IK:   I am of a philosophical mindset but not religious in the conventional sense. I am a priority monist. In my view, the whole (the cosmos) comes before the parts. Novel parts emerge and evolve while remaining linked in one cosmos system. Ontologically, this means I make no distinction between material and immaterial as Cartesian dualists and most Christians do. There are only, strictly speaking, “existents” interacting interacting via complex system processes and seemingly bound by emergent and usually strong laws, so far as we can tell. Epistemologically, I go no further than empirical observation will take me, except to develop what I call a near-empirical metaphysics. This means I reject dogmatic religion. I’m an agnostic existentialist and scientific humanist but I also reject doctrinaire scientific positivism. My position and ethics would be closest to those of a non-theistic strand of Buddhism.

I reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Reasons and assignments of causes are inventions of human logic and inference, though these do sometimes allow us to usefully model real processes and facilitate predictions and manipulations. But we should never make the mistake of Platonic essentialism and assume that a useful model or deduced law of reality actually contains any essence of reality itself.

I even reject the Law of non-contradiction outside of classical logic itself. In other words, I am of the view that existence as such can contain contradictions. The clearest one (following discoveries in physics) is that it appears that existence can arise out of non-existence and collapse back into it. These intimations don’t surprise Buddhist philosophy at all, which has long held such a position.

Me:  That’s an excellent point of view. It is however stuck in unknowingness which IS very high on a scale of consciousness in fact the only state higher than it….is knowingness.

The willingness and ability to integrate both knowingness and unknowingness is what enables us to be/become fully conscious instead of only partially so. It also enables us to have a real, personal experience of time as both a moment and as a flow of moments because if you remain in a radical state of unknowingness or only allow yourself to know at lower epistemological levels like data or abstraction…..you arbitrarily limit yourself to an abstract knowledge OF time. The personal experience of present time and each flowing moment of it is one of the goals of virtually every strand of buddhist thought.

To me the integration of our partial consciousness/knowingness with and via direct and thus somewhat heightened awareness of the electro-magnetic flux that is continually around us in present time….is what is known as higher/full consciousness…itself. It’s all natural….and glorious

IK:  Craig,

You seem to me to be propounding a form of gnosticism: a state where humans can have perfect or true knowledge and know with certainty that they are right. That’s not a position I could develop out of my philosophy. It’s not consistent with issues of transmission of information and loss of information in complex system information theory. Nor is it consistent with issues of modelling (the brain models the world) where the model is always perforce less complex than reality. Plus there are the further issues of errors in modelling.

But each to his own in metaphysics. 🙂

Me:  Integrative natural gnosticism perhaps. I’ll take the observations and experiences described in the world’s wisdom traditions (and my own naturalistic experiences as well) over the limited mereness of the current-modern paradigm for inquiry of Science Only.

The integrated mind understands that ethics and personal responsibility always applies in one’s personal life and also always in the livingness of systems. The overly comparmentalized one too often doesn’t.       Steve Hummel 10/27/2019

Dave,

“as your ideas don’t make sufficient sense for us to be able to align ours with yours, why don’t you respect us by trying to align yours with one of ours?”

That is an incorrect statement as additional money in the system and no harmful inflation is the goal of virtually every heterodox economist. Also it is the duty of honest investigators to acknowledge that mere targeted reforms and even more organized theories in fact need to align THEMSELVES with the ultimate integrated-integrative phenomenon AKA a paradigm and its change.

“about changing from scarcity to abundance looks particularly ridiculous without qualification, e.g. to “scarcity to abundance” of giving each other credit for who we are. (Each of us having our own responsibilities).”

Who has ever suggested that we don’t need to be responsible for our actions? Not me.If you can equate me suggesting we contemplate the many aspects of grace as in love in action and applying that concept to the monetary and economic system so as to invert its current realities and so also to have an everyday re-inforcement of that universally acknowledged highest personal good….with lack of responsibility, then I welcome you to try.

“Likewise your 3), advocating “a re-juvenated profit-making economics” without defining ‘profit’, which in our capitalist context will be assumed to be a monetary surplus enabling money lenders to live off the services of others.”

Does not apply to what I’ve said here many times because I suggest the end of private for profit money creation and the creation of a non-profit, publicly administered national banking, financial and monetary system aligned with the concept (grace as in monetary gifting) of the new monetary paradigm.

KZ:  Related to but slightly different from the above, I also want to point out that debates among economists about what money is or is not, and how it “ought to be used” are largely unheard and irrelevant to most of the people who use money every day. Bankers listen to economists with one ear, some businesses with half an ear, and the ordinary citizen with no ears. Governments listen to economists when they should definitely not.

Me:  “Related to but slightly different from the above, I also want to point out that debates among economists about what money is or is not, and how it “ought to be used” are largely unheard and irrelevant to most of the people who use money every day. Bankers listen to economists with one ear, some businesses with half an ear, and the ordinary citizen with no ears. Governments listen to economists when they should definitely not.”

Defining money is fine. Better is to recognize it as an effective and essential tool, the economy as monetary in nature and to look for ways that it can be utilized to resolve income, revenue and systemic problems.

Again to paraphrase: “It’s the monetary paradigm, stupid.”

KZ:  Craig, you are correct that money is just another cultural tool to use in figuring out how to live our lives. So, let’s figure out how to best use it.

Me:  Thanks Ken. Correct, and actually my statement that “to look for ways that it can be utilized to resolve income, revenue and systemic problems” was slightly off my real point which is that more of us need to discover the simple and yet economic paradigm changing effects of an accounting and algebraic operation of equal numerical amounts credited to consumers and debited back to enterprise….of a 50% Discount/Rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale.

That single policy has so much problem resolving effect, so much integrative economic benefits to both individuals and commercial agents and potential personal, social and systemic psychological up-lift-ness that I am continually amazed that you guys don’t get on the bandwagon with me on it.

This thread affirms what I have been trying to break through the sound barrier with other posters here. The Interdisciplinary-integrative approach is always wisdom. It is in fact the very process of wisdom itself. The world’s major wisdom traditions, despite most of their adherents, have given us the contemplative, ab-reactive and consciousness raising techniques to self actualize the higher concepts necessary to qualify for what defines the word wisdom. Wisdom in its highest form is not religion, but rather deeper insight and the development of the integrative mindset.

Economics has been analyzed and critiqued fifteen ways from the middle and most of us here agree with the various heterodox perspectives that have resulted from that work. What remains to be done is to analyze the most important and influential aspect of the economy on the integrative level of the paradigm, namely the money system, whose paradigm has not changed for the entire course of human history.

Two of the techniques used by various wisdom traditions is to repetitively ask the novitiate to contemplate an absurdity until they have a deep cognition about a problem or their own moment to moment consciousness, or to ask them to look at their immediate environment until they discover that they have not actually looked DIRECTLY at things there since early childhood but rather relate to it via an abstraction instead.

Repetition is not always appreciated, but it is a very workable technique.

JD:  I would like to ask a very sincere question, if you don’t mind. I am not a professional economist, so I really don’t know the answer. Why don’t economists start by saying what the purpose of an economy (or “the economy”) is and then analyze what is happening in relation to that?

Me:  I’ll answer that in the most basic and potentially insightful way, as basics/elementals are always insightful.

The purpose of economic production is consumption.

And a 50% Discount/Rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale facilitates a free flowing economy by doubling everyone’s earned income purchasing power, doubling the actually available individual income/business revenue for any and all enterprises and just as a kicker not only completely eliminates any possibility of price and asset inflation, but by so integratively inverting the reality of chronic inflation to beneficial price deflation…fulfills one (and all) of the historically verifiable signatures of paradigm changes.

Look at that. Don’t just gloss over it. Its effects are mathematical, empirical, temporal and almost un-gameable (and virtually so with philosophically aligned tax and economic regulations). And when everyone (immediately) realizes how nice it is that their income/revenue is mathematically doubled and economic stability is bulwarked, another of the signatures of paradigm changes will take effect. That is, everything adapts and moves on to the new paradigm….not the other way around….because its so obviously beneficial to every economic agent and to the system.

The operations of paradigm changes are always basically simple and yet always transformational to the pattern it relates to.

We should be focusing on the new paradigm, its problem resolving aspects and building a mass movement to herd the political apparatus toward its implementation, not endlessly affirming already agreed upon theories and policy parts of the paradigm change.

C’mon.

JD:  If we take your purpose statement as a starting point, and I think it’s a pretty good one, economic analysis probably should begin by looking at how well and how efficiently an existing system actually serves people’s material needs, right? Why, then, don’t economists do that?

Me:  That’s because they are largely off in some abstraction ONLY looking for the answer when they should be integrating both abstract and direct observation. And that’s the heterodox ones. The orthodox ones are simply way inured to their orthodoxy, concerned with career more than the search for truth, afraid to risk criticism and/or numerous other factors none of which is the wisdom of integrative thinking, and thinking on the paradigmatic level which is the quintessential integrative mental and temporal level of thought and observation as it is the integration of simple and complex, singular concept and pluralistic pattern effect.

It’s a very good book. (Doughnut Economics) But it still lacks the key policy insight we need.

What’s more re-orienting than

1) a monetary paradigm change from scarcity to abundance,

2) the baulkiness of systemic austerity to free flowingness via primary factor and tool,

3) near crazed over production due to fear of commercial ruin and/or an unbalanced ethic of greed and power to a re-juvenated profit making economics guided philosophically and policy-wise by the concept and ethic of grace and

4) international far flung energy intensive supply chains due to the warped dreams of financial monopolistic and paradigmatic dominance to local and national production and finally

5) what’s more re-orienting than a new insight about the power and significance of a direct and reciprocal monetary policy at the point of retail sale that would accomplish the above inversions of reality and primary signatures of every historical paradigm change? (inversion of temporal reality and new insight and/or tool)

If we guaranteed every adult 18 years of age and older $24k of purchasing power with a $1000/mo. universal dividend and a 50% discount/rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale, and also implemented a job guarantee of 35/hrs/wk at $10/hr that would give them a total of $57.6k/yr worth of purchasing power per individual or $115.2k per 2 adult household. And if we had a national non-profit financial and monetary system that gave a second 50% discount/rebate policy at the point of 0% note signing for electric autos, solar panels, green homes and every other green technology….we could end individual monetary scarcity, systemic austerity, chronic price and asset inflation and actually rapidly do something about climate change….instead of forever chattering about all of the junk economics and seemingly unsolvable problems….enforced by ignoring the power and significance of a direct and reciprocal monetary policy at retail sale.

Velocity of money is really just an indicator of “good economic times” even though that state is ephemeral and such description exists only within the rigged nature of the current monetary and financial paradigm. Money does NOT sprout a mind and decide to make prices rise. The two primary reasons for the economic vice of price and asset inflation are

1) individual income scarcity and hence systemic business revenue scarcity that tempts commercial decision makers to raise prices in hopes of garnering more business revenue in that austere system and

2) confusing freedom with chaos (which every economic perspective from ultra libertarian to MMT is guilty of) and thus not searching and finding a better, more beneficial alternative for all agents individual and commercial…to that rigged, austere and chaotic system.

Hyperinflations do not occur without several disastrous prior circumstances have taken place and finally a compliant central bank simply prints and/or leverages up speculators who short the currency. Normal garden variety inflation has always been a smallish single digit percentage except during and after wars or cost inflation due to a major commodity’s price rise…which isn’t “monetary inflation” anyway.

Retail sale is the end of the legitimate economic/actually productive process where production becomes consumption. That by definition also makes it the ending and summing point for any and all economic factors including of course price and asset inflation. Thus a high percentage, say 50%, discount/rebate price and monetary policy at that point and time will not only eliminate inflation it will beneficially integrate price and asset deflation into profit making economic systems, and accomplishes everything the leading reforms say they want which is more money/purchasing power for everyone and a system which does not get de-stabilized by inflation.

Popping out of the abstract thrice removed fugue of economic theorizing and coming into present time to recognize the incredible significance and power of such a policy shatters the orthodoxies and confusions described above and enables us to cognite on the new paradigm we all are seeking. Discovering genuine ending, summing, factor expression and pivoting points is incredibly powerful both mentally and temporally.

So what is everyone’s conclusions from all of this likely disinformationally laced geo-political goggledegook?