So what IS the project? Part 1: Influences

Having talked about my motivations, it perhaps behooves me to actually discuss what I'm trying to do. The problem lies in the fact that I've been thinking about this stuff, thinking about it in a certain way, for so long, that while it makes perfect sense to me, it’s hard to communicate it with anyone else because of how fundamentally different my framework for thinking about it is from everyone else’s.

So while my immediate goal is, in itself, distinct from a historical recounting of how I got to where I am, as a practical matter, getting someone else into that particular mindset requires motivating thinking about economics in a certain way, and to a certain extent, doing that is best accomplished by biographical recollection.

Complicating matters further is the sheer breadth and diversity of subjects and influences which have contributed to the final shape of my ideas. In thinking about economics, it would be fair to say that I have been influenced by biology (especially evolutionary biology), physics (especially thermodynamics), psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, mathematics (especially dynamic systems theory and its cousin, chaos theory), philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics (particularly, the problem of material constitution). It has been influenced, as well, by work I have been doing in parallel on sociology and politics. Most unusually, I was strongly influenced by Frank Herbert’s Dune series (the six books he wrote; the concluding two books of the series written by his son finish the story nicely but lack the sophistication of the originals), in particular the implicit thought behind his approach to ecology and economics.

If you notice a distinct lack of any mention of economics (books, authors, etc.) in the above list, there is a specific reason for this, to which I will get to in a moment. I have read a miniscule amount of economics (if reading the entirety of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom can be considered miniscule) but have for the most part tried to keep my mind uncluttered of specific economic theories. So you may wonder, what have I been doing in all this time, and how does it relate to economics?

Here, biography and motivation are important. Having determined that, yes, there must be some fact of the matter about economics and that, no, economists sure as hell don’t know what it is, I started thinking about how best to approach the subject. At this point in my life, I was a recently recovering Dualist. Having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian church, I had some time before ceased to be a young-earth creationist, but had only recently finally studied and understood the explanatory power of natural selection in evolution. And I was applying my new-found understanding of the world to the area of philosophy that I was most interested in: Philosophy of Mind.

A result of my late/adult conversion to physicalism/naturalism, I was willing to discard a great deal of pre-intellectual, folk-psychological baggage about the mind that informs most people, simply because a) I recognized it as stemming from my own assumption of the existence of an immaterial soul, and b) since I had both explicitly embraced dualism and was explicitly discarding it, I could intellectually begin from a standpoint of “What would happen if we were to take Darwin seriously?”

Now if you think that a naturalized approach to understanding the human mind would be a comforting gloss over what you already think you know about it, you are very much mistaken. The scientific approach inexorably yields a perspective as divorced from common sense and familiarity in the realm of mind as it does in the realms of the very small (quantum mechanics) and the very fast and large (relativity). What I found in philosophy of mind was that as “traditional” philosophy of mind got mired in debates literally centuries and millennia old, and covered topics more and more arcane and abstract, my own thoughts on the subject quickly converged to the same positions as those of philosophers, like Andy Clark, Jerry Fodor, Robert Cummins, and especially Daniel Dennett, who were literate in the cognitive sciences.

More shockingly, I found that those of my physicalist peers who had grown up atheists, and therefore had been physicalists throughout their lives, universally rejected the positions I was advancing on topics in the Philosophy of Mind. Having the near-universally accepted tenets of folk-psychology foisted on them by dint of relentless exposure, and not recognizing how much of them were extrapolations from the assumption of an immaterial soul, their response to the obvious-but-counterintuitive consequences of a naturalistic philosophy of mind was as reactionary as anyone else’s.

Cool, I thought. But what does this have to do with economics?