[Graeme]

Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')tudies have found that upon entering an office, people behave more competitively when they see a sharp leather briefcase on the desk, they talk more softly when there is a picture of a library on the wall, and they keep their desk tidier when there is a vague scent of cleaning agent in the air. But none of them are consciously aware of the influence of their environment.

There may be few things more fundamental to human identity than the belief that people are rational individuals whose behavior is determined by conscious choices. But recently psychologists have compiled an impressive body of research that shows how deeply our decisions and behavior are influenced by unconscious thought, and how greatly those thoughts are swayed by stimuli beyond our immediate comprehension.

In an intriguing review in the July 2 edition of the journal Science, published online Thursday, Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in the Netherlands lay out the mounting evidence of the power of what they term the "unconscious will."

[evilgenius]

Simple selfish or self-interested behavior is not free will. Believing that is a common mistake. Free will is about shaping a moral-ethical construct from reason and following it, even if it means you have to act against your own selfish interests. From reason is important because religion is received, not reasoned and therefore just as subject to the whims and foibles of the people as prevailing attitudes about competition or the place of the weak in society.

[eXpat]

Cutting all the crap

[Ibon]

If what we think is free will really isn't than why do we defend so fervently democracy and freedom? When the Chinese with the strong central authority are eating our lunch with managing their complex society isn't it time we consider alternatives to liberal democracy.

The Chinese central government has no vision but let's for example imagine the unimaginable scenario where we adopted here in the USA or Europe an intelligent peak oil aware benevolent authoritarian government?

Would you choose this over the cumbersome democracy whose effectiveness in times of crisis may prove hamstrung?

[Graeme]

It looks like "unconscious will" is a kind of brain washing by the environment. This could produce negative - genocidal, religious or cultural conversion, doomer - or positive - educational, utopian goal-oriented, optimistic - outcomes. We simply move to the environment you want to go to. Living in a democratic society with free speech is far preferable to a dictatorship. I read somewhere recently that Chinese and Indians would, if given the chance, emigrate to Canada!

[americandream]

Translate "I read somewhere" into "another nail in the coffin of my indoctrination". We have no reasonable means of knowing what two billion people plus feel about things and to suggest that a sample poll represents the will of this vast mass, is my friend, absurd.

You are a perfect example of a capitalist lackey Graeme.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', 'I')t looks like "unconscious will" is a kind of brain washing by the environment. This could produce negative - genocidal, religious or cultural conversion, doomer - or positive - educational, utopian goal-oriented, optimistic - outcomes. We simply move to the environment you want to go to. Living in a democratic society with free speech is far preferable to a dictatorship. I read somewhere recently that Chinese and Indians would, if given the chance, emigrate to Canada!

[Graeme]

Investment Immigrant to Canada Doubles

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he number of Chinese investment immigrant applications for Canada has doubled over the past six months and soon may surpass the number of applications filed by technology immigrants, the Canadian newspaper "The Daily World" reports.

Guan Guorong, President of the Jiahua International Study and Immigration Center, said China has been the main origin of technology immigrants who have gone to live in Canada for the past 10 years, although that has now started to change. He also said Chinese immigration to Canada has experienced three peaks over the past 30 years. The first occurred when Chinese students started to go to Canada to study. The second one was the technology immigration trend that happened 10 years ago. And the third one -- the current investment immigrant trend -- began at the end of last year.

According to Canadian immigration law, the application fee for those who apply for investment immigration is C$400,000. Of this amount, C$280,000 will be returned after the immigrant has lived in Canada for five years, so that the actual fee is C$120,000.

Another reason for the increase in the number of investment immigration applications is that Canadian officials plan to raise the application fee, and many Chinese want to apply before the increase goes into effect.

Nevertheless, many Chinese investment immigrants still desire to move to Canada to provide a better educational environment for their children and enjoy better social security benefits.

[americandream]

How many fold has Western capitalist investment into China increased?

So on the one hand, we have a natural flow of capital from the heartland of capital into low cost labour zones and a reverse flow from labour zones into the heartland of capital. And in the meantime, wide spread cnditioning works to tweak the process to its maximum efficiency in ensuring that both sides of that equation are in perfect equilibrioum (and that calls for some independent thought on what those components are Graeme, not regurgitating what you're being conditioned to bleat.)

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', '[')b]Investment Immigrant to Canada Doubles

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he number of Chinese investment immigrant applications for Canada has doubled over the past six months and soon may surpass the number of applications filed by technology immigrants, the Canadian newspaper "The Daily World" reports.

Guan Guorong, President of the Jiahua International Study and Immigration Center, said China has been the main origin of technology immigrants who have gone to live in Canada for the past 10 years, although that has now started to change. He also said Chinese immigration to Canada has experienced three peaks over the past 30 years. The first occurred when Chinese students started to go to Canada to study. The second one was the technology immigration trend that happened 10 years ago. And the third one -- the current investment immigrant trend -- began at the end of last year.

According to Canadian immigration law, the application fee for those who apply for investment immigration is C$400,000. Of this amount, C$280,000 will be returned after the immigrant has lived in Canada for five years, so that the actual fee is C$120,000.

Another reason for the increase in the number of investment immigration applications is that Canadian officials plan to raise the application fee, and many Chinese want to apply before the increase goes into effect.

Nevertheless, many Chinese investment immigrants still desire to move to Canada to provide a better educational environment for their children and enjoy better social security benefits.

[americandream]

BTW, India I last heard was a Western style democracy and a high western capital, low cost labour designation.

[Ibon]

Graeme, I don't think you got this right about Chinese sentiment. It would only take 5% of Chinese to be discontent with living in China to represent 75 million people, more than double the population of Canada.

The truth is that the overwhelming number of chinese are in perfect alignment with their government. I know many Chinese and am friends with one who is a professor in China who spent a lot of time in the west. At the time of the Tinanmen Square massacre he had a poster of Hu Yaobang in his dorm room and protested against the communist party. Today he said that in the 20 years since that event he has changed his mind and actually saw the governments action as necessary. He believes that open democracy in China would have resulted in an even more ruthless mafia and ruthless capitalism than what we see today in China. You have to stop a moment and think about what kind of government it takes to manage 1.5 billion people and look at what China has done in the 20 years since that event in terms of infrastructure and modernization. It would have never been possible under a democracy.

China is a model because the stresses of managing 1.5 billion people have many things in common with the stresses we will in the west experience once resource depletion will not be able to deliver the "goods" that we have assumed are part of "freedom"

Democracy will not survive as we know it and has in fact already been in the process of transforming into something else here in the USA since quite a while.

China will continue to outperform the west with its authoritarian central command free market approach. It's efficiency will yield such advantages that competing with them together with responding to the consequences of resource constraints will end up forcing us to copy many aspects this authoritarian model. But China offers today no real ecological understanding yet about resource constraints and are certainly not a model for the future. But their logistical advantage is clear. The west will have no choice to move to a more authoritarian government. And the irony is that it will not be forced. It will be chosen by the people, the electorate, once the chaos gets out of hand which our current democratic system will not be able to manage. This anti government tea party rhetoric will turn 180 degrees in a heart beat demanding a strong government once they feel some real hard core consequences.

These views I have come to believe are a result of living several years in Asia and from seeing clearly the writing on the wall. I may deluded but I don't think so.

Me personally? I am a product of the self entitled baby boomer generation. I want no part of this authoritarian future and have chosen to finish the last chapter of my life in a quiet back eddy up some mountain in Panama. I don't necessarily like or support the scenario I have outlined above but I believe it most confidently.

[americandream]

ibon

The Far East starting with Japan has led successive generations of Western conservative to progressively embrace the command style of the Far Eastern elites. If the truth be told, what we have is essentially the return of the Western wealth to its feudal root however, a process the Far East avoided in bypassing the turmoil of Reason.

A confluence of these outcomes is the flash point for capital's demise however as reason must prevail, for the will to survive is all dominating. However, in the interim, globalisation is an ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE as these forces are objectively determined by the composite will to profit and the availability of surplus.

[Graeme]

Ibon, Can I respond to this further tomorrow - just about to finish work? I wonder if part of the chinese satisfaction is due to indoctrination, topic of thread.

[americandream]

One could well say that about your level of satisfaction. However, this is a rather ciurcumstantial area fraught with problems of measurement and there is no objective threshold against which we can set the ideal and then say, yes, he is indoctrinated whereas I am not.

The crux of this matter for me however is satisfaction in the face of the impossible....exponential growth in a finite paradigm. That WILL take a sophisticated degree of indoctrination to rationalise, sustain and extend to the degree we find in the entire global capital, especially in the apparently open West.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', 'I')bon, Can I respond to this further tomorrow - just about to finish work? I wonder if part of the chinese satisfaction is due to indoctrination, topic of thread.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', 'I')bon, Can I respond to this further tomorrow - just about to finish work? I wonder if part of the chinese satisfaction is due to indoctrination, topic of thread.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', ' ')globalisation is an ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE as these forces are objectively determined by the composite will to profit and the availability of surplus.

[americandream]

I agree. However we characterise the mindshift, it will be a significant shift away from what I term the sustainable unsustainable, an absurdity; and will see a gradual aligning of social economy with the consistency of Reason. More transparency as well.

The will to survive is a powerful agent of evolution.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', ' ')globalisation is an ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE as these forces are objectively determined by the composite will to profit and the availability of surplus.

[SeaGypsy]

I think Ibon's take on Chinese politics is exactly on the money.
Having also lived in the Philippines, I have seen what free range democracy, poverty and violence combine into. In the recent election campaign in the Philippines over 120 people were murdered, including the infamous Mingandanao massacre of 57 people trying to lodge an application for Provincial Governor candidacy.
Philippines has about 90 million people. My best guess is that thousands would be dying every election cycle in China, had the Tianmen protesters been successfull.
For some weird reason the psychologists involved in the kind of research sighted here get their jollys from likening humans to rats. They find the evidence they are looking for to back their pre judgement.
There is a body of evidence proving the intelligence of various species besides humans; this of course is ignored.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eXpat', 'C')utting all the crap

[PrestonSturges]

China is doing well because they have not invaded anyone (not counting Tibet) since......what? 1300 something?

It's the Japanese that would go on genocidal rampages across Asia.

However, there have been a series of berserk knife attacks on Chinese school children, so all is not well.

[americandream]

I think it was Marx who observed that in seeking to be made in the capitalists image, the East would turn to the West. Japan's accession into the "civilised" world, it recognised, had to be accompanied by an emulation of the Wests' own conquistidorial record hence the wars of "colonisation" in its teeming neighbourhood. To a smaller extent , we see such behaviour in contemporary China and India as they jostle for a place at the table of the "civilised". All mere posturing again whilst there is surplus available.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PrestonSturges', 'C')hina is doing well because they have not invaded anyone (not counting Tibet) since......what? 1300 something?

It's the Japanese that would go on genocidal rampages across Asia.

However, there have been a series of berserk knife attacks on Chinese school children, so all is not well.