Money is a medium of exchange. That is to say that people obtain some amount of it by exchange for the purpose of yet further exchange. It contrasts with things manufactured by them for exchange, and with things obtained for use other than in further exchange. Money arises whenever someone is clever enough to accept more of a commodity than he or she would otherwise want (at the given rate of exchange), and uses it in a further trade. What we ordinarily recognize as money is whatever money has become standard in the exchanges that we observe, but any commodity obtained in one exchange, with the intention of being exchanged yet again, and then indeed thus traded, was money.

Historically, commodity money is routinely followed by commodity-based money, with promissory notes circulating as money. There may at first seem to be no real difference between commodity money and commodity-based money, but fractional-reserve banking actually makes that difference very real, with the promises exceeding the stock of the commodity held to meet those promises, so that the amount of money exceeds the stock of the commodity. And, following upon the introduction of commodity-based money, we observe the introduction of fiat money, where notes that make no promises somehow circulate as money.[1]

Economists — not merely advocates of commodity money or of commodity-based money, but economists more widely — have a great difficulty in explaining why fiat money should have any value in a market economy. We can say a great deal about what prices must obtain if people use some given stock of notes as money for exchanges of some given set of stocks or flows of commodities, and have some given available technologies for transferring these notes, but it seems that we cannot fully explain why people agree to make these exchanges using this money, and hence we cannot explain the value of this money.

On the other hand, most economists seem to be comfortable in the explanation of commodity money and of commodity-based money. It is claimed to be the value of the commodity in non-monetary use. That is to say that to explain the value, for example, of an American silver dollar, one would find the persons who wanted to smith the silver or use it for wiring or somesuch, and see what commodities they would and could offer for that amount of silver. (To express the value in other commodities, one would have to follow a chain of offered exchanges.)

However, this explanation of the value of commodity money and of commodity-based money cannot account for the full value of an indefinitely circulating money.

Before continuing the principal discussion, I want to critique some features of neo-classical economics — the mainstream of micrœconomic theory.[2]

Neo-classical economics proceeds almost entirely within a framework of limiting cases; even when a neo-classical theorist makes a move towards greater reälism with respect to some aspect of the framework, most of the rest of the theorizing retains the familiar limiting-case features. The use of these limiting cases often produces models that are defensible on instrumentalist grounds, but certainly not when they cause whatever is the problem principally under consideration simply to leave sight.

In the case of the problem here to be raised, three of the standard presumptions of neo-classical economics that are objectionable are:

• that preferences are complete
• that goods and services are continuously divisible
• that small costs may simply be ignored

The idea that preferences are complete is that, for absolutely every two potential choices, either a person thinks that one is better than the other, or the person thinks that they are, effectively, equally good. Cases in which people instead behave in some meaningfully different way both from treating the one as better than the other and from treating the two as equally good (or equally bad) are disallowed. I've attacked the literal truth of completeness elsewhere.

The idea that goods and services are continuously divisible might be attacked on the basis of physical theory — what we know of the properties of matter. But, before we pick such nits, I think that we ought to concern ourselves with how finely the human mind actually divides things. Even the folk who carefully eye bottles of water, seeking to determine which is most full, don't get below a particular resolution. And if perfectly accurate and precise measures were always available, then we'd be lost beyond some number of digits to the right of the decimal point.[3] (Our limitations in this regard are entangled with the costs of resolution, which might bring us to the issue of small costs being ignored, except that the costs of ever finer resolution can sky-rocket!)

I don't think that the presumption that small costs may simply be ignored needs much explanation. But note that it can sometimes directly contradict the presumption of completeness of preferences! A cost corresponds to forgone goods or services, and small costs are small variations in the goods or services that one might have had.

I believe that in many other cases, these three presumptions are not a matter of great concern, though they are objectionable in explanation of the value of a money that is a commodity or is based upon a commodity. But there's a fourth presumption that is relevant and that I do not think is ever justified. Specifically

• that, when an agent is otherwise indifferent amongst choices, he or she makes that choice which would be required for the theory to work

That is to say that not only does Buridan's ass choose one of the bails of hay but, if theory won't work unless he chooses the left bail in particular, then he just does. The weaker presumption, that an indifferent agent (person or donkey) will choose, is usually based on a theory that the agent can and will flip a coin, but the idea that the agent will flip a coin contradicts expected utility theory, the mainstream of the theory of choice under risk. The stronger presumption that the agent will necessarily just happen to choose whatever is needed for the rest of the theory to work is incoherent.

In some contexts, most people understand that, for any person to agree to an exchange, he or she must expect to be better-off if the exchange takes place than if it does not. Most people lose sight of that point in a variety of contexts; some screw their eyes shut so as not to see it. Under the presumptions of neo-classical economics, it can be made to disappear.

Imagine that Ann has some quantity of blackberries, and Bob has some quantity of strawberries, and that Ann would rather have the strawberries that Bob has, and that Bob would rather have the blackberries that Ann has, and that they each feel this way even accounting for the costs of arranging and effecting a trade. In the real world, the trade will take place; and in the neo-classical world the trade will take place. Chances are, the trade would take place even if Ann were offering a slightly smaller quantity of blackberries while Bob offered the same amount of strawberries. In the real world, if we decrease the quantity of blackberries below some point, Bob may still think that the blackberries would have been worth it, except for the hassle of negotiation and transfer; in the neo-classical world, that hassle is usually considered small enough to ignore. So we leave reality behind, and can keep paring-back the offered amount of blackberries. We can do so with infinite precision, because blackberries are imagined to be continuously divisible, and because Bob is imagined to have complete preferences. Eventually, we reach the point at which the offered amount of blackberries is worth exactly as much to Bob as the strawberries that he has. But, at every place up to that point, he would agree to a trade; to put that in mathematical jargon, so long as there is any ε (no matter how tiny) of blackberries greater than the amount at which he is indifferent, neo-classical Bob will make the trade. So the claim is that, at the limit, he will still make the trade, even though he has nothing to gain. Mind you that this is a limit approached from one side. If the epsilons were all short-falls, rather that surpluses, then Bob would have been refusing right up to the limit. Still, neo-classical Bob might work well enough as a model for real-world Bob if short-falls just never occur for him. If they do, it would be quite terrible to claim that the behavior to one side of the limit (by even an ε) is the behavior when approached from the other side, and that Bob both trades and refuses to trade at the limit, or trades both ways (strawberries for blackberries or blackberries for strawberries) at the limit.[4]

The value of an additional amount, more or less, of strawberries or of blackberries relative to other possible changes, doesn't typically stay the same. In particular, as one has ever more of something, one would increasingly find more of something else relatively more useful; and as one has ever less of something, one would increasingly find more of something else less useful.[5] As a result, under the presumptions of neo-classical economics, one could expect that, by playing with the amounts of blackberries that Ann has, and the amount of strawberries that Bob has, one could produce a situation in which each valued what they had equal to what the other had. Given these presumptions, as soon as Ann and Bob have made a trade, they might be willing to make the inverting trade, so that they end-up where they were! And I've seen models in which it is implicit that just this sort of thing happens!

So long as we understand these assumptions as producing imperfect instruments, they may have great value. Newtonian physics has been empirically falsified, and never really held together, but it works fine not merely for much technology, but for investigating the basic answer to various scientific questions. Likewise for some applications of neo-classical economics. But one must not confuse artefacts of counter-factual assumptions with actual answers to whatever questions are at hand.

Imagine three people, Aya, Gus, and Tor. Aya has a pepper but wants strawberries; Gus has strawberries but wants okra; Tor has okra but wants a pepper.

Aya can get what she really wants by using okra as a medium of exchange (trading the pepper for okra and then the okra for strawberries); or Gus can get what he wants by using the pepper as a medium of exchange (trading the strawberries for the pepper and then the pepper for okra); or Tor can get what he wants by using the strawberries as a medium of exchange (trading the okra for the strawberries and then the strawberries for the pepper).

But if the only potential use that Aya has for the okra is as a medium of exchange, and likewise for Gus with the pepper and for Tor with the strawberries, then it will not make sense for Aya to use the strawberries as a medium of exchange, for Gus to use okra as a medium of exchange, nor for Tor to use the pepper as a medium of exchange. No matter what is used as money, the person responsible for its having value in exchange is also a sink for the money; once it is in his or her hands, it will cease to circulate as money.

One might imagine a larger community, in which the money had to pass through more hands to reach a sink. But the reasoning that launched the money was based upon its value to a person who would be a sink. If the money could not be expected to reach a sink, it could not be expected to reach the person who gave it value. It seems that it must go to a sink to be money.

My model of Aya, Gus, and Tor has only persons each of whom places no value on the item for which he or she could initially trade, except as a medium of exchange; and the trades considered are those in which each person gives all of his or her stock. We can imagine an economy with a large number of people, many or all of whom place some value on various or all of the sorts of commodities that might be used as money. We may presume that some goods and services are possessed by more than one person and that some goods and services are sought by more than one person. For various potential transactions, we might suppose competition both amongst those seeking the monetary commodity (for use as money or for non-monetary use) and amongst those offering the monetary commodity to them. We may conceive that many stocks of goods and of services are divisible.

When stocks of a commodity are divisible it becomes possible (and sometimes necessary) to put some portion to one use and the remainder into another use or into other uses. Various portions may be traded with various persons, and some may be put to use other than in exchange; and these different sorts of allocation of different portions may make sense because (as said earlier) as one has ever more of something, one would increasingly find more of something else relatively more useful; and as one has ever less of something, one would increasingly find more of something else less useful. It certainly becomes conceivable for some people to acquire both stocks of the monetary commodity for use as money and stocks for non-monetary use.

But, even with these added complications, it seems that the persons responsible for the monetary commodity having value in exchange are also sinks for the money; once it is in their hands, it will cease to circulate as money.

Whatever may be their priorities, rational people make only trades that they regard as improving expectations, and do not forgo greater such improvements for lesser improvements. In a neo-classical framework, that improvement might be imagined to be 0, the ghost of a departed ε, but in the real world it must be more than that. Trading with the monetary commodity is no exception to the rule that rational people do not trade unless they expect their priorities to be best served by the trade.

If a person wants a positive amount of the monetary commodity for use in trade, that means that (given his or her priorities) the anticipated value of the use of that portion as money exceeds the anticipated value of that portion in other use; it must be expected that someone will give give something worth more than that other use. We may then consider that next person. Either he or she will put the whole to non-monetary use, removing it from circulation as money, or will reserve some for monetary use. But we cannot indefinitely pass the buck if we are explaining the value of the monetary commodity by its non-monetary use. Eventually, either all of the commodity will have been removed from monetary use, or we will be back to someone whose position has already been considered. If money circulates indefinitely then it must for all participants have a greater value than they place on its non-monetary use!

My understanding of the relevant history is more limited than that of some people, but I think that some commodity money and commodity-based money has enjoyed enough circulation to indicate or at least to suggest that it might well circulate forever, that its value as money is not fully explained by its value in non-monetary use. [Addendum (2015:12/13): The recurring practice of fractional-reserve banking is only sustainable if money circulates indefinitely. Some opponents of the practice may insist that it is unsustainable; but, in any case, the monetary commodity must be fairly far removed from a sink for fractional-reserve banking to work at all, and frequent observation of fractional-reserve banking suggests that money indeed circulates indefinitely.]

If that is correct, then we want to explain the additional value. And, quite possibly, we might find in such an explanation something that will help us to explain the value of fiat money.

[1] At least passing mention should be made of the point that, if what appears to be fiat money is legal tender and there are price controls, then the money may be considered to be backed by the price-controlled commodites, or perhaps by the punishment delivered to those who fail to produce the commodities at those prices when the money is presented.

[2] There is no objection to marginalism here. Although both neo-classical economists and opponents of marginalism often treat them as if conterminous, they are not.

[3] With limited bearing on the problem of money, but of potential interest in other contexts, there is an additional issue of divisibility for commodities that are not simply measures of a substance, of space, or of time. Dividing something such as a car in two is not like dividing water into two containers. If for every proposed fractionalization (a half, a third, a fourth, &c) we could somehow find or construct some car which under natural descriptions had that fraction of each feature of another car (half as much leg-room, half as much cargo space, &c) and such that all persons regarded the corresponding multiplicity of these lesser cars as equivalent to one of the larger cars, then we might have a case for a sort of divisibility. But those conditions cannot be met.

[4] It would be then as if one claimed that, within a range from 0 to π, tan(π/2) were variously positive and negative simply whenever that makes a theory work.

[5] This is the actual law of diminishing marginal utility, though neo-classical economics gets lost in a special case of the principle.

At a site whose content seems intended to entertain, I read of a teacher who is said to have challenged his or her students to explain time and to define time. The words explain and define are treated in the narrative as if referring to the same task, which suggests something about the sort of answer sought. None of the students succeeded in doing what the teacher asked.

While we might perhaps have different conceptions of time, the essential concept of time is not one that we assemble from and with other concepts. Time is fundamental in our experience. Thus, when we seek to define time, the best that we can do is to find synonyms that might seem to put us into loops. For example, The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines time with duration, and duration with time. But to define a term is to coördinate it with a concept; so either definition actually works just fine as a definition, on the assumption that we have a concept for the complementary term.

Definitions often involve conveying a concept by showing how to assemble it from and with other concepts; that is perhaps what one expects when asked to explain a concept or a word. But disassemblies that somehow never reached an end would never reach a concept. We must at some stage somehow point to a concept without further use of definition. In the case of time, we have reached a concept that we cannot disassemble; in the case of time, we have found a word for which we can find only either simple synonyms or assemblies in which its concept lurks undisintegrated, even if unrecognized.

While the word slavery gets used in many ways, its core meaning is that of a personal condition of being property of another person or of a group of persons

However, there are recurring attempts to redefine slavery, insisting that a person who reaped only subsistence from his or her labor were by definition a slave. Now, this proposed definition is really orthogonal to any proper definition.

• On the one hand, a person reaps only subsistence when living with a minimal technological infrastructure in a world of markèd scarcity. Much of humankind for most of history lived with little or no production above subsistence, regardless of whether someone else were making ownership claims against them.
• In some cases, people have had lives of relative material comfort, and yet would have been tortured or killed by their masters had they sought different employment.

(Compounding the problem with the redefinition, people who are consuming commodities far in excess of their needs for survival like to redefine subsist to include various comforts, such as electronic entertainment.)

Perhaps most of the people who abuse the world slave in this manner do so thoughtlessly; but it ties-together with an aspect of left-wing thought to afford them a significant evasion, deceiving others and deceiving themselves. That aspect is a resistence to acknowledging a relationship between wage-rates and the amount of labor employed in an economy.

One sees this failure in present support for an increase in statutory minimum wages. What these laws really say, to put things quite simply — yet perfectly truthfully — is that if an employer or would-be employer is unwilling or unable to employ a worker at or above the statutory minimum, then the employer must fire the worker, or not hire the worker in the first place. Most advocates presume that the employer will neither fire nor refrain from hiring, as if demand for labor were perfectly inflexible.

A rather pure expression of this dissociation of wage-rates from labor employment is found in the economic model of Piero Sraffa.[1] Sraffa's work is utterly unknown to most lay-people, and unfamiliar to most economists, but to economists on the far left it is an important benchmark, exactly because it claims so much of what they want to claim. However, its persuasive success is largely a matter of subscribers failing to note or to acknowledge a great deal implicit in the model. Perhaps most remarkably, in his model, the very same amount of labor is produced and consumed with absolute disregard for the wage-rate. That is to say that workers deliver the same labor (imagined as a scalar quantity) whether they are offered literally nothing in return (not even subsistence), or all of production is given to them as wages (with the same wage-rate for each worker).

When I look at the Sraffan model, I see workers behaving as if they are slaves. When their wages provide them no more than sustenance, they are as miserable slaves; when their wages provide them less than sustenance, they are as dying slaves; when their wages provide them far more than sustenance, they are as materially comfortable slaves. What makes them seem to be slaves is that they never exercise, and thus appear not to have, any freedom of choice in where they work nor in how hard they work.

(In those states of the United States that allowed private ownership of slaves, slaves were expected to deliver some fixed quota to their owners. They were not typically offered rewards for exceeding these quotas; they were punished, sometimes horrifically, for failing to meet them. I know of no other way, in the real word, to get labor production of the sort that Sraffa describes.)

In Sraffa's model, whatever production does not go to workers, goes to the owners of the other productive resources — essentially to the capitalists.[2] If one embraces Sraffa's model or something very much like it, and if one waves-away the proper meaning of slavery and instead uses it to mean one who is paid no more than sustenance, then it is easy to insist that, in a system that most favors a distinct class of capitalists, workers would be slaves, whereäs alternatives decreasingly favorable to such capitalists move workers ever further away from slavery. And if one imagines the workers getting an ever greater share exactly as production is administrated on behalf of the worker, then the movement away from slavery is a movement towards socialism.

However, if one continues to accept a model along the lines of Sraffa, yet restores the proper meaning of slavery, then one begins to see one why it had been doubly convenient to redefine the term. Because, in imagining a world in which workers never, one way or another, exercise freedom of choice in labor regardless of how production is distributed, the left has come perilously close to suggesting that workers, under socialism, would be slaves.

The underlying truth is that labor is one of the means of production. If an economy is fully socialized, then the potential worker must be employed however and wherever the best interests of the community as a whole are served, and his or her interests count no more in this decision than do those of anyone else.

This grim principle has repeatedly been illustrated in communities that have attempted a very high degree of socialism. Sometimes the attempt has been hijacked by leaders with less than sincere interest in communal well-being, but these leaders were able to make the populace their slaves because socialism required slavery of the populace. Trotsky's observation that

The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.[3]

was true under Stalin because it or something like it would, as a practical matter, have been true under any fully realized socialism.

Meanwhile, as much as many people living in more market-oriented economies like to imagine themselves as slaves to their employers, they're fully aware that these employers cannot send agents to recapture them should they quit their jobs. To the extent that any group of persons other than ourselves exercises such ownership over us, that group is the state — the very institution usually entrusted to effect socialistic measures.

A movement towards socialism is a movement towards slavery, rather than away from it, and if one is going to bring the subject of slavery into an honest defense of socialism against all alternatives, then it is necessary somehow to make a case for slavery.

[1] The Production of Commodities by Commodities; Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory (1960).

[2] Note how advocates of higher statutory minimum wages point with outrage at those who amass great wealth while paying workers less that some proposed statutory minimum wage, as if there were a zero-sum game being played between employer and employee.

[3] The Revolution Betrayed, ch 11 Whither the Soviet Union? § 2 The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with the Class Enemy.

I've read that Anonymous has found the names of about a thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan, and is preparing to release them.

I'm hoping that none of the 10 other people in this nation with the same first and last name as I are members, because it could be Hell for the rest of us. I'm also hoping that Anonymous doesn't add names of people whom it dislikes, especially as I might be amongst them.

A few years ago, I challenged their attack on Stratfor. Stratfor was a journalistic enterprise, focussing on issues of global politics (including military action) and security, and publishing both free content and content that required a paid subscription. Some at Anonymous were sure that Stratfor were, effectively, a criminal undertaking because

• Stratfor communicated off-the-record with policy wonks and with state officials (as did and do almost every other major journalistic enterprise and many of the minor journalistic enterprises); and
• Stratfor expressed opinions with which Anonymous vehemently disagreed.

So Anonymous stole e.mail, e.mail addresses, and credit-card information from the Stratfor servers. If one had so much as subscribed to a free newsletter from Stratfor, then one's e.mail address was made public, and one was subjected to hoax e.mail from Anonymous. Many who had simply paid for something from Stratfor had their credit card information used to make contributions to charitable organizations (each of which then had to spend resources on returning the stolen money, at a net loss).

The e.mail itself was given to WikiLeaks, which processed it with the help of other journalistic institutions. Some of these institutions shamelessly used the stolen information to their own advantage, though it didn't provide evidence of wrong-doing by Stratfor. Indeed, after almost four years, no evidence of criminal wrong-doing has ever been presented. Stratfor's greatest sin was gross incompetence in the field of security.

None of the major media outlets has drawn attention to the point that the supposed end that was to justify Anonymous's means was not met. They have been virtually silent about this attack on journalistic freedom. That's because, as I suggested in my entry of some years ago, these outlets are themselves afraid of being attacked by Anonymous.

Journalists are fond of seeing their profession as brave. Well, there truly are some brave journalists in this world, but they're in a minority, and the rest don't deserve to see themselves as heroes for keeping company with that minority.

As I was walking home from the bisto this evening, a couple of women were walking a leashed pig into the local Petco store.

A tiny but courageous or foolhardy dog wanted to investigate, but was held in check by the person at the other end of its tether.[1] One of the employees initially seemed distressed, but was in fact just greatly moved to see a pig.

I had some desire to enter and pet the pig, but I figured that the owners — and perhaps also the pig — got too much of that as it were.

[1] Were my own dog still around, and confronted with a pig, then his reäction to it, as to so much, would have been the canine equivalent of What in the name of G_d?!?

In a restricted entry of several months ago, I briefly mentioned an episode (about fifteen years ago) in which someone attempted to kill me. On Tuesday of last week, I was telling the story more fully to my neighbors Claudia and Ren.

At the time of the attack, I was very frustrated and upset with what was happening in my life, and had elevated levels of adrenaline and of cortisol. That may have saved my life.

As I sat in a lounge, I was approached by a very large fellow; he was well over six feet tall, and well over 200 pounds. (By comparison, I'm about 5 ft 10 in and I probably weighed something less that 150 pounds.) He told me that I were telepathically disrupting his thoughts.

I grimly noted to myself that here was one more thing gone wrong. Then, aware of the underlying humor but expressing myself in a serious manner, I asked Would it help if I moved to the other side of the room?

His reply was No, but I think I know what would.

What?

If I killed you. He lifted a chair with which to strike me.

I shot to my feet, and grabbed the chair by a cross-piece. He found that he couldn't much move it — which was because my body was so wired. (I was holding it with just one hand, keeping the other immediately free; but, with what was in my blood-stream, one hand was enough.)

Thwarted, he listened as I tried reasoning with him, and I talked him out of trying to kill me.

Claudia wanted to know what I'd said to him. After all these years, I simply don't remember.

She also asserted that my reäction was unusual; that most other people would have attempted to shield themselves with their arms while cowering in their seats. Until she made that assertion, I'd not thought about that point; but I believe that she's right. A typical person would probably have done that, perhaps crying for help or for mercy. Had I done that, I would have had my arms fractured and my head injured; I might have been killed.

But, as far as I can recall, none of the typical response occurred to me; I didn't even consider doing those things. I don't think that I calculated that such a reäction would fail; I just didn't give thought to responding in that way. (After I had hold of the chair, I considered calling for help, but decided to bring the situation under control without assistance.)

So, after Claudia's assertion, the scientist in me asked why not. The best answer that I have is that my actual reäction was implicit in my ethos. While I'd never given conscious thought to the question of what my childhood rôle models would do in a situation such as that, and didn't ask myself in that moment, I was responding much as any one of them would. Curt Newton would have grabbed the chair; Solomon Kane would have grabbed the chair.

Years ago, a friend and I were talking about something, and he mentioned Hitler. I declared

I don't know why you ever liked that guy!

in reply to which he barked

Oh! That is a lie![1]

Well, no, it wasn't a lie. I escalated by betting him dinner on the matter. Then I explained to him that, since the truth of a proposition is a precondition for it to be known, one of the ways that I could not know why he'd ever liked Hitler would be if he'd never liked Hitler. Another way would be if I'd never believed that he'd liked Hitler, regardless of how my friend really felt about Hitler.

Indeed, the contradiction of I don't know why you ever liked that guy! is I know why you at some time liked that guy! Formally,[2] So,

I don't know why you ever liked that guy!

was a truth (though perhaps not a simple truth, as he'd had trouble seeing it).

Having won the wager, I waived the prize; my objectives in betting had all been met. Now, had he won the wager, then I'm sure that he'd have collected; but had I claimed, as he'd thought, that he'd once liked Hitler, then he'd have been quite justified in extracting the dinner; it would have disincentivized my insulting him in such a way, and off-set the felt sting of the calumny.

[1] That was how he spoke. He often began with Oh!, and when learning English in Hong Kong he had been taught to avoid contractions.

[2] (2015:09/24): I have edited the formal expression, seeking to have it capture more completely the structure of the natural-language expression.

As a society becomes more affluent, the marginal cost of reducing toxins from its environment decreases, and still other things may propel a culture to reduce their presence.

Of course, a substance is toxic to the extent that its ingestion, inhalation, or topical application is harmful. Part of the implication, then, of substituting less toxic products for those previously used or offered is for the new products to become more ingestible, more food-like. That's not to say that we're trying to create a world in which we do eat everything, but we're none-the-less moving towards a world in which we could eat everything.

Well, as things not intended to be eaten become more like food, of logical necessity food becomes more like things not intended to be eaten, even if the food hasn't changed at all. Indeed, even if the food is itself becoming safer, if other products are still more rapidly reducing their toxicity, then food becomes more like things not intended to be eaten.

Considered thoughtlessly the idea that food is becoming more like things not intended to be eaten seems dire. But, really, it is a natural consequence of other things becoming in some way better, without food getting any worse.

Repeatedly, someone takes note of how there's stuff in our food that is also in, say, our anti-freeze. Not the stuff that used to be in our anti-freeze, mind you, but the stuff that's now in our (far less toxic) anti-freeze. Or maybe it's not anti-freeze. Maybe it's flame-retardant, or an anti-foaming agent, or some-such. There's stuff in our food that has other uses, which makes it sound scary, because we remember that the sorts of things that once were put to those uses would do terrible things to living tissue.

And someone who hasn't made — or chooses to ignore — the connection between attempts to employ less toxic substances in those other uses gets on the radio or on Facebook or some-such, and tells us that this-or-that thing being sold as food contains this-or-that chemical which is elsewhere used to do something formidable. And a bunch of people rail as if modern life is being made ever more poisonous, when — at least in the case in question — rather the opposite is true.

Yester-day after-noon, I misread a rumpled sign in the distance. It was an advertisement for guitar lessons, but I thought that it offered

Of course, I wouldn't expect guilt lessons to be seriously and openly advertised (though some college courses seem indeed to be guilt lessons). Rather, I had thought that the advertisement were a joke or a work of art. I suppose now that this were a matter of illusory found art.

I've recently posted a couple of entries that bear upon belief in G_d. In one, I noted how it is that we may have a legitimate sense that some events are guided by a purpose, which purpose is not that of any human being, yet is after all also not that of gods either. More recently, I challenged the notion that morality must or even can originate in commandments of G_d.

It isn't my intention to produce a parade of entries about G_d, nor to deal with the subject comprehensively in this 'blog. But the theme of G_d has been on my mind enough to provoke this one further entry. Like the previous two entries, this one will critique an argument for the existence of G_d, but will not attempt a disproof of that existence. I would be surprised if any of the reasoning that I provide in this entry were novel, but I hope that my exposition will be helpful.

One of the reasons that people believe in G_d is that they believe that She provides an explanation for the existence of the universe.

Part of the problem here is in being a bit careless about to what one refers with the word universe; that word has multiple meanings.[1] It would be abusive to presume that a theïst were using one of the narrower meanings — a currently closed set of interacting energy and matter — and show how that which we inhabit could have been creäted by previous mindless processes within some larger cosmological system. The theïst would naturally and rightly insist that by universe he meant that larger system.

For purposes of this sort of discussion, I think that, by universe, we really ought to mean reälity. However, a lot of theïsts want to assert that G_d is outside of what they call the universe. Now, saying X is outside of reälity is really saying that there is no X, that there's no more than an idea which is not instantiated. Plainly, when theïsts say that G_d is outside of what they call the universe, they don't mean that She is unreal; they must mean to divide reälity into at least two parts, one of which is G_d, and the other of which is something that they call the universe. Likewise, for those who more generally claim that G_d not is not entirely contained by what they call the universe, though all or part of it might be within Her; they do not mean that the remainder of G_d is unreal!

What they're claiming is that, at one time, reälity was just G_d, and then She brought that which they call the universe into existence, perhaps external to Herself or perhaps within Her (in which case we might speak and write of two parts, one of them being the universe, and the other being the rest of G_d) or perhaps partially internal to Her and partially external.

But if, instead of asking what brought the universe into existence, we ask what brought reälity into existence, then we've not yet got an answer. We have G_d, sitting there, unexplained.

Now, most theïsts are of the view that there was no time when G_d did not exist. Perhaps they imagine that an eternity has already passed; perhaps they imagine that time had a beginning, and G_d were there. Either way, if that is an acceptable claim about G_d, then it is not clear why it would not be an acceptable claim for an impersonal cosmological system. Likewise for just winking into existence ex nihilo after the passage of some time, if such a proposition (entailing the passage of time with nothing to change!) were coherent.

And a claim that G_d is the Great Mystery (accompanied perhaps by a beatific smile) is no explanation at all.

The introduction of the idea of G_d simply begged the question of whence it all came. The begging of the question is compounded if reälity is imagined as in two parts, one of which is G_d and the other is taken to be defined as creäted. Separating reälity into two parts, one G_d and the other called the universe allowed this group of theïsts to confuse and to be confused.

The question of why the universe should be lawful — why there's logic and math and why various things have physical properties and so forth — is often mistaken for a question distinct from that of whence came reälity. But any thing exists exactly to the extent that it has properties; in a sense, a thing is what it does. When we describe what a thing does, we give its properties; this is no more or less than describing its laws; the most general laws describe the widest collections of things. (A friend once objected that logic did not seem to be a property of any thing; I told him that logic corresponds to properties of everything.) While it would seem that the universe might in many cases have very different laws, the idea of a law-less universe is incoherent.

[1] Some or all of these meanings have been noted by cosmologist John D. Barrow in The Book of Universes. Unfortunately, in other discussion, Barrow himself is sometimes unclear as to which definition he is employing.