Why the Mind Cannot Just Emerge From the Brain — Robert J. Marks and Michael Egnor

Interesting critique of emergence in natural systems.

Is the brain the producer of consciousness, or is the brain a receptor?

MindMatters
Why the Mind Cannot Just Emerge From the Brain
Robert J. Marks in conversation with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor

WHY THE MIND CANNOT JUST EMERGE FROM THE BRA

WHY THE MIND CANNOT JUST EMERGE FROM THE BRA

WHY THE MIND CANNOT JUST EMERGE FROM THE BRA

Caitlin Johnstone — Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder

I often hear people in my line of work saying “Man, we’re going to look back on all this crazy shit and think about how absolutely weird it was! 

No we won’t. Because it’s only going to get weirder.

It’s only going to get weirder, because that’s what it looks like when old patterns start to fall away.

The human mind is conditioned to look for patterns in order to establish a baseline of normal expectations upon which to plan out future actions. This perceptual framework exists to give us safety and security, so disruptions in the patterns upon which it is based often feel weird, threatening, and scary. They make us feel insecure, because our cognitive tool for staying in control of our wellbeing has a glitch in it.

When you’re talking about a species that has been consistently patterned towards its own destruction, though, a disruption of patterns is a good thing....

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder
Caitlin Johnstone

Duncan Green — Please help me answer some scary smart student questions on Power and Systems

Uncertainty and emergence in huge complex adaptive systems.

To what extent can reflexivity anticipate emergence anticipated and reduce uncertainty by applying creative and critical thinking?

Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to Power
Please help me answer some scary smart student questions on Power and Systems
Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB

Olivia Goldhill — A philosopher who studies life changes says our biggest decisions can never be rational

At some point, everyone reaches a crossroads in life: Do you decide to take that job and move to a new country, or stay put? Should you become a parent, or continue your life unencumbered by the needs of children?

Instinctively, we try to make these decisions by projecting ourselves into the future, trying to imagine which choice will make us happier. Perhaps we seek counsel or weigh up evidence. We might write out a pro/con list. What we are doing, ultimately, is trying to figure out whether or not we will be better off working for a new boss and living in Morocco, say, or raising three beautiful children.

This is fundamentally impossible, though, says philosopher L.A. Paul at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a pioneer in the philosophical study of transformative experiences. Certain life choices are so significant that they change who we are. Before undertaking those choices, we are unable to evaluate them from the perspective and values of our future, changed selves. In other words, your present self cannot know whether your future self will enjoy being a parent or not....

Having established the epistemological significance of transformative life choices, there still remains the question of how, exactly, we should make such decisions. Paul is still figuring this out. So far, her best proposal is that, while you can’t know which choice you’ll prefer, you can at least decide whether you want to experience a transformation.

Perennial wisdom suggests the principle, It is always reasonable to go beyond reason to love. The transformational power of love is the strongest force in human life.

From a systems perspective, this transformation involves emergence, and emergence involves uncertainty.

Quartz
A philosopher who studies life changes says our biggest decisions can never be rational
Olivia Goldhill

Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna — Advanced economies’ progress: Dismal and dazzling

Neither history, nor the present-day pace of scientific discovery supports the notion of diminishing returns to technological innovation. The challenge for growth economists is that analytic models are poorly suited to capture, and set society’s expectations for, these impending disruptions. Some consequences will be too pervasive and long-term to show up clearly in the immediate data. Some will change our behaviours, and by doing so invalidate prevailing economic assumptions. And some will transcend the economic sphere entirely to touch higher human values.

Growth economics is powerful. At its best, it is an empirical science that helps determine how to lift human wellbeing – one of civilisation’s most important tasks. But it is unable to capture the dynamism of our new age of discovery for a reason. Much that matters is still beyond its sight.

The authors argue in the post that big changes are in the works and that a this will result in a paradigm shift. Pessimism in growth economics is unwarranted pessimistic.

Complex adaptive systems are characterized by emergence, which implies surprise. While specific surprises remain unknown unknowns, there is a pattern of known unknowns that is developing that suggests big transformations lie ahead sparked by technological innovation already underway.

Good read.

Vox.eu
Advanced economies’ progress: Dismal and dazzling 
Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development, University of Oxford, and Chris Kutarna. Fellow, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

Nick Johnson — Marx and Engels on the dialectics of nature

I've left a couple of comment there.

The Political Economy of Development
Marx and Engels on the dialectics of nature
Nick Johnson

David Orrell and Roman Chlupatý — What Role Should Money and Markets Play in a Good Society?

How can we redesign money— and our mind-set—for a mature economy or an ecological civilization?…

Perhaps the defining issue of our age is that the human economy has grown to a scale where it impacts the environment at every level: on land, in the oceans, and in the air. As Kenneth Boulding put it, we are transitioning from a cowboy economy, where the world is an open frontier, to a spaceman economy, where we are restrained by natural limits.

This transition, ecologist Eugene Odum argued, resembles that followed by ecosystems as they become established. At the early stages of an ecosystem’s development, available energy (whose ultimate source is the sun) is rapidly exploited by a few species in a sudden bloom of growth. As the ecosystem matures, the food chain switches from a linear chain—carnivores eating herbivores eating plants—to a more web-like, decentralized structure in which multiple species interact in increasingly complex ways. The waste of one organism is recycled as food for another, and resources such as nutrients and minerals are conserved. An example of a mature ecosystem is a tropical rain forest, where most of the nutrients are not in the ground but in the trees and the species that live in them. The land itself has little agricultural productivity, as farmers discover if they cut down the trees and try to grow soy or provide pasture for cattle.

Economies also develop in a similar manner. In a society of pioneers, wrote Odum, “high birth rates, rapid growth, high economic profits, and exploitation of accessible and unused resources are advantageous.” As the economy matures, the emphasis switches to “considerations of symbiosis (i.e., civil rights, law and order, education, and culture)” and the recycling of resources. However this transition is a work in progress: “Until recently mankind has more or less taken for granted the gas-exchange, water-purification, nutrient-cycling, and other protective functions of self-maintaining ecosystems, chiefly because neither his number nor his environmental manipulations have been great enough to affect regional and global balances. Now, of course, it is painfully evident that such balances are being affected, often detrimentally.” And matters have not improved in the ensuing half-century, as carbon dioxide emissions have climbed and the lifesupport abilities of the planet have continued to degrade. We have grown richer in monetary terms but the hidden charges are mounting up.…

Very much worth the read.

As the Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel explains, “We have drifted from having market economies to becoming market societies. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society, by contrast, is a place where almost everything is up for sale.” In this case: “What role should money and markets play in a good society?

Lots of info that raises more questions than the authors are able to answer, which they recognize, but these are the kinds of questions that we need to answer in a complex adaptive system subject to emergence.

Evonomics
What Role Should Money and Markets Play in a Good Society?
David Orrell and Roman Chlupatý

Mark Buchanan — Arrogant physicists — do they think economics is easy?

Mark Buchanan smacks down Chris House.

What the physicists DO believe, however, is that markets and economies are great examples of what scientists have come to call “complex systems” — systems of many elements (people, firms, etc.) with strong interactions between those elements which create webs of non-linear feedback. The elements learn and adapt, their interactions create “emergent” coherent structures and fluctuations at the collective level, and these structures then act back downwards to influence the behavior of the elements. What happens in the system comes about through this interplay of bottom-up and top-down cause and effect. In this sense, economic systems share a deep character with many physical or biological systems from the earth’s crust to turbulent fluids to ecosystems. It’s this complex systems aspect of economics which makes physicists believe that ideas from physics (and other natural sciences) can be useful in economics.

This is precisely why many physicists, myself included, are convinced that modern economics is indeed, in an important sense, “held back because of a deficiency of mathematical tools and techniques”, to use Chris’s words. I can’t do better than to quote a short section from Brian Arthur’s excellent article Complexity Economics, which describes what many people (including physicists) believe is lacking from current economics:

The Physics of Finance
Arrogant physicists — do they think economics is easy?
Mark Buchanan

Mark Buchanan — Actually, Economists Can Predict Financial Crises

Economists have long argued that they shouldn’t be expected to predict crises, such as the one that almost sank the global economy five years ago.

That depends on how you define the word “predict.”...

The answer is that predictions can be useful without being quite so precise. Scientists make valuable predictions all the time that have little to do with foreseeing the future, but develop our understanding of cause and effect....

In this sense of a causal relationship, quite a few people did foretell the financial crisis....
The challenge for economists is to find those indicators that can provide regulators with reliable early warnings of trouble....

One problem has been “physics envy” -- a longing for certainty and for beautiful, timeless equations that can wrap up economic reality in some final way. Economics is actually more like biology, with perpetual change and evolution at its core. This means we’ll have to go on discovering new ways to identify useful clues about emerging problems as finance changes and investors jump into new products and strategies. Perpetual adaptation is part of living in a complex world.

Bloomberg
Actually, Economists Can Predict Financial Crises
Mark Buchanan, theoretical physicist
(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Philip Pilkington — Keynes on Parts and Wholes

Complex adaptive systems, emergence, non-ergodicity, reflexivity  etc. make an atomistic mechanistic reductionist approach irrelevant to the data and context.

Fixing the Economists
Keynes on Parts and Wholes

Philip Pilkington

Alan Kirman & Dirk Helbing — Why mainstream economic models are unreliable

Economics has long had the ambition to become an “exact science”. Indeed, Walras, usually recognised as the father of modern economic theory, said in his Lettre no. 1454 to Hermann Laurent in Jaffe (1965):

“All these results are marvels of the simple application of the language of mathematics to the quantitative notion of need or utility. Refine this application as much as you will but you can be sure that the economic laws that result from it are just as rational, just as precise and just as incontrovertible as were the laws of astronomy at the end of the 17th century.”Furthermore his successors openly declared themselves as having the same goal...

This model of “perfect competition” is considered a useful idealization, and features such as the aggregate effects of the direct interaction between individuals are thought of as inconvenient “imperfections”. However, deviations between economic theory and reality may be of crucial importance in practice, and the consideration of the links between individuals and institutions cannot be written off as being of little relevance to the behaviour of the system as a whole. This is a lesson that is clear to all those, who are familiar with the analysis of complex systems.

In a comment on a previous post, Unlearning Economics observed that creating idealized models that are perfect and considering deviations from perfection to be "imperfections," misrepresents the reality of markets, which are not perfect and for a variety of reasons cannot be perfect. So it is incorrect to call these supposed phenomena "imperfections."

This is an important point not only with respect to models as representational but also rhetorical. When a phenomenon is labeled an "imperfection" rather than simply a phenomenon that is a regular feature of such conditions, the implication is that the situation can be improved by removing or reducing the "imperfection." However, this may not be the case, or the whole enterprise may be futile due to its construction.

As Paul Meli has observed, arguing about "imperfections" on the basis of an idealized perfect market is similar to considering friction an "imperfection" in physics and attempting to eliminate it, which is the goal of those who have sought to create a perpetual motion machine. This, of course, is ruled out by the laws of thermodynamics.

So modeling economics on physics must also take the laws of thermodynamics into account, so to speak, which implies that perfect models are necessarily non-representational.

It may be argued that an objective in engineering is to reduce friction in order to improve efficiency and this holds in economics, too, where friction is often called "drag." However, to suggest that this phenomenon can be eliminated  in the actual world is wishful thinking, since idealized models can only be rough approximations of the behavior of a limited number of variables rather than the basis for laws that apply generally.

Moreover, attempting to model what is complex, adaptive, and emergent, that is, determined by system relationships that are flexible rather than fixed, makes social science quite different from physical science, where simple models (however complicated) can be employed in that physical motion is regular across time. While ergodic modeling is appropriate in the natural sciences, it is not in the life and social sciences, where organisms are not simple stimulus-response mechanisms following general laws, as behaviorists had assumed. Reductionism did not work in psychology; it has not worked in social science, and it will not work in economics, and we know precisely why.

Why then do economists persist in their folly? The reason appears to be ideological, especially when buttressed by special interests promoting a status quo that favors these interests. For example, according to neoclassical economics and its offspring, the primary source of market "imperfection" is government "intrusion." Granting that government policy can create drag, it does not follow that reducing government also reduces drag automatically, as often assumed. 

The answer might be, and often is according to heterodox economists, that changing policy to reduce drag or improve performance might involve more government in some cases and less in others, depending on context such as the business cycle and the financial cycle. It is becoming clear from evidence that "expansionary fiscal austerity is not working as projected, just as heterodox economists warned would be the case when applied at the trough of a cycle, where more government is needed rather than less to offset the drag of flagging demand during a period of deleveraging at the culmination of a financial cycle.

Of course, conventional economists also realize the importance of government policy even though they may not admit it. For instance, they call for government to increase activity when and where it benefits ideological interests, such as military and security in protection of private property, to access resources, and to extend market reach through intimidation of weaker parties.  The type of policy recommended or pursued is based on ideological bias, based either on purely ideological considerations or special interests that are promoted by the ideology. 

For example, for the right government support of labor by legislating collective bargaining is an "intrusion," while supporting military Keynesianism is a requirement of national security, even when the military does't want the weaponry being appropriated. The left would take up the opposite position.

These are normative, ideological issues that should be argued as such rather than using the rhetorical sophistry of complicated mathematical (econometric) models to bias the debate on the basis of pseudo-scientific claims that do not pass the smell test.

Lars P. Syll
Why mainstream economic models are unreliable
quoting Alan Kirman & Dirk Helbing

Lord Keynes — King on Post Keynesian Approaches to Microfoundations

One of the most important insights King makes is this: the idea of reducing macroeconomics to neoclassical microeconomics is an instance of the strong reductionist fallacy.

Strong reductionism has already failed, not only in biology, but also (more importantly) in the social sciences (King 2012: 226). There are fundamental emergent properties in macroeconomic systems that make their reduction to microeconomics impossible (King 2012: 226).
For example, a lower-order set of parts in a biological system may interact in ways that cannot be inferred by reductionist analysis (King 2012: 51). The principle of “downward causation” consists in the manner by which a “whole” (a system broadly defined) may affect, constrain or influence its parts.
In economics, we see macroeconomic phenomena that are irreducibly social in nature. 

Nor does the strong version of methodological individualism work (King 2012: 60; see also Hodgson 2007). For interactions between individuals may cause “emergent properties” or (that is to say) novel properties not displayed by, or deducible from, the individuals in isolation.

Social Democracy For The 21st Century
King on Post Keynesian Approaches to Microfoundations
Lord Keynes

King gives two reasons for the continuing attraction of the neoclassical microfoundations delusion: physics envy and politics in the age of neoliberalism (King 2012: 229). Reductionist ontological thinking in economics is nothing less than the attempt to reduce macroeconomics to the aggregate of micro behaviour, and the assumption of individual rationality implies a socially rational outcome (King 2012: 229, quoting Denis 2009: 14). In other words, this method produces the delusion that laissez faire results in the best economic outcomes.

Bingo. But nothing new to the readers of this blog.

Joshua Wojnilower — Macro Theorizing in a Non-Ergodic World

More on the ergodicity assumption.

Bubbles and Bust
Macro Theorizing in a Non-Ergodic World
Joshua Wojnilower

Greg Fisher — Social versus natural complex systems

Emergent principles, imagination, reflexivity in social vs natural systems.

Synthesis
Social versus natural complex systems
Greg Fisher

David Hales comments:

I think you’ve put your finger on a major issue here that is often not made explicit when ideas from complexity are applied to social systems. This has created a lot of confusion and miscommunication and we need more discussion at this level to clarify the issue. I think it was Popper who noted that since our actions in the world are strongly affected by our view or model of the world – and this changes with experience – then strongly predictive theories of the social world are logically inconsistent since they imply we can predict now how we will view the word tomorrow. Or to put it another way: if we can know now how we will view the world tomorrow then why are we not viewing the world like that now? Or to put it even more starkly – if you could produce a model that predicted the next theoretical breakthrough in physics then you’ve already made that breakthrough.

On the subject of coherent theories of collective action – well, there was the old classic by Mancur Olson “the logic of collective action” but that was from a purely rational action perspective. I would say that the more recent classic by Eleanor Ostrom “governing the commons” is the good start on this enterprise – based as it is on empirical work and self-organisation principles. What is true of both through is that importance of the group, how it is defined, where its boundaries are and how the behaviour of some relate others.

Greg Fisher recommends The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics by Richard Bronk. Here is some information at Amazon:

Since economies are dynamic processes driven by creativity, social norms, and emotions as well as rational calculation, why do economists largely study them using static equilibrium models and narrow rationalistic assumptions? Economic activity is as much a function of imagination and social sentiments as of the rational optimisation of given preferences and goods. In this 2009 book, Richard Bronk argues that economists can best model and explain these creative and social aspects of markets by using new structuring assumptions and metaphors derived from the poetry and philosophy of the Romantics. By bridging the divide between literature and science, and between Romanticism and narrow forms of Rationalism, economists can access grounding assumptions, models, and research methods suitable for comprehending the creativity and social dimensions of economic activity. This is a guide to how economists and other social scientists can broaden their analytical repertoire to encompass the vital role of sentiments, language, and imagination.

David Colander likes it, too: "The book is superb-a wonderful blend of common sense, erudition, and imagination." - David Colander, Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics, Middlebury College

Here is an Amazon review:

Yes. The problem is that " modern " economics is just old Benthamite Utilitarianism in new mathematical garb 

 By Michael Emmett Brady VINE™ VOICE

The author has,in general,put his finger on the fundamental problem facing economics today as it is taught to undergraduate/graduate students in the average college/university economics class. The problem is that economics is just the latest use of cribbed mathematical and statistical techniques shoehorned to fit the latest version of Benthamite Utilitarianism,which is what all variants of neoclassical and Austrian economics are. The author correctly points out that the " Romantics " rejected Benthamite Utilitarianism He recommends their writings as a counter weight to Benthamite Utilitarianism. However,a more powerful antidote , in my opinion,would entail going back and digesting what was written in the Old and New Testament, as well as in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Adam Smith. Smith ,for instance completely rejected both libertarianism and Benthamite Utilitarianism in Part V of The Wealth of Nations (1776). Unfortunately, Part V of the Wealth of Nations is not taught /covered in any undergraduate/graduate level course at any college /university in the world .

Lars P. Syll — Robert Lucas and the intellectual collapse of freshwater economics

Robert Lucas is at is again. The invisible hand will return the economy to equilibrium at full employment to the degree that it is allowed to operate by eliminating government interference. And as Lars points out, without a shred of evidence in the face of massive failure of that paradigm to foresee the crisis, which it explains as either resulting from governmental intervention or an unforeseeable shock.

The presumption of equilibrium in neoclassical economics is derived from a 195y century view of physics that contemporary economists have attempted to save using DSGE. That is is say, the assumption is that equilibrium is the guiding principle in analysis of "free" markets and distribution by price discovery.

This is reminiscent of past presumptions that affected thought in the West. The Greeks had that cosmos (order) is imposed on the original chaos (randomness) by logos (rational principle or cause – Greek αἰτία). The Greek term logos is the root of English "logic." The ancient Greeks held that the universe (cosmos) is rational. Logic is the rational structure underlying human cognition of invariant principles that order change iaw law (causality). Mathematics is an aspect of logic. The lintel of Plato's Academy was inscribed with the words, "Let no one ignorant of geometry come under my roof." Given this presupposition the discovery of irrational numbers was an earth-shaking event that initially concealed from the uninitiated lest they lose faith. Subsequently, it led to a bifurcation between arithmetic and geometry that persisted until the beginning of the modern period.

The discovery of irrational numbers caused a break in Greek mathematics between arithmetic and geometry. The Greeks could not accept the fact that some lengths were incommensurable with rational numbers. Therefore, they decided that numbers could not be associated with lengths. Unfortunately, this decision led to a division between arithmetic and geometry that was not reconciled until the time of Descartes. (Math Lair)

Similarly, Aristotle had posited that the motion of heavenly objects must be circular because of the perfect form of the circle. This presupposition was at the root of the resistance to change in astronomy from a Ptolemaic system of epicycles to the simpler heliocentric Copernican system, later explained by Kepler, who was the first to use elliptical orbits.

Modern physics also presents a parallel. Classical physics presents the universe as realistic and deterministic. The discovery of quantum mechanics shook that foundation by suggesting the bedrock on which classical physics is built is probabilistic. Einstein famously objected to this interpretation with "God does not play dice," and engaged in a running debate with Bohr for decades over this. The debate was finally resolved by time, and now a majority of physicists accept that "reality" is probabilistic at ground.

The discipline of economics is affected by a similar presumption — equilibrium. Keynes rejected the neoclassical view, but Keynesians were not able to hold the fort. Samuelson capitulated and "bastardized" Keynesianism with his neoclassical synthesis. Now mainstream economists, who call themselves "orthodox" and everyone else "heterodox," which is a euphemism for "heretical," have largely prevailed and imposed equilibrium as the "normal" paradigm in Kuhn's sense.

Until this lock on the discipline is broken, economics will be theology and lag its sister science in adherence to a dogma that has been widely discredited.

As Robert Vienneau wrote recently:

If you want to argue against mainstream economics, a mainstream economist can dismiss you as ignorant of some model variation and as attacking a strawperson. Furthermore, this dismissal could be "justified" by just checking whether you have a degree from a small number of schools, and, if you do, just mocking you as not having fully learned what they are teaching. Thus, your time can be taken up with argument about whether you know what you are talking about. The mainstream economist never need get to the point of engaging a critique.

The economics profession is broken and it cannot be fixed without replacing those who adhere religiously to discredited dogma, which looks suspiciously like a conservative preference for government as an adjunct to business rather than the ordering mechanism of society as a complex system in which emergence presents challenges that markets alone are not suited to address.

Lars P. Syll's Blog
Robert Lucas and the intellectual collapse of freshwater economics
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Joshua Wojnilower — Macroeconomics Could Benefit From Complexity

How complexity affects macroeconomics and results in calculation problems in ergodic (deterministic) models due to emergence in that a whole (system) is greater than the sum of its parts (elements) since unforeseeable properties may arise from the relations among the elements. This is true even in the physical sciences and even more so in the life and social sciences. It's one reason for radical uncertainty and a strong argument against a neoclassical approach.

Bubbles and Busts
Macroeconomics Could Benefit From Complexity
Joshua Wojnilower