Can an Economy Feel Joy? | Hacker News Reader

Can an Economy Feel Joy?

camerongordon.site

47 pointsiciac12 comments

In Echopraxia, Peter Watts argued that group minds invariably become psychotic, if inter-node latency is too great. Which makes sense to me. So arguably no.

And yeah, TFA does considerable bullshit in order to display text. I mean, what is "parastorage.com"?

https://parastorage.com

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Looks like Cameron used Wix for his site. `parastorage` only shows up in the context of Wix as far as I can see.

ed: https://www.wix.com/corvid/forum/search/parastorage

"That is a part of Wix CDN network to deliver images and stuff like that faster." by word of a "Wix Code Evangelist"

"We are all multiple personalities, they just have imperfect amnesia and the same name."

~R. Bandler

I think the question suggests another question:

Can an economy feel "irrational exuberance"?

Site doesn't load content w/o JS enabled (or some other BS.)

ORT (Only Read Title)

No: economy doesn't have glands.

However, consider, can cells feel joy? Everything we do is done by cells: we see because the cells in our eyes can see, we digest because our cells digest, we move because our cells move, we think because our cells think, and so on...

If we allow a an analogy (however imperfect) between cells and the body, and between people and their civ/society/economy, then it seems to me that, yes, you can measure or quantify a given civ by the joy of its members.

Bhutan actually formally collects and analyzes data to form a Gross National Happiness index (as contrasted with the GNP metric), and attempts to use this as feedback for their government.

Well, yes, given that economies aren't organic individuals, their "feelings" will be something different. I also do no think it's useful to separate "economies" to study as if they were entire beings, they are a part of "societies" - this reads a lot like asking if our arms feel joy.

> Well, yes, given that economies aren't organic individuals, their "feelings" will be something different.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm trying to say. The analogy between a human organism and human society is imperfect, so I think the closest you could come to saying a society is joyous would be if the humans in the society are joyous.

As for what would constitute the subjective experience of a society, you could call that the extrinsic Hard Problem of Consciousness, eh?

> I also do no think it's useful to separate "economies" to study as if they were entire beings, they are a part of "societies" - this reads a lot like asking if our arms feel joy.

I agree with that too. FWIW I would maybe identify money with oxygen and the economic system with the circulatory system, and maybe (parts of) some others (I'm an expert neither on economics nor physiology.)

If you start from philosophical questions of mind and identity (e.g., substance dualism vs physicalism, etc.), it’s not hard to get to an argument that qualia are neither substances nor physical identities but instead properties of systems (cf Whitehead), so you can ask not only “what is it like to be a bat,” but also “what is it like to be any system capable of qualia?” It’s possible that such systems could include societies, economies, corporations, and so on, depending on what you assume the criteria are for a qualia-capable system. (This is also how you get to the Gaia hypothesis, which sounds utterly crazy taken on its own, but almost axiomatic if you build it up from a systems approach to mental states with loose enough coupling and coherence restrictions).

The kicker of this approach is that the modes of qualia or consciousness at different system levels are likely to be so completely alien and the causal mechanisms so hard to discern that you could never definitively answer the question of “what is it like to be an economy;” it’s as impossible as a neuron wondering what it’s like to be Proust eating his madeline.

Scientifically, it’s virtually unfalsifiable but, if correct, it does have the delightful side-effect of turning social sciences such as economics from attempts to formulate natural “laws” to something more like efforts to psychoanalyze alien gods.

I appreciate your post, you make it very clear why it is reasonable to ask questions like this one, and explain why it's difficult to get to meaningful answers.

It's very level-headed :)

In re: Gaia, if the basis of qualia involves something cells do then (IMO) there's no inherent difficulty in assigning "mind" or subjective experience to the global ecosystem. We can "fold in" that question with the problem of human subjective experience.

Gregory Bateson speculated that evolution and thought are two aspects of the same process. ("Steps to an Ecology of Mind", "Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity")

Michael Levin's lab's work on the self-regulation of living forms points to ambient intelligence. The cellular machinery that neurons use to think is common to all cells. It's concentrated and accelerated in neurons but the clear implication (IMO) is that all life thinks.

"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

Ask the 1920's or 1990's.

Can we get a "Betteridge" filter for headlines that ask stupid questions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com