He sits back on his haunches, looking at the bills and coins in his hand. He looks from the bag to Clayton and back again, suddenly shaken and terribly shocked. –Barre Lyndon, The War of the Worlds, Scene 268.
The 1953 version of The War of the Worlds has a wonderful scene where a well-dressed man offers a bag of money to board a Pacific-Tech truck fleeing Los Angeles, only to be violently rebuffed by more rugged souls. And so he’s left, perplexed and dismayed, to await his doom wondering how money, the long-time source of his power over others, suddenly possesses no power at all.
Money offers a paradigmatic example of the confusion of differential or relational properties with intrinsic properties. Given the reliability of a system, information pertaining to the system need not be known to master the capacities belonging to some element within the system. An…
View original post 1,744 more words
synthetic zerØ 
passed this along to RSB so hopefully he can engage this more fully, my sense in general is that the search for meaning is the kind of fly-bottle that Wittgenstein was hoping to free us from, fittingly for this discussion perhaps a kind of bewitchment by grammar.
hmm, not sure if you are strictly talking meaning here or more satisfaction/powers.
we may be on the precipice of some kantian rabbit-hole here.
And I seem to be catching up on your catching up. Thanks for this, arranjames – I absolutely love these cross-disciplinary convergences. And thanks, as always, to dmf, for helping my inner kitten chase the right laser pointer from time to time! Which of Bentall’s works is most concerned with the role source-monitoring plays in psychosis? Schizoid disorders could be analogized as losing the ability to match different tools to different problems. And it suggests that the work being done by Gigerenzer and the ABC Research Group might provide a new paradigm, or at least a suggestive input, for understanding psychosis.