From: Damien R. Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 02 1998 - 20:20:38 MDT
On Sep 2, 5:51pm, Dan Fabulich wrote:
> I think this misses the point. Imagine that your brain and my brain were
> hybridized (possibly through/with an AI). At that point, we would no
> longer use an "economy" to allocate resources; we'd just make up our
> collective mind and go for it. So the goal is not to eliminate
> speculation, but to eliminate the economy and replace it with a different,
> very complex system.
But how would we make up our collective mind? If you follow Minsky's Society
of Mind concept, or Hofstadter's idealet research, the mind looks like a bunch
of competing entities and processes competing for time and passing in and out
of existence. Very economic.
Hybridization might reduce some of the potential for cheating. Given our
capacity for self-delusion, I doubt it would eliminate it.
> >I like to say that there are many parallels between capitalism and
> >Thermodynamics as well as Evolution.
> This is interesting. What sort of parallels do you see?
Various elements competing for scarce resources over time. Firms in the
economy, alleles in the gene pool. Hofstadter says he modeled his research on
simulated annealing, which provides a connection to thermodynamics, but I
always think quasi-Darwinian would also describe it. Idealets are generated
at random; ones which seem to help solve the problem get more time and get to
spawn more idealets, and eventually they can hook up to form an extended
process.
And the more I learn of them and their history, the more economics and
evolutionary biology seem to be the same theory applied to two different
fields.
-xx- Librarian Bound in Pale Leather X-)
Dance, dance, wherever you may be,
For I am the Lord of the Dance said he,
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