The invisible hand of the market and God.

Apparently every third-order emergent property is God at work. There's apparently a belief gaining some steam that the invisible hand of the market is God at work.We see this same thing in various other places too, in Evolution by natural selection we see that it's God at work, and within the human brain we see that that too is mysteriously God.

a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time.

Well, sometimes things like markets, intelligence, science, and evolution which all rely on evolutionary algorithms are easy to confuse. Early on we develop a theory of minds, and are often keen to assign minds where they don't belong and end up painting with a broad brush to catch all human minds and any other third-order emergent structures, so we see the products of nature as the products of minds. And the invisible hand of the market as God's hand. And the amazingness of our own minds. We see minds in every third order emergent structure, because realizing something is/has too much design to be the result of first or second order emergent structures typically in our lives means it's the result of a mind. Though, it could similarly be the result of anything implementing the evolutionary algorithm, which basically is just the non-random selection of randomly occurring differences.

David Hume, I pencil, Markets, and Intelligence.

All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man...

 One should logically draw this conclusion. The author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man. Somehow about the time Darwin looked behind the curtain and determined  that the author of nature is nothing more than compounded dumb luck, blind chance distilled into the miraculous, where life cheats at thermodynamics and only collects on the winning bets and forgets it even made the losing ones. That design is the product evolution by natural selection sufficed to give cause for forgetting these previous conclusions. Why should we accept a logical conclusion of the sort that "the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man"? When we know full well how the author of nature writes? Sure we don't have a flipping clue how the mind of man works, but certainly we can be justified to ignore the logical arguments above out of hand, without explaining it. After all when one considers the amazing nature of  human minds, it ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. And equivalences somehow only go one way, to say that the author of nature is similar to the mind of man, certainly it true but to be disregarded because we now have Darwin to explain the authorship of nature. And why should anybody bother taking that one tiny extra step of saying that perhaps the mind of man is somewhat similar to Darwinian evolution? -- I would argue that they should because it explains the vast majority deep mysteries about intelligence. But that's just me.

There was a somewhat influential essay within Economics, which some are coming to understand  is Darwinian in nature, called I Pencil. Which argues, that the markets are such that nobody really knows how to make a pencil. That we cannot fathom how trees are made and so we conclude that it must be God. Only God can make a tree. But, nobody really knows how to make pencils. We know they are wood, graphite and brass (now aluminum for the ferrule) but who knows how to mine graphite, who knows how to make the mining equipment, who knows how to drill for oil to power the equipment, who knows how to make the lighthouse for the shipments of tin, or to power the saws. The division of labor by the markets is so profound that nobody really knows all the steps. You could set no person on a massive island filled with resources for the taking and have them make a pencil, because nobody knows how to do it.

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.

Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

 That evolution plays a distinctive role is nothing new, to economics. It's gaining some steam but isn't a rather widely understood point. Evolution is decentralized and doesn't require that particular part know the whole. It's just not needed. And though, Read here seems to suggest that God is behind the invisible hand rather than the same blind watchmaker behind the tree. And also concludes his essay with a presumption of laissez faire faith.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.

Neglecting that the blind watchmaker does better for humans when humans gum up the works. Everything in nature is on a knife's edge. Nature's red in tooth and claw. And filled from the foot fungus to head lice with parasites. We shouldn't have faith in the markets, we should recognize that they are the single most powerful economic tool we have but are far better off domesticated than dominating.

In any event, the invisible hand of the markets, the blind watchmaker, the homunculi that live in the pituitary gland are really just different sides of the same process. A decentralized process that doesn't require knowing anything to know everything, to design without understanding, to arrange without forethought, to create without a creator. Is it any wonder that religious people the world over have been saying intelligence is behind the designs of nature? Darwinian evolution looks exactly like intelligence, because intelligence is likely the same process at its core. Intelligent design is trying to replace the cranes (in the Dennett sense) of evolution with the skyhooks behind intelligence often wrongly attributed to God, but really if one takes the arguments seriously, the universal acid of evolution flows the other way. It doesn't save God from the clutches of evolution, it allows the universal acid of the explanatory power of evolution to explain away that meek idol of that He who made the lamb made thee. It ends up splashing acid in the face of God. Because yes, you can argue for intelligent design in nature, but the intelligence, like all intelligence, is just another face of Darwin. The illusion of design, and the thoughts of intelligence behind nature, which even Darwin noted tend to come and go, are the other side of the same coin.

Within research into intelligence, we haven't produced anything even remotely intelligent and fail to produce anything, there is an utter lack of something we could confuse for intelligence. Within biology we have gobs of intelligence, it's all over the place infecting ever facet of what biologists do, and a seeming effort to call it an illusion of design, a mirage of intelligence. On one side of intelligence, we have no intelligence and deeply want something we could confuse for intelligence and no understandable processes and on the evolution side, we have lots of intelligence and a process we understand and all the while deep in the vaults of human intellectual history we have valid arguments which say these are the same thing. It was a mistake to disregard the equivalence of the Author of Nature with the contrivances of human minds, just because Darwin fully explained nature. We should have, at the time, and in the years since, realized that Darwin also explained human minds. It isn't that intelligence in nature is an illusion or that the design is a mirage, it really is there. It's actually completely really deeply and truly a part of nature. God is the illusion. We see the intelligence in the essence of nature and claim that it must belong to somebody, but that's just not the way it works. You can worship the Author of Nature as God, the Intelligent Designer as a divine being, but really if you look behind the curtain you'll find that you're just worshiping what Darwin so aptly described. But "It's intelligent!" one  might insist, rightfully I concede, but that's not a contradiction. Darwin's process is behind that curtain as well. Intelligent Design doesn't save God from evolution, it meekly attempts to call evolution God. Somehow I don't think that even theists who find Paul Tillich's God (a theism as close to atheism as twilight is to night) palatable could manage to swallow that bitter idolatry when properly unmasked.

Properly, the argument for design has been touted as the greatest argument for God ever devised, but really, when you get down to the core, and a dollop of universal acid is splashed on it. We find that much of theological effort, has been, over the years, engaged in worshiping Darwinian Evolution. Insisting on the false distinction that because it's intelligent, it can't be evolution.

Social Darwinism vs. Evolution on life, economy and society.

Social Darwinism is the general view of selection within societies being good for the species or that one's plight in life has to do with one's fiber, blood, character, superior breeding, genetics, race, class, etc. That the drunk who dies in the ditch earned his place in the ditch because he was somehow inferior to the businessman who inherited his father's fortune. That if we help the weak, heal the sick and educate the ignorant we are serving to weaken humanity because the weak are weak because they are inferior, the ill are ill because they are weak-blooded, the idiot is stupid because he is unteachable.

Social Darwinism suggests that somehow social situation is the principle result of ones abilities. That some people do well in business not because they had the opportunities and education and luck to succeed but because they are somehow more worthy and able in some intrinsic capacity. Social Darwinism is a hollow echo of actual evolution by natural selection.

In nature the geometric rise of populations of all organisms is checked by nature, predation, death, mate selection, starvation, illness, weather, and sometimes some of these attributes are a little better suited to a situation or a little worse and these improvements find they increase in the gene pool at a greater rate and keep doing so. So by sickness, death, and predation all organisms are naturally given to a propensity towards complexity, utility, adaption, and improvement spiraling off into the infinity of the unknown.

Now, we should notice stark differences between the two things. One is based on some nebulous idea of inferiority and the other is based on certain individuals doing slightly better as far as their genes were concerned. One has a vague idea that somehow peoples lots in life are their own fault or their lot, while the other recognizes the general struggle for existence. One asks that we withhold our mercy and condemn the victims of fate while the other asks that we do jack squat because it simply sits there explaining all the design of life. Social Darwinism is after all an argument about how we should act and general vague notions that that is how things should be or that they are somehow better that way. Whereas evolution by natural selection explains life whether we care or not.

While sometimes Social Darwinism finds political cover and adherents especially among the wealthy and affluent and gets rehashed over and over again in more modern social philosophies like Ayn Rand's Objectivism and finds strong comradeship with bizarre ideas about the need for anarchy as a system of government and deregulation to unbind the invisible hand of the market. That the world is better as a dog eat dog world because it demands we pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and become the captains of our souls and masters of our fate. Interestingly these related ideas find themselves properly opposed by the same thing that opposed Social Darwinism in the first place, actual evolution by natural selection.

Evolution, beyond simply being just a theory to explain the design of life, also finds itself properly applied in very diverse disciplines such as game theory, morality, and economics. It turns out the world isn't really best off as a dog eat dog world. In fact, one would be well advised to understand that the world isn't dog eat dog but that dogs are themselves pack animals and work together in cooperative groups. The invisible hand of the market isn't a magical wand but rather the economic equivalent of the blind watchmaker in biological evolution. And we should closely observe that the blind watchmaker doesn't craft simply efficient producers but is riddled with parasites from top to bottom. And that we should properly understand that cooperation is the natural propensity of evolution rather than necessarily competition. Markets will naturally gravitate towards parasitism or monopoly rather than simply producing the best product for the cheapest price. We should not nor cannot embrace the idea of letting the chips fall where they may while the greatest indicator for where you will end up in life is where you started in life.

Truth comes from understanding that we live in a cooperative society rather than a meritocracy and that the poor are not necessarily poor because of some vague sense of inferiority but rather more correctly because there but for the grace of God go I. That I was born in America has much more to do with my successes than my genes could ever account for. The fact that I was born to a middle class family and was able to go to college without trouble or incident, that I lived in a good neighborhood, that my country has public schools, that I went to honors classes, that both my parents are college graduates in the sciences. Dumb luck has more to do with individual success than anything else. Science has more to do with societal success than anything else. Morality has more to do with humanity's success than anything else.

Suffice it to say that Social Darwinism in all its iterations both old and modern are predicated on rather staggering errors, and evolution as properly understood within society, biology, and economics strongly indicates that our greatest prosperity will be seen not within the idea of laissez faire (hand's off economics) but in the domestication of our markets and the socialization of the essentials of modern life, the promotion of science and embracing of international cooperation.

The invisible hand of the market, Darwinism

I have long based my beliefs in favor of market regulation on what seems to be a significant flaw in basic economic theory. It turns out others are starting to come around. The analogy of an invisible hand within economics seems to be a firm parallel between the blind watchmaker of evolution. That economics is, at it's core, a Darwinian process where the system that makes the most money tends to survive. So from humble beginnings we end up with an amazing system that is intricate and impressive that self-regulates in basic ways like many simple biological evolutionary processes.

The laissez faire belief is that the market works best when governments and society keep their hands off and lets the hand of the market decide. What they don't seem to understand though is that nature is full of parasites, from worms that live in your eye, to plants that choke to death other plants, to viruses that take over your cells and mold that grows on your feet. Nature is largely a web of parasites. Organisms that devour plants for all the added energy and eat and leech and prey upon each other. And where nature gets along and works in some cooperative fashions the economic parallels are those of monopolies and trusts and market collusion. It isn't a dog eat dog world out there, in fact, dogs are pack animals and work together to devour various other kinds of prey. Rather than fight each other and yield benefits to the consumer, they work together in order to help each other and thus themselves.

There is a long relationship between the theory of evolution and economics. In fact, Darwin borrowed from and saw the light because of the economist Malthus. If the economies of nature were like the economies of humanity, then there is a required curbing of the exponential growth of all species and so any tiny advantage that crept into an individual would quickly become extremely important. The error behind laissez faire thinking is similar to humanity without society.

It is no coincidence that many of those who adhere to a firm belief of hands-off when it comes to the market also tend to oppose societal equality as well. The idea being, we should simply stay out of everything and let reality decide. These individuals show a strong adherence to the social Darwinistic idea that if somebody is poor, it is because he or she simply isn't the fittest when it comes to society.

The claim is that we should exist within a state of nature, within society, within economics, within the world. Such unbending faith is akin to Nietzsche heralding that coming prophesied Uberman, or Ayn Rand lamenting the evil of taxation as a scourge on the creative people. However, much as Hobbes' state of nature where there is "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"-- the adherence to the belief that the invisible hand of the market is a benevolent Deus ex Machina leads to societal outcomes equally as disturbing. And while there is a certain draw to the idea of letting the chips fall where they may, the truth is that the strongest indicator of where you will end up in life is where you started in life. Much of business is successful but parasitic. Success in the realm of buisness is not indicative of a healthy econosphere or a satisfied consumer.

Prior to the regulations of the markets, we suffered collapses every decade or so. It was boom and bust like algae blooms, and a modicum of domesticating the markets to actually work for us rather than blindly accepting quasi-mystical beliefs in the unerring nature of the market, ushered in a long standing era of prosperity. When these regulations were reversed, we started to suffer the market blooms again in the form of various economic bubbles.

It is certainly true that nature designed a marvelous sheep, but with the human domestication of sheep, the benefits to mankind are pronounced, woolly, warm, and scratchy. The advocacy for regulations is an advocacy for domesticating the market. To make it work for us, rather than for its own self interests, which may or may not coincide occasionally with those of the consumer.

The parallels between economics and evolution are deep and far reaching. It is simply one of many directions the universal acid of evolution flows. I think it's actually a minor one (comparatively) but, as a result sheds considerable amounts of light.