Thanks, philosophercat, for reinforcing what I told freedomforall a few months ago when he visited me. He is a close friend and is right on almost everything else. While what he says about the bankers is true for the most part, and quite consistent with G. Edward Griffin writes in "The Creature from Jekyll Island" (not coincidentally close to where freedomforall grew up), with regard to BB&T specifically, freedomforall is inaccurate. The banksters in NY and with the Federal Reserve put BB&T into a corner.

I told freedomforall about John Allison's public comments on this topic several months ago. Now you are hearing it from someone who worked for BB&T and went through their job training. John Allison is the real life banking equivalent of Hank Rearden having to sign away everything except for his metal.

CEO John Allison who addressed this issue in public remarks. His point was they did not want to be in the bailout but were forced into by direct calls to BB&T. Hank did not want to sign over his rights to Reardon metal.

You should be careful in your language. Their business practices are based on rationality, honesty, integrity, and employee and customer self interest. I think what you mean is you want them to stop being regulated but in this government controlled economy it is not possible. Of course all the honest people can quit and who does that leave you to do business with?

I am interested in the reasons you think Snowden sold out.

Hello, Freedomforall,

Yes, you did answer my question this time.

I wholeheartedly agree that we mast oppose statists with all the means at our disposal. My view is that until we change the composition of Congress, petitioning them is a waste of time.

If Snowden had not sold out to Russians and Chinese, I might not consider him a traitor. How is it rational to fight statists, by helping the two most monstrously statist regimes on the planet?

I lived for 21 years under Hitler and the communists. I know what statists do.

The fundamental problem for us here is the irresponsible and uneducated "we the people".

Maritimus, I take no offense.
We have seen leaders in virtually all areas making compromise after compromise and the result has been more and more government.
I think that more compromise gains nothing.
We must oppose statism, not compromise with it. Would a petition have any effect?
Until someone does it, how can we know what the immedaite effect or the more important long term effect will be. Would it merely mean a replacement of management under pressure, or would it be the first crack in the dam of state? Did anyone expect Solidarity to succeed against the regime in Poland?
I do think of Snowden's act as an ethical response to statism, and I think the only realistic hope for the republic is for many leaders to stop compromising and act ethically for individual liberty. There is no liberty without risk, and the days of avoiding all risk are past.
If this is not an answer to your question, please restate it ;^)

That is not an answer to my question, I think.

I think that Snowden has nothing to do with what we are discussing. He is not a heroic figure in my estimation. Let's put him aside.

Instead of the answer to my question, you gave me another illustration of your passionate beliefs. Please notice that I am not criticizing those beliefs.

My comments are about what an ethical management would do.
Should Edward Snowden have remained quiet because it was convenient and safe?
BB&T management are looters. Without the federal reserve act to virtually guarantee profits they and the entire current banking industry leaders would either collapse or learn to produce a real service of value.
Evil men will triumph if they are unopposed by good men.

Do you really think that a petition from BB&T would induce Congress to move even an inch? It seems to me that such petitioning would have no constructive effect other than, perhaps, gaining you as one of their customers.

Hello, WS,

I hear you.

My problem is that it seems to me that to know truly everything about another person would require my brain to become a carbon copy of that person's.

The other problem I have are those multiple interconnections that are not permanent and change according to multilayer set of criteria of which we know virtually nothing.

I am sure that you are right that we can build machines and program them to do some narrow segment of what we do. But to clone a human mind electronically to a fully functional normal human being I think is science fiction. Would that clone have sexual drive? How would they mate? Would their sexual intercourse risk a short circuit if particularly vigorous? I am having fun here!

What bother me the most in what you say is the denial of free will. I think that leads directly to collectivism, supernatural designer and denial of individuality. All these, in my mind, are horrendous threats to humanity.

Thank you for replying.

Would you please supply the source of this information?

Fine.
You praise BB&T for their training.
I condemn them for their business practices.

BB&T refused to participate in the bail out until they were threatened by Sec Treas and the FED with refusing to processing their transactions. That would have violated all their contracts with their customers. that is the kind of moral bankruptcy that honest people have to confront in every day. John Allison and BB&T know we the people need an honest institution that will fight for our rights.

Since all the tickets sold for admission to AS's three parts were paid for with money what philosophy would you want the people who processed the funds on behalf of the producers to have. Fortunately for you some businesses take it seriously. What philosophy do you want your surgeon to have working in a hospital?, what philosophy would you like a general to have in the civilian commanded military? The problem is how do you get to a moral govenement? I want individuals to adopt reason in their lives and they will change the world. Consider promotion from within with all employees being trained in objectivist virtues and ethics.

And they would have refused to accept bail out funds.

When BB&T stops profiting from a government given monopoly to steal from others, then I will consider their motives more favorably. To me BB&T management is treating the training as the GOP ttreats libertarians and tea party. They will take profits from the internal use of ideas, but BB&T then acts in the opposite way in its business.
If they believe and act objectively they would petition congress to repeal the federal reserve act, convert all federal banks into S&L's without the ability to create legal tender from nothing. Actions in the marketplace speak louder than words in seminars.

BB&T has for every employee a training process based on the objectivists virtues. I heard John Allison present the BB&T training course at OCON 2009. I then went in Austin to see how they implemented it in practice as they acquired a bank in Texas with 4 branches in Austin. I met with two managers and went over the actual manuals they were issued. Miss Rand's work was clearly and logically presented with each virtue translated into terms applicable to branch banking. I discussed marketing eith the staff using the virtues of honesty and integrity to increase market share. BB&T teaches objectivism. It also funds IJ, The Anthem Foundation and funds several chairs in philosophy including Tara Smith at Texas and at Pittsburgh. Ayn Rand and Aristotle believed justice called for rewarding the good as well as trashing the bad. The burden of reason is to know the difference.

You can look at the problem of free will from two directions. The first one is to ask if we know of any creatures with free will. More to the point, do we have free will? Those who believe in metaphysics think that something ‘outside’ of the body, such as a soul, affects free will but I think in this venue we will attempt to analyze the process using reason.

We certainly have the appearance of free will but whether we actually do has long been a matter of debate. The more you know about someone, the more likely you are to be able to predict what they will do, and if you can predict it, then are they really acting on free will or coming to a predictable conclusion? If we knew everything about them would we be able to perfectly predict what they would do, thus revealing free will to be an illusion? Can we know ‘everything’ about someone?

As we study the human brain, we are developing mechanistic explanations for how neurons work, how they interconnect, how learning is accomplished by creating interconnections, strengthening ones that are deemed useful and removing the ones that aren’t. The network of neurons is vast but not infinite, with 100 billion as a good upper bound. Of course these can be interconnected in many ways as well, so understanding how it works is daunting. Nevertheless, one can imagine that it is possible at some point to understand how a single neuron works and then how ever larger groups of them work when connected. There is no conceptual barrier to being able to eventually understand the complete functioning of the human brain. And if you completely understand how the brain functions, do you then have the ability to perfectly predict what it is going to do in response to a set of stimulations? If you can, there goes free will.

There are those who believe that random effects at a quantum level play a part in the decision of individual neurons to trigger which would make the process theoretically impossible to actually predict. This randomness could reintroduce free-will. It’s possible that exactly the same inputs might generate different results. We can’t really tell whether we will need cat food until we open Schrodinger’s box.

From another perspective, we do not have to recreate a specific human perfectly to meet the requirement of having a creation with at least as much appearance of free will as we have. We simply have to construct a system of sufficient complexity that we are unable to practically predict what it is going to do. We can even introduce some physical randomizer into our design to provide a quantum input into the process. It’s easier than you think; we actually work rather hard to make computers predictable.

Most of computer programming is designed to generate expected outputs to your inputs. You don’t want your accounting system to generate different numbers based on ‘free will’. But that’s just because it’s what we want to have them do. There are also types of software which has sets of rules and mechanisms to balance which decisions to make based on relative inputs. In short they start to look like what a neuron does. And as you connect them together you will have systems that are practically impossible to predict, which could be considered free will.

So, we can make computers unpredictable. Can we make them creative? Once again, we are dealing with something that we don’t entirely understand. Computer programs have been able to find correlations that no one knew existed, so is that creativity? If a human found a new way of combining two pieces of data we would call it a creative solution to a problem, can we not extend the same word to the same deed if done by complex silicon based algorithms?

In the end, we must fall back on Turing’s test: if we cannot perceive the difference between the actions taken by an algorithm or by a human, then essentially there is no difference.

Processing visual information in the brain...I have only one comment: the dress was white and gold!

Jan

So true. The productive gain advantage and achieve success. Then they become lax, sometimes spoiled. Their inventions spread, the advantage disappears, and they try to use their accumulated power to crush competition instead of embracing it. Then they use government pawns to "protect their interests" against evil foreign interests. Bankers fund the destructive wars that follow ad-infinitum.

Today's fedgov, UN, EU actions on AGW are eerily similar.

Unfortunately BB&T is a looter and couldn't survive 10 minutes without a government granted monopoly that lets them create 'legal tender' from nothing. While I applaud any productive enterprise that teaches Objectivism, if BB&T actually taught objectivism, the newly educated employees would quit their jobs and go find productive work.

Excellent example of where "making" a tool and "inventing" a new implement is a matter of discussion. We speak unashamedly about Archimedes "inventive" use of the lever, but when my dog does something similar to reach food, we at best call it "using". Humans are narcissists by nature, and that arrogance sometimes gets us into trouble.