Time Preference and Emergent Psychosocial Complexity

I have written before on the ideas of J.T. Fraser here and of Clare Graves (through Beck and Cowan's Spiral Dynamics) here and here and here, with references to Fraser in the postings on Graves' ideas, but I have been asked an interesting question hereabout Fraser and time preference, and I decided the best way to answer that would be in the main blog.

I have in fact touched on this question, combining Fraser's ideas with Graves' ideas, in my book Diaphysics Let me begin with the excerpts from Diaphysics relevant to this issue.

273.
J. T. Fraser proposes a model of emergent reality that ties into this idea of emergent complexity, while explaining the evolution of time over time in the universe. From his model, we learn that the experience of time changes over time, and that evolution evolves. In brief, if we start from the Big Bang, the moment of pure energy, pure randomness, we begin with no time experience – as we learn from Einstein’s theory of relativity, anything traveling at the speed of light will not experience time passing. As the universe expanded and cooled, quantum physics with its many forms of particle-waves emerged – and with them, a probabilistic time experience. In the wave-form, there is no time experience, but in the particle-form, there is deterministic time experience. As atoms, and then chemistry, emerged, deterministic time emerged – this is the experience of time Newton described. With the emergence of cells from complex systems chemistry, an experience of time as happening in a particular direction emerged. And with the emergence of human intelligence, there was the emergence of the experience of past, present, and future in a very strong way – since we can think about things that happened before we were born, and things that will happen after we die. The more spacetime folded in on itself, the more time was gained by each level – first, the present was gained and then, with animals, a limited past and future, and then, with humans, even more past and future. One would expect the next level of complexity, having even more folds of spacetime, to have even more time experience.

274.
But even this is only a simplified description of the world. The deterministic level is not purely deterministic, but also contains elements of the probabilistic and the truly random, from the two levels below it. Only the strictest of solid-state physics acts in an almost purely deterministic fashion. But complex systems chemistry makes strong use of probabilistic elements from the quantum physical state. In the same way, with living organisms, there is not only the emergence of freedom in life, but deterministic, probabilistic, and random elements as well. Darwin focused on the random elements in his theory of natural selection, but more recent work have shown that there are probabilistic, deterministic, and even primitive choices in evolution as well. And all of these elements are also present in the emergence of human intelligence, in which emerged even greater freedom in the ability to model many more multiple futures from which to choose. The universe does not get rid of lower levels of complexity, but rather builds on top of them, enfolding and incorporating the lower levels into the new emergent levels. Further, the spacetime field, with each folding into more complexity, becomes increasingly individuated. What we see in the emergence of each new level of complexity is the emergence of even more individuation and even greater freedom – and that is what we would expect in the emergence of the next level of complexity as well.

275.
Objects with fractal geometry have self-similarity regardless of scale. If the universe itself is fractal in its geometry, we would expect self-similarity to be expressed in the emergence of new levels of complexity as well. In other words, there should be two sublevels of complexity at the quantum physical level, since it is the second level of complexity, and three sublevels of complexity at the chemical/macrophysical level, since it is the third level of complexity.

276.
The first level, the pure energy of the spacetime field, has but one level – that of pure energy. It gives rise to the second level of reality, that of quantum physics, and with it two sublevels of reality – that of free particle-waves, such as photons and electrons, and from them, the emergence of much more complex atoms, which are particle-wave systems. From here we get the emergence of chemistry in the reconciliation of the paradoxical need to have both full electron shells and charge neutrality. At this level, we get the emergence of three different sublevels of chemical/physical reality – fluid dynamics, solid-state physics/chemistry, and complex systems chemistry (which emerges on the borderlands between fluid dynamics and solid-state physics/chemistry). From complex systems chemistry, we get the emergence of biology. And since it is the fourth level, there are four sublevels – single-celled life forms (eubacteria, archaebacteria, and eukaryotes), multicellular life forms (such as plants, animals, fungi), and, in the animals, we have the line that led to vertebrates, invertebrates in the line that led to those with exoskeletons, and the predecessors of both, and in the vertebrates, we have schooling/herding, territorial independent, and territorial social animals. I will note only in passing that each of these four subdivisions themselves have three subdivisions.

277.
The next level of complexity is that of human intelligence – what Fraser calls nootemporality. In this level have emerged five levels of human mental complexity, as outlined by Clare Graves, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. Actually, they have come up with six levels, but the first level of mental complexity is actually that of social mammals, particularly that of the social apes, as ethological research continues to show. Thus, there are in fact only five levels of emergent mental complexity in humans, into which I will go into more detail later. I will only point out that the last sublevel of mental complexity is what prepared the groundwork for emergence into the next level of complexity, what Graves, Beck and Cowan have called Second Tier thinking, and what I am calling a new level of complexity on the same level as the emergence in complexity from the animals to humans.

278.
Clare Graves, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan recognize six levels of emergence in human thinking. Again, I recognize five, since the first one is actually the same level of thinking as chimpanzees and bonobos (possibly even social mammals in general), though it also belongs to humans. Beyond that first level, which belongs in the biotemporal level, there are five distinctly human levels of emergently complex thinking. The first is tribal/familial thinking. The second is the heroic/egocentric level, the time when writing is invented in a culture, when we hear tales of people typical of this level, such as Achilles, Odysseus, and Gilgamesh. The third is the level of truth from authority, typified by such thinking as that of the medieval Christian church and social conservatives. The fourth is the level of capitalist and deterministic scientific thinking, typified by materialism and liberal/libertarian thinking. The fifth is the level that promotes human bonds, and typically is anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, relativistic, perspectivist, and typically respectful of differences among people (at its best; at its worst it is dehumanizing, politically correct, fascistic, and Marxist). This fifth one is a smooth fitness landscape, of flattened hierarchies, and thus is the groundwork for emergence into the next level of complexity.

279.
Just like with the biological level of humans – where we are social mammals, vertebrates, multicellular, and cellular simultaneously, as well as chemical and quantum physical and ultimately made up of energy – emergence into each of the new levels does not mean elimination of the lower levels. Rather, we have a nested hierarchy. If we take someone who is at the top level of human thinking – the egalitarian level – we see that they can contain all of the lower levels as well. In addition to promoting human bonds and having a multidisciplinary view of the world, they typically believe in science as a way of knowing the world and are disciplinary, they still need ethics and believe in categories, they still have mythic needs, and they also have the need to belong to a family and have rituals. The difference is, each of these levels tends to be more inclusive of other people. The first level is that of the family and tribe – and thus quite exclusive. The second level expands into wider cultural contexts, such as being Greek, being Egyptian, etc. The third level expands into a wider group of fellow believers, regardless of culture or language, such as being Christian, being Buddhist, etc. The fourth level expands into including anyone who will trade with us, or who will engage in the pursuit of scientific knowledge with us. The fifth level includes all people in the world – but especially those who are of the same level (there is a bit of a tendency at this level to suggest that all animals are equal, but that some animals are more equal than others – though, officially, everyone is in fact the same). But in each, the family (lowest level of thinking) remains – even if our ideas about the family change in each new level. In the same way that biology affects the chemistry that gives rise to it in a bidirectional feedback loop, each new level of thinking affects lower levels of thinking that gave rise to it. The family for a fifth level person is different than is the family for a second level person.

280.
Each of the physical levels of existence are also environments. Humans create a cultural environment humans have to live in, though if this environment were to disappear, it would harm nothing on earth except humans (which is actually to get it backwards since, so long as there are humans, there will be human culture, so it takes the destruction of humans to get rid of human culture). Plants, fungi, prokaryotes and animals, including humans, all create and affect the biosphere and all the various regional bio-environments. Humans are imbedded in this environment as well, and cannot survive without it, being biological organisms. Life and the biosphere are in intricate, intimate interconnection. But this bio-environment is also embedded in a larger chemical environment. There are geological processes going on (many of which are affected by the biosphere in a nonlinear feedback loop), atmospheric chemistry and weather, water and hydrophilic chemistry, etc., which create the baseline on which life emerges and engages in its own kind of chemistry. Without this environment, there would be no biological nor cultural environment. Next, the chemical environment is imbedded in a quantum physical environment of particle-waves, which creates the background and baseline on which chemistry and macrophysical processes occur. And quantum physics emerges out of an environment of pure energy. None of the new, emergent environments could exist without the environments below them – thus, a sort of environmental pyramid emerges. If any of the levels are removed or damaged, everything above that level collapses with it. Thus, humans have to learn to live better in each of these environments, and to see themselves as living in these environments. Further, each of the levels of human thinking create their own cultural environments – which we have to learn to live in even as we emerge into new levels of thinking. However, it is the top levels that are obliged to live in the environments of the lower levels, not vice versa, as the lower levels can and will continue to survive even if more complex ways of thinking emerge. Attempts to eliminate lower levels will result in tragedy.

281.
All five emergent levels of human thinking also reflect the time experiences of all the levels, below and including the human. Time is experienced by pure energy as atemporal, meaning the time experience is circular. Incidentally, the tribal way of thinking experiences time as circular in an eternal return of the same things. The second physical level of probabilistic time, going between circular and linear time, is also shared by the second level of human thinking as an eternal return of similar things (circular time linearized into a spiral or helix). The third physical level of chemistry/macrophysics’ experience of time as deterministic is shared by the third level of human thinking, where human lives and history are understood to be on a certain path, often one already prepared by God. The fourth physical level of biology, which experiences a slight forward direction of time, is also shared by the fourth level of human thinking, since for the first time life and history are understood to change and be changeable. Finally, the fifth physical level – the human level – is doubly experienced at the fifth level of human thinking, where past, present, and future are beginning to be brought together into a single model (which sometimes has the ironic outcome of giving rise to ideas of an “unchanging state of nature” that does not exist and never has and never will). And, just like in the physical world, the human experience of each of these levels bleed through into higher levels, creating even more complexity than these apparently simple divisions indicate. But do not forget: models, like math, are only precise approximations of reality. Models are digital representations of a digital-analog world.

282.
With this model we see some of the parallels between the human levels of thinking and their emergent complexity, and the emergent levels of physical reality. Further, we have seen that each new emergent level has become more internalized, and individualized, ending with the emergence of one particular species into complex intelligence. One would expect, if new levels of emergent complexity emerge as past levels have, with each emergence becoming even more individualized, that individual humans would be the ones emerging into the next level of complexity – Graves, Beck and Cowan’s Second Tier thinking. And this leads us into my proposal that this Second Tier thinking is in fact the emergence of a new level of complexity.

283.
J.T. Fraser says the next level of emergence is the sociotemporal level, which he says emerges from the interaction of humans in society. But this makes as much sense as saying the level emergent from the biotemporal is the world ecology level of time experience. The social actually evolved prior to humans, in the social mammals, and the way that Fraser uses “sociotemporal,” it is clear that he means something like the world culture. But as we have already seen, the culture is merely the environment in which the nootemporal lives. The nootemporal level, the actual next level of complexity out of the biotemporal, evolved from a particular kind of animal, and the next level of complexity will evolve, not from all humans, as the idea of sociotemporality suggests, but from particular humans – those who, after reaching the highest level of human thinking, have seen and resolved the paradoxes of human thinking, and have thus emerged into the next level of complexity. In fact, I would argue that it already has evolved in Graves, Beck, and Cowan’s Second Tier thinkers. The first two sublevels within this new level of complexity are integrationism and holism. Others will follow and, if the same pattern that has been found in the universe throughout its entire history holds, it will have six of these sublevels before the paradoxes inherent within this level create the conditions for emergence into the next level. And, just like humans have all the other levels below them, including the biotemporal level, making humans in that sense indistinguishable from animals, the Second Tier thinkers are indistinguishable from other humans, except in certain aspects of their thinking. I would propose calling this new level not sociotemporal, but intertemporal, since it is the first level self-aware in understanding both the depth of its own thinking, through all the sublevels of the nootemporal, as well as the nested hierarchical temporality of the universe as a whole. In this sense, the intertemporal level is also neotenous, in that it takes on the fully “adult” way of human thinking, but also every other level under it, as well as embracing every other level of reality, and not just the “adult” one of nootemporality.

284.
Beck and Cowan say that Second Tier thinkers have several qualities. While human thinking has its fears and each level knows that it has the answer, in metahuman thinkers, fear drops away, and what is known is precisely how much is not known – such thinkers know so much, they realize how much is inherently unknown, and even unknowable. This emergent level is where emergence becomes understood and known. This is where it is most self-reflexive; it is the first level of emergence that comes to be fully conscious of emergence as such. And it becomes aware of its own self-emergence from human thinking, whether it has found the words to articulate the idea yet or not. Here too there is the first real awareness of time – no effort is made to eliminate time from consideration, as human thinking tries to do in notions of eternity, timelessness, and “unchanging nature.” Further, Beck and Cowan point out that the Second Tier person “sees too much, from too many new angles to accept simplicity that is not there” (273). There is an inherent interdisciplinarity in metahuman thinking. Interdisciplinarity is different from postmodern (egalitarian human) multidisciplinary thinking in that postmodern multidisciplinary thinking is pluralist, postrustructuralist, and anti-hierarchical, making it tend to make false connections and incorrect associations since everything is considered to be on the same level and is therefore fundamentally the same. Postmodern thinking tends to be deeply reductionist (like deconstruction) and ahistorical (since, if nothing has changed, why bother with history?). For it, everything has the same level of complexity – meaning, if we understand quantum physics, we will understand the complexities of biology, human thought, and culture. As opposed to multidisciplinary thinking, interdisciplinary thinking is based on fluid and nested hierarchies which place everything in proper relation to everything else. Thus, quantum physics is at a level of complexity below chemistry. Humans are not divided up according to race, but according to complexities of thinking, which occur based not on race, but on life conditions. Interdisciplinary thinking is emergentist and complex, as well as historical and evolutionary. It is information- and knowledge-driven. It understands the world is nonlinear, meaning top levels affect lower levels once the top levels emerge, but the lower levels are what give rise to the top levels. Thus, there is both bottom-up determinism (which is foundational), and top-down determinism (which emerges), both working in a nonlinear, and thus chaotic or biotic, fashion.

285.
There is an exponential (sigmoidal, actually) difference between linear, human thinking, and nonlinear, metahuman thinking. “With the shift toward Second Tier thinking the conceptual space of human beings is greater than the sum of all the previous levels combined with a ‘logarithmic’ (Graves’ term) increase in degrees of behavioral freedom” (Beck and Cowan, 276). Although Beck and Cowan then go on to deny that this is a “new breed of human” (and in a real sense, they are correct that it is not a “new breed” of human per se – as this new level of complexity cannot be bred for), this is precisely the description of emergence into a new level of complexity. Each new level is logarithmically more complex than the previous level. In Time, Conflict, and Human Values, J.T. Fraser proposes that there have been 101000 organisms through the history of life on earth (he also suggests we would get a complexity of 10 at the quantum level, and 1010 for the level of chemistry/macrophysics), while for humans, we would get a level of complexity of about 1010,000, for the number of possible brain states. This then suggests that the next level of thinking would be at a level of complexity equal to 10100,000. If the brain is emergent in complexity from life itself, then the brain should give rise to the next level of emergence in its own complexity. Thus internalized, this new level of complexity would be very difficult to detect – and could not be detected by just looking at different people – but only by seeing how certain people think and behave.

286.
What is metahuman thinking like? Unlike at human levels, there is an understanding for such people of the legitimacy of all levels of thinking and existence, as well as an understanding of these levels’ importance and proper position in the world’s natural hierarchies. They have a sort of extreme self-awareness that is accompanied by self-acceptance. And they are adept at integrating complexity, explaining parallels, and creating and seeing connections among things. Such thinking is thus at least highly interdisciplinary, and even holistic in nature. Ideas are multidimensional, paradox and uncertainty are not just seen, but understood, and even enjoyed. Chaos and order are understood in their proper relation to each other – not as in annihilatory opposition, but in creative conflict. Multiple perspectives are considered simultaneously, given proper weight, and used to inform each other before a decision is made. Thus, difference is of utmost importance, though the mistake of thinking that difference necessarily means either good or bad is not made, as it is understood that difference just means difference. The world is understood to constitute particles and entities as well as groups, fields, and waves, and it is understood that there is a “‘holistic’ wisdom within systems” (Beck and Cowan, 284), and that this wisdom is not in conflict with knowledge – that the two together in fact constitute beauty. The world consists of fractals, the laws of nature that apply throughout the universe supplant doctrinaire laws, and it is understood that everything connects to everything else. Fortunately, with the higher level complexity thinking involved, all of this can be done extremely rapidly.

287.
What is perhaps most interesting is the issue of communication of information. With each new level of complexity, there is the emergence of new forms of communication. Quantum physical bodies communicate with each other using particle-waves – electrons communicate using photons, for example. Chemistry communicates with other chemicals using both quantum physical elements, but also topology. Biology uses both of these, plus chemicals and, for some, sound to communicate. Humans use all of these, plus grammatical language – which is to say, combining sound communication with the narrative structure required to make active decisions and choices. And what of metahuman communication? First, it appears that metahuman thinkers ar able to think while communicating. But there is more. In reading the next part, one must keep in mind that, to other metahuman thinkers, this will make sense, while to human thinkers, it will make as much sense as human language makes to other animals. This is not an insult – it is the nature of emergence into new levels of complexity. And the fact that I have to communicate this in language only makes it more difficult, as it is not the proper form in which to communicate this kind of information. But please bear with me on this, as what will appear as borderline insanity to many will make complete sense to some. But this is no more or less insane than building a space station is insane to a cat – a space station makes sense to the human way of thinking, but to a cat, if you can’t eat it, drink it, or have sex with it, then to do something like build a space station is at best nonsensical; at worst, madness. Beck and Cowan in fact argue that 2nd Tier thinkers are practically invisible to 1st Tier thinkers, just as more complex 1st Tier thinkers are practically invisible to the least complex 1st Tier thinkers. The less complex thinkers just can’t see what the more complex thinkers are thinking.

288.
Frederick Turner, in The Culture of Hope, talks about some things that, at first glance, from a human way of thinking, appear borderline mad. He talks about how the poet is able to communicate with trees, stones, mountains, etc. What many would take to be a poetic metaphor, Turner means in a literal sense. What I once took as poetic I now understand much more clearly and concretely: the metahuman thinker is actually able to communicate with trees, stones, mountains, etc., which do not communicate using human language, but in their own languages. The metahuman thinker is the first to be open to such communication, and is the first to be able to understand across the levels of complexity. This can be understood if we really understand what is meant by spacetime being more folded with each new level of complexity – this is to say, spacetime is in contact with itself more and more. Thus, a more complex level than humans should be able to communicate even more, and more clearly, with and through more levels of spacetime. This leads us to what appears to be an even stranger form of communication at the metahuman level. With human language, there is a limited reflexivity – the present refers to a close past in order to push into the future. This gives humans a great deal of freedom, and an ability to greatly order the world. Each new, emergent form of communication has increased in reflexivity, and given more freedom, and more order, to the world. Thus, we should expect the new, emergent form of metahuman communication to fit that criteria as well. And it does. Beck and Cowan talk about how Second Tier thinkers are more intuitive – such thinkers know what they should be doing at any given time, especially when dealing with big decisions. Frederick Turner suggests that these intuitions are people in the future communicating backwards in time to the present to guide us. This makes sense if we realize that communication for the metahuman has become even more reflexive, so that all potential I’s in the future are able to reference my past I (which is actually my present I) to guide me into the best path(s) to create a better future. Perhaps even more complex future levels are more capable of communicating through time this way, having even more spacetime folds in them – and this new level of complexity is the first to most clearly receive this form of communication, having now been deeply folded enough into spacetime to do so. The way to understand this is to see the future as branching, and all our future selves as well as others’ future selves on all the branches. Some of the branches are better futures than others. For the metahuman, the future I’s (perhaps not just theirs, but others’) are able to communicate back to let the present I know what would be the best path. If there is a bad future, that particular I would either be silent, or discourage such a path as would lead to that future, while for good futures, those I’s would encourage decisions that led to them. Spacetime folds back onto itself in greater complexity than we now understand, and thus, because we are able to communicate with ourselves backwards through time, sending these “feelings” or “intuitions” back to let us know which paths are best to take, we have both greater freedom and more order in the universe. Now, all of this would be confusing to those who first encountered such communication – the same way, I would imagine, those who first emerged into grammatical language found it confusing and disconcerting though, as they grew used to it, and played with it, and learned how it worked, it turned into a great and powerful tool that molded not only their thinking, but future human generations’ thinking. As the metahuman level comes to understand this new form of communication, and how to use it better and more efficiently, they will grow more comfortable with it, and more able to communicate with it.

Let us then get (finally!) to the issue of time preference. We see lower time preference with increasing complexity of thought. And we should be able to see why that is. Those with a tribalist perception of time as circular do not see things as changing. It is hard to get such a person to think about the future, since to them the future is just more of the same exact thing over and over and over. The heroic individual, however, has a slightly lower time preference precisely because time does not repeat, though he certainly would argue (with Mark Twain) that it rhymes. One would have a similar problem here, though, as with the tribalist thinker, since there is not a lot of difference between things being identical and things being practically identical. There is no real notion of improvement, which we at least see in the authoritative level. With the linear, teleological idea of time, there is at least a notion of change occurring. Such a person might be convinced to invest and save -- but only if you can convince this person that it is "God's will" or the equivalent thereof. The problem is that for this level there is also a certain degree of fatalism -- that things are as God intended them. With the fourth level, we get ideas of progress, meaning that we now have an even lower time preference, which allows people to really think about the future in a positive way. It makes sense to save and invest, because there is a better future ahead if you do. The fifth, or egalitarian, level of psychological complexity is consumerist and thinks in aggregates. There is a much lower time preference -- but sometimes it is to the point of thinking generations ahead, at the expense of the present. At the same time, there is a "we have to do something" mentality that can result in rash deicisions about the present. The second tier thinkers, however, are the only ones fully conscious of time and its consequences. Theirs is a very low time preference, which is all-encompassing and complex. Needless to say, those who consciously have time in mind have the lowest time preference of anyone.

This may be more than was really asked for, but I think it is good to think about these things, as they have real consequences for ideas in economics. For example, what happens when you have a significant number of each level in high concentrations, as we see in cities? What are the social and economic consequences? If we group people according to their psychological complexity, what socioeconomic patterns do we see? what educational patterns? what employment patterns? what ideological patterns? How does this kind of heterogeneity fit into our economic theories? What theories might it fit best into?

How might one develop these ideas further?

At Home With the Kids and My Ph.D.

I have a new article at Clarion Call, At Home With the Kids and My Ph.D.
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My article has also been picked up at Minding the Campus.

Interdisciplinary World-Wide Web

This week's top countries who have visited Interdisciplinary World:

United States 350

United Kingdom 20

Russia 14

India 12

Moldova 12

Germany 8

Netherlands 8

Canada 7

Greece 6

Philippines 6

I'm not at all sure why I'm so popular with Moldova and the Philippines this week. :-)

Becoming Comfortable Living in the Open Society

The "genetic makeup [of humans] evolved over millions of years to work in small, closed, enduring, inward-looking, solidaric circles of 20-100 people. The unsubtle mind of band-man sees society as organizational, not a network of spontaneous relationships. It years for an encompassing coordination of sentment, not a cosmos of intersecting romances. It yearns for common knowledge, and is uncomfortable with disjointed knowledge. It years for social justice, and is not satisfied with merely procedural or commutative justice. It presupposes a configuration of collective ownership, not one of individual ownership. As the band passed to the tribe and the nation, the unsubtle mind was taught restraint, social hierarchy, and increasing complexity, and the closed society of the tribe and the nation eventually developed into the open society, and ideas of the subtle mind flowered in the 7th and 18th centuries and developed into what would be called liberalism" (Klein, Daniel B. "From Weight Watchers to State Watchers: Towards a Narrative of Liberalism" The Review of Austrian Economics (2010) 23:408)

Liberal here meaning "classical liberal," meaning someone who supports free markets. Please note that the "unsubtle mind" is definable as either Right-conservatism or Left-liberalism. The differences between those two world views are that the former sees itself as pre-capitalist, the latter as post-capitalist -- yet both in fact yearn for the same primitive state. Both want someone to rule, someone to take care of them, someone to tell them that everything is alright, just follow me and do as I say. The only difference between the two is that the former is exclusive, the latter inclusive (unless you disagree with them on ideology, of course, in which case they are as irrationally discriminatory as the Right is on race, religion, gender, etc.). But both yearn for a more primitive life.

They do so despite what should be overwhelming evidence that the open society provides greater wealth, well-bring, security, health, happiness, etc. than has any society to ever come into existence. They do so because they give into their primtive yearnings. Yet the soul of civilization itself is born from the repression of those yearnings.

What does it take to become comfortable with a spontaneous order not of our design, yet of our making? What does it take to become comfortable with the necessary depth and breadth of our ignorance, which we will never be able to overcome? What does it take to become comfortable with commutative justice, rule of law, and forgiveness? What does it take to become comfortable with private ownership, including that of one's self and one's mind, which were necessary for society to recognize for the very flowerings of culture and wealth?

I have already ventured an opinion on these questions here. If beauty is the answer, then we need a more beauty-based education. More, we need more beauty-based art. The anti-beauty movement that has dominated since the advent of Modernism, and especially in postmodernism, is part and parcel of the anti-market intellectuals' war against classical liberalism. We need an art and literature that helps make us comfortable living in the open society. We can evolve beyond our primtive drives -- and great art is what allows us to do just that.

Profit Means Disequilibrium

Israel Kirzner argues that the entrepreneur makes a profit when he finds a state of disequilibrium and moves the system toward equilibrium. This is the essence of arbitrage. If we understand this insight, then we can see that the economy is necessarily in a state of disequilibrum. At least, it is in every single industry where profit is being made. In other words, if Kirzner is right about how profit is made, the existence of profit demonstrates that the economy is in a state of disequilibrium. Where does this leave equilibrium as a valid method of analysis?

The Agonal Truth of Plotted Literature

"Art tells the truth in the general form of a lie." -- Nietzsche.

Along Nietzschean lines, truth comes out in the agon -- the struggle -- between two arguers. Plotted literature uncovers truth precisely because it presents the agon between the antAGONist and protAGONist. Truth does not lie with the hero-protagonist, but in the struggle the hero-protagonist has with the antagonist. This is how art tells the truth.

Disequilibrium Economics

When you have agents engaged in multiple interactions over space and time, you get a strong dynamic nonlinear, non-equilibrium process, which results in structures and patterns, also known as self-organization. This arises entirely from interactions internal to the system. If we then cause the system to change due to external inputs, we get turbulence in the system, making the system even more nonlinear, throwing it into a far-from-equilibrium state. It is when it is in the far-from-equilibrium state that it is most creative. If the economy is a spontaneous order, it is a self-organizing system/process. And if it is a self-organizing process, it is a non-equilibrium process. And if it is a creative process, it is likely to be in a far-from-equilibrium state (and if it is a dynamic, self-organizing process with external inputs, it is likely to be in a far-from-equilibrium state).

Of course, neoclassical economics is based on the idea of equilibrium. However, I have noticed that the following result in disequilibria:

space
time
entrepreneurship involving new ideas/products
ignorance
knowledge
success
failure
different cultures and subcultures

Now, since these are features of any real economy, and each causes diseqeuilibria, piling diseqeuilibria on disequilibria, does it make any sense to discuss equilibria? It is argued that it is a "useful fiction," but one does have to wonder how useful it really is, if it creates a consistently false picture of the economy. Worse, it creates "ideal conditions" which are unachievable, creating the fiction that there is such a thing as "market failures." Market failures are impossible except in the utopia of neoclassical equilibrium theory. That makes it a theory failure.

Fraser and Libertarianism.

It turns out that the connection between J.T. Fraser and libertarianism was closer than I thought. Though Fred Turner and I are both libertarians, I know that not everyone who loved Fraser's ideas were, and Fraser himself never gave a clue as to what his politics were in anything I read of his (probably for the best in the grand scheme of things).

J.T. Fraser and David Nolan, RIP

Saturday, November 20th was a sad day for me ideologically. David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party, and J.T. Fraser, philosopher of time, both died. No doubt there would be libertarian ideas out there without the LP, but the LP helps give libertarianism some political definition. I was introduced to Fraser in my Ph.D. program, through Alexander Argyros (later my dissertation chair). His ideas have been central to my thinking across the board.

Now, it may not seem likely that the two are connected, but for me they are necessarily so. I believe the world is self-organized from the bottom-up, with new emergent levels of complexity (Fraser's umwelts), and that top-down imposed order is unnatural. Taken to its logical conclusion in economics, society, culture, and government, that naturally lead me to libertarianism. Of course, I discovered libertarianism before I discovered Fraser, but Fraser's ideas really provided me with a full structural world view, showing me how it all tied together.

Overall, my debt to Nolan is fairly indirect. I came to libertarianism through my Introduction to Philosophy class with Ronald Nash, which led me to read Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand -- and eventually to the Austrian economists. My debt to Fraser, though, is far more direct.

Ten years ago I went to UT-Dallas to work on my Ph.D. I signed up for a class on Existentialism with Alex Argyros. I loved him and the class so much I took him again for Foundationalism and Antifoundationalism. It was there where I first read J.T. Fraser -- Time, Conflict, and Human Values -- and Fred Turner (who I also met that semester, of course). I had an undergraduate degree in recombinant gene technology with a minor in chemistry, I had been reading about quantum physics and chaos theory and dissipative structures and complex systems on my own, I had just finished a M.A. degree in English, and I was starting my Ph.D. in the humanities. Though I believed that they should all fit together, Fraser's work showed me how they all fit together. I went from a vague postmodernist, multidisciplinary thinker to an integrationist interdisciplinary thinker through Fraser's work (both directly and indirectly, through Alex's book "A Blessed Rage for Order" and Turner's "The Culture of Hope"). I am now a structuralist thinker -- and the structure is Fraser's umwelt theory. It is behind all of my scholarly work, whether directly stated or not. Fraser is omnipresent in my dissertation, "Evolutionary Aesthetics," and I went to my first ISST conference in Cambridge just to meet Fraser (since I had not submitted anything, and thus was not presenting anything). He was a good and generous man, excited at meeting a budding new scholar interested in his ideas. He was equally generous when I attended my next ISST conference, at which I presented, in Monterey Bay. I was sad that I could not afford to go to the ISST conference in Coasta Rica -- and I am now even sadder I could not attend.

Inspired by Fraser, and seeing how his work fit beautifully into the work of psychologist Clare Graves, I wrote my own book: Diaphysics. He continues to inform my thinking, even as I have moved into doing more scholarly work influenced by Austrian economics (a tradition in which time is central -- making it potentially rich soil for Fraser's ideas). My intellectual debt to Fraser is profound (my pantheon of influences: Fraser, Fred Turner, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Clare Graves, Hayek, Milan Kundera). One of the greatest thinkers certainly of the 20th century has passed from us. He will be sorely missed.

Some of Fraser's work:

Time, Conflict and Human Values

The Voices of Time

Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge

Time: The Familiar Stranger

The Validity of Abstract Terms

I have gotten into an argument here about the validity of using the term "wealth." Rodger Mitchell argues that "wealth" is a meaningless term. I argue that economics is the science of wealth creation. If true, this means we need to define wealth. But is that really possible?

Consider the following:

Biology is the science of life.

Aesthetics is the science of beauty.

Natural law is the science of justice.

Psychology is the science of the mind.

Now, define life. Define beauty. Define justice. Define mind.

Is it a coincidence that all our specialized areas of study are of terms we cannot fully define? Is it not then the definition of folly to argue that we should abandon the terms? Or is the point of the science to try to define the terms?

My Little Node in the World Wide Web

The rotating globe at the bottom of my page is a lot of fun to watch. I get to see where my readers live -- and they are from all over the globe: Australia/New Zealand, Asia, Europe, and North America. I have an idea of who some of the people may be, and some are a complete mystery to me. However, I have noticed that there are two major places where I have not had a single hit: Africa and South America! The Middle East is also noticeably unlit with red dots. Some interesting patterns are definitely emerging.
________________________

After checking my stats, I noticed one hit from Turkey, and two from Brazil, so the Middle East and South America are now included.

Writing for the Social Sciences

I have been reading complaints by law and economics professors about students' inability to write. They are right, of course, to complain, because schools have for the most part abandoned everything necessary to teach students how to write. Students don't have to learn grammar or logic. The only thing they have to learn is how to "express themselves," for which no judgement can be made. In college they get "rhetoric", but it is a pale version of Aristotle's ideal (it more resembles what Plato complained about).

So what to do? I suggested that if the social sciences (broadly defined) wanted to teach their students how to write, they needed to have their own writing classes. No doubt this would cause s turf war with the English department, but one has to decide if the battle is worth it. While I would most certainly love to work and teach in an English department, I would also like to say that if anyone is bold enough to have a writing professor in, say, their economics department, I would be more than happy to teach such a set of classes -- especially if I could design the class and set up the requirements. First, the department would have to require my class for this to work at all. Second, I would require grammar and logic as prerequesites. If poetry writing classes all taught formalist poetry, I would even require that (being, in my opinion, the best way to introduce structural rhetoric -- the rest of rhetoric I would introduce in my class). In my writing class I would discuss both reading strategies (hermeneutics) and department-level vocabulary, discussing the ambuguities in the terminology used. Much can be made of the fact that many of the words used by economists can also be used in ethics and in psychology, for example.

These are a few ideas. If anyone wanted to set up such a class within their department, I would love to jump on board and really create a writing program that works.

Digital Humanities

Here is an interesting article on the digital humanities. I would like to welcome them to work I was doing 6-7 years ago for my dissertation. I wish I could have followed up on it. My most recent work, on the spontaneous orders of the arts, is quite amenable to this kind of methodology. Maybe as the rest of the humanities catch up with my methodology, I will be able to get a job.

Revising Poetry

To be a poet of any worth whatsoever, you have to revise, revise, revise. Rare is it that the first things that come out are gems. Let me give some personal examples.

One summer I wrote a sonnet a day without really understanding the form. I have been revising those poems for a while, and while I am finding that some revisions hold the sonnet form, others result in new forms. Consider the following original (sonnet) and revision (villanelle):

Lost Time

We waste time and we spend it – what’s it cost?
We pass the time and fill the time, there’s no
Lack of excuses for all the time lost
(Even as Proust searched for it we all know
It can never be recovered again) –
What we never seem to want to renew
Among all the filler and endless din
Is to make up for all the time that flew
From tree to tree until we could not see
Where all the time had gone. Do we have time
Enough for love? – or is it on the sea,
Caught up in its rhythm, or in this rhyme?
Despite the time we’ve spent together, I
Wonder where the time’s gone, and wonder why?


Lost Time

We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time
We’re trapped in all its waves and ebbs and flows –
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme.

We treat time like it doesn’t cost a dime
When we’re in debt to it. Lord only knows
We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time.

Our minds and bodies are set to its chime,
Connected more to poetry than prose:
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme.

We think we can control it, then we mime
All that has come before: it’s all a pose –
We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time.

When will we learn to use it as a prime
And natural source of life, which always shows
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme.

We’re monkeys in the tree of time and climb
The limbs, the places where each of us grows.
We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time –
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme.


Now, I'm not saying that the villanelle is a great poem, but I think we can agree that it's better than the sonnet from which it was derived. Such a drastic revision makes this a new draft, so it probably has to undergo some more revision (and suggestions are, of course, welcomed), but I think I'm moving in the right direction with this particular poem.

With my sonnet "Wedded" I transformed the poem from a sonnet into a blank verse poem with a rhyming couplet at the end. Here is the sonnet:

Wedded

In an old white Dutch Masters cigar box
Lies what looks like a Bible, tiny, white,
Pink silk flowers and a gold cross that locks
Away a secret that slips out, a sight
I had not seen, but heard about, a ring
Not a ring – a tab from an old pop can,
The tab my dad gave my mom, that would bring
Them together in marriage, and began
The life that ended in her too-early
Death by cancer, asbestos brought to her
On clothes by her husband unknowingly
From his work. Still, I know that she’d prefer
To have lived this same life over again,
Beginning with this little tab of tin.

Here is the revised poem:

The Engagement Ring

Although my parents never smoked cigars
Or even cigarettes, I have their white
Dutch Masters cigar box, and wonder what
It holds. I lift the lid and look inside –
I find a small white Bible there with pink
Silk flowers and a golden cross that locks
Away a secret. This false Bible is
A box that holds a metal object I
Had never seen, but heard about, a ring
That’s not a ring – a pull tab from an old
Pop can, that tab my dad gave to my mom
When he asked her to marry him. She slipped
It on and told him yes and cut him on
The thumb with it when she gave him a kiss.
This tab brought them together for a life
That ended in her early death by cancer,
Asbestos brought to her as dust by her
Beloved on his clothes unknowingly
From work, destroying her through her weak lungs.
But still, I know that she’d prefer to live
The life she did with this same death again
Beginning with this little tab of tin.

But not all my sonnets have changed form. Take the following sonnet:

Why Bother

Words fall silent on those you love the most,
Those who don’t are the most attentive.
At home you’re ignored or seen to just boast
About all you know. There’s no incentive
To share knowledge or wisdom, it will go
Unheard by those you most wanted to hear
Everything you had to say. And now so
Much harm falls upon those you hold so dear.
What should you expect? For Jesus himself
Said a prophet is not without honor
Save in his own country – full of the wealth
Of knowledge of you, even the horror
That you could possibly have within you
A wisdom they don’t, a knowledge that’s new.

Which I have revised into the following sonnet:

The Prophet at Home

The prophet’s words cannot be heard by those
Who love him most and know him growing up.
At home, they think you only boast – who knows
You as they do? They ask, “Who is this pup?”
Why share with them the wisdom you have gained?
It goes unheard, all that you wished to share –
Their inattentive ears have only pained
Their lives – but also you, because you care.
But those who do not know you are attentive
To what you have to say, and take the most
Of all your wisdom. They have an incentive
To listen – growing, they don’t think you boast.
For Jesus too said that a prophet’s not
Without his honor save with his own lot.

This revision has the sonnet's dialectical development, and resolution in the ending couplet. The subject suggested the retention of the sonnet form in this case, and I abided by that content-form connection. In the two above cases, there were elements in the original poems that suggested different forms, and I listened to them. In the case of the villanelle, though, I did have the form in mind and searched through the poems I had printed out to revise to see if any could fit the form.

What does all of this suggest about form and content? The two are undoubtedly connected, but which comes first? Is it always one, or the other? I am certain others have written poems in one form and then revised into another. Does the presence of the former form get remain somehow present, though transformed into a new form?

Of course, any suggestions regarding revisions are more than welcome!

Late Weekend Nights at the Hotel

The prostitutes all come, but do not rhyme --
They go upstairs for a short time and climb
Into the warmth with bare legs, wooly boots,
A standard mini skirt, and silver roots.
Such models of efficiency I see
Them each return and leave so rapidly
You'd think they're paid by piecework rather than
The hour (no doubt they are, paid man by man).
They never speak -- they have a job to do --
Indeed, they do, the faster ones. And through
The night their sisters come and disappear --
But they are paid with whiskey shots and beer.

Richard Ebeling

A great interview with Richard Ebeling.

Earth Below

Go to the very bottom of the page and you will see the earth and the location of everyone who, from the time I post this on, has been to this site.

Austrian Economics: A Primer

Austrian Economics: A Primer by Eamonn Butler. Read it and learn.

So You Want to Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities

In Praise of Peter Thiel

For those who have read my articles in the Dallas Morning News on education, here and here, you know that I have been increasingly questioning the basic value of certain kinds of education. I value the education I received in the humanities, but I'm not so narcissistic as to believe that, therefore, everyone should have my kind and level of education. Of course, most highly educated Leftists are so narcissistic; thus, this screed against Peter Thiel. Who is Peter Thiel? Well, among other things, he's the founder of PayPal and a founding investor of Facebook. That is internet genius. More, he's a strong libertarian -- one willing to put his millions to work to create a more libertarian world. The issue in the article -- the attitude of which is no doubt more connected to Thiel's being a libertarian rather than a good, feels-shame-at-his-wealth leftist billionaire -- is the Thiel Fellowship, which "will give entrepreneurs under age 20 a cash award of $100,000 to drop out of school and pursue their business ideas." Whether expressed this way in his announcement, the Thiel Foundation's website doesn't say anything about "having" to drop out of college. But it does point out that they will help educate those who win. They will no doubt receive the kind of education that entrepreneurs really need -- which cannot in fact be achieved at a university. Invention and creativity are two things that cannot be taught at any university, by any professor. A university education can teach you skills, structures of known things, and challenge your thinking. You can participate in discovery in the sciences, of course, and it can teach you what it known so you become aware of the existence of gaps in knowledge -- two things very necessary for the sciences to advance -- but it cannot teach you how to be innovative, entrepreneurial, creative. All too often, I have seen formal education kill those very things. I have seen great painters, poets, and fiction writers become technically much better, but conceptually much worse. To remain innovative, you have to manage to retain a rebelliousness that education is often designed to crush. And if you retain it, you are likely to suffer once you graduate, since it is the conformists who get the jobs, not the rebels. Thus, I celebrate Thiel's Fellowship. It's the sort of thing that will in fact help grow our economy and, thus, improve people's lives -- something few university professors (especially the anti-growth leftist ones) are able to accomplish.

All Is Force -- The World View of the Left

The Left cannot tell the difference between voluntary exchange and the use of force. That is why they think there is no difference between slavery and working for an employer for pay. That is why they think it is valid to replace voluntary exchange with force. If it is all force anyway, it might as well be MY force. How does one combat this? If they cannot see the difference between a voluntary economic exchange and the use of force to accomplish your ends, how can you begin to have a discussion?

How the Humanities are Useful

Never mind the nonsense about economics (this crisis is of course causing questions, but increasingly they are questions about the nature of macroeconomics -- thankfully), this article on how the humanities are in fact useful (contra Fish) is fantastic. It certainly explains my obsession with rules and rule-changing. :-)

From Trivium to Triviality

I have a new article at The Pope Center: From Trivium to Triviality

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, Father of Fractal Geometry, has Died, Age 85

One of my heroes, one of the greatest scientists of all time, who will no doubt be mentioned in the same breath as Netwon and Einstein, Benoît B. Mandelbrot, has died at age 85. The Mandelbrot set is an image of infinity, and image of the finite -- of the paradoxes that lies at the heart of beauty. It is a shame that such a great mind has to pass -- but, like his Mandelbrot set, though finite in life, he will live on into infinity because of his contributions to knowledge. There are a few people who change the world to such a degree that one can recognize a time before his work, and after. Mandelobrot is one of those great people. RIP

Why I Chose to Be an Artist

Just because one can identify the chemicals and the neurological structures involved in the creation of emotions, that doesn't mean one has "reduced" everything to those structures and chemicals. Reductionism is only one side; the other is emergence. What is then interesting is how these elements and structures creates this emergent quality. But perhaps that is best understood by the arts, and not by the sciences.

To Do List

My task:

"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values." -- Nietzsche

My challenges:

"A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation." -- Nietzsche.

"Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest." -- Nietzsche

Why I am a poet: "I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service." " -- Nietzsche

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." -- Nietzsche

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication." -- Nietzsche

Not Yet -- A Poem

The caracaras circle. Surely I'm
Not facing death. I'm scarcely half through time.
They land and flush and throw their heads far back
And screech their call. What do I surely lack
That I can't move, that I'm mistaken on
The midday of my life for carrion?
Or is it I who am mistaken? Fate
Does not bring them for me, but for a mate.
I've granted meaning where none could exist.
I look around. I wonder what I've missed.

The Socialists' Favorite Mammal: Mole Rats

Often when arguing with socialists (here I am talking about self-professed socialists), I bring up the problem that socialism seems to demand of people that they act like social insects (i.e., ants and bees) rather than social mammals. This typically results in their denying that that is what they really mean. However, recently, I have run into an entirely new argument: "what about the mole rat?" Indeed, there are two species of mole rat which are considered to be "eusocial," in the same way that social insects are. (I find it interesting that once a mammalian example was found, the socialists I have argued with happily abandoned their denial about trying to make us like social insects, and have embraced practically the same model just because it's a mammalian one -- which suggests to me that I was right about their wanting to make us like social insects, with a central ruler and everyone else equally ruled by that ruler.) I am considering writing an article on the issue of the eusocial mole rat, and its (ir)relevance to evolutionary biological arguments for or against socialism. Or am I the only one getting the mole rat argument?

The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction

The Kauffman Foundation has a research article, The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction, that makes an even stronger argument than I did below regarding the importance of new products and ideas driving the economy. Specifically, the author argues that, "net job growth occurs in the U.S. economy only through startup firms." That's a pretty strong statement. If true, then, again, we have a pretty clear reason why the economy cannot be jump-started through Keynesian methods.

Economies are Driven by Supply

Peter Smith points out that, "Keynesians believe that economies are driven by demand." Let us take a few seconds to demolish this nonsense, shall we?

What was the demand for the iPod before the iPod was invented and, afterwards (as it necessarily had to be), supplied?

What was the demand for the iPhone before the iPhone was invented and supplied?

What was the demand for the internet before the internet was invented and supplied?

What was the demand for the car before the car was invented and supplied?

Hector Sabelli points out in Bios that "creation necessarily precedes destruction." Schumpeter's concept of the dynamic economy as "creative destruction" requires creation before there can be destruction. To put it another way: there has to be supply before there can be demand. Once the supply is made available, demand increated, and demand can then drive the creation of more supply.

In a recession or depression, there is widespread destruction. Creation/supply must occur for there to be demand. Therefore, Keynesian policies are going to have no real effect on the economy, as any demand will be for what is already created. Thus we will see what we are now seeing: some economic growth without a change in employment. We will see growth in already-existing companies (indeed, we see greater profits), but no creation of new companies and new products. Keynesianism is why we get such things as "jobless recoveries." It is why we have reports from experts that the economy is out of recession, while there is little evidence from the real economy that any such recovery is or has been underway. Now we know why.

Is Macroeconomics Nonsense?

In 2009, I argued that we need to completely reconceive the field of macroeconomics. Well, Peter Smith, in Quadtrant, argues that macroeconomics is outright nonsense. If you go back to my earlier posting, I'm not sure I would agree, but he nevertheless makes some pretty valid points. Insofar as macroeconomics = Keynesianism, it is, of course, utter nonsense. But there can and should be a non-Keynesian macroeconomics. I say this because, in the way I conceive of what macroeconomics should be, to argue against macroeconomics would be like arguing that there is no such thing as a cell, that there is only biochemistry. Why might Smith think this way? Well, from the perspective of a biochemical, the idea that there might in fact be a cell could sound like utter nonsense. The theory of the cell isn't what it nonsense, though -- it's the theory that any given biochemical ought to be in charge of it that's nonsense (for all the reasons Hayek gave for why controlling or even sensibly regulating an economy is at all possible).

Smith goes on to criticize GDP, which I think needs criticism. GDP hides what really happens in an economy. I have given the example (which I read or heard somewhere -- I wish I could remember where) of two countries, A and B, which each produce Good X at the rate of 1 unit a year. The difference between the two, though, is that each year A destroys each X it produces, while B accumulates X. Both have the exact same GDP, but after 5 years, A will have 1X, while B will have 5X and, thus, be wealthier (a point Smith makes with his example of the government-built library). What doesn't seem to be taken into consideration is what happens to each good once it is produced and "consumed." The true nature of wealth seems to never be considered -- or to have even been properly theorized. Which is undoubtedly why we have people arguing that we need to "redistribute the wealth" -- a task which is quite literally impossible -- when in fact what they mean is they want to "redistribute riches." There is a difference between riches and wealth. Riches can certainly be redistributed, but wealth can either be created or destroyed (but never redistributed). That difference needs to be properly theorized as well.

Conceptual Integration and Education

"Conceptual integration -- also known as vertical integration -- refers to the principle that the various disciplines within the behavioral and social sciences should make themselves mutually consistent with what is known in the natural sciences as well" (Cosmides, et al. from the Introduction of "The Adaptive Mind, 4).

And, I would add, the humanities as well.

"A conceptually integrated theory is one framed so that it is compatible with data and theory from other relevant fields" (4).

We see this in physics, chemistry and biology, where chemistry, for example, is compatible with, but not reducible to, the laws of physics. Psychology would similarly be compatible with, but not reducible to, the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology/evolution, and the social/humane sciences and the humanities compatible with, but not reducible to, the laws of physics, chemsitry, biology, and psychology.

However, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities are not fully conceptually integrated -- except in the theories of a handful of scholars. This is damaging to the creation of knowledge in those fields, and it is damaging to students who major in those fields.

Education is overdue for renaissance and reform. Anything short of full conceptual integration of all fields of study will be a failure.

Robot Workers of the World Unite?

It just occured to me that there is a definitive argument against the Marxist claim that the workers are the real owners of the products they create. Consider this: What is it that laborers do? They transform matter according to some pattern -- a pattern created by someone else. That would be one argument against the Marxist view, as the workers couldn't do what they were doing at all unless someone had created the pattern for them to transform matter into that particular pattern. But there's a stronger argument than that. As physical labor becomes automated, you wouldn't expect anyone to argue that the robots doing the transforming-of-matter-according-to-a-pattern are the "real" owners. If it makes no sense to argue that robots making something according to someone's pattern own the produced good, it equally makes no sense to argue that a human worker should own it. In the former case, one pays to buy the robot to do the work; in the latter case, one pays the worker to do the work.

What Do Your Opinions Signal?

Robin Hanson has an excellent list here that anyone who is honest about finding truth should consider. I reproduce it here:

Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth:

1.You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.

2.You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.

3.Realizing that a topic is important and neglected doesn’t make you much interested.

4.You have little interest in digging to bigger topics behind commonly argued topics.

5.You are less interested in a topic when you don’t foresee being able to talk about it.

6.You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.

7.You are uncomfortable taking a position of high uncertainty about who is right.

8.You care far more about current nearby events than similar distant or past/future events.

9.You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.

10.You are reluctant to change your publicly stated positions in response to new info.

11.You are reluctant to agree a rival’s claim, even if you had no prior opinion on the topic.

12.You are reluctant to take a position that raises the status of rivals.

13.You care more about consistency between your beliefs than about belief accuracy.

14.You go easy on sloppy arguments by folks on “your side.”

15.You have little interest in practical concrete implications of commonly argued topics.

16.Your opinion doesn’t much change after talking with smart folks who know more.

17.You are especially eager to drop names when explaining positions and arguments.

18.You find it hard to list weak points and counter-arguments on your positions.

19.You feel passionately about at topic, but haven’t sought out much evidence.

20.You are reluctant to not have an opinion on commonly discussed topics.

21.More?

Of course you may want your opinions to mainly signal loyalty and ability.

Tyler Cowen reproduces the list too, and adds one (which is really just a reproduction of #12):

"You feel uncomfortable taking a position which raises the status of the people you usually disagree with."

It's a good list to always keep in mind with anything you write, with any opinion you have. We should be interested in the pursuit of truth, not scoring ideological points. One can perhaps add a few to the list from my previous posting on ideology, found below.

Progressivism

If this is Progressivism, then I'm practically a Progressive. If we reject the economic ignorance expressed in the article as being central to progressivism, then I'm a full-fledged Progressive. What the author, Conor Williams, describes is a moral spontaneous order. In such a case, there is in fact no conflict between the expansion of rights and "natural rights," as he supposes. His argument thus implies a break with tradition that is not necessary -- nor, quite frankly, realistic. One has to have property and property rights in order to have changing ideas of property and property rights. One has to have a concept of voting rights to expand voting rights to more and more people. One has to progress within a tradition. Breaking with tradition isn't progress -- it's merely change. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes one needs this kind of change. But history has shown that it is much better to continue within a tradition. One of the consequences is that over time, where you are in that tradition may little resemble where you began. But the change has happened at the margins, allowing people time to adjust and integrate everything together well.

Williams thus seems to suggest that Progressivism is interested in discontinuous change change, even while trying to argue that there is in fact a tradition of progressivism in the U.S. This idea that progress involves discontinuous change is what brings about charges of nihilism and lack of foundations. Insofar as Progressivism advocates for the rejection of tradition, it is in fact anti-foundationalist. the classical liberal position, however, is one of change within a tradition. It is a foundational progressivism. This makes all the difference in the world.

There seems to be some disconnect between Williams' ideal Progressive and real-world ones. For example, he argues that, "Constitutional protections of individual property, speech, and conscience are meaningful because they make it possible for Americans to enjoy valuable individual and community goods. They are judged by their consequences, by their fruits. Insofar as American institutions do not lead to the political goods central to the American wager, they fail in their stated purpose." Fair enough. Why then do actual Progressives repeatedly support policies that have proven to "fail in their stated purpose," arguing that what really matters was their intentions? What he describes here might be more accurately attributed to real classical liberals rather than to real Progressives. Indeed, one can go back to the above stated examples of American Progressivism, in the expansion of voting rights and the alteration of ideas of property in the abolition of slavery, as successses in classical liberalism, as it was the classical liberals who pushed for these reforms.

If we replaced the problematic economics with a better understanding of the catallaxy, then what Williams describes is classical liberalism. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by that, as the modern American liberal tradition comes precisely out of this tradition. It is classical liberalism stripped of an understanding of economics, returning instead to folk economic understanding. And that's not progress.

Blinded by Ideology

Ideology -- especially when tied to a particular political party or movement -- does strange things to people. For one, it makes people extremely selective in judging what is right and what is wrong. A party ideologue will defend to the point of irrationality a member of his party doing exactly the same thing he rightly condemms a member of the other party for. Why? Just because the person in question is a member of their party.

You are a member of Party A, and a member of Party B is found to be cheating on his wife with several women. You condemn the member of Party B for being a sexist and a cheater. Good. But then a member of Party A does the same thing and . . . you excuse his behavior? Why? Because he believes the "right" thing, even if he does the wrong thing? Even if his actions belie his words?

When we are blinded by ideology, we cannot see the evils of those on our team. This is one of the great evils of collectivist thinking. Party loyalty is collectivist thinking. Racism is collectivist thinking. Socialism is collectivist thinking. In each case, collectivist thinking brings out the very worst in us. The party ideologist ends up supporting and defending the indefensible. The other side is pure evil; my side is pure good. This Us-Them mentality is part of the collectivist mentality, and it is common to party ideologists, racists, and socialists. More, no amount of evidence is sufficient to persuade. You cannot provide enough evidence to show that the other side is not really evil, that they may in fact be well-intentioned (and it never occurs, then, that the Other may just be wrong, or different, as the case may be). This is because the collectivist suspends all judgment, accepting instead the judgment of the collective. One cannot judge for oneself in a collective. One can find these kinds of ideologists on the right and on the left -- it's not a matter, then, of right and left, but of the inherent collectivism in ideological thinking.

One element of ideological thinking is that those who engage in it seem to think that everyone else is then necessarily ideological. Yet, there are world views that are inherently anti-ideological. Among them are pragmatism and classical liberalism. In politics, pragmatism pretty much boils down to a cynical "what works to get me re-elected." The problem with pragmatism is that is sees things in the short term. Missing the big picture, those who make "pragmatic" decisions very often make bad decisions for the long term. The classical liberal is interested in how the world, as a whole, and in its particular parts, actually works. The classical liberal is interested in both agents and their interactions and the systems that arise out of those agents interacting. The traditional classical liberals saw the world as self-organized from the bottom-up, and that top-down ordering was unnatural. The science has borne them out. That is indeed how the universe came into being, and how each level of complexity has organized itself from its constituent parts. If this is true at the atomic through the biological and psychological levels, what sense does it make that it is not true also for the arts, the economy, the culture, the sciences, and other social systems and processes? Do we all of a sudden have to have a wise orderer where we did not need one before? I mean, it makes some sort of consistent sense that if you believe that there was in fact a wise orderer needed for natural processes, that one would be needed for social processes -- one would be a consistent creationist in both cases. One could also be a consistent intelligent designer if you applied it to the natural world and to the social world and were thus a social interventionist (in the economy, a Keynesian, welfare statist, interventionist, etc.). But to posit that self-organizing, evolutionary processes are sufficient for natural processes below the level of human complexity, but not for those above human complexity -- which is to say, social processes -- is logically inconsistent. The same is true if you reverse it.

Only an ideologue could believe that some things need a wise orderer while others things don't. Being an ideologue is the only way to be comfortably inconsistent. It also allows you to comfortably ignore inconvenient facts, or to make up facts without thinking you are being intellectually dishonest. These are all the things ideology can do for you. Me, I prefer to being open to learning how the real world works. I have no interest in being blinded by ideology.

Yaron Brooks for a New Moral Order

Some eminent criticism of the moral order by Yaron Brooks. Something to think about.

Horwitz on Buchanan on Spontaneous Order

Some thoughts by Steven Horwitz on James Buchanan and spontaneous order. We have to really study spontaneous orders in all their forms.

The Moral Order vs. The Democratic Order

Kenneth Minogue on the moral order vs. the democratic order. An example of why we should, to the extent possible, keep the spontaneous social orders separate.

Happy Birthday Daniel

Today is Daniel's birthday! Happy 1st birthday, Daniel!!!

A Few Thoughts on Networks, Self-Organization, and Complexity

Networks with maximum efficient connectivity are neither orderly nor chaotic, but exist on the border of these two. At the border between order and chaos, you get a far-from-equilibrium state and self-organization. To have self-organization, you have to have a power law distribution of elements. Self-organizing, far-from-equilibrium systems are complex and maximally creative. The more complex a system, the more creative (or, more rapidly creative) it is. Greater complexity is achieved thorugh the creation of a nested hierarchy -- the social network is made up of people with minds, which is made up of an embodied neural network, which is made up of cellular networks, which are made up of chemical networks, which are made of atomic networks, which are made of subatomic networks. The most connected and, thus, complex networks are those made of both strong and weak bonds (friends and acquaintances). Which are likely to be more complex, though: networks of homogeneous or of heteroegeneous members? All homogeneous polycellular organisms are simple; all heterogeneous multicellular organisms are complex. Note, though, that multicellular organisms have difference cells programmed by identical DNA. When humans are homogeneous, they live in simple tribes. As the tribes grow, they become increasingly heterogeneous, allowing them to become even more heterogeneous, until humans reach a high level of complexity. Heterogeneous networks are thus more likely to be complex networks.

Artists as Entrepreneurs

After having heard Israel Kirzner at the FEE seminar on Advanced Austrian Economics, it occurred to me that the idea of the entrepreneur might be a good approach to understanding what it is that artists do, and why. Of course, one of the benefits of looking at this idea through economics is that you know if you have succeeded or not as an entrepreneur: you made profits, or not. Definite feedback. However, how does an artist know if she or he has succeeded or is succeeding? We have artists who are considered important artists who did not succeed in the market, and we have market successes that end up not lasting long within the artistic order.

Mises points out that "Profit-seeking speculation is the driving force of production" (Human Action, 325-6). How would we have to redefine "profit" to make it apply to the artistic order? What is it that artists qua artists are after in creating their work?

Hayek is interested in how the market facilitates mutual learning among people so that they end up maximizing their knowledge. How can we apply this insight to what artists do? What is it that artists are trying to learn in what they do? Can what they do be called "mutual learning"? Might this be a way to understand various artistic movements? More, Hayek shows that competition is a discovery process. Within the arts, we indeed see artists becoming most creative when they considered themselves in competition with others. Are there institutions which can foster more competition among artists?

Kirzner says that "The theory of entrepreneurial discovery sees the explanation of market phenomena in the way entrepreneurial decisions, taken under disequilibrium conditions bring about changes in prices and quantities. The market process so initiated consists of continual entrepreneurial discoveries; it is a process of discovery driven by dynamic competition, made possible by an institutional framework which permits unimpeded entrepreneurial entry into both new and old markets. The success which capitalist market economies display is the result of a powerful tendency for less efficient, less imaginative courses of productive action, to be replaced by newly discovered superior ways of serving consumers - by producing better goods and/or by taking advantage of hitherto unknown, but available, sources of resource supply. The theory focuses on the concept of discovery in contrast to the notion of the individual decision of mainstream theory" (How Markets Work, 31).

As the last sentences indicates, the Austrian approach is much more open to being applied to other social processes, such as artistic production. Artistic production, done properly, is a process of discovery, not a "decision." How can the above language be modified to apply to artistic production and, thus, to the artistic order?

How can we combine these insights to understand the artistic order? These are the questions I need to work through. It will be interesting reading more Kirzner on entrepreneurship.

Can We Ever Model an Economy?

In "The Sensory Order," F. A. Hayek observes that "any coherent structure" such as the brain "which within itself contians a model guiding its actions, must be of a degree of complexity greater than that of any model that it can contain, and therefore than that of any object it can reproduce" (5.91).

This raises some interesting questions. From a purely human perspective, if the economy is less complex than the mind, then it can be fully comprehended. However, if the economy is either as complex or more complex than the human mind, then it can never be fully comprehended -- we will only ever be able to comprehend its various parts and some of the relations among those parts. At best, we will be able to create some abstract models that will be more or less accurate to the actual economy, though it will always be hard to tell if it actually is. It is therefore very important to know if the economy is more or less complex than the human mind.

Interestingly, a complex systems-theoretic approach seems to argue that the economy is more complex than the human mind, while a complex process-theoretic approach seems to suggest(at least, according to Sabelli) that the human mind is more complex than the economy. Of course, Sabelli may be wrong, and the process-theoretic approach may argue that it is either at the same level of complexity, or more. The co-evolution of psychological complexity with social complexity may suggest an equivalence in complexity. More, it may suggest that more complex psychologies may be able to understand less complex social systems, but not equally or more complex social systems.

Many questions.

Leftist Antihistoricism and Education

In "Individualism: True and False," from Individualism and Economic Order, F.A. Hayek notes that Descartes showed contempt "for the study of history, languages, geography, and especially the classics," and that this came out of his antihistoricism, which came out of his philosophy of Reason (10n13). He also demonstrates how Cartesian Reason led toward collectivism and, thus, socialism. Now consider: is it any coincidence that the postmodern Left also demonstrates contempt for the study of history, languages, geography, and (especially) the classics? or that contemporary American education is dominated by the Left? or that history, languages, geography, and (especially) that classics have been deemphasized and outright denigrated? I would argue that the New Historicism is itself an antihistoricist approach to history. An interesting idea, that the Left are antihistoricist (an irony that this claim comes from Hayek, an Austrian economist, who is in an economic tradition typically thought of as not being interested in history? or does this make clearer that the Austrians were in fact historicists in a more proper fashion, in the same way they were more properly scientific because of their opposition to scientism?). Their antihistoricism may also explain in part (or is it, rather, a product of?) why they are political and economic creationists.

Play Idea

A play on bureaucracy titled "The Parasitic Class".

From Vice, A tragedy

ACT I

Outside. We see the corners of two houses. There are bushes planted between them. Flowers also decorate the fronts of both houses.

Scene 1 – Enter Sam, Allie, Ben, and Randy. Allie is dressed in such a way as to indicate she is a member of a very conservative religion. It should look fairly uncomfortable. She will wear something similar throughout. The men are dressed conservatively.

Sam: The sign is down. I guess that someone bought
This place. What kind of neighbors will they be?
I hope they’re moral and do as they ought.
To know that, we will have to wait and see.

Allie: Don’t judge them, Sam, before you get to know
Them. We will see if each is a black crow
Or swan-white, full of grace and beautiful.

Sam: If they all shine with grace or else are dull
From evil living, I will know for sure
When I meet them. I’ll know if they are pure.

Ben: And if they’re not? What will we do with them
Beside us? It could be a real problem.

Randy: Can virtue live this close to wicked vice?
I hope they’re good, else we’ll pay the price.

Allie: I’m sure that they’ll be fine. They’re moving here,
So they must know that our community
Is very ethical. I doubt they’d leer
At us or try to foster enmity.

Sam: I hope you’re right or, if you’re not, that they
Are open to conversion. This, I pray.

[Exit all.]

Scene 2 – Enter Carter, Nancy, Albert, Barney, Britney, and Lindsey. Carter and Nancy are dressed like the upper-middle-class professionals they are. Albert is dressed like a typical teenaged boy. Barney is dressed flamboyantly, advertising to all his homosexuality. Britney and Lindsey are wearing miniskirts and/or short-shorts, tops leaving little to the imagination, and heels. Each should wear variations on these outfits throughout the first two acts.

Carter: Well, here we are. The movers say they’ll be
Here soon, so we can get moved in. Are we
Still happy with the bedrooms that we chose?

Nancy: The people that I saw as we drove in –
They made me nervous, like they all are part
Of some big cult. I don’t think we’ll fit in.

Carter: Oh, don’t be silly, hon. No matter where
We live, all people are the same. They can
Be reasoned with; they all love one another.
We also should be sensitive to how
These people live. We cannot judge the way
They dress or eat or live their lives. We let
Them live their lives, and they’ll let us live ours.

Barney: This place is marvelous. I hope that there
Are lots of real cute boys around cause I
Am feeling hungry. Do you think the boys
Around this town are out and open too?

Britney: I want my clothes and stuff to get here soon.
I’m bored. I want to get my room set up.

Nancy: Have patience, dear. The truck will be here soon.

Lindsey: Well, Barney better keep away from my
Boyfriends this time, ‘cause me and Britney hate
It when he hits on them and runs them off.

Barney: I didn’t run them all off, Lindsey. Rick
Kept coming over. You were an excuse.

Lindsey: I know, you jerk. And how am I supposed
To get another boyfriend when the whole
School thinks that Rick’s my boyfriend? Why should I
Be forced to do without so he could stay
With you in secret? He was in the closet
And I’m the one who suffered. You had fun.

Barney: He was a lot of fun. Too bad we moved.

Albert: I wish the two of you would quit. You both
Annoy me with your pettiness. You both
Are superficialities, no more.
It’s sex and shoes and sex and clothes and sex
And blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. There’s more to life.
The world has gone to shit and you are both
A pair of gaping assholes. Fuck you both.

Nancy: I wish you wouldn’t say those kinds of things
To Barney, Lindsey, Britney. It’s not nice.

Carter: The boy’s expressing himself, as he should.
It doesn’t matter if you disagree:
Don’t stifle his expression or his speech.

Albert: Oh, shut up, dad. Annoy somebody else.

Lindsey: Don’t talk to dad that way, you selfish jerk.

Albert: Go find a football team to fuck, you floosie.

Lindsey: “You floosie”? When you from, the fifties, jerk?

Albert: I won’t apologize for having a
Vocabulary from which to draw insults.
The only thing you seem to have is “jerk.”

Carter: Not everyone’s as widely read as you.

Nancy: I really don’t think that’s the point. I wish
The two of you would stop the fighting. Moving
Is already so stressful as it is.

Carter: The truck is here. At last. Let’s go and show
Them where to put the furniture. I’m glad
We finally can move into our home.

[Exit all.]

Morality in a Nutshell

Morality has a biological foundation in our origins as a social species. In other words, we evolved to have a moral mind. The details of ethical behavior is worked out in the moral spontaneous order as we learn to live with people and learn to rationalize our drives and, in rationalizing, think them through and adjust using moral reasoning. This allows us to expand our moral universe and live together with more and more people. Moral philosophers act as eminent critics of the spontaneous order, but they necessarily come much after the fact. They mostly theorize about what has already happened, and provide critiques of it, but they are not the origins of moral thinking -- let alone behavior.

That's the moral universe in a nutshell.

Answers to the Poll Results

The only things listed in my poll that are not spontaneous orders (bottom-up organization vs. top-down): a business, the computer you are working on, a work of art, and non-democratic governments. And, arguably, religion (though I suspect everyone thinks every religion but their own was organized bottom-up). All the rest are spontaneous orders, self-organizing systems, creative processes.

Poll

Last day to vote in the poll at the bottom of the page.

The Sunflower's Reason

The wise sunflower nods toward the sun --
Its arc is eminently rational --
As is the tastiness of its ripe seeds,
Seductive kernel in the striped hull --

How clever! It gets birds to spread its seeds
And humans to domesticate it so
The species can proliferate its gold
And have its seeds protected from the snow.

The sacrifice of seeds makes perfect sense
For all the flower has to gain. It fills
The fields in monocultures it could not
Achieve alone -- it covers well-tilled hills.

The flower's flavorful seeds fulfill all
The species needs -- the choice to coexist
With other species much more rational
Than making poisons with which to resist.

The bees will get their pollen, nectar -- man
Will get the honey and the seeds, all three
Cooperating to make mutual trade,
For nothing ever in this life is free.

Economy as a Process vs. Economy as a System.

Is an economy a system or a process? The answer to this question will tell you what theory is able to create an accurate model of the economy.

To date there are three basic system theories, and one process theory.

Systems can be described as:

1) Equilibrium

2) Cycles

3) Chaotic

Process are described by bios theory, developed by Hector Sabelli.

If an economy is a system, then any one of the systems theories may be the most accurate model for how to understand how an economy works. But if an economy is a process, then bios theory will provide the most accurate model (of all the models we have available).

I will note this: the order of complexity goes, from least to most: equilibrium, cycles, chaos, bios.

If an economy is a simple system, it can be described using equilibrium. If it is a complex system, it can be described with chaos (and, of course, if it is somewhere in between, it can be described with cycles). And we see all three being used. It is possible for each to provide some useful information about an economy precisely because, even if an economy is a process, it will contain within it chaos, cycles, and equilibria as less complex constiuent parts. Thus, an equilibrium theory can tell us something about an economy, even if it may be a special case, or an attempt to remove time from the equation to allow us to understand what is happening in a given moment. But that is in fact all an equilibrium theory can do. A cycle theory is more complex, and can explain more things. We can get things ranging from Austrian Business Cycle Theory (which is really a theory which explains why the economy sometimes is simpler than it should be, and thus acts accordingly) to Schumpeter's creative destruction theory of entrepreneurship (insufficient, to be sure, but a great improvement on equilibrium theories, and moving in the right direction, toward process). A chaos theory is more complex yet -- we get the introduction of such concepts as self-organization, strange attractors, and dissipative structures (where you have to have change to maintain the structure, meaning that the more things change, the more they stay the same). Yet each of these do not allow for creativity. Nothing new is made -- the system is merely maintained. With equilibrium, it is maintained at a stable point; with cycles it is maintained at and between two stable points; with chaos, you have the entire phase space investigated, but once it is investigated, you reach a steady-state. Do any of these sound like an actual economy?

Bios theory describes processes which are in fact creative. In mathematical terms, a new phase space is created. Thus, bios can appear to be chaotic -- and will indeed have chaos as its immediate foundation (with cycles, and equilibrium as even deeper foundations), including self-organization -- but rather than simply filling the given phase space, a biotic process creates a new phase space, which it can then investigate.

Sabelli identifies the following as essential features of creative processes:

1) diversification -- "variety increases with time" (20)

2) complexification -- that is, it must be heterogeneous

3) novelty -- "non-repetitive change" (21) which is "beyond chance" (22)

4) episodic patterning -- that is, new patterns of limited lifetime (complexes) are generated (22)

5) autogenesis/autodynamic -- "Every change brings on the enxt one, so there is a correlation between steps (autocorrelation)" (22)

6) irreversibility /asymmetry -- that is, time matters

7) spontaneity

8) aperiodic patterning -- power law distribution, and highly sensitive to inputs (23)

9) non-stationarity -- "creative biotic processes have a global sensitivity to initial conditions absent in chaotic attractors" that cause the system to jump into a new phase space (83-4).

Such biotic processes are "generated by action, conservation, and bipolar feedback" (8). To have any kind of physical process, you have to have action, matter, and information. To have a biotic process, the information you need is bipolar feedback. All of these should sound familiar to Austrian economists. Sabelli points out too that bios creates levels of complexity such that "Simple processes have priority, and complex processes have supremacy" (8). In other words mathematical processes have priority, and physical processes have supremacy; physical processes have priority, and chemical processes have supremacy; chemical processes have priority, and biological processes have supremacy; biological processes have priority, and psychological processes have supremacy; psychological processes have priority, and social processes (such as economies) have supremacy (Sabelli reverses these two, but it makes little sense to think that a social process can exist prior to its constituent parts -- humans). The parts create the processes, and "In turn, complex processes feedback into their simple environments and control it through their greater informational content" (8). This is one kind of bipolar feedback -- self-organization creating the process, and the process influencing those interactions. In economic terms, though, "Bipolar feedback includes cooperation and competition as well as abundance and scarcity" (10), and supply and demand (567).

Indeed, what kind of economy does bios theory describe? What kinds of economies to the systems theories describe? What would one expect to happen if you based your economic policies on each of the systems theories described? What would one expect if one based them on process theory?

Theater of the Spontaneous Orders

In my paper on The Spontaneous Orders of the Arts, I quote Russell Berman as saying

Dramatic literature, in its convening of the community, tends toward decisive activism, while the novel, with its focus on individual interiority among a polyphony of characters and addressed to the private reader, tends toward a dispersion of power. The former resonates with democracy per se, the mobilized public, the latter with liberalism and the lives of individuals. (164)

Now take this idea and combine it with this insight from Scott Atran and Joseph Heinrich in "The Evolution of Religion", that we one can collectively engage "emotions and motivations using music, rhythm, and synchrony" (Biological Theory 5(1) 2010, 23). More, synchrony results in strangers being more likely to cooperate "by strengthening social bonds among group members" and all three contribute to the instilling of "committment and trust" (23). In other words, drama would be even more effective in the way Berman suggests if it included rhythmic poetry, music, and dance. It is perhaps no coincidence that ancient Greek tragedy involved all of these elements.

Now, I supposed that one could object that opera includes music and poetry/songs. And many musicals include all three. But how many musicals are indeed serious? And who sees contemporary opera?

What kind of theater could create the feeling of integration into the social spontaneous orders?

Marxism -- Secular Religion

I have often argued that Marxism is a religion. I have recently even argued that Marxists and other advocates of central planning believe in what is essentially economic creationism (which is really just a development of the former theme). But let us consider my claim in light of the following definition of relgion by Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich in "The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Committments to Prosocial Religions" in Biological Theory 5(1) 2010:

the cultural evolution of prosocial religions and the historical rise of large-scale civilizations involve the dynamic interaction of the by-products of adaptive cognitive mechanisms (e.g., minimally counterintuitive beliefs and overextended agent concepts), adaptive learning heuristics (e.g., emulation of successful and prestigious individuals), credibility-enhancing ritual displays (e.g., self-sacrifice and costly comitments to seemingly preposterous beliefs), and cultural group selection for those packages of rituals, devoltions, and beliefs that best sustain in-group prosocial norms (e.g., monumental undertakings, sacred values). (19)

Now, one may argue about exactly how pro-social Marxism actually is (I think it is deeply anti-social insofar as we are talking about social mammals, but it is certainly pro-social if we are talking about social insects), but let us look at the rest.

Does it have "minimally counterintuitive beliefs"? Certainly. Who isn't in favor of justice, equality, and fairness? None of these are counterintuitive. What makes it "minimally counterintuitive" is that the equality comes about from acting as though people were equal in fact and actuality, rather than under the law. The opposition to private property is also minimally counterintuitive -- it's easy to imagine any number of utopian systems without private property. It has nothing to do with reality or how people actually behave, but it's easy to imagine.

Does Marxism involve "overextended agent concepts"? Most definitely! Marxism treats the economy as an agent with goals and purpose that should thus be taken control of by someone with godlike knowledge and reason (thus overextending agent concepts among people as well). They act as though it is rational to discuss justice as an element of the market economy. It is not. It is not precisely because they overextend agent concepts into spontaneous social orders in which teleological concepts are inapplicable.

Does Marxism involve "emulation of successful and prestigious individuals"? Another way of asking this: does it have heroes? Again, it most certainly does. Marx, Engels, Castro, Lenin, Mao, and now that fool Hugo Chavez.

Does Marxism involve "self-sacrifice and costly committments to seemingly preposterous beliefs"? Again, most definitely. First, you have the preposterous beliefs that constitute Marxism itself in it concepts of human nature, human action, the nature of the economy, the nature of justice, the possibility of egalitarianism as a social reality -- pretty much everything. It is an endless stream of preposterous beliefs. And committments to it have proven over and over again to be costly -- in wealth, economic growth, and in human life. The rhetoric of every communist country is and has always been "one must sacrifice one's self to the collective."

Does Marxism engage in "monumental undertakings"? Look at the monuments built in the former Soviet Union and in Communist China. Look at Stalin's 5-Year Plans.

Does Marxism have "sacred values"? That's all Marx ever offered.

None of this applies to the free market spontaneous order.

Internalism vs. Externalism in Evolution and Order

A short piece in "Biological Theory" 5(1) 2010 by Marta Linde Medina titled "Two "EvoDevos"" points out that there are two theories of how life is organized and how it evolved: :the externalist and the internalist perspectives, also called functionalism and structuralism, respectively" (7). She observes that "Darwinism, and consequently, the standard theory of evolution, derives from the externalist perspective. From this point of view, living matter is a passive and non-intrinsically ordered entity, requiring organic form to have been forged by an external agency. This framework is the result of importing Newtonian mechanics into the study of living organisms by both preformationists and Darwin during the 18th and 19th centuries respectively" (7) On the other hand, we have the iternalist perspective, where "living matter is an active agent---an excitable medium capable of self-organization, i.e., capable of exhibiting "order for free" by the interaction between different subcomponents, without requiring an external organizing factor" (7-8). She observes that the latter was also how Kant imagined organisms to be.

This is also the issue in economics, culture, and other areas of social organization. Where does that organization come from? Does it come from the outside (i.e., from government), or is it properly organized internally? The answer for social organization and evolution, including for economies, is the same as that for the brain's organization and evolution, biological organization and evolution, and even --dare I say -- cosmological organization and evolution. I have posed this as creationism vs. self-organization. This is another way of stating it that keeps things scientific for those squeemish at the fact anti-market thinkers believe in economic creationism. Those who oppose markets and think the government is the answer to everything are externalists -- and just as wrong. Newtonian economics is as wrong as Newtonian cognitive theory (which requires the Cartesian homonoculus) and Newtonian biology.

Finally, she observes that "From the externalist perspective, where organization is a product of chance and sorting, the existence of organizational principles is denied and evolution is considered a historical narrative. from the internalist perspective, organic form is the result of the laws of organization, implying that evolution has a law-like component" (9). This last observation should sound very familiar to Austrian economists.

F.A. Hayek's Amazing Book "The Sensory Order"

Reading F.A. Hayek's "The Sensory Order" at the same time one is reading other works on how the brain works, on complex adaptive systems, and on bios theory helps one really see how incredibly brilliant and ahead of his time Hayek was -- on a subject he was technically not an expert in. Hayek argues, for example, that the brain creates an internal model of the world, and that it necessarily does so; Stuart Kauffman argues that this is necessarily a feature of all living things as complex adaptive systems in general, and of brains in particular. Hayek takes the approach he does because he believes that understanding mental processes will help us to understand economic processes; Hector Sabelli in "Bios" argues that "The continuity of evolution requires that the same fundamental forms must be expressed in physical, biological and pyschological processes" (4-5) -- and similar social systems such as economies. Thus, to understand one helps one to understand the other. Hayek argues that we sometimes process similar things as different and different things as similar; Dehaene in "Reading in the Brain" points out that we do exactly this in reading different shapes of letters as the same (L or l) and similar shapes as being different (depending on context).

A good example of the latter -- what is this: |

It is either a line segment, a capital letter I, a lower case letter l, or the number 1. The same image is processed differently.

Hayek argues that our minds are made as modules; evolutionary psychologists make the same argument. Hayek argues that these modules are processed by a general intelligence; David Sloan Wilson makes the same argument. Hayek argues that as over a given span of time, sensory imputs do not so much "evoke specific responses but increasingly merely to modify and control behaviour in the light of the whole situation" (5.33); Hawkins in "On Intellgience" observes that this is exactly how vision actually works, by periodically checking to see if everything is the same as it was before.

"The Sensory Order" was published in 1952. Amazing.

Central Planning Misallocates Resources -- Education Edition

Last night I had a discussion with my wife, who is an elementary school teacher, about how there is no correlation between spending per pupil and educational outcomes. In fact, there is almost a negative correlation. She pointed out that her district did in fact spend a lot, and the educational outcomes were some of the best in the nation. True enough (not that that's a real horse race in this country). Still, I argued, most of the spending on technology was a complete waste, because there was no correlation (again, more of a negative one) between use of technology in a classroom and educational outcomes. I argued that most of what we do in education is a distraction. I'm not sure she really believed me.

One of the pieces of technology in question is one my wife was exciting to get. She told me that everyone in the district received these new computer pads that you can write on and with which you can project what you write using a projector that comes with it. A thousand dollars apiece, and each teacher in the district got one. Everyone is being trained on them, and everyone is expected to use them. My wife has been looling forward to using it, so my diatribe against technology in the classroom really rained on her parade.

Today, my wife comes home and tells me that the lights on the projectors have been burning out. The lights are $300 each, and the district doesn't have any money available for new bulbs. In other words, when the bulb runs out, the pad is practically useless for classroom use (it will still work on the computer -- but you can't have 20 kids sitting around a laptop). So those whose projector bulb has already blown will be unable to use it at all -- and it will sit in the corner, collecting dust. A thousand dollar paperweight. The rest, knowing the looming problem, will be reluctant to use the pad for fear that the bulb will burn out and they won't be able to use it at all.

You have to love the outcomes of central planning. Combine it with fad-chasing, and you have the public school system in a nutshell.

My wife confessed to me that she almost didn't want to tell me what happened with the bulbs. Not only will they likely be pedagogically useless -- it turns out each one will soon become literally useless.

Musings on the Place of Justice in the Spontaneous Orders

The purpose of an economy is to produce goods people want -- the result of which is to improve people's material conditions. This is based on individuals' subjective values. No system of justice can be based on subjective values. What, then, does justice have to do with economics?

If justice cannot be based on subjective values, does that mean it is based on objective values? What can we mean by "objective" here? Or is there a third option?

A work of art, literature, etc. may represent people acting virtously or unvirtuously, but that does not make the work itself virtuous or unvirtuous. One can make ethical judgments of the characters (including the narrator in a work of literature), but not of the work itself. Only aesthetic judgments apply.

Justice must be moral, but not all actions judged immoral are unjust. This implies that justice emerges out of the moral order, but is not the same as the moral order.

This implies that each kind of spontaneous order -- economic, artistic, scientific, moral, etc. -- has its own criteria of judgment that is separate from issues of justice. When is justice ever applicable to any of these spontaneous social orders? Perhaps only when the participants of the orders do something within those orders that are truly dysfunctional, that expel them from the order -- thus throwing them into the legal order.

However, please note that there is little one can justifiably point to in the artistic order that would result in your being thrown out of the order and into the justice order. The same is true of science -- falsifying data doesn't get you in legal trouble (most of the time), but it does get you ejected from the scientific order. If justice in the legal sense makes little sense in these orders, why does it make sense for any of the other orders? The economy, for example?

Beauty and Paradox from My "Diaphysics"

A thing is beautiful if it is paradoxical. Beauty has or contains the following features:

Complexity within Simplicity

Digital-Analog

Emergent from Conflict

Evolutionary (changes over time)

Generative and Creative

Hierarchical Organization

Play (a nonserious thing done seriously)

Reflexivity or Feedback

Rhythmicity

Rule-Based

Scalar Self-Similarity

Time-Bound

Unity in Multiplicity

These are also features of the universe as a whole. Christian Fuchs lists the following features as aspects of self-organization:

Emergence

Complexity

Cohesion (digial-analog)

Openness

Bottom-up Emergence

Downward Causation

Non-Linearity

Feedback Loops, Circular Causality

Information

Relative Chance

Hierarchy

Globalization and Localization

Unity in Plurality (Generality and Specificity)

And for Emergence, he lists the following aspects:

Synergism (productive interaction between parts)

Novelty

Irreducibility

Unpredictability

Coherence/Correlation

Historicity

If we compare the lists, we can see there is a correlation between self-organizing complex systems and beauty. Each have the same attributes. "Cognition, co-operation and communication are phenomena that can be found in different forms in all self-organizing systems. Information is a relationship that exists as a relationship between specific organizational units of matter (Fuchs). All beautiful objects are information-generating systems. And to the extent that something is a self-organizing system, it is beautiful.

Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: Lewis, Aristotle, and Practical Reason

Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: Lewis, Aristotle, and Practical Reason

Good stuff. Arnhart is doing good work on the evolution of morals and the moral spontaneous order.

Hayek In Mind Essay Proposal

This is the project I am working on now:

As humans evolved more social behaviors, we evolved an improved ability to detect intentions in others, to the point of it becoming almost instantaneous. One result, though, is that “Our ancestral sociality endowed us with a hair-trigger when it comes to detecting intentions, even where there are none. When confronted with impersonal processes, we prefer to see design, purpose and agency” (Tonaka, Jiro. “What is Copernican?” The Evolutionary Review Vol. 1, pg. 8). This has resulted in errors in understanding the economy, society, culture, and even the brain. This tendency is perhaps why Descartes developed his mind-body dualism, and his homunculus theory of the mind.

F. A. Hayek proposes a way out of this designer fallacy. Hayek proposes a bottom-up emergence of system-wide patterns from the interactions of the system’s parts. This is the theory of mind advanced in The Sensory Order. To the extent that Hayek is talking about what is called general intelligence, he has proven to be mostly correct. What, then, do we make of the modular theory of the mind, as proposed by proponents of evolutionary psychology? Does that disprove Hayek – or does Hayek disprove evolutionary psychology? Or might they be reconciled?

Recent work in cellular regulatory systems suggests there are three basic structures: simple hierarchical structures, complex, decentralized systems, and intermediate forms (Nitin Bhardwaj, Koon-Kiu Yan, and Mark B. Gerstein. “Analysis of diverse regulatory networks in a hierarchical context shows consistent tendencies for collaboration in the middle levels.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010). We see similar structures in social organizations, with humans evolving in simple, hierarchical societies, and those societies evolving through intermediate-structured societies to complex, decentralized spontaneous orders. It seems likely the brain evolved in a similar fashion, and still retains elements of each, with human general intelligence as described by Hayek finally emerging. The modules proposed by evolutionary psychologists represent intermediate levels of complexity whose structures in humans are modified by human general intelligence structures. And more rigidly hierarchical structures in turn underlie the modules.

This has consequences for behavior, including moral and economic behavior. We would expect limits on behavior – and the kinds of systems humans will create naturally and can live in. More, if the three basic structures also follow the patterns of stability found in regulatory systems, we would expect simple, hierarchical systems to be most delicate and, thus, resistant to change, while complex, decentralized systems would be most robust and able to change (which is indeed a feature of general intelligence). We would expect behaviors associated with our most primitive brain features – inherited from territorial lobe-finned fishes – to be most rigid and unchangeable.

To traverse all of this, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary. The mind is an embodied complex system whose structure is created by complex interactions among genes, the body, and the social environment – each of whose structures resemble each other. At their most complex levels, Hayek seems to have created the most accurate models of the latter two. With modifications, Hayek’s insights can continue to move us forward in understanding the most complex entities known to man: our societies and our brains.

Some Excerpts from My Book "Diaphysics"

171.

Bios theory [which was developed b Hector Sabelli] shows that growing, changing, creative systems are nonlinear and exist on the borderlands between order and disorder. Complete order---and complete disorder---both are definitions of being dead. A salt crystal is an example of complete order--a gas in a closed container at a constant pressure and temperature is an example of complete disorder. Living things exist on the edge of order and disorder, the realms of chaos and bios, wherein lies the principle of growth. Living things are systems, and systems have order and disorder---the heart is a system (which is part of the circulatory system, which is part of the organismal system) that can have neither completely orderly beats, nor completely random beats, but must have beats that are mostly orderly, with some disorder, which means the beats are biotic, creating a mandala shape when their time series is transformed by sine and cosine, complementary opposites. Cell membranes are orderly and disorderly---they are liquid crystals, fluid yet solid, as the proteins and phospholipids slips past each other. All living things live on the principle of growth, live in the realm of order and disorder, live lives far from equilibrium.

172.

If the principle of growth and stability for life is in the nonlinear, far-from-equilibrium realm between order and disorder, this would be the principle of growth and stability for systems of living things as well, icnluding superorganismal systems such as ecosystems, economies, and governments. Indeed, studies of ecosystems show they are not stable---at some sort of equilibrium---but are in fact always in flux, always changing, in time. And the way they change follow power laws---with many small changes, a few medium-sized changes, and very few large changes, as we see in avalanches of sand when we pile sand up one grain at a time. They are systems far-from-equilibrium, always growing, in a state of orderly disorder---disorderly order. If something were to happen to make any given ecosystem stop changing---which is to say, stop growing---that ecosystem would die off. Ecosystems are stable only so long as they are constantly in flux, constantly changing. Thus, they cease being the ecosystem they are within the next moment, forever changing---deserts move in and recede, forests expand and recede, grasslands expands and recede. Meandering rivers cut off oxbow lakes where new kinds of fish evolve---to be introduced ot the river when the meandering river merges again with the oxbow lake. The new fish compete with the other fish in the river, pushing some to evolve, others to go extinct, others into other habitats. They change as the river changes, flowing into new species with the flow of time and the flow of the very river in which they live.

227.

Without cooperation, nothing could get together to create complexity. Without conflict, no tensions would exist to lead to creativity. The universe has evolved greater complexity and greater creativity---meaning cooperation and conflict (love and strife, eros and eris) are necessarily present. Everything in the world is both in conflict and in cooperation. Both, simultaneously.

228.

All bonds are created through the combination of attraction and repulsion---chemical bonds, atomic bonds, love bonds, and economic bonds. Love and strife make the world.

294.

There are no natural systems controlled by a central authority.

295.

A natural economy is a bottom-up hierarchical self-organising open system. A natural society is a bottom-up hierarchical self-organising open system. A natural culture is a bottom-up hierarchical self-organising open system. Bottom-up hierarchical self-organizing systems contain a great deal of redundancy, which is what makes them robust. The more complex a system is, the more redundancy it has to have to reimain stable. Remove redundancy---that is, simplify the system and make it more "efficient"---and you kill the system. If one part of a completely efficient system breaks down, the entire system breaks down. This is why socialism is always going to be a failure---as though it being a dehumanizing system were not enough of a reason. Systems theory warns us "that the Leviathan of organization must not swallow the individual without sealing its own inevitable doom" (Bertalanffy, "General Systems Theory" 53).

297.

In economics, supply and demand curves have a point called the equilibrium point. This point only exists in a land without time. What we need is steady-state economics, recognizing the economy as a dynamic system. Still, the supply-demand curve is a useful fiction that more people need to be more faimilar with so fewer demagogues will have the ability to successfully lie to us about the causes of prices (competition among producers drive prices down; competition among consumers drive prices up).