that documentary. I only knew him by his more popular art, but that film put me off anything he'd done. His family was a mess, and he himself is without a doubt the last person of it I'd ever want to meet. Every single interaction he had with a woman (even by proxy) on screen made my skin crawl. A creep of the highest caliber.

Economics is a social science, the study of how people interact with things of value. It cannot be hard, since it has a feedback loop.

You're looking at it wrong. We can't change the laws of physics, but we can change society. That's the practical difference.