Re: Fundamentals

[Ted Winslow <winslow@xxxxxxxx>]

John Legge wrote:

>
> We are getting close to debating the number of angels dancing on the end of
> a pin.  When I make a decision I actually believe that I am acting
> rationally in evaluating the available evidence and then making the best
> choice.  If the circumstances were different, then my choice might be so,
> too.  If I was being nagged by an economist about a decision with minor
> consequences I might make the "wrong" choice to prove that I was capable of
> making choices, but what does that prove?
>

The inconsistency doesn't lie in assuming that the future is both
"determined" and "undetermined".  Self-determined behaviour isn't
"undetermined" behaviour.  The inconsistency lies in adopting a form of
determinism that logically excludes any possibility of self-determination
while at the same time assuming that self-determination can affect the
future.  Knowledge of a future winning lottery number, for instance, would,
on your assumptions about the way the future is determined, be useless since
the owner of the winning number is, on your premises, as "determined" (in
the sense of unalterable by present choice) as the number itself.  The idea
of "rational choice" entails the idea of self-determined behaviour; it can't
be consistently combined with a determinism that logically excludes the
possibility of such behaviour.  (A detailed explanation of the point is
available in Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, pp. 96-9).

We are debating the number of angels dancing on the end of a pin but not, I
suspect, for the reason you think.  Even if we eliminate the inconsistency,
your determinist premises lead to absurd conclusions.  The question of their
internal consistency is, therefore, purely scholastic.  It's also
"scholastic" in another sense associated with Keynes (who also criticized
economists for this first kind, pointing to the "rigorous logician" - e.g.
Hayek - who, by starting from a mistake, ends up in "Bedlam").  Keynes
borrowed Ramsey's definition of "scholasticism" as "treating what is vague
as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category"
(X, p. 343) to describe economics conceived as deductive reasoning from
precisely defined axioms.


> Fundamental incomputability means that you cannot anticipate my decisions
> reliably in non-trivial circumstances, and I cannot anticipate yours.  On a
> list such as this, I cannot even prove that "Ted Winslow" is not the name of
> a particularly clever program running on some powerful workstation. My
> knowledge of the state of the art of intelligent machine development
> suggests that your computations are carried out using a computing device
> with a protein rather than a silicon substrate, but would your intelligent
> and percipient remarks about Marshall, Whitehead and others have been less
> percipient if they were computer generated?
>

By identifying persons with "computing devices" you are repeating the
identification of rationality with formal logic.  For the reasons I gave
earlier this is a mistake.  The conclusion that a complicated computing
machine could be indistinguishable from a person is derived from the
assumption that a person is nothing but a complicated computing machine.

The aspects of Marshall, Whitehead and Keynes to which I'm pointing
elaborate the idea of a wider "logic" - the idea of what Keynes, again
following Ramsey, calls "human logic" (X, pp. 338-9).  Computing machines
can only replicate the formal parts of reasoning.  Formal logic is not
co-extensive with reasonable thought, however, as Whitehead shows.  Keynes
accepts this point (though, for reasons that reflect badly on his character,
he doesn't credit Whitehead's role in establishing it).

"The gradual perfection of the formal treatment [of logic] at the hands of
himself [Russell], of Wittgenstein and of Ramsey had been ... to gradually
empty it of content and to reduce it more and more to mere dry bones, until
finally it seemed to exclude not only all experience, but most of the
principles, usually reckoned logical, of reasonable thought."

"Human logic" includes all that is excluded from formal logic - i.e. "all
experience" and "most of the principles, usually reckoned logical, of
reasonable thought."  The reasoning underpinning this claim is not reducible
to formal logic, ditto for the reasoning that makes use of the claim to make
an interpretive point about Keynes.  In neither case, therefore, can the
reasoning involved be replicated by a computer. This point also undermines
attempts to interpret Keynes (or, more importantly, "rationality") in terms
of the idea of "bounded rationality".

As I've pointed out before, Whitehead himself applied a conception of
"rationality" free of these limitations to the problem of business
forecasting (Adventures of Ideas, chap. 6, "Forecasting").  His expectation
(the chapter began as a lecture to the Harvard Business School) that
business could come to be run by minds rational in this way was naive.  He
does, however, provide criteria on which to base judgements of the
rationality of business decisions and behaviour.

Ted
--
Ted Winslow                            E-MAIL: WINSLOW@xxxxxxxx
Division of Social Science             VOICE: (416) 736-5054
York University                        FAX: (416) 736-5615
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, Ontario
CANADA M3J 1P3