🚀 go-pugleaf

Lets characterize Homo religiosus in this context as a believer in the
afterlife. Homo religiosus is different from Homo oeconomicus in that
his decision horizon includes a (potential) eternity. Short term
maximizing behaviour brakes under this assumption, such that utility
orderings differ from those of people who dont believe in an eternal
life or dont care about it. For the religious man, what happens in the
next, eternal life is more important that what may happen in his
current, immediate life. This includes an essential opposition in
value (orderings) between hmo religiosus and oeconomicus that is not
solved by the market. Homo religiousus will tend to discount at a
higher value his future eternal life than his current life! So a
systematic distortion is added to maximizing behaviour where decision
wont be seen as optimum for current life believers, but will make
sense for those who believe in perpetuity. This short term suboptimum
path is not compensated by any _visible_ market...

What matters most is that there is no communication between this life
and future eternal life. Hoarding for future life doesnt work, as
there will be no payment that can be anticipated in this life.
Financial decisions are biased. There is no way for hypothetical
actors in the future eternal life to engage in commercial activities
for current life economic agents!

All financing is seen as a perpetuity, as opposed to more measured
time horizons for investments, particularly human capital investments.
Because of its nature, capital investment in, say, knowledge for the
future life make no sense in terms of current life! That is, reading
religious books or engaging in praying will report no benefit or
economic activity gains in this life so those activities have to be
considered as leisure time or consumption time of few goods...

In aggregate terms, even if religion does create a maket, religious
men following leisure time, non optimum decisions will generate
widespread underdevelopment....

Note that depending on the particular belief in the afterlife life,
even antieconomic activities like war, destruction, genocide or
suicide (satanics) will make sense for the decision maker even if
total output, both personal or collective is diminished, temporally or
permanently!

Religious activities like praying can be seen as an investment
expecting a future payment in the afterlife. From this point of view,
not producing either goods or services in the normal sense can be
justified for the individual, to the point of self destruction of the
individual...

Charity is of course justified thus as it will give revenue (a fixed
perpetuity) in the afterlife!

(I think I lost another day, second day this weekend and I dont know
why)

This is taken from the Theory of Beliefs thread:

Lets define a (concurrent) algebra G over all chains of words G:(W,H +
| _ = )

where W, H are chains of words w1w2w3... h1h2h3... there is a number
n
of chains occurring simultaneously. For two simulatneous chains
w1w2w3... + h1h2h3...  we can define operators in general as:


+: w1h2w3...
| : w1w2h2w3...
_: h1h2h3...
=: (w1h1)(w2h2)(w3h3)...


This algebra expresses telepathic and freudian slips. Operation + is
the typical freudian slip, where a word is misspelled giving a new
meaning to the whole phrase, that is, some intended word by the
speaker is substituted by a word heard consciously or unconsciously
in
the hidden channel; this is the typical slip characterized by freud
as
giving some unconscious message; note that some freudian slips swap
words. Operation | intercalates words from the hidden channel in the
speech of the speaker, the speaker unaware of it; in this case the
original speech is meaningful, that is, w1w2 w3.... recover the
original word stream so this operation has a partial inverse
operator;
the hidden channel content is expressed by the intercalated words,
which can be distinguished as they themselves form a separate
message.
Operation _ would be total substitution of the speaker s speech; the
original stream is lost and the hearer can only hear the hidden
channel, which is true of mediums and trance like states of mind
(this
operation can also model the case were there is no underlying speech
stream but the hidden channel is heard nonetheless as coming from the
hypothetical speaker). Operation = intends to purpport that both
channels are heard at the same time by the hearer. Both streams
occur,
a schizo hearer would hear both or only the hiddne channel, a normal
hearer would only perceive once stream. Note that for two streams
occurring concurrently, some operations may be confused depending on
the hearer s abilities, so _ and = may be interchangeable, in which
case they can be used to model threshold conditions. | is
informative,
+ is misleading to the hearer. In  general there wouldnt be a one to
one correspondence between two the two streams, so some stocasticity
(indetermination) has to be assumed for big numbers of operation
samplings. + may be under control by strong telepaths, strongness
depending on the relation between the telepath and target, while |
would be totally indetermined and may or may not be noticed by the
hearer, though for non schizos would be most informative; some
unconscious selection by the speaker would take place in selecting
what words are included in the resulting stream. The last two
operations would be to blame in coflicts between a target speaker and
an schizo(phrenic) or normal hearer, as the hearer would get a
message
very different from that intended by the speaker, though this effect
may or may not be in control of the telepath. (this is what I was
supposed to write yesterday... the other ideas I reserve for later).


Fabrizio J Bonsignore now Danilo J Bonsignore