Tax the Rich?

(This is just a stub post to collect multiple links.)

Tax the Rich? is the headline, but it’s the recurring issue of how nation states can remain meaningful, when individuals and commercial entities can become bigger, wealthier and more powerful than nation states, and can avoid regulation and taxation by seeking exceptions in weaker states, without strong federal / international commitment. I’m suggesting beyond a certain level of wealth the marginal tax rate should be agreed to be 100% – achieving it is a whole ‘nother set of questions – and how rich is too rich, etc. (How free-democratic nation states, and their supra-national arrangements, operate is the natural end game of Systems / Cybernetic / Governance thinking.)

Note that this has nothing to do with limiting freedoms to earn etc, or the general unfairness of grotesque wealth disparities between individuals (though that ought to be an issue) – just a basic pragmatic orderly society question. How can we govern ourselves if … ?

The prompt for capturing this stub today is the emerging consequence of the US (and other) national debts hitting multi-Trillion record highs, and economic commentators warning of potential disastrous consequences. The feature that many are pointing out is that gilt / government bond rates are creeping up to unprecedented levels too. A major lever of government regulation of national finances has been that government treasuries were the lender of last resort – with the steadiest / safest (lowest rate) source of investment funding. What’s changed? Some of the tech-bros can now compete for that lending business. (Check – have I got that summary the right way round? – either way the point is individual entities are becoming “bigger” than nation states in these markets that regulate interest and inflation rates especially in times of national / international financial and banking crises. “Scary” as an actual Bank of England ex-chairman said this morning, ditto Andrew Neil watching the gilts markets yesterday and the debts this morning US 40Tn / UK 3Tn.)

The BBC story on the US and comparison to others inc UK, the key point being that because the US$ is still the main base currency the US can actually get away with the risk for longer than the rest of us. The risks are real if any new political or financial crisis arises.

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Previously here on Psybertron:

Borders vs Business – from last year.

General search on Tax the Rich

General search on Wealth

To be continued, somewhere …

(And – reminder – need to read Mark Carney’s “Values”?)

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Up to Date on SubStack

All my original postings and notes are on SubStack these days, so here a catch-up posts since my last one here on only recently having read Roger Penrose (1989) “Emperor’s New Mind”. Starting from the most recent:

What’s So Funny ‘Bout
– the Peace, Love and Understanding of Jason Arday?
(First mention, the day after his death.)

Penrose-Hameroff Consciousness
Does their work actually give us any explanation?

Being Against a Good Thing?
Dysmemics – The dangers of mis-memeing a good meme. (Responding to Musk’s claims about “Empathy”)

Intellectual-Social Interactions
Defining Pirsig’s Social and Intellectual Layers

A Welcome Diversion Around Dennett
Dan Dennett’s memoir “I’ve Been Thinking” (2023)

Vive la Difference / Différence / Différance
The significant reality of male / female brain / mind differences.

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Post note: and before I continue, I picked-up some new reading. Loved Arundhati Roy’s writing in her “God of Small Things” though I didn’t write a review much longer than that comment, but I kept an eye on here lefty-feminist activities ever since. Love the person too. In a casual trip to the local bookshop I was passing today, I noticed her “Mother Mary Comes To Me” latest title. The title is a song lyric, a Beatles song. Last weekend’s Sunday Session playlist, was Beatles covers. Apparently her mother Mary didn’t say “Let It Be”. It’s a memoir with 40-odd short, titled chapters I noticed “What’s So Funny [’bout]?” and “Declaration of Love” which put me instantly in mind of my last post about Jason Arday being ridiculed when talking about his “Axis of Love” and his use of song titles and lyrics in his work. Anyway, none of those things are actually connected, but I bought the book on spec and have already started to read.

Oh, and wow, the links never end. That post above on my previous reading of Roy, was on the day we experienced the biggest, closest, thunderstorm of our lives in Chattanooga – the lightening bolts and thunder simultaneously exploding on the bonnet of our car while stopped at the lights! Talk about gut-feel. As I type, there’s a welcome rainy thunderstorm crashing around outside, here on the NE coast of England. And an item on BBC R4 “News At One” on the newly licensed Tunny (Tuna) fishing in Whitby, all over the social-media locally in recent months. The first commercial landing of a couple of 2.5/3m long specimens just yesterday, after several months of licensed catch-and-release establishing sustainable stocks and generating sport-fishing income.

Gotta go.

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Roger Penrose

For completeness, posting mainly new content on Substack these days, but just cross-posting a link here to maintain semantic connectivity until the whole project is functioning.

I’d never read Penrose before today, despite his obvious relevance to my long-standing agenda here.

https://substack.com/profile/21157024-ian-glendinning/note/c-300150506

Enjoy.

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A Little Piece of (Blogging) History

Posting this on the original Psybertron blog because it was missing from my 2006/7 archive. Forests, thickets, trees and clearings (and fences, and gates) are frequent metaphors in knowledge discovery (and identity and definition) contexts, and the number of times I’ve remembered this image, but failed to re-find the copy I blogged back then, is scary and time-wasting.

Thanks to ChatGPT for finding it for me:

View of the forest around Stockaryd, July 2005. The clearing work after the storm Gudrun has resulted in a visual tree shaped in the landscape. The photo was also awarded Picture of the Year 2006 (photo courtesy Joakim Berglund / Expressen).

It’s actually the salvage logging clear-up from a hurricane event in Sweden, so it’s questionable how much of the shape is due to the wind-damage process and how much is due to tracks of the logging operation, but the result is a distinctly tree-shaped hole in the forest. Re-documented here 20 years after “Storm Gudrun”.

Today’s context is that I was reminded of the missing image above when I saw this short MP4 below showing the rivulets left behind a tide ebbing over the mudflats of a Chinese river. (Social media algorithms being what they are, I have captured the image / video but have completely lost the details and provenance.)

(Despite the help of ChatGPT can only find similar but not the same video, so all I know: “Tidal tree” on the Qiantang River, Zhejiang, China. Original filmmaker/source currently unknown—identification welcomed.)

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Reading & Housekeeping

Had some very productive writing time recently. Turned down a couple of gigs and writing of reviews – they’re my escape from the intellectual project(s), but it’s easy to fill your time with those instead. Also avoiding a couple of conferences I’d normally support, to the point of feeling guilty, but still found myself reading – all writing / research related but – nevertheless:

Hard copies of these two:

And a Kindle copy of this:

So, in the order I’ve read them:

Charlie Higson’s history of our Kings and Queens. Not normally the kind of stuff I’d read, but wittily and readably done, with satirical / topical references to our 21st C politics. Like “1066 and all that, only accurate” – according to the Tom Holland. (I guess I was sub-consciously interested because of my mother’s post-Norman local-history that we published last year.) Read start to finish in just a couple of sessions. Recommended.

Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveller” biography of George Forster. Bought on the strength of her two previous biographies of Humboldt and the Jena Set, and it’s getting great reviews. In the same way that Humboldt was the first “ecologist” Forster was the first “human rights” advocate, where humanity included the locals encountered on his youthful foreign travels with his father in 1760’s Russia and with 1770’s James Cook. So many overlaps and influences on the great and the good (and the not so good). Mind-bogglingly fascinating. Won’t be reading to a conclusion for now, but recommended and back on the shelf as reference for now.

Laura Spinney’s “Proto” is a history of language (and geography, civilisations and culture) through the Proto-Indo-European language family. One of those topics I’ve written about multiple times before 2005/07/13/16, but always tainted with doubt as to the authenticity of “Aryan” stories told by 19th/2oth-C white, western, ex-colonialists. It’s real alright, 10,000 years of language, before written history, and now backed by so much 21st-C science in archaeology and genealogy. Endlessly fascinating already, after the front and end matter and just a couple of chapters. (A hobby-horse of mine; lots of those “rules” of sound and spelling changes as languages migrate, b<>v and art<>craft<>rta etc, which reveal essentially the same words across languages that diverged millennia ago. And, even the good-old “Mama” as first word / sounds of human offspring before any actual language “learning” – topical in recent days with “two-Dads” parenting cases.) (Post Note – hat tip to Simon Adams for this Claude-AI attempt at the language tree.)

Will also put aside for future reference for now.

Back to the writing – picking-up on the inputs to my “Identity and Distinction” chapter from the RPA Dialogue with Keith Gillette. Just one more chore first.

Onwards and upward.

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Onto-Epistemic Layering of Values

As notified, my writing has effectively moved to Substack, and here is my most recent post there:

Multi-Axis Evolutionary Layering
of Values in “Onto-Epistemic Structures”
(with Pirsig’s 4 Layer Metaphysics as one example.)

(Prompted by a discussion with Keith Gillette on the new Robert Pirsig Association discussion forum.)

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Switching Platforms

As of today, I’ve switched my writing and blogging to my SubStack.

A note on my latest SubStack post (on sex differences of brain & mind) has a note explaining the shift, quoted here:

(*1) My Psybertron blog “What, Why and How do we Know?” has over 25 years of content on WordPress. A fork in development of that technology platform is making support increasingly problematic (see post note below), so whilst I am maintaining that content on-line, I am looking for alternatives to preserve its value and accessibility as well as continue future blogging on SubStack. In that 25 years I have often remarked that blogging notes was very similar to the paper-slips or index-card techniques used by various authors to create and organise their semantic web of complex ideas and their relationships into manageable evolving texts. Robert Pirsig’s story of how he wrote both “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila” is one clear example. That technique however has a name – “Zettelkasten” – German for note-box, and unsurprisingly these days there are electronic tools that support it. Not for the first time, I’m in the process of capturing the semantic-web of my own thinking and writing to date, in the “Obsidian” tool.

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I’m contemplating simply switching all you historical followers and commenters here directly over to the new channel, but feel free to subscribe there directly.

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Post Note: I’m not killing my WordPress instances, just looking for insurance for valuable content and off-ramps if things go completely pear-shaped. I’ll keep them live even if I reduce dependency for now.

The problems with WordPress are serious according to founder Matt Mullenweg. Here his post on 23 years of WordPress just a couple of days ago, a plea for the “internecine warfare” to cease. It’s in danger of killing WordPress, and hurting real people in the process, and for what? (And – incidentally – in his very next post – he points to the calming value of 2 minutes of Alan Watts. Wonder if Matt knows the Watts / Pirsig Zen connection – the Robert Pirsig Association also runs on WordPress. Perhaps the internecine war could benefit from Sun Tzu?)

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David Deutsch and “The Pattern”

The video embedded below is a conversation between Russ Roberts (EconTalk) and David Deutsch – a hero of mine, a quantum physicist who is incredibly thoughtful and erudite about government, democracy and society – read his “Fabric of Reality” and “Beginning of Infinity” if you haven’t already.

Their discussion topic – Deutsch’s particular thesis – is seeing antisemitism as “The Pattern”. A meme – existing long before “Jews were held responsible for the killing of God in the body of Jesus” – the impulse to legitimise hurting jews – whether big historical genocides, pogroms and lethal terrorisms or not, it’s there nascent in everyday life. In that sense they are “bottom-up” atrocities, not primarily decreed by authorities, except in some specific infamous “holocaust” cases where The Pattern was exploited by authorities. And it’s the impulse to legitimise hurting, not necessarily actively hurting, let alone killing. And the meme is not itself active “Jew-hate”, that’s also a symptom arising regularly from The Pattern.

It obviously conflicts with many other moralities in other (eg Christian) cultures, but has always been “accommodated” even if that is reducing in more recent history. The Pattern sustains, without actively being worked against. The accommodation – of the legitimisation impulse – is built into society’s world-views, quite formally and explicitly so by Augustine and Martin Luther, say. These are often rationally perverse and contradictory, often intended to help Jews, softening the impulse from active killing, without actually reversing the impulse.

That it exists and persists has clear evidence over 2500 years, even if we cannot clearly say why, when or where it arose. The whole interview is excellent on historical and modern examples through the crusades, the renaissance and reformation to today. (Dated after October 7th, and prior to the Bondi Beach atrocity.) “Anti-semitism as a mind-virus?” is the host’s sceptical summary, which I would also adopt non-sceptically as Deutsch’s memetic thesis. (He used “meme” at the start, but baulks at “mind-virus” – I’m OK with either. Strong intersection with the empathy meme / impulse – more later – often not real empathy or compassion, more part of post-rationalisation of one’s own impulses.)

“This [the pattern] isn’t the only irrationality going around.” Deutsch.

I’ll say! – Pretty much my agenda, where the antisemitism and islamophobia cases are mere examples. If we had the right / better understanding of the phenomenon, surely we’d be better placed to address it, opines David. Hear, hear!

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My thesis is that both antisemitism and islamophobia (and other public irrationalities) are about problematic self-identity in public, and the only reason I asked David for the above link to explain “The Pattern” was because of the dialogue arising on X after he had posted this:

[“Him” being yesterday’s Golders Green stabbing terrorist. Self-identity in relation to others, notice. I need to elaborate where I last raised these as “identity” issues.]

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More Bookmarking

I’m putting off reading (and watching / listening) as much as possible to focus on the writing, but I keep getting things – related to the writing – I really do want to give attention to.

I did respond to this (Facebook) post about Brian Josephson, Nobel prize-winning physicist that’s been part of my metaphysical origins story since the start. The FB post. My response. [Will dig out text, but FB is very badly behaved.]

I didn’t yet respond to the content of this one about the rationality of optimism. The FB Post. My holding response – depends pragmatically on narrow vs broad definitions of both words. Hat tip Mark Hammonds.

Further to last week’s Blake post a piece from IAI linking Blake to Heisenberg.

Heisenberg meets William Blake: The danger of science’s “single vision” The need for poetic science.

And finally, I only interjected one small comment to Ben Taylor about this LinkedIn post on Karl Friston. The LinkedIn post. Hat tip to Daniel Friedman (mentioned in my previous post) for commenting / sharing. The post is a defence against a critique of Friston’s Free Energy Principle which matters to me a great deal:

Ben commented (quoting an effective summary) ‘high entropy states are most effectively achieved by the involvement of low entropy/negentropic agents’

I replied “That’s certainly been my take for a decade or two.” ie the creation / evolution of intelligent life – localised low or neg-entropy – is an efficient part of the universe’s drive to maximise overall entropy. The “reason why” intelligent life exists.

(The above is clearly closely related to the earlier FEP critique “The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets”.)

Confirmation bias is a good thing. It exists for good reason 🙂

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Blake, Bronowski and Pirsig

I made a more than passing reference to William Blake – specifically his “America: A Prophecy” in my previous housekeeping post, and made mere passing references to Jacob Bronowski and Robert Pirsig.

An amazing tangle of threads coming together, that serve to reinforce my #NothingNewUnderTheSun angle that everything that needs saying has already been said before and, apart from branding and marketing – ie attention seeking – there is very little need to re-write or re-invent anything.

The subject of the reference was a new paper by Daniel Ari Friedman ‘Before Pragmatism Had a Name: William Blake’s “America: A Prophecy” Anticipates American Anticipatory Epistemology’

Apart from very encouraging introductory sections (quoted in that earlier reference, and repeated below) I’ve not read the paper itself yet, but I have been picking up the threads I referred to, before I do actually read it.

As the techie / geeky / engineer type long before my conversion on the road to Damascus, I was nevertheless a fan of the humanity in Bronowski’s (1973) “Ascent of Man”. It was much later I picked-up on his prior Blake scholarship in (1943) “Man Without a Mask“. What I hadn’t noticed until today, is there are a handful of Blake references already in his Ascent of Man. (He also did his research and teaching at Hull University, home of the Centre for Systems Studies – footnote here – but I digress.)

Anyway in “America: A Prophecy” – Plate 8 – there is of course a reference to Blake’s “Urizen” – the Americans were rebelling against what Urizen embodied in terms of rational codification of rules whether based on science or religion and enforced by the authority of a monarch or church.

The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness:
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves
But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps

Ditto Milton. Ditto Shelley. Clearly also the same “Church of Reason” Pirsig was warning against, and providing an alternative in his Metaphysics of Quality. It’s the enforced codification that drives the life out of humanity.

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Opening extract from

Daniel Ari Friedman – Before Pragmatism Had a Name: William Blake’s “America A Prophecy” Anticipates American Anticipatory Epistemology. Daniel of ISSS 2025/DC Systems Knowledge Base etc AND of the “Active Inference” Institute – incidentally based on the work of Solms’ collaborator Karl Friston. The best current systems thinkers are pragmatists in the respectable sense of the word. I’ve ordered the Blake originals (America & Europe) and started on Daniel’s paper – all 83 pages(!) – it starts:

The Unlikely Dialogue Between Prophecy and Empiricism

At first glance, William Blake (1757–1827)—the visionary poet-painter who conversed with angels, denounced Newton, and declared “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”—seems utterly remote from the hard-headed philosophy of action and inference that Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey launched in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an ocean away and a half-century after Blake’s death. Blake was a Romantic mystic; the pragmatists were post-Darwinian naturalists. Blake attacked empiricism as “Newton’s sleep”; the pragmatists embraced “the empiricist attitude.”[Peirce, 1877] Blake prophesied in illuminated etchings; Peirce formalized in symbolic logic.

And yet the distance collapses under examination. Both Blake and the pragmatists mount a sustained assault on the same philosophical target: the spectator theory of knowledge—the Cartesian-Lockean picture of the mind as a passive mirror or dark chamber receiving impressions from an external world. For Blake, this is the sin of Urizen, the tyrannical Reason-God who “closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”[Blake, 1790] For Dewey, it is the core error of Western philosophy from Plato to positivism, the assumption that knowing is contemplating rather than doing. For Peirce, it is the fatal conceit of Cartesian foundationalism—pretending “to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”[Peirce, 1877]

This manuscript argues that Blake’s visionary epistemology and American Pragmatism share not merely superficial affinities but deep structural convergences across six qualitative dimensions:

  1. Inquiry as Active Engagement
  2. Truth as Living Process
  3. Experience as Transaction
  4. The Social Constitution of the Self
  5. Anti-Representationalism
  6. Synergetics and Pragmatic Geometry

[Pirsigians see ourselves as following the James / Dewey / Peirce US pragmatist tradition – against that “church” of the “tyrannical god of reason”. I’ve got my earliest enlightened modern reading of Blake from Jacob Bronowski. Fascinating.]

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Topical? Today in IAI news: Heisenberg meets William Blake: The danger of science’s “single vision” by Mark Vernon, previously one of my goto’s on Dante and Barfield … and now Blake – “The need for poetic science”.

Wonder if Mark Vernon has read Daniel Friedman’s piece?

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