Mark,
Thank you for the thoughtful reading and response.
I realize I'm stepping into a bit of a physics minefield with that thumbnail description, but its use was to lay a foundation for how our physiological dichotomy of the central nervous and circulatory systems are biological equivalents to the functions of government and finance.
Then the other leg of this view is how energy is inherently dynamic, while information is necessarily static. Consider the words on this page; How much would civilization have advanced without this stability of patterns? How much would reality exist as we know it, without those stable patterns? There is the view opposite to yours, that only the patterns, the math, are real and presumably, especially considering the concept of blocktime, that energy is just an illusion of the geometry of spacetime.
I have to say I avoid most serious discussions of quantum information and mechanics, because they seem to have presumptions of an objective classical reality that doesn't exist, but which only they realize. Take for instance a moving car and consider the idea of position; It really doesn't have one. There is no exact location, anymore than there would be an exact location for a subatomic quantum of energy. Yet you could certainly measure features, ie. information about it, if you measure it in a small enough unit of time. I think if we were to really peel away the last hundred years of increasingly abstract formulations(more of those static forms) and try to view it with the collective wisdom from many fields, such as information theory, neurology, etc, it might fit in better than we think.
One point I keep making is that we look at time backwards. While we experience it personally as a sequence of events and so think of it as the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics distills to measures of duration for use in the geometry, the reality is it's the changing configuration turning future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns. This makes time much more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. Just that with temperature, we look at the overall effect and with time we look at the particular actions, but there is no universal clock, just a composite effect of lots of actions. Faster clocks don't move into the future quicker, they recede into the past faster, as they burn/age quicker. The hare is long dead and the tortoise is still plodding along. There is also no need to assume the future must be deterministic, or the past remains probabilistic, ie, multiworlds, as probability precedes actuality. So I think there are a number of such basic conceptual errors built into the model, but no one can really step back far enough to see them, so now it's string theory and multiverses as solutions.
As for combining information, consider taking a picture and how the shutter speed determines clarity. Now if we were to leave the shutter open longer, more light would get in and so presumably more information being carried by that light, yet the effect is to wash out the picture, as the information/energy cancels out. Much of how we experience life is just that sort of editing out lots of energy and only registering those parts to make sense of what we need to know. Extracting the signal from the noise.
In Tom Ray's thread, I tried laying out a more precise description of the economic argument, which I'll paste here;
"In our capitalist economy, we treat money as a commodity, in fact one with by far the greatest overall value, given the amount of currencies, bonds, and all the other notational devices and derivatives being traded, not to mention actual commodities, like gold, whose value is largely a function of their use as a currency. Given the power of these markets, it is safe to say we have something of a tail wagging the dog situation.
What I would argue is that money is not a commodity, but a contract and if we understood it as such, it would seriously change the economic dynamic for the better. Originally what became money was specifically contracts, such as clay tablets used as receipts for stored grain in ancient Sumer, up to the gold certificates issued by the Rothschilds in 18th century Europe. They were essentially IOU's backed by a specific item. It then became convenient to trade these contracts around as though they were commodities in their own right. Then such things as futures, bonds, etc, which were backed by promises of future income, came into use. Not to mention all the innumerable devices of notational value since created.
From this commercial convenience arose the use of state currencies. Which were originally minted from precious metals and so presumably had intrinsic value, eventually became notational as well.
Now what backs the value of these notes is essentially the health, wealth and economic productivity of the state issuing them. Essentially they are a contract between the community and its members, that one can count on the overall goodwill of the community in making good on the worth of these notes. "Accepted as legal tender in all transactions."
Yet when we then consider them as commodities, they become personal property and so there is no moral imperative to consider their function and no logical reason to limit their acquisition. Since they possess effective value and manufacturing them is only limited by the insistence on validity of the promises being made, there is a very strong inclination to create as much as possible and ignore the backing. The result is that the entire economy and often much of society becomes focused on the creation and acquisition of these notes, often to the detriment of the actual society and economy on which they are based.
Now if people truly understood these notes really do belong to the agency that issues them, since they hold the copyright, are responsible for guaranteeing the value and can adjust that value at will, possibly then people will start to be far more careful how much they are willing so extract value from interpersonal relations and environmental resources, in order to exchange for these notes. Also, on a more fundamental level, if it is to be understood as a contract between a society and its members, there would naturally also be leeway built into the system in case of emergencies, etc, because this would seriously reduce the need to accumulate excess. On the other side of the bargain, it would mean those who do try to hoard them, or otherwise abuse the relationship, could have the value of their store penalized. This then would encourage people to store value as goodwill, strong personal relations and a healthy environment. It would also create a smaller and more stable monetary system that would be more adapted to the efficient circulation of value around the economy and rather than being the giant tumor that it currently is.
Now I realize in the current situation, this proposal is as far fetched as any here, but given the solution to the last debt crash was to issue trillions more in credit, ignore any improprieties and water down all regulation and enforcement, it is a virtual certainty there will be a much larger and even more systematic crisis, given the effectiveness of the prior solution is likely well watered down, so there likely will be attention given to other models and theories and with the extent to which society is networked, some of these proposals will undoubtfully go viral."
I would add further that on physical terms, this current system does act like a giant value vacuum and so simply taxing the stream of notional wealth being shot out one end, as Piketty, et al suggest, does not stop and cannot repair the enormous social and environmental resources being sucked up and destroyed by the other end.
Regards,
John
