context setting

I was about to read Tom Slee‘s book review about Akerlof and Kranton’s Identity Economics and in the very introduction there was this summary of the individualism X collectivism issue (so i felt compelled to type down some of my own thoughts about this before i allowed the review’s ideas to contaminate my thinking. Maybe after i read it, i’ll make a second post):

For the fifty years since Gary Becker first applied economic techniques to social issues such as dysfunctional families and crime, the social sciences have been inhabited by two solitudes, seemingly incapable of communication. Sociologists and cultural theorists talk of ideology, identity, hegemony and discourse; economists deal in rational choice, individual tastes, incentives and the mathematics of game theory. Sociologists suggest that society shapes the individual; economists that individual traits shape society. Many economists come from a right-wing and market-friendly outlook; mainstream sociology has a more left-wing perspective.

My first reaction is: BOTH! Individuals shape collectives at the same time that they are being shaped by other collectives. Nowadays we are almost always involved in games consisting of so much more than one individual and one collective: Not feedback loops, but feedback mazes. And still, there is asymmetry between individual and society and we can ask: How does this difference work? My answer is context-setting.

new answer

That the current answer is wrong does not mean that some other contrary is right.

If you pay enough attention to the world, you’ll see all kinds of action and discourse that purport to be self-motivated and critical, but are actually just driven by a gut feeling that «this is wrong!».

mind/body problem untangled

The so called Mind-Body Problem is an older than dust problem in Philosophy, so old in fact that to really understand it we should talk about it in very different terms than originally proposed. It is also a problem which tends to sound trivial at first mention, but becomes harder and harder as we think further about it. Let’s put it like: how can an immaterial thing be produced from something material? There are things we know are “of the mind”: an idea, an information, an equation or even an opinion. And there are things we know are “of the material world”: a brain cell or a processor chip. But how can the later create the former? This is our circumstance:

the thinking machine

The (misguided) comparisons between brain and computer usually begin by stating that the brain is massively parallel, working into multiple threads of thought at the same time.

But it just isn’t.

The brain is not a massively parallel processor. It does not process more than one symbol-chain at the same time. The brain deals with only one thing at a time, and it can’t even vary this one thing: the brain is always dealing with the person’s immediate circumstance.