Socrates is in prison awaiting execution, and he is doing something he had never done before: writing poetry. When his friends ask him why, he explains that he has always had a recurring dream, a voice that told him to “cultivate and make music” (Phaedo 60e). Socrates had always assumed that by “music” the dream […]
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A Scientific Definition of Money
The importance of trade and what we ambiguously call “money” demonstrates a simple fact: humans are natural cooperators. Evolutionarily, this is no surprise. Agents gain more if they manage to coordinate on mutual contribution than if they act alone. Any subset of a population that succeeds in coordinating on such cooperation will tend to outcompete […]
Searle’s Hyenas
In a previous post, I described how a dog’s barking and gaze alternation towards its owner appear to express meaning. The animal seems to ‘tell’ the human what it wants — an unreachable piece of food — and the human, recognising this, may respond. The situation looks like communication. This scene is a good reduction […]
Who Really Rules in the Abrahamic Religions?
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are commonly perceived as systems of divine law imposed by God the Father, with men as the mediators of that authority. We picture patriarchs leading households, issuing commands, and binding entire clans and nations to covenants. Yet when we read closely, the stories themselves tell a more ironic tale. Beneath the […]
Money and the Whore of Babylon
I first came across this idea in Bernard Lietaer’s The Future of Money. In it Lietaer — one of the architects of the euro — describes how, in ancient Mesopotamia, the temple distributed clay tokens that entitled the bearer to a certain amount of barley. Some writers — beginning with Herodotus — have linked these […]
Domestication of Humans: Speciation?
The fossil record continues to grow. And with it, so does the contradiction at the heart of the study of human evolution. Each year brings new hominin fossils—jaws, skulls, infant mandibles—that confuse our picture of early human evolution. Instead of revealing a coherent lineage shaped by adaptive refinement, the evidence points to mounting morphological […]