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Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Increasing Constraints by Higher Levels of Biological Organization

Feared by the bad, loved by the good,
Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Robin Hood!
                -Refrain from the theme of the television show The Adventures of Robin Hood

In the very interesting book by Raymond and Denis Noble, Understanding Living Systems, there is a figure (8.2 on page 128) that depicts a direction of increasing constraints by higher levels of organization on lower levels, and to my surprise, I agree.

However, these increasing constraints do not usually consist of threats of pain. In fact, the great majority of pain signals flow in the opposite direction, from lower systems to upper ones. It's Scotty in the engine room yelling to Captain Kirk in his Scottish brogue, "I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!" (although he apparently never quite said that). When the increasing constraint does consist of threats of pain, say in a pack of wolves, the individual doing the threatening is very much at risk, direct or indirect.

In the case of human governance by the state, there is a combination of both threats of pain—inconvenience, imprisonment, or even death—and the absence of risk as the "deciders" are insulated by the many layers of bureaucrats and enforcers "just following orders" from the pain being inflicted.

Because of this isolation, we have stories of heroes like Robin Hood, who outsmarted the Sheriff of Nottingham and his boss, the evil King John, and returned money taken through onerous taxation to the helpless peasants. Modern political participants believe that democracy has created a return nerve pathway to signal pain to the rulers, but anyone can see that policies that are bad for the peasants are just as difficult to change as they were in Merry Olde England. Once the campaign is over, the elected politicians simply do as they like and their campaign utterances can only cause them real harm in the next election.

As a rollback of the state seems unlikely, the only remedy for this situation is the possibility of secession on the scale of the individual, possibly leading to a situation like what Chandran Kukathas advocates in The Liberal Archipelago. This remedy was eventually applied in the case of state religions with the happy result that religious wars and persecution, at least in western nations, have ceased. Let each person choose their property regime and method of bringing it to fruition, and let entrepreneurs respond to those choices.

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Comments on "Evolution and Human Behavior" by Gordon Tullock

 I just finished reading Gordon Tullock's essay "Evolution and Human Behavior," which is included in The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, volume 10, Economics without Frontiers, and was surprised by his omission of the idea of valuing in discussing human behavior.

As Mises and Popper pointed out (see Mises and Popper on Action), action implies a valuing—a preference for a new state that may be achieved and is hypothetically better than the current one. Tullock, ignoring this fact, asserts that his landing on the beaches of "Normandy on D plus 7" was predicted by his genes rather than his values—he was, like his fellow soldiers, "genetically programmed to fight for their tribe" (p 168).

This assertion might be plausible for tribes, as they were tightly-knit communities in which all members were organically connected to each other, if not genetically through the common struggle for survival. If one person felt pain, everyone felt pain including the chief. In this position, a threat against one was a threat against all, and the willingness to fight would have been an asset.

Fast forward thousands of years and we have the environment of the nation state. Here, outside our family, we are alone. Our tribe is dispersed, and we rely for our existence on people we do not know that live far from us. Our State hardly knows we exist, although a failure to pay our taxes my bring us to its attention. The State is not organic—when we feel pain there is no pain felt in our legislature or the departments that execute the legislation that is intended to limit our actions. In this environment, how can we be convinced to risk our lives to perpetuate our State?

The answer may be quite simple. Perhaps it is to make us dependent—to produce a situation in which we believe that all we are and all we could become is dependent on the perpetuation of the status quo in our particular state. When we combine the social services State with the welfare State we have the ingredients of a potent cocktail to mold the values of citizens to make acting against the State a mortal sin and acting in its favor is a moral duty.

Returning to Gordon Tullock, we can imagine that he was taught, as was I, that our country, the United States of America, was prosperous because of our governmental system, and that we lived in a free country. Tullock was only 7 when the Great Depression began and would have been subjected at an impressionable age to all of the New Deal propaganda and may have even benefited from some of the programs. Even though he claims in the essay that he "wasn't even enthusiastic about the war," we can imagine that when he was drafted (Levy & Pert, p. 4) to refuse would have meant prison and/or dishonor. It wasn't his genes that made him ready to kill or be killed by people he had never met who were across an ocean and thousands of miles from his home of Rockford, Illinois—it was his values.

Now, I confess, genes may have an influence on values; but Tullock, although he had read Ludwig von Mises's Human Action (three times!) (Levy & Peart, p. 4), did not first establish that action depends on values and preferences and then speculate about how those values and preferences might have been affected by our physical evolutionary history as opposed to our psychological development.

2015 Levy, D. and Peart, S., Gordon Tullock and Karl Popper: Their Correspondence

Tuesday, January 02, 2024

Mises and Popper on Action

 Today the Ludwig von Mises Institute published my short article, "Mises and Popper on Action," a result of my joint project with Rafe Champion to explore the synergy between Popper and the Austrians (The Austrian School of Economics as a Popperian Metaphysical Research Programme).

If two schools of thought seem to be not only right, but incompatible, there are only two choices: 1) one or both of them are wrong; or 2) their differences may be resolved through semantic reconciliation and the discarding of mistakes that are of minor consequence. Rafe and I have been on the latter path for some time and hope our work encourages others to take the same path.

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Reflections on Presenting at the Southern Economic Association/Society for the Development of Austrian Economics Conference of 2023

 I believe this year's conference was the last one I will attend. It's not so much that it was a waste of time and money, but that I very much doubt that I have another paper in me. In fact, there was only a mass of paragraphs underlying my presentation, not a paper.

The title of my presentation was "Biophilosophy and Praxeology" in which I made many assertions that I expected would be challenged or at least would produce a request for elaboration in the Q&A period. As there was only 15 minutes for the presentation, you can imagine that many things were glossed over, including the apriorism that is surfacing in biophilosophy and the idea that Ludwig von Mises should have looked to biology rather than philosophy for the source of his apriorism. In fact, when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would address the vast array of possible questions that would require deeper explanations of my thinly supported assertions.

At the very end of the paper there is a short example of how an a priori concept in biology, metabolism and the requirement of binding and releasing energy (Mayr), could lead to the creation of goods and the process of evolution that Menger described in development of money. For some reason, this example became the exclusive focus of questioning by the session organizer and then, in open discussion, by other participants. I was corrected from the floor that the definition of money is the generally accepted means of exchange rather than the most liquid commodity.

In addition, there was very little follow-up after the end of the session in which people like to engage in private discussion. Apparently, nobody liked it, and nobody hated it—a non-event. At the SDAE dinner one student said he liked the presentation and found it interesting.

Note that no one told me that I was rehashing old material that was more clearly or rigorously presented in the past or had misinterpreted the material I was citing. Perhaps it was the emphasis that this year seemed much more empirical than in previous years. Maybe there simply is no interest in rescuing the apriorism of the Misesian program of praxeology from the evolutionary empirical emphasis that dominates the Hayekian mind set.

It only remains for me to seek an alternative path, possibly through the biophilosophers. Do I have confidence of a different result in that direction? Who knows—pigs may fly!


Thursday, March 02, 2023

Comments on "Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm" by Naomi Beck and Ulrich Witt

A few weeks ago, on February 1, 2023, after reading "Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm" I sent an email to Dr. Ulrich Witt with a copy going to the lead author, Dr. Naomi Beck. Dr. Witt replied promptly, indicating interest and a desire to respond pending a two-week absence starting the following day. After waiting over a week beyond his projected return I reminded him of his interest but have had no reply. The text of my original email follows:

Dear Dr. Witt,

I have just finished reading "Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm" and feel compelled to write you about it. I am addressing you, specifically, while you are not the leading author, because it appears that Dr. Beck has moved on to other endeavors and may no longer be as engaged as yourself. It is clear from the vast body of work that you have produced over the years that you are committed, as am I, to the examination of evolution's relevance to economic thinking. I hope that you find my comments of interest, if only in exposing a different view of the problems addressed.

On pages 213-214 you discuss the problem of "the emergence of novelty" and corresponding "epistemological constraint." Here I think it best to turn to Popper who stated in "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind," his Darwin Lecture at Darwin College, "I think that scientists, however sceptical, are bound to admit that the universe, or nature, or whatever we may call it, is creative." Popper also suggested that "All life is problem solving" and "All things living are in search of a better world," exhibiting a metaphysical or axiomatic approach to the understanding of life and evolution. When you wrote that "a preference for experiencing the thrill of novel stimuli… may even be innate" you were hypothesizing that such a preference may be axiomatic or—dare I say it—a priori. And here we have arrived at where I find the greatest difficulty with your article.

Before continuing it is imperative that I emphasize my belief that Mises made mistakes, specifically in attempting to isolate economics from the other forms of knowledge, especially biology. I say it to assuage your fears that I am simply a disciple of Mises rather than someone who has critically read his (and, I must say, Karl Popper's) work.

Unlike you, I think Mises's apriorism, rather than being an obstacle, is the only path to an Austrian economics that is compatible with evolution. The apparent inadequacy of Mises's work comes not from his axiomatic approach, but from the lack of axioms from biology. For an attempt to identify biological axioms, see Mahner, M., Bunge, M. (2013). Foundations of Biophilosophy. (Germany: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.), which incorporates at least one axiom that is more fundamental than biology—that of realism (p 5). Unfortunately, the book does not include those axioms or a priori concepts that Mises smuggled in when he referenced human action. On this point Barry Smith was quite right when he wrote in "The Question of Apriorism":

Consider… the concepts causation, relative satisfactoriness, reason, uneasiness, valuation, anticipation, means, ends, utilization, time, scarcity, opportunity, choice, uncertainty, expectation, etc. The idea that one could simultaneously and without circularity reduce every one of the concepts in this family to the single concept of action, that they could all be defined by purely logical means in terms of this one single concept, is decisively to be rejected. (p 4)

Economics has previously had a significant impact on biology, with Malthus's work on population inspiring both Darwin and Wallace. Mises also recognized the effect of economics on biology when he wrote in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1966/1974, Translated by J. Kahane. London: Jonathan Cape):

The division of labour is a fundamental principle of all forms of life. It was first detected in the sphere of social life when political economists emphasized the meaning of the division of labour in the social economy. Biology then adopted it, at the instigation in the first place of [Henri] Milne Edwards in 1827. (p 291)

Unfortunately, Mises did not seem to see the importance of the fact that a law discovered in a more complex field of knowledge would then apply to, and in turn be derived from, one of lesser complexity (see Karl Popper on reductionism in The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, p 149). Mises missed the fact that what we might discover in ourselves would then apply to life in general. I think that many of the concepts of economics including action, property, profit, marginal utility, and the laws of supply and demand will be found to have biological, largely a priori, origins (on action, property, and profit see Gladish, B. and Champion, R., Evolutionary Economics: An Austrian Approach (unpublished)).

In the end it matters little whether biology establishes laws that are introduced into economics empirically or axiomatically. In either case, economics, and Austrian economics in particular, is not required to argue for their applicability, just as chemistry does not need to argue for the existence of atoms in a discussion of molecules.

There is, of course, more to say, especially about Popper's ideas on metaphysical research programs and their applicability to the empirical status of economic theory. I hope that I will have a chance to discuss them with you.

Regards,

Brian Gladish

If Dr. Witt responds I will be editing this post to reflect that fact. 

Monday, October 25, 2021

The Trouble With "Popperians"

Introduction

In recent months I have come into increasing intellectual conflict with a number of Popperians—people who embrace Karl Popper's philosophy of science and, worse, his politics—and now seek to identify some of the issues from my point of view. This is a difficult task for me, as I have actually written a couple of posts here (not as many as I had originally intended) while self-identifying as a Popperian. At this point I must reject that label in favor of considering myself a critical rationalist who largely accepts Austrian economics, especially as espoused by Ludwig von Mises. This acceptance rests on the idea that some truths really are self-evident, including truths that Sir Karl himself uttered, like "All things living are in search of a better world," a statement that may be considered a broadening generalization to all organisms of Mises's definition/axiom of human action.

Note that the following observations do not apply to all Popperians and that not every Popperian exhibits all of the negative characteristics that I identify. Popperians are individuals and must be treated as such, usually being a mix of error and truth as are the rest of us.

A Different Flavor of Positivist

Popper rejected the idea that he was just a different flavor of positivist—a falsificationist rather than a verificationist. However, Popperians generally fall into this category, ignoring Popper's writings on metaphysical research programs, which, while subject to criticism, could not be falsified.

Although Popper wrote almost exclusively about metaphysics and its application to real world problems, Popperians tend to see everything as empirical. The one self-evident truth that Popperians seem to accept is that there are no self-evident truths—in spite of the requirement that theories be internally consistent.

Critics Rather than Problem Solvers

Popperians seem to be heavy on criticism and light on problem solving. They tend to attack, criticize, dismiss, and mock tentative theories while rarely attempting to generate new helpful conjectures themselves. This behavior is evident in their constant efforts to discredit Austrian school economics while failing to offer an alternative. They declare it to be unfalsifiable and, therefore, unscientific, ignoring the fact that many positivist economists have tried and failed to produce any universal statements that may be tested.

This problem is actually addressed by Popper when he writes in the preface to The Poverty of Historicism (p x-xi): 

I think that it is convincing in itself: if there is such a thing as growing human knowledge, then we cannot anticipate to-day what we shall know only tomorrow... 

This argument, being purely logical, applies to scientific predictors of any complexity, including 'societies' of interacting predictors. But this means that no society ca predict, scientifically, its own future states of knowledge. [emphasis in original]

Therefore, from economic theory we can expect explanation, but not prediction. And without prediction we have criticism, but not empirical falsification. 

Popper as a God

Many Popperians see Popper as Revealer of Truth who should guide us in all respects, and that the world may be saved through recognition of these truths. I think this is fallacious, as he is a revealer of a number of truths that actually do guide us. In other words, he explains the process by which knowledge—in his terms, objective knowledge—is produced through the process of problem solving by conjecture and refutation. It is true that the knowledge of this process may improve our capabilities in applying it, but if Popper is right, it is the process we—and all living things—have been using all along. I hasten to point out that these truths are metaphysical—they are not subject to empirical refutation and are, therefore, not science. They are, of course, subject to criticism and are still the subject of controversy to this day.

Treating Popper as a god makes those who criticize Popper or advocate approaches that seem to contradict his, heretics or worse; and by implication, wrong. For example, Mises's epistemology has been the subject of many papers and criticisms, primarily on the basis of empiricism. His claim that economic theory is a priori and cannot be falsified by empirical data is attacked by mainstream economists and Popperians alike, although economists like Hutchison simply bewail the lack of empirical tests of universal statements in economic theory while offering no alternative.

Failure to Apply Principals Popper Himself Advocated

Popperians tend to ignore Popper's rationality principle and situational analysis in engaging in argument. For example, they are quick to take Mises's suggestion that to rule his works as non-science, as a Popperian generally would, is a "verbal quibble," as evidence that Mises is simply ignorant of Popper's work or stupid. They do not recognize Mises's lifelong battle against the positivists in which an identification of his economic work as non-science would have meant its declaration by the positivists as non-sense.

In addition, although Popper suggested we should not argue over words, Popperians do not seem to be willing to grant Mises's use of the word "science," most likely meant as "organized knowledge." They fail to recognize the fact that Mises was already well-established, having published his groundbreaking Theory of Money and Credit in 1912, when Popper was 10—almost 25 years before Logik der Forschung. That his understanding of a word would be different from one Popper had himself created is hardly surprising.

Conclusion

Popperians are largely a politically confused bunch, as was Popper. Jeremy Shearmur wrote, in The Political Thought of Karl Popper (122), "I do not know what real-world institutions could even approximate to by playing the kind of role that [Popper] would be asking of them.” In fact, Popper's political thinking does not seem to rise much above what I learned in high school civics class, consisting mostly of platitudes about open discussion and criticism, after which the piecemeal social engineers impose their will and somehow, assess their success.

Without attitudes that are more akin to that of Popper himself, Popperians are likely to be impediments to, rather than facilitators of, progress.

Sunday, August 08, 2021

Mass Psychosis

 An amazing video showed up on my Facebook feed today! It is called MASS PSYCHOSIS - How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL. If you have 22 minutes (11 minutes at 2X), you might want to watch it now.

Assuming you have watched it, you probably noticed that the graphics implied the target psychosis was what might be called COVID mania. In my view, COVID mania is a mass psychosis, but so are the other "issues" that are driving the political narrative, including the immigration debate. But this is all politics offers us—one mass psychosis after another. We can call the two current most virulent strains The Great Reset Psychosis—which includes COVID mania and catastrophic climate change—and the MAGA Psychosis—which includes anti-immigration, China demonization, protectionism, and the belief that only Donald Trump can provide the antidote to the Great Reset Crisis.

That being said, those who suffer from these psychoses will most likely see the insanity of their opposition and deny that of their own. It takes a big person to realize their own behavior as insane. The real problem is that, having recognized that insanity, it is unlikely that the revelation will cause them to adopt a libertarian, classical liberal, or "live and let live" position, as politics virtually demands the adoption of a psychosis.

As long as people believe that the existence of the state is a benefit, and that it must be governed through politics, there will be no end of psychoses followed by death and destruction.