One of the interesting things about people who engage in closed-system thinking is that they believe in the free-floating animistic fallacy at the same time. Meaning, they are wrong at both ends. They think it's all in your head - things manifest as a result of our thinking them - but at the same time there is only one universal frame of reference, it can be complete and accurate for all heads, and it must be internally consistent based on simple logic proceeding from popular initial assumptions (and which assumptions we should all "reasonably" agree upon).


We saw examples of this back in the limit-order thread - where a group of academics believed that by making the free-floating decision to refer to the NYSE specialist as "she," they could change the resultant texture of sexual occurence on the exchange floor - as well as in my discussion of the animistic fallacy with Craig H - where I pointed out the flawed thinking of propagandists who imagine that simply by getting the large masses of people to believe something you can make it so. Then again, without the idea that influential individuals can engineer the world, you can't write very interesting fiction.


With Marco, we have an example of a person who equates wealth with currency - with dollar $igns in effect. And he inquires whether it is better to be a trend setter or a trend follower - as if you can decide to be either, as if you can roll dice to pick which country to invest in and when, rather than having your opinions formed for you, by a process of Darwinstics selection among opinion leaders and popular ideas.


Review the Marco model. The properties of wealth and of money are equal and overlapping - and can be respresenetd by a dollar sign and all the words which that sign is associated with. And in a world of cause and effect, of intentions emerging from nowhere (or emanating from the human spirit) and free-floating results, we have trend setters and trend followers.


Years ago, I had my eye on a smart-looking uzi for sale, for a couple hundred bucks at a local store. Finally, the week before the new assault-weapons ban went into effect, I made up my mind to go buy it - only to find out another guy had beat me by four hours, and had paid four times what the tag had been for however many months prior. So naturally, I wondered, had the subset of weapons chosen to be banned statistically coincided with the weapon I had considered to be smart-looking?


Was it all an image thing? And were these images a free-floating feedback loop, an internally-consistent popular cartoon world, with no basis in reality? What physical properties did the weapon actually possess in my mind, could it shoot straight, or was it just scary?


So I went around asking people what they thought of the new Federal Assualt-Weapons Ban, recently signed into law by Congress. Universally, people wrung their hands and nodded their heads, and said it was a Good Thing, Very Good. I then defied every single one of these people to define for me what subset of guns qualified as "assault weapons" - or, alternatively, to draw me a picture of what their idea of an "assault weapon" was.


But not one of them could! They could barely even say, well, "it's a black, mean-looking thing," much less a cheap, lightweight rifle, mass-manufactured at low cost for foot soldiers by communist planned economies. Or something. The images they had seen in the movies had not even imprinted a cartoon on their minds which they could draw upon.


So what had even taken place, what was the physical manifestion of this ban, other than that they wouldn't be scared? Or was any such physical connotation, such as a reduction in feelings of violence - okay, a reduction in actual murder - even contemplated?


So, I got to thinking, if people could talk all day wihtout having any idea what they were taliking about, could not a computer be programmed to do the same thing? To talk about it all day, did a computer need to have any idea of what an assault weapon was beyond a few word associatons, such as black and pointy and "mean, greedy, black-haired men?" Could you simply construct a two-axis/nine-square physical-categorization table for words in a symbol-association network, by which all phenomena could be explained, and all sequences of words could be translated into other words?


The two physical-property axes were "good" vs. "evil" and "subject" vs. "object" - plus some colors and so forth. In other words, Bill Clinton is good, as well as a leader - by being an animator or a "mover" in the words of Craig H. He has good intentions, and can choose to be a trend setter. A tree is also good, but it is an object of good and bad intentions, and does not have its own intentions. The only internal debate comes up over the friendly dolphin, which is universally defined as being good, but whether it is good as a mover, doing good deeds, or as a mov-ee - in need of being on the receiving end of the good deeds of others - is in question.


Note, the core physical-descriptor table only has nine squares - good-neutral-evil by manager-inanimate-managee - and there is no spot even for simple tools, which convey transitive properties, for instance. There are just leaders and followers, good and bad, and inbetween.


In other words, the dolphin has feelings - same as trees - but also may be more animate, more self-directed than the helpless ghetto/welfare mother in "need" of health-care coverage (which coverage can be produced out of thin air, merely by the good intentions of others who are also good, but are on the cause side of cause and effect). It's an interesting model of the universe, but it exists only in people's heads. And of course, it is only in the free-floating logic of Marco's symbol-association network that my model becomes self contradictory.


But I'm not talking about symbol manipulation pursuant to evolved rules, I'm not talking about mathematics. Nor am I talking about indentities, where rather than building a castle out of thin air, we discover two existing castles which happen to fit on opposite sides of an equals sign. I'm talking about reality, which is beyond the human ken. If you begin with an initial set of assumptions and proceed to build on them - only the initial assumptions are adjusted backwards to produce a feelgood result, or one consistent with what you were originally inclined to hallucinate, or the least common denominator perception of the mob - anything is true, so long as we wish it, and if only we could overcome the stubborn objections of reality-addicted meanies, like


eLROY


P.S. I actually had a far more complete social/language model for a computer simulation of an articulate mob idiot than I have even touched on here, but I scrapped it - for obvious reasons.