Saturday, December 30, 2006

economic entropy

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1429429

If the economy suddenly doubled in size, and the number of jobs increased by 2, then what would happen?

half the employees would leave their jobs, and some of the companies would fail. the resulting surplus of companies would then also fail etc.
 like the expansion of a gas, irreversibly.

even if you guyaranteed jobs, then companiees would fail, and vice versa.  there is atradeoff between safety of capital (companies) and safety of workers.  this should not be.  tightly interlinked capital and workers would prevent this.


 

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Triune brain

http://www.ezls.fb12.uni-siegen.de/mkroedel/paul_maclean.html

The emotional life is dependent on some protection from around it to allow us to behave properly. The reptillian brain and cortex surrounds it. Similarly, we need to know how to counter the reptilian behaviour of other people around us, in order for us to live our own rich and emotional lives.

the cortex provides a ceiling to our emotions, delineating the limits of our emotions.

Conciousness is nothing more than a phase transition, a place where there is a critical mass of interconnected thoughts thatw e can say that we are self aware. Then maybe the brain releases a chemical that makes them all connected in some automatic way, without having to actually think the thoughts. If we lower the amount of thinking that we do, the chemical ensures that even small thoughts will propagate throughout the network, thus ensuring the structure established by conciousness performs its function even with simple stimuli. If the chemical level drops to a low level, then the whole thing "dies" and becomes a useless mass of tissue.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006