DoYouEvenBTC on Nostr: (Riffing on Dennett is my current thing, apparently) #Bitcoin changes everything. ...

(Riffing on Dennett is my current thing, apparently)

#Bitcoin changes everything.

It’s a “universal acid”, eating through everything it touches, including any container.

That makes it a tremendous thinking tool.

Bitcoin forces us to come to terms with things we THOUGHT we understood, but only because most of us tacitly agree to collectively NOT look too closely.

We hover around the topic, not digging too deep. We all have fuzzy concepts that overlap enough for us to make do. But we can find that we might mean very different things when using a given set of words.

What is “life”?

What is a “mind”?

What is “money”?

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Evolution by natural selection explains the unity and diversity of life on Earth. Design without a designer. Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” was summarized by a critic as:

“‘In order to make a perfect and beautiful thing, it is not requisite to know how to make it!’”

It was said pejoratively, but it ***is*** accurate. There is amazing design in living things. Darwin’s theory explains it.


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Dennett riffs on this when looking at Alan Turing, who invented the computer. (Later made practical by Von Neumann).

Turing’s strange inversion:

“In order to be a perfect computing machine, it is not prerequisite to understand arithmetic”.

By arranging matter and energy in a precise way, a machine can do work that used to require a thinking person, trained for years or decades.

In principle, there isn’t anything a mathematician can do that cannot be replicated by a machine; given adequate resources.

You can make a calculator.

Or a chess player.

Or a digital “painter” that takes text as input and renders astonishingly relevant, compelling, and varied images.

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What is Satoshi’s strange inversion?

I have a feeling for the character, but haven’t found words that match the other two just yet.

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