Thanks for the corrections, in economics my terminology is poor. So please feel free to correct and educate me in such matters. I’ve been a bit cruel in that I’ve introduced you to concepts about human nature that are not easily absorbed. Ideas like “there is no self” “no free will” require some thinking. I’m still thinking about such matters because it requires a botttom reconstruction of what being human is about and that can take years. For your own purposes, as John has pointed out, I don’t think it makes any significant difference in the short term. Over generations though I suspect the gradual dissemination and acceptance of new ideas about human nature will impact on our behavior and the way we structure our cultures. What I hope to see in the future, and to some extent it is already happening, is that economics can learn from social psychology and related disciplines. Economics, after all, is really about human behavior.

PS: the comment about pollies and nappies, not mine, I saw it in a book and it was simply Anon. I don’t want to take credit for such a gem of a statement!

Obviously notional property rights are necessary for a market to function, however the fact that there are markets for stolen goods and markets for human slaves shows that markets operate quite readily even in hostile environments. If anything it is the sometimes brutal and amoral efficiency of markets that causes people concern. Markets are essentially inevitable. Although of course John did refer to “free markets” which have a more specific meaning.

DS — you say markets work best when you have: “Like honesty, trust in trading, property rights, rule of law”

I note that the last two actually are necessary in the definition of markets so their inclusion is tautological (free markets work best when they are free markets). Regarding the first two, there are reasons to believe that honesty and trust are encouraged by a free market as rewarding strategy, while dishonesty and breaking trust makes more sense as a strategy in a more controlled market.

I hope you stick around. You are losing me on some of the references but otherwise what you say makes a lot of sence, or at the very least interesting reading. I do think humans are very programable and once programmed any notion of free will is rendered weak. The main reason I programmed myself to avoid bacon (which I used to adore) was to come to terms with the maluability of the mind. Unfortunately I have not yet had as much success on a broader scale as I had hoped in this regard. The mind is a difficult puzzle even if I restrict the topic to my own.

Even though free will is very weak in the face of programmed behaviour (I do assume that free will is real, although I didn’t always), I think this makes it even more necessary to defend freedom. Without freedom, free will and the small dose of hope it represents is all but snuffed and we disappear back into the soup of oblivion.

Regards,
Terje.

The difference between us is that you are adopting a positivistic frame of reference. I do not have that much faith in human logic. Science is provisional in its claims, naturalism is not. To give you an example: since the time of Darwin the concept of Larmarkian transmission of traits has been considered heretical. It aint so no more, there is clear evidence of Larmarckian tranmission. It is only a small part of the story but it does make a difference and it illustrates the dangers of dogma in science.

By the way, I perceive the no intrinsic relationship between the question of free will and determinism. We may not have free will but that does mean our behavior is determined.

This is very good (from your link) except this: it explains bugger all about human behavior.

This takes a bit of explaining, so hang in there. Even though we don’t have contra-causal free will (which is to say we are fully caused creatures) it’s still true that we very much want certain things to happen, and very much don’t want other things to happen. We very much want to live, and don’t want to die. We love our friends, children and our families (maybe even some of our neighbors), and we want them and our communities kept safe and secure. What this means is that even though we don’t have free will, we are still very strongly motivated to want certain outcomes in life, namely we want ourselves and our loved ones to flourish. And this means that we still will want to make sure that people, including ourselves, act in ways to ensure this flourishing, which generally means behaving morally: not stealing, cheating, lying, or murdering. So we don’t lose our moral compass in accepting naturalism.

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However, I do not believe that at this point in time we can safely say that we can come with a model of human nature and behavior that avoids metaphysics. Indeed, concepts like self, soul, are metaphysical because these are not objects that we can grasp, we imagine them. Naturalism is just another philosophy. I like it but to me it is just another theory of everything.

This is why I think the future lies in ideas from people like Patricia Churchland: that eventually we may be able to create a “neuro philosophy” ie. a view of human nature and behavior based on our scientific understanding of the same, not the conceptual baggage that we pick up from our culture.

Jason,

The presumption to rely on markets would be just as rational in a society made up of robots .

Actually that is an indictment on free markets because it denies the value of human agency. It is essentially metaphysical because it presupposes “markets” are some mysterious entity that act independently of the agents which actually make the markets happen. Yet the point here you are making may touch on why markets do fail: we assume that a market, independent of the foibles of human agency, will always work well. Like us, markets do not always work well. Efficient markets require cultural preconditions. In any event, if robots do not have wants and needs there would be no demand. If they did have wants and needs, just how different would they be from us?

Markets works precisely because of human agency. These fail for the same reason. As I previously stated, the goal is to structure markets to achieve maximum efficiency. This “structuring” does not mean intervention, it means that if people want to get the best out of market dynamics then there are certain rules that will facilitate this. Like honesty, trust in trading, property rights, rule of law, … . One economist I read recently stated that one of the primary reasons countries fail economically is because trust is all but absent in the society.

John,

Yes, the “idea” of free will is very important, or at least appears to be. Yet you would be surprised at the number of people who completely repudiate the idea yet there is no way of knowing it by their behavior. I’ve just jumped over from a discussion forum where various people don’t accept free will and they were all hard working publishing academics.

“Then I presume you also have a problem with government solutions, considering that the government is made up of people.”

Obviously! Politicians are like nappies, you have to change them frequently and for the same reason.

To be blunt I am very annoyed at what governments are now doing. They are increasingly curtailing our freedom, they are using scare tactics to keep us in line, and they reify a line from Tom Waits, Whistling Past the Graveyard, “I never told the truth so I can never tell a lie.”

I have done almost a dozen posts on this.

Libertarianism doesn’t require any metaphysical assumptions. The presumption to rely on markets would be just as rational in a society made up of robots .

Then I presume you also have a problem with government solutions, considering that the government is made up of people. I think it was Jefferson who quiped that if you don’t trust people to make their own decisions, how could you trust them to make other people’s decisions?

I don’t have a reference, but I understand Hayek approached the existence of absolute free will by pointing out that it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that people act as though they have free will.

I’m disapointed you didn’t like Dennett. I think his claim of defending deterministic free will was a semantic trick of no great import, but (like hayek) I thought he showed the politically more important point that a fake free will is good enough.

Btw, I’m not willing to give up on the existence of a “soul/mind/self” yet. But I consider it a unfalsifiable religious issue that doesn’t impact on politics. And even on the religious front I think that perhaps asking the question is more important than answering it.

Now don’t get alarmed but I reason I proffered the advice is because chronic gut problems can induce “leaky gut syndrome”. This can have significant long term implications for cardiovascular and cerebral health. So don’t sweat it yet but don’t ignore this problem.

If it continues to be a problem, contact me and I’ll do some digging around for you. I am very good at digging up medical research, with some luck we may be able to sort this out. Alternatively and in the first instance, get on your doctor’s case about it. If he\she isn’t proactive enough, find one who will be proactive.

I read Dennett, Pinker (how the mind works), Penrose (The Emperor’s new Mind), Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis), Damasio (the Feeling for what happpens), and … . I threw Penrose across the room in disgust, Dennett’s explanation aren’t worth two knob’s of goatshit, Damasio was interesting, Crick is always interesting, Pinker’s work explained how the publishing industry works, not the mind. By the way, I don’t beleive in “minds” either.

“Free will” is a moot concept to me because it offers no way of moving forward in understanding behavior. For me, a concept must be what physicists refer to as “fertile” ie. it must proffer some promise of advancing our understanding. So at that level the concept “free will” fails to meet my utilitarian demands for concepts.

Over and above those concerns, there are too many studies which demonstrate how subtly our decision making processes can be influenced. Even the colours in a room can change our responses etc etc etc. One problem I do have in relation to libertarian ideas is that these seem to be predicated on the notion that human beings are possessed of an absolute free will and hence will eventually come to rationally based deductions. This is to be expected because our cultural milieu is steeped in this belief. Essentially I am a strict empiricist but not within a postivistic frame. “Knowing” is a great quandry to me. I’ve just raised this issue on a neuroscience forum and you should see the bullets fly … . Currently I have 3 bods going head to head over it.

I am not a libertarian, probably never will be. I am leftist in my orientation but I am convinced that we need to remove government from some areas of life and we need to restructure commerce dynamics so that the full benefits of an economy can be realised. I am here because I am impressed by the likes of yourself, Terje and a few others. What I am not impressed about is the ranters but they occur on every discussion forum.

Reflecting my own personal bias, what I would like to see is libertarians, economists, policy makers, and think tanks learn much more about human behavior. For example, I just read an excellent text by an economist from the the London School of Economics. R. Layard: Happiness: lessons From a New Science. This touches on the sorts of issues I think need more attention and I am pleased to see that economists are beginning to pay more attention to this. There are even a few journals specifically devoted to this(eg. Behavioral Economics).

There is more to state, so much more to state, but I’ll leave it there for now.

Thanks.

But I agree about the cross over between anatma (ie no self) religions and the deterministic concept of no real metaphysical free will.