Magpie

Yes, I was talking more about the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Someone like Derrida or Nietzsche doesn't have the same problem with identifying irrationality.

I think that's a fair point, although there is a distinction between questions like "how does the brain work", and "how do neural networks recognise patterns" and questions like "why does the result of brain activity feel like 'me thinking' " and "why do we have such a strong sense of being a 'person' and of having free will". For the latter questions it is still important to know how the brain works, but knowing that doesn't necessarily resolve those problems satisfactorily. For me, something that always bugs me about philosophers is how unwilling they are to recognise and account for irrationality. For instance while reading your rant I was interested in the part about patterns - it's always seemed to me that a lot of what the human brain does is to look for patterns and narratives in the objective world. It is indeed good at doing this, but also many cases of irrationality arise from projecting patterns that aren't genuine (for instance numerology, if you think of the way it affected medieval thought in particular) and from clinging to previously observed patterns and narratives and then interpreting new facts in the light of them (for instance when you get two opposing religious/national narratives you find the two sides of the argument interpret all facts in the light of their previous assumptions). Philosophers tend to think they are extremely rational and that all problems have an ultrarational solution so they are uncomfortable with irrational thought. That also leads me to question your last paragraph. Does knowing how the brain works necessarily teach us how to prevent silly ideas and myths? Perhaps it just explains why we are prone to such irrational behaviour?

Hi Steve, As a (longtimeago) philosophy graduate I feel vaguely compelled to defend philosophy. I read the link and did enjoy it, and you're right that philosophers can be a bit too detached from scientific inputs - though there is some value in that also as science is subject to its own myths and prejudices and occasionally a philosophical perspective can be valuable. But my main feeling reading your views was that you aren't really attacking modern philosophy, but a dated version of what it consists of - very few philosophers bother to ask "what is the meaning of life" or "where did we come from". Whereas there is a lot of discussion of how neural networks relate to thought and whether the sensation of free will arises from (chaotic or deterministic) brain processes. You have recent schools of thought like functionalism and neural darwinism and the work of Dennett which has a lot of interesting stuff to say on these topics. Your answers to the questions are fine and would probably be all a scientist needs to bother with, but one can see potential problems in them and it is in those problems that a lot of modern philosophy resides.

Yes, so knowledge and belief are a relation between the thinking subject and the objective world. d2thedr's point would maybe be better expressed in terms of "facts". There are facts about gold that are not subjective, not in any way dependent on someone thinking about gold - facts about its durability, chemical make-up, mass etc. However (IMO) value is always subjective - we ascribe value to an object based on our beliefs/knowledge of that object. We may ascribe value for good reason, for instance it is true that gold is durable, rare on this planet, and that it is generally valued by other people. But the value is not inherent to the object, only the facts that cause us to value the object.

I might be wrong but I think Churchill saw it as a matter of honour to restore the pre-war rate - because a lot of citizens had bought government bonds, thus funding the war deficit, he felt that to devalue would be to pay them back at a reduced rate. He may have had a point, but his stubbornness on this probably did more harm than good in the long run (and yes there was a bit of mythology underlying it too).

Absolutely. The former is a pretty meaningless metaphysical statement, whereas the latter is a useful and interesting observation - one can then go on to debate whether or not the current situation would or wouldn't be improved by a move to make gold more central in the monetary system once again. I'm not convinced that it would, but I don't have a problem with anyone who argues it would.

Absolutely - the fact that value is innately subjective doesn't mean we can't talk intelligibly about it, only that any search for objective value is doomed. I think it's fair to search for something which makes a reasonable de facto measure of "constant value" simply for the purposes of a rule of thumb, which is perhaps what id5 really wants. I just think it's always a mistake when people confuse that practical need with a more fundamental search for objective value - in fact I think that the desire to "believe in gold" is often strongest in people who have thought hard enough about money to become rather alarmed by how subjective and metaphysical value is - but rather than embrace that subjectivity they want to find something "solid" and "objective" that they can believe underpins value - thus one ends up with (eg) gold as real money, or the labour theory of value or whatever - anything other than accepting value is entirely subjective.

You're wasting your time then, on a philosophical value at least - because all value is subjective, and exchange/monetary/economic value in particular. The value of any one thing is measured in how much of other things it could be exchanged for. There is no constant in this process.

Thanks, that's an interesting read. The thing that I'm not sure he has taken into account is the political and military dimensions of the problem. China's CB doesn't act in isolation from the consequences of its actions and if it pursues a policy that destabilises the world in other respects there is a serious problem. But I think it's a fair point about how a tipping point might be reached where it is smarter (in Prisoners Game terms) for a CB to keep buying and move towards remonetisation than risk not doing so.

Yes I can see scenarios leading that way. I suppose what I am talking about is trying to come up with a system to prevent things reaching that level of emergency - for me all monetary systems have some level of instability and compromise and the difficulty is finding semi-permanent solutions that keep the peace. I don't really think the end of the dollar system is going to be achieved painlessly though, however it comes about.

I agree with the first sentence absolutely. Over the centuries, gold has been a fairly good one, (as has silver) so I half agree with the second sentence - I just think that in the era of global trade there are some real problems it doesn't solve. (Incidentally, apologies to all for blathering about this stuff here, I know it's not the core purpose of the thread)

Hmm, just like Bretton Woods and "occasional devaluations" then. What could possibly go wrong... It didn't quite work anywhere. The gold standard as an international system was pretty intermittent and there were plenty of suspensions and problems within it. Most major countries were on and off it at various times, it contributed to the long depression, and trade problems contributed to the build up to the first world war. The reasons why this is the case are complex of course and fiat's record this century isn't any better. Neither has fixed the problem of how to make a global free trade system work. The only thing that has given either the temporary appearance of working is the hegemony of imperial (or semi-imperial) powers.

It certainly comes into it when you consider how a transition to a new monetary system could be managed. Who holds the gold, do governments seize (or compulsorily purchase) private gold, how does one maintain liquidity of gold reserves, what level of international liquidity does one start from etc etc. Even if you are basically deriving SDRs or bancors from gold as a notional valuation, and leaving every piece of gold where it is now, I think it is problematic, can't see how it would work except in a total emergency. The advantage of a basket of commodities is that it ties money to tangible values without declaring one substance to be "real money" and thus creating new distortions around that one substance. I think you have a point about the rational/barbarous distinction. But I don't see giving in to the non-rational relic as the solution personally. I do agree that people might currently prefer to see money tied in some tangible way to "real value" though, that may be an outcome of this financial crisis.

There's significant problems with using just gold, based around the restricted supply compared to the size of the global economy and the distribution of current reserves.

All true - and yuan stability helped the Chinese economy grow to the current level, but has also created that unsustainable imbalance, so it's a hard circle to square. Might have to be larger than 20-30% to keep the system alive though. And if they try to fix it at those kinds of levels, and try to fix a system that keep a permanent Chinese surplus then it is an inherently unstable system. What you say sounds like it reflects the Chinese view fairly accurately, but why repeg the currencies and why have fixed rates at all? As soon as currencies are pegged you are storing up trouble for future in terms of trade imbalances. The formal gold standard never really fixed this problem in the 19th century, I don't see why a new one would fix it now.