Neurology and rationality

Economics Economics Questions
1

I’m kind of playing Devil’s Advocate here, or “checking my premises” if you will.

There are studies suggesting that actions are “decided” at an unconscious level and only manifest as a conscious “choice” after the fact, almost as an ex post facto rationalization of the action the brain has already decided upon. Here’s an article about this:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121450609076407973.html

If that is true, what implications would that have on the concept of rationality (particularly in the Misesian sense) and economic theory in general?

Furthermore, it could be argued that the Austrian ends/means framework is as much a useful but simplified model as any of the models mainstream economists use. Just as those models are said to contain unrealistic assumptions to facilitate the use of mathematics, is it possible that Austrians assume away too much with methodological dualism? Do you think it would change anything if we had a complete neurological understanding of human behavior?

2

Do organisms generally act in involuntary ways that are conducive or destructive to their own self-interest? There is a brief section near the beginning of Human Action where Mises addresses this point and banishes it to the study of biology or psychology… praxeology is unaffected since it is simply the study of what people do.

Clayton -

3

Clayton has it correct. If choices are determined, it is irrelevant to the study of praxeology. All Mises is studying is the manifest effects of the underlying psychology. Obviously humans deliberate and make choices and that is his area of focus, not on what causes them to act.

However, I think under determinism all action would be “involuntary” at its most fundamental level and the idea of a “voluntary” action would just be a useful fiction.

4

However, I think under determinism all action would be “involuntary” at its most fundamental level and the idea of a “voluntary” action would just be a useful fiction.

Yeah, determinism seems to be a trump card over libertarianism. Yet I think that the argument might be a bit circular. If we accept determinism plainly and say “no need to be moral any more”, you don’t actually know what was pre-determined to happen. Maybe you are still pre-determined to act morally… Because of this I believe that though free will doesn’t exist, we should act as if it does.

A full understanding of neurology would be a visual bridge between atomic determinism and the macro world, making this problem of determinism even larger.

If you can predict with 100% certainty that someone will commit a murder in 20 years, even if the person has had no evil thoughts yet, are you allowed to arrest him?

5

So how do people play chess?

6

Its kind of strange that the entire basis of methodological dualism rests on a similar premise as Friedman’s positivst methodolgy: if the model provides good predictability, then its a good theory regardless of how absurd the premises are. Unlike economic models though, methodological dualism continues to provide a solid basis for the social sciences and I think its precisely because it is a true premise. I honestly believe that a complete neurological understanding of human action would tell us the same things we already know. Ontological dualism probably isn’t real, but monism seems to manifest itself in such a way that meth. dualism still makes sense.

7

There’s no such decision to make if there is no freedom of will. Whatever happens, it was inevitable.

Determinism is self-evidently false, a bit like nihilism. It doesn’t matter if some lower part of your consciousness made a decision for you fifty years before you pick up the chess piece - it made it. Chess is a silly example to use in any case, because it’s about determining strategically most appropriate moves within a comparatively limited mathematical context, assuming one is trying to win or at least do the best they can. A computer can play it. The real question is why someone decides to play chess in the first place. The older Harvard study which involved pressing one of two buttons ‘randomly’ was more interesting.

As Eric says, praxeology deals with what happens after the singularity of choice in any case.

8

But you can’t. It’s like asking if a person could fly by flapping his arms, could we force him to get a plane permit? The question that actually matters within the context of law is whether damage must actually be done before a tort has been committed or whether the reasonable expectation that damage is about to be done is a sufficient basis for taking action to prevent the tort from occurring or suing for damages based on the unilaterally imposed risks associated with the threatened tort.

Clayton -

9

Well I know that he regarded the study of the psychological events resulting in an action as outside the scope of praxeology, but I was under the impression that his conception of purposeful behavior implied or required conscious forethought. If that’s not the case then would you consider “purposeful” whatever action the brain calculates as an appropriate response to the circumstances?

Also, your initial question reminds me of someone I’ve talked about this with. She says she does certain things without any rational reason and that she’s done psychological evaluations for which the psychologist cannot determine any reason for her behavior. I pointed out that on some level she must prefer what she does to the things she chooses not to do even if she doesn’t know why. Still, she maintains that this is an example of irrationality. I don’t really buy her argument, but I find it hard to respond to, and it makes me wonder about the relationship between neurology/psychology, purpose, and demonstrated preference.

10
  1. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best- refuted theories that have been advanced, and in Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)-- thanks chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of ocular evidence.

For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that “stood fast” of the earth–the belief in “substance,” in “matter,” in the earth-residuum, and particle- atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth. One must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless war to the knife, against the “atomistic requirements” which still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects them, like the more celebrated “metaphysical requirements”: one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the SOUL- ATOMISM.

Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses–as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as “mortal soul,” and “soul of subjective multiplicity,” and “soul as social structure of the instincts and passions,” want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust–it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT–and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.

Nietzche - Beyond Good and Evil

And to hack Mr. Stirner:

if atoms , as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall have no complaint to make of my “emptiness.” I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

11

If you are involved in a life-and-death altercation, one of the things that will happen is that your arms and legs will become weak and shaky. Do you know why? Because your brain is re-routing your blood from your outer limbs which are more likely to be injured and bleed to your core where you are less likely to be injured. If you fall, you will instinctively stretch out your arm because your brain knows it’s better to have a broken arm than a broken rib cage. Involuntary reflexes are there and hardwired because nature put them there. It is an extremely difficult argument to make that these reflexes somehow got there despite not contributing to the survival of our ancestors. That doesn’t mean that these reflexes are adaptive to the modern world or that they cannot be improved. For example, one of the core disciplines of the martial art Judo (and Jiu-Jutsu from which it derives) is called ukemi which teaches the individual how to fall without extending his arms so as to avoid breaking the arm. However, specialized skills in falling must be developed to override the natural reflex to sacrifice one’s arm or leg as a break-fall.

In other words, unconcious action logicaly must always seeks to attain the goal of survival and reproduction… in the environment for which we are adapted. The apparent tension comes in because the modern world (concrete jungle, high speed driving, financial minutiae) is not the environment for which humans are adapted. So, it’s always important to ask yourself for what environment is this unconscious action adapted?

Not all purposeful action is deliberative. In fact, it may be the case that the majority of purposeful action is not deliberative but the result of pre-recorded or pre-programmed patterns of behavior (habits/dispositions) that our brain replays without cluttering our frontal cortex with information it doesn’t need unless something goes wrong and requires conscious deliberation to resolve. Driving leaps to mind as an example of this kind of behavior. Once you’ve learned to drive, you really don’t consciously think about 99% of what you’re doing. “Turn on left turn signal, turn slightly left, gradually brake, come to a stop about 3 feet behind the car in front of me, watch for the light to turn green, check the rearview mirror for any cars approaching dangerously fast in case I need to release the brake” etc. etc. etc. It’s all pre-recorded patterns and your brain mostly just “goes through the motions”… the only time you need to deliberately concentrate on what you’re doing is when something is out of place or an unusual situation arises.

But this affects praxeology not one bit. Praxeology literally means “the study of doing” or the study of what people do. Doesn’t matter why or how they do it. All that matters is what they do versus what they don’t do.

Clayton -

12

Determinism holds no such trump card over libertarianism. I’m both a libertarian and a determinist - the latter in the sense that there is “nothing more” than the fundamental pieces of the universe and the laws of physics which govern them. However, it’s impossible for any person to actually predict any future state of any part of the universe - including the future state of another person. A simpler way of putting this is that it’s impossible for anyone to actually predict (i.e. calculate) what anyone - including himself! - will do at any given future point in time. It’s this impossibility that I call “free will”. It doesn’t exist as a thing-in-itself, but it’s most definitely a useful concept.

13

If one could take a “God’s-eye” view of the universe, he would certainly see that this is true. Of course, none of us can actually do that.

However, decisions are simply patterns of neural interactions. So the question becomes, where did a given pattern of neural interactions come from? Things spiral out of control pretty quickly beyond that point.

Even if a computer can beat a human at chess, that doesn’t mean a computer plays chess the same way a human does.

14

I’d certainly say that Mises’ conception of “purposeful behavior” implies consciousness/awareness of the behavior (a.k.a. “rationality”). At the very least, it implies the existence of the concepts of “means” and “ends/goals” within the person’s mind. This allows us to distinguish between behaviors that are instinctual/reflexive and behaviors that are not so.

On the one hand, she just might not have much self-awareness. That is, she might not be able to recall or formulate justifications for her behavior after the fact. On the other hand, the psychologist might not be using the same definition of “rationality” as Mises uses. Under Mises’ definition, for example, a schizophrenic can be said to behave “rationally”.

15

I’ve read something similar; we can accept that the behavior of, say, an ant is deterministic because it seems so simple to us, but as you look at animals with more and more complex brains and behaviors it seems less clear-cut, until you get to the complexity of humans which we cannot really calculate but for which we have useful heuristics such as “free will” in order to kind of predict what people will do.

I had some other thoughts relating to this notion of calculation but I think that might best be saved for another thread.

16

I should have distinguished between causal determinism and biological or theological determinism. It’s the latter that’s patently false, and incompatible with the former in fact.

Yeah, well. I like to use this analogy for ‘schizophrenia’… I like to imagine the person as being a nation-state with competing factions vying for control of the government. Whatever emerges as ‘government policy’ is ‘rational action’, even though the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

17

To paraphrase Napolean Hill…

“In order to achieve one must first concieve”

Read up on quantam physics and familiarize yourself with the concept of ‘observer created reality.’

How are you able to form an arguement? Do your words automatically flow or do you have to stop and start as you think about what you are trying to communicate? Have you never set a single goal in your life?

I am sorry but it is absurd to suggest that we do not have free will; humans operate as subconcious automatons.

Besides all of that, rationality is subjective/relative. What one man considers perfectly rational another will decry as insanely irrational.

18

It’s worse than that. We can’t even calculate the future behavior of an ant. We can’t even calculate the future behavior of many non-living things/systems, such as weather, plate tectonics, or nuclear reactions. There’s always some margin of error. Really, it’s only inert objects that seem to be predictable to us. I think this is why animism is universal to scientifically primitive cultures.

I, for one, look forward to it.

19

I think I understand what you mean by “theological determinism” (i.e. predestination), but I’m not sure what you mean by “biological determinism”. Can you explain?

Otherwise, I should’ve been clearer on what I meant by “determinism” - namely the causal kind. :stuck_out_tongue:

A schizophrenic isn’t the same as a person with (allegedly) multiple personalities. A schizophrenic senses or believes things which are empirically false. Hearing voices inside one’s head is the classic symptom of schizophrenia.

20

I have. From the standpoint of quantum physics, “observer-created reality” means that measurement of an experiment affects its outcome. This is due to the fact that, on the quantum level, it’s (next to) impossible to separate the system under observation from the measurement apparatus (and hence the “outside world”).

How do you think the mind works?

Then what’s the point of trying to argue anything?