Today, I returned to an idea I was facsinated with when I was younger. That is, Douglas Hofstatder's works in particular his ideas of the emergence of consience through emerging 'self refrential loops' that as they complexed eventually came to refrence the self and conscience emerges. At least, that is his argument as I interpred it at the time and I admit I could have it wrong.
So, in thinking about this today I immediatly drew a parallel to the work of Hayek and others on the concept of emergent and sponteaneous order as knowledge dispersed etc. I was curious if anyone else drew any kind of conncetion and what they thought about it.
"Man thinks not only for the sake of thinking, but also in order to act."-Ludwig von Mises
I have thought the same. Emergent order is everywhere: common law systems, webs of symbiotic relationships in the natural world such as between plants and soil microbes and between fruiting plants and animals, and of course in advanced (or even primitive) market economies. I think this is the strongest argument available for anti-statism. It's especially effective for environmentalists, who already realize that interventions into one kind of natural order (nature itself) are liable to produce harmful effects.
Anyone who's ever seen the old TV series The Prisoner probably has thought of how the conscious mind is more like a committee than a singular entity. In some sense, personality seems to be an emergent order arising from competition and trial and error among competing factions in one's mind.
In the absence of civil government, most people engage in productive activity in peaceful cooperation with their fellows. Some do not. A minority engages in predation, attempting to use violence to expropriate the labor or output of others. The existence of this predatory element renders insecure the persons and possessions of those engaged in production. Further, even among the productive portion of the population, disputes arise concerning broken agreements, questions of rightful possession, and actions that inadvertently result in personal injuries for which there is no antecedently established mechanism for resolution. In the state of nature, interpersonal conflicts that can lead to violence often arise.
What happens when they do? The existence of the predatory minority causes those engaged in productive activities to band together to institute measures for their collective security. Various methods of providing for mutual protection and for apprehending or discouraging aggressors are tried. Methods that do not provide adequate levels of security or that prove too costly are abandoned. More successful methods continue to be used. Eventually, methods that effectively discourage aggression while simultaneously minimizing the amount of retaliatory violence necessary to do so become institutionalized. Simultaneously, nonviolent alternatives for resolving interpersonal disputes among the productive members of the community are sought. Various methods are tried. Those that leave the parties unsatisfied and likely to resort again to violence are abandoned. Those that effectively resolve the disputes with the least disturbance to the peace of the community continue to be used and are accompanied by ever-increasing social pressure for disputants to employ them. Over time, security arrangements and dispute settlement procedures that are well-enough adapted to social and material circumstances to reduce violence to generally acceptable levels become regularized. Members of the community learn what level of participation in or support for the security arrangements is required of them for the system to work and for them to receive its benefits. By rendering that level of participation or support, they come to feel entitled to the level of security the arrangements provide. After a time, they may come to speak in terms of their right to the protection of their persons and possessions against the type of depredation the security arrangements discourage, and eventually even of their rights to personal integrity and property. In addition, as the dispute settlement procedures resolve recurring forms of conflict in similar ways over time, knowledge of these resolutions becomes widely diffused and members of the community come to expect similar conflicts to be resolved in like manner. Accordingly, they alter their behavior toward other members of the community to conform to these expectations. In doing so, people begin to act in accordance with rules that identify when they must act in the interests of others (e.g., they may be required to use care to prevent their livestock from damaging their neighbors' possessions) and when they may act exclusively in their own interests (e.g., they may be free to totally exclude their neighbors from using their possessions). To the extent that these incipient rules entitle individuals to act entirely in their own interests, individuals may come to speak in terms of their right to do so (e.g., of their right to the quiet enjoyment of their property). In short, the inconveniences of the state of nature represent problems that human beings must overcome to lead happy and meaningful lives. In the absence of an established civil government to resolve these problems for them, human beings must do so for themselves. They do this not through coordinated collective action, but through a process of trial and error in which the members of the community address these problems in any number of ways, unsuccessful attempts to resolve them are discarded, and successful ones are repeated, copied by others, and eventually become widespread practices. As the members of the community conform their behavior to these practices, they begin to behave according to rules that specify the extent of their obligations to others, and, by implication, the extent to which they are free to act at their pleasure. Over time, these rules become invested with normative significance and the members of the community come to regard the ways in which the rules permit them to act at their pleasure as their rights. Thus, in the state of nature, rights evolve out of human beings' efforts to address the inconveniences of that state. In the state of nature, rights are solved problems.
Why anarchy fails
Here's another post that references the idea of a "committee of conscious selves" by one SarahC in reply to an interesting LessWrong article.
I think this dualism, this image of the "technical guy" versus "George Clooney," reason versus the passions, is oversimplified. Why only two selves?
When I think about the problem of the "divided will," the issue isn't really that my actions are hijacked by my subconscious. It's not a rational good guy overcome by an irrational bad guy. The issue is that there are different, incompatible lenses through which to see the world, and most human beings haven't picked a single lens.
Think of a single decision -- should I go on a cross-country charity bike trip? My experience-seeking self, my vain self, and my humanitarian self like the idea. My danger-averse self, my professionally responsible self, my people-pleasing self, and my brutally honest self despise the idea. The decision I make will depend on which selves are dominant at the time. How much I regret the decision afterwards will depend on which selves are dominant afterward -- for example, if someone yells at me for neglecting my academics for a dumb-ass bike trip, my responsible self will pop into the foreground, and I'll regret my decision.
The point is, it's not just the "real you" versus "your brain." You don't have only one "real you"!
Sometimes (procrastination, addiction) it's pretty clear cut that there's a smart self and a stupid self. But sometimes even on reflection it's not clear which "self" is superior. The article makes a good point that "selves" that require deliberative thought tend to be weaker. But that doesn't mean that there's a single "technical guy" or that he's always right.
Emergence is becoming much less esoteric and much more formal as time goes on. That doesn't stop the scientific establishment from crying bloody murder about it however.
For the physics of emergence, the gold standard is Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
They do cry blood murder, don't they.
A common objection seems to be (and this is true as far as it goes): there is nothing in the "emergent" phenomenon that isn't - in principle - contained in the micro-level theory. Well yes, but that's like saying there's nothing in chemistry that isn't contained in physics theory.
The other big problem is when looking at any particular piece of the puzzle in isolation, scientists will determine (through fairly accurate but still quite imperfect methods) that that particular puzzle piece agrees with theory or paradigm X. Then they will do the same for all the other puzzle pieces, one at a time, each conclusion about the other puzzle pieces serving to reinforce paradigm X and provide even more evidence to prove the next puzzle piece is also explained by paradigm X. And although each conclusion must by logic be only provisional, they often will not acknowledge that a study that considers all pieces of the puzzle might yield very different results. Basically, the method of science as generally practiced (not the scientific method itself per se) is weak against paradigm shifts that can only be seen when viewing several puzzle pieces at once.
Perhaps the solution is simple: stay ready for paradigm shifts by always remembering that all conclusions are provisional and have some non-100% degree of certainty (and that slight fudge factor could add up), and routinely examine several aspects at once to see if a combination of data sets might more strongly suggest an entirely different paradigm. I'm surprised how rarely this type of analysis is addressed in scientific literature, although it could just be that I don't read much of it.