Dear (~~~~),

You're joking, right? And I'm just not getting the joke?

Not a single war in recorded history has been fought over healthcare. I can't imagine a single person taking to the streets over being infected by HIV, and especially so if they have full-blown AIDS. AIDS is, if you don't recall, a pretty deadly disease. Its victims aren't really given to taking up arms, forming militias, or fighting governments.

On the other hand, quite a few have been fought over natural resources. Some of the worst wars in history, and many genocidal events, can be traced to regions that lack natural resources, or where the scarcity of resources mean the average person's way of life is considerably harder than you can imagine. It doesn't require huge leaps of imagination to understand the link between resource availability and opportunity, and the politics of conflict.

We have not been able to derive what it's like to be a mind from the physical description of the brain. So if you were to look at my brain right now, I would have to tell you what it is that I'm experiencing. You can't simply get it out of the physical description. So where does that leave us? It might mean that we're not our brain. It might mean that we have an incomplete description of the brain.

There are quite a few mechanisms in the world that follow this model, in which state cannot be determined accurately from a physical description of the system in question. The human brain is only one of them. Other examples would include (at the "micro-" level) single-cellular states, and at the macro level, silicon-based computers like a desktop PC. There are no models to record their internal state beyond their actual physical reality. You can model them, but you cannot simply look at them and understand all that is happening within them. In this, they and the brain share many similarities.

The problem is one of complexity and encoding, not of some characteristic inherent in the brain's system itself. Pinker and Goldstein are gracious when they allow that there might be some disconnect between the physical makeup of the brain and the mind, but they know the truth, as do the rest of us: there is not such divide. The mind cannot go on without the physical mechanism of the brain, nor does it transcend the brain.

You need only look at the millions of cases of degenerative brain and neural disease, or brain damage from accidents, or diseases that result in improper brain formation, to understand that the brain is a mechanism. An intricate, incredibly complicated and wonderous mechanism, but still, a mechanism. It can be understood, and with time and sufficient study, one day it will be.

...just what good a mortgage-based deriviative really does?

I've had one person tell me that derivatives are good for isolating yourself from risk when investing. That seemed like a bit of a reach to me.

I can understand how some forms of derivatives are good for mitigating risk. But the derivative is still tied to the value of the underlying security, and there's no getting away from it.

To my way of thinking, it's actually just another level of profitability for financial institutions. It's another product to market, and it costs them next to nothing, which is why it shouldn't be so shocking when the risk actually comes home to roost again.