War Cost








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Dreams Wishes and Delusions

I did have a weird dream last night but that's beside the point. I'm talking about the kind of dreams you have when your awake, things you wish for that aren't true or at least presently so.
And the delusion part refers to the ability or predisposition of the human mind to wish things were different and to be able to rationalize whole belief systems around that delusion.
I guess this came out of some books I've been reading lately. One was a hopeful piece of fiction about life choices, dreams and fulfillment of destiny and the other one is a careful analysis of the ability, and the reason the ability exists, for otherwise intelligent people to belief in irrational things. I guess hope can be more fun than pragmatism. I've also been listening to lectures on cell biology, motivation and comparisons of the USA to the Holy Roman Empire, the latter of which has been pointed out to be none of the three. Then again there is the placebo effect of wishful thinking which I've heard is being used as a replacement for real steroids. So apparently there is some value in it for us somehow and it's up to us to try to balance the usefulness of the technique against the travails of it's irrationality.