Young Master Smeet
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JUst run across this article:http://theconversation.com/chattering-brain-cells-hold-the-key-to-the-language-of-the-mind-24085
Quote:We can also determine the location of every single neuron and all of its connections and its chemical messengers. Having done this, though, we still will not understand how the brain works. To understand a code we need to anchor that code to the real world.We easily anchor Shakespeare’s code (we find out that “Juliet” refers to a specific young woman, “Romeo” to a specific young man) but can we do this for the brain? It seems we can. By recording the chatter of neurons while animals (and sometimes humans) perform the tasks of daily life, researchers have discovered that there are regions where the neural code relates to the real world in remarkably straightforward ways.If I'm reading that right, we can't isolate the brain states from the whole chain of environment and action that they are connected to their objects, intimately. That for me is a thoroughgoing account of how the meat-bots relate to the universe and pretend that they think to each other.
I wonder how much of the scamming came from the fact that other NGO's from Western States were operative there? Certainly, one scammer in Africa tried to play us off against an NGO out there.Anyway, a useful resource:http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/library/directory/ukraine2014.htm
Richard Seymour does a nice take down on the Stop The War Coalition's stances on this issue:http://www.leninology.com/2014/03/ukraine-against-infantile-realpolitik.htmlActually, I don't think it is that complex.One mafia opposed the mafia that was in charge, and co-ordinated the discontent in the government, and found muscle through the fash (and maybe lost control of the muscle). The mafias had relations with groups in Europe and in Russia, who sponsored them. One mafia had friends in the unions (in the East).Our position (and Stop the War's) should be clear: we are against the mafia. We don't support anyone dying for either side, and we don't support "our" state sending anyone to the theatre to kill or be killed. We have no interest in where the borders are drawn, but we do care that effective and meaningful democracy be restored.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26438661
Quote:Writing about the future of shipping Oskar Levander, Rolls-Royce's vice president of innovation, engineering and technology said: "Now it is time to consider a road map to unmanned vessels of various types. Sometimes what was unthinkable yesterday is tomorrow's reality."Given that the technology is in place, is now the time to move some operations ashore? Is it better to have a crew of 20 sailing in a gale in the North Sea, or say five in a control room on shore?" he asked.Such vessels would not need expensive crew quarters. People would not need to risk death, be separated from the families or just spend their lives on a boat. But the 100,000 merchant marine vessels are the livelihoods of around half a million (I'd guess) people and their dependents. Of course, the next step would be the automated car and truck. Of course, the mid point is that a human remains on ship, as a token (or flies between them).
Mike,I couldn't find the other quote I half remember, which is that Agnostic is just a polite English word for Atheist. I can never see any distinction between agnosticism and atheism. The former is just louder about the "as far as I know" caveat than the latter.
Time for an eggregious drive by Freddy Engels quote
Freddy wrote:I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability", we should be even worse off than we are. This book defends what we call "historical materialism", and the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly inadmissible.[…]As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is. He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-mat.htmAnd of course, from there, we invoke Russell's teapot…
I think it's rather quite simple. Either ideas are material, and thus subject to causation and the laws of thermodynamics, or, they are not, andcauseless effects occur off the back of ideas.
So, in the UK the minimum wage is £6.31. Assuming a 35hr week, and a citizens income of 80% minimum wages that gets us £176.68 a week. Assume that is given to all UK citizens, that is 70 million people, that would cost £12.4 billion. The UK spends more than £23 billion on child tax credits alone. On those numbers, I think the reality of a citizens income is in the "feel" and the proaganda value (especially as it would be paid to citizens not immigrants only).
I imagien such a reform would be very cheap. For those in work, it turns into a tax rebate, up to the value of the citizen's income. Anyone paid enough to pay more tax than the income would then subsidise the unemployed. The state then abolishes all otehr welfare benefits, since the citizens income gets declared to be enough to live on (and it would be cheaper to administer without having to manage the entitlement gateway). It then becomes a constant struggle to hold the basic income at just below subsistence, so people are forced into low wage work (which will now come relatively cheap for employers). Of course, there will be, as with the minimum wage, an increase just before elections.
DJP,Ideas look like they are immaterial and infinite, but they require processor time (to abuse a computer analogy), and can only come into being through the transformation of energy.
I used that quote since it seems an adequate refutation of your claim that value, for Chucky, doesn't contain an iota of matter.My view is that value is material, entirely and completely and is subject to the laws of thrmodynamics, it is only created (and destroyed) in so much as it is one thing transformed into another, ultimately energy from the sun.
Lbird,what I wrote was a (slightly edited for context) quote from Marx. "Substance" and "Material" (Materiatur)are his words.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/appendix.htm
With regard to value, what I think is that only through a general character does the value-form correspond to the concept of value. The value-form had to be a form in which commodities appear for one another as a mere jelly of undifferentiated, homogenous human labour, i.e. as expressions in the form of things of the same labour-substance. For they are all material expressions of the same labour, of the labour contained in the linen or as the same material expression of labour, namely as linen. Thus they are qualitatively equated.
LBird wrote:Well, perhaps I've succeeded (at last!) in pointing out to you the difference between a 'realist' and a 'physicalist' view of nature.It's your choice, comrade, which ideology you want to employ to help you to understand the world (physical and social).Leaving aside the substantive issue of 'value', etc. and how we understand it, I'm just glad that I've been able to finally explain something!I think it's more like we now understand your terminology. You say Critical Realism, I say Cultural Materialism, after the deaths of millions of electrons, we now agree that what we've been calling materialism is what you call critical realism….Now, potato, or potato?
