If one fails to distinguish between mental acts (“presentations,” inner-realm items) on the one hand from their contents (“components of a thought,” third-realm items) and on the other from their objects (“the things themselves,” outer-realm items), one may fall into the error of supposing that any presentation of a cat that fails to include its colour or posture must thereby have as its object or content a colourless, postureless cat. That is the mistake that Frege is diagnosing in the above passage, and Friedman’s is like unto it: he seems to assume that if an economic account fails to include a presentation of the wheat-trader’s eye-colour or ancestry, it must have as its object or content an eye-colour-less, ancestry-less wheat-trader – and so must be “unrealistic.” But once we follow Frege in distinguishing among the three realms, Friedman’s psychologistic assumption dissolves.

That said, I will only add that empiricism, in so far as its ultimate grounding is in the tradition of Locke, Hume, etc., is ultimately as self-defeating as Cartesian Rationalism and Kantian Idealism. Both are rooted in an idea that all knowledge is constructed; that is, both the rationalist tradition and the empiricist tradition of Modernity begin not by taking the world as it appears to us but by first doubting everything except that which can be upheld by Reason alone (i.e., “I think therefore I am”). This notion of True Knowledge as the product of pure Reason is embedded deep into the scientific method, which must always design experiments in such a way as to produce a definite answer to a definite question. This method is necessary to understand how nature might be manipulated to better serve our ends, but this is something entirely different from the totality of all knowledge as the empiricists believes it is. It should be obvious now that this approach is wholly inadequate to address human behavior.

wrong. there is a whole scientific debate about this under the label of non-trivial machines. read heinz von foerster about it

moreover, there is not a single scientific reason to believe there is a free will. read the austrian review about the topic:

http://www.csun.edu/~hceco001/Researchpapers/FreewillAustrian.pdf

I still don’t get why one would think neuro-science changes teleological notions. I still don’t get what the hell free will and determinism have anything to do with the debate. Teleological notions can be determined by something in our brain – but they are still teleological. Methodological dualism still stands even with the most complex molecules being shown to do this and that and this and that and that causes us to want this and that.If the physiological notions of something shows how we become teleological – it doesn’t rule out the teleological notion within our lives. It just shows how in the physical world things occur. All these things Neoclassical seems to be saying in terms of all various types of philosophies is a convoluted, irrelevant mess and a misinterpretation of methodological dualism.

Neoclassical, your position is filled with lack of explanation, and you seemed to have gone around in circles. Even if everything can – physiologically speaking, go back to physics in terms of neurons doing this and that, how does that disprove us having purposeful wants? You seem to assume both without clearly bridging the two.

Anyway, my main point was, and remains, that I think that methodological dualism is necessary in economics even if we don’t have free will.

It certainly is not an absurdity. Free will is the absurdity. Free will is a contradiction in of itself.
We are all apsects of the universe and subject to the immutable laws that govern the universe.

We make decisions with the intent to reach some end result. The only way that this end result can be reached is if causality applies. That is, every cause has a definite pre-determined effect. If causality did not apply, then the entire concept of intent is meaningless.

But to say that causality applies to some things but not to others is ludicrous. Human beings are made up out of the exact same stuff that inanimate objects are. Furthermore, human beings are subject to the exact same laws that inanimate objects are. Causality must apply to both. Therefore, whether an event occurs as a result of human action or not is irrelevant. The event was inevitable.

Human action is simply action causally related to a complex thought process (which we call intent) occurring in a human brain. There is nothing “causality-breaking” about the human brain. It must obey the laws of gravity, electromagnetism, etc. If I drop you off a cliff, do you not plumet to your death? No amount of willpower will allow you to freely float around ignoring the gravity well of the Earth.

We make choices, but we ultimately have no control over what choice we make. Einstein summed it up nicely: “Man is free to do as he wills, but he is not free to will what he wills”.

I think JB McMunn and Russ highlight the issue in their discussion of epiphenomenalism, physicochemical principles and software; I believe that, rather than being “epiphenomena” – mental events caused by physical events that have no effect upon any physical events – chemical or computer “software” is a particular kind of information that can be “executed” such that it gves rise to other effects, both physical and informational.

We generally have no problem with the dualistic nature of information – that it is embedded within a medium but can be expressed in other media; that structure and arrangement as information can determine function (both static as in a tripod or dynamic as in a windmill); that it can be encoded, transmitted and decoded; that it can be interpreted as a set of instructions and through interpretation can either be used to modify itself (e.g. genetic algorithms) or external entities (e.g. a cooking recipe). As such, information is different from the material in which it subsists but has no problem interacting with it. More than that, it often dictates how the material in which it subsists behaves and how it responds to external and internal stimuli.

If the mind is software, this special kind of information that stores both properties and functions, it needn’t subsist only in the “zillions of atomic billiard balls knocking around” we call the brain. The brain under normal operation emits electromagnetic waves and these aren’t limited to the confines of the skull. Anything that is transmitted can be received with an appropriately resonant device. Now I’m not asserting that these waves definitely contain mind-like information, but it should be a testable hypothesis. Given that we construct such wireless networks with computers I don’t think it would be unreasonable to suspect that other informational systems exhibit this behaviour. Messages may be encrypted with more than a 128-bit key cipher though(!)

There would be choice as to what degree the brain is attuned to be resonant with external stimuli or otherwise; first though, the mind must be aware that there is such a conscious choice or the default would prevail – how the current programming is set to respond absent deliberate self-programming. Good old nature or nurture.

How does this relate to economic theory? Well, if the mind is essentially of this informational nature – that is, programmable – and that this can occur due to both self-generated and external stimuli then the set of assumptions we can make about a person’s (or a society’s) behaviour is bounded by our knowledge of their current beliefs and those that they are exposed to, and to how resonant they may be to each other. It would validate praxeology in that human behaviour is an ever-changing, self-modifying and dynamic thing rather than something that can be assumed to follow a set of immutable laws. It would validate psychosociological study in that a culture or trend may not just be something that is in evidence, it may actually be an information “virus” – a transmissible idea that becomes interwoven throughout the functional programming of many minds. Have I just described modern marketing methods?!! Well…

The point is, a conception of the mind as information / program is both dualistic and non-trivial; to say the mind is ‘just’ a function of the brain is like saying this web page is just a function of the web server it resides on. Information is more than just its medium, even if that medium is necessary (rather than sufficient) for its expression. If we look at the information rather than the medium we learn more, we grasp the inherent abstraction. A wall is more than all of its bricks – it is all of its bricks arranged in a particular way. A market is more than the individuals in it – it has structure, formal and informal rules, it responds to external events etc. As Bruce Lee said “It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory”.

One more time for the back row: Austrians will become less certain the moment you successfully refute one of their analyses according to the notions you have laid out above. Barring that, you are essentially saying, “I can’t prove you wrong, but you have to admit that you’re not certain.” What kind of weak point is that?

PS. Russ, I struggle with Dennett, who was mentioned above, who’s a bit over my amateur head (his book on Darwinism is great, when he talks about Consciousness Explained, I struggle), but I understand that he allows you to have your cake and eat it too. Determinism only goes so far, and there’s a hell of a lot wriggle room. Maybe it’s an illusion, but if I shoot a man tomorrow, I will end up in jail, and if I don’t, I will not. That’s good enough for me, and Meursault.

I meant to type “…for economic purposes the causes of the “choice” are irrelevant, and the choice can be used as data.”

BTW, thanks, Coury. I’m not sure exactly how pithy they are, though. Just the random brain-droppings of somebody with nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.

You have just encapsulated thousands of words and hundreds of paragraphs into two pithy posts.

In other words, I am rejecting the stance that there is no such thing as the mind; there is only a conglomerate of neurons. The mind is a function of the conglomerate of neurons. You can have your cake and eat it, too.

“1. The process by which the mind arises from physicochemical principles is so incredibly complex that it looks like magic – or an epiphenomenon.”

I don’t think that an epiphenomenon need appear like magic. Software can be thought of as an epiphenomenon of computers, but there is no need to think of it as magic. Granted, the brain is much more complicated than a computer…

“2. The mind is trying to analyze itself and innately abhors the idea of being nothing more special than the result of zillions of atomic billiard balls knocking around.”

I’m not trying to say that while the cells of the brain are physical, the mind somehow manages to transcend this physicality. Far from it.

“Hence, refusal to believe in a deterministic world is a psychological phenomenon where the analytic machine innately refuses to believe something unpleasant about itself.”

My use of the concept of “epiphenomenon” is not an attempt to dodge materialistic reductionism. I do believe that the mind is, when it comes right down to it, a function of a conglomeration of neurons. I am invoking “epiphenomenon” merely as a way of explaining how one can be a materialist and still believe that minds, in a very real sense, exist.

“Even if minds are completely absent of any prejudice one way of the other, epiphenomenalism still has a huge problem: connecting the intangible mind to the tangible body.”

Well, of course, a lot of work has been done studying pathologies of the brain and their effect on thinking, on stimulating the brain with electrical impulses to trigger memories, etc. But I suppose one could be an extreme skeptic about these, if one wanted to. Even then, a dualist has huge problems too, in proving that the mind is exists in some non-material fashion.

There are on the other hand things in science which are considered ‘settled’ like: germs cause disease, Maxwell’s equations, and the speed of light. On the other hand, some theories are considered to have been disproved like: the phlogiston theory, the vitalist theory and the geocentric model of astronomy.

It is true that you cannot disprove a negative, nor can you affirm positives, but you should conceivably be capable of disproving a positive claim, all you need is a single counter-example, theoretically. If I claim to have a free will, we can perform the following test: You will calculate everything I do or think for 24 hours and if after that span of times your predictions are correct, than I think that constitutes as disproving my ‘free will’ (at least in the broad sense).

Pain is actually an excellent example (and a rather classic one too) for the problems of ‘hard’ materialistic reductionism, because ‘pain’ is essentially qualia, and not any of the specific biological components involved in the process (C fibers, etc…), hence pain has not been successfully reduced to biology let alone physics to this day (please correct me if I’m mistaken, I know the discussion only from the philosophical viewpoint.).