Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
Economics, even capitalist economics, assumes that there are desiring beings, but it does not ask why these beings desire one thing rather than another. Economists say that they are interested not in the reasons for people’s preferences, but in revealed preferences, i.e. preferences that are enacted. Economics does not ask about the reasons for these preferences – why would a mass of people prefer to buy cocaine rather than books or cruise vacations...? – it takes into account and calculates the preferences expressed, i.e., the exchange that is acted out. Exchange is an act, not a belief, and it is a more or less risky exchange.
Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.
Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being. Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.
