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Archive for November 26th, 2008

Bailouts support bad behavior… Don’t do it!

Posted in analysis of behavior, business strategy, economics, politics, tagged , , , , , , , on November 26, 2008| 1 Comment »

By engaging in bailout after bailout, government bureaucrats in both parties perpetuate the system that is not working: special interest groups getting special treatment.

Follow the consequences! By subsidizing failed but well-connected losers with a bailout we collectively are confiscating the necessary resources from productive and successful companies and tax paying members of the economy. Effectively, that means the successful work for the unsuccessful.  We are considering giving billions to those executives that brought their companies to the brink of irrelevancy.

Such bailouts are a bad idea because the failed company management doesn’t feel the pain as they feel the bonuses when they do what they are supposed to do. The selection by consequences that operate everywhere in life are again short-circuited for these companies and the communities that feed off their inefficiencies. The consequences for bad behavior never come to rest on those that were instrumental in the problem so they don’t learn. Why should we allow the natural consequences of bad behavior in a free market to be aborted in favor of special favors resulting in our representatives selecting who will owe them favors? We shouldn’t !

Do something about it or shut up!

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Consciousness Explained?

Posted in analysis of behavior, anthropology, brain, intelligent agent, philosophy, research, science, tagged , , on November 26, 2008| Leave a Comment »

This is just about the best dialogue I’ve read on consciousness. Alva Noë’s model is plausible and falsifiable.  And it correctly rejects the notion of internal motive events and the good ol’ mind/body duality.

In many ways, the new thinking about consciousness and the brain is really just the old-fashioned style of traditional philosophical thinking about these questions but presented in a new, neuroscience package. People interested in consciousness have tended to make certain assumptions, take certain things for granted. They take for granted that thinking, feeling, wanting, consciousness in general, is something that happens inside of us. They take for granted that the world, and the rest of our body, matters for consciousness only as a source of causal impingement on what is happening inside of us. Action has no more intimate connection to thought, feeling, consciousness, and experience. They tend to assume that we are fundamentally intellectual—that the thing inside of us which thinks and feels and decides is, in its basic nature, a problem solver, a calculator, a something whose nature is to figure out what there is and what we ought to do in light of what is coming in.

We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically matter of just a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

Read the entire piece or watch the video.

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