Dar Innis about the essence of being

And now something completely different.

Dar Innis is my friend from Philosophy House. One day we were chatting about the existence, and it became clear to me that Dar was no stranger to the topic…in fact I found out that he was quite a metaphyscist with original ideas about the essence of existence. After a little persuasion he gave me notes about his ideas and how he had worked definitions and a new approach to “Being of things” that could open ways for a new kind of metaphysics.

After reading the writing twice, I was very impressed!

I intuitively feel that although he was quite provocative in suggesting that his approach in defining being would open up ways to build a new kind of metaphysics that would make quantum weirdness more understandable….there actually could be something in it!

Dar wanted to emphasize that this writing is only on a very draft level, but he allowed me to publish it anyway, since I think his basic idea of the nature of being is presented there already so clearly. The ideas and argumentation are deceptively simple, yet intriguing and makes one want to develop the connections further as well as challenge some of the assumption....all characteristic to an exceptionally interesting work in my opinion. Also the responses to Parmenides and Heidegger are very interesting - check it out!

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Dar Innis:
Being Is Not Relative, And Perspectives Of Being Are Relative

Introduction

I have come to an understanding of being, and I want to share it. I hope this account of being helps you to come to a better understanding of being.

The title of this work sums up this account of being. Being is not relative, and perspectives of being are relative.

During the 6th Century BCE in what is currently Italy, Parmenides of Elea discovered the non-relativity of being. Parmenides did the best a man of his time and culture could do to understand what the non-relativity of being meant, but he fell short. With the benefit of over two and a half thousand years of philosophic and scientific advancement since, I have managed to succeed where Parmenides failed.

However, this victory is far from final. This rational account of being, or metaphysic, lays a foundation for a scientific theory that I am not qualified to develop or test. With this metaphysic, I understand why space and time dilate due to relative motion and about masses, as it does in Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity. With this metaphysic, I can even begin to understand why the phenomena explored by Quantum Physics behave in such unintuitive ways. Yet, that is as far as I have managed to push it.

I must leave it to other seekers of truth to succeed where I have failed. I hope by sharing my successes and failures that I may in some way contribute to the endeavor to understand being.

What Is Being?

What is being? The simple answer is that everything is being. Whatever one can consistently state to in any way be is being. It is being that one plus one equals two. It is being that we have observed bodies in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by a force. It is being that George Washington was the first president of the United States of America. It is being that Odysseus outwitted a cyclops in the Odyssey. Anything that is, whether abstract, physical, non-fictional, fictional, or in whatever other way that a thing can consistently be considered to be, is being.

It is that it is the case that it is the truth that it is being that we have many synonyms for being. Parmenides called it 'what is' or 'that which is'. Whatever is the case is being, and being itself could be considered the totality of the case or the case itself. That which true propositions accurately state is being, or we could even call it truth.

All fields of investigation are attempts to understand being. I do not believe it any wonder that sciences such as physics and chemistry explore being. However, even humanities such as art and literature are explorations of being.

Metaphysics, as I use the word, is the rational examination not of what is being, but of being itself. As this account of being is a metaphysic, let us proceed to examine being itself.

There is not being anything that is not being.

There is not being anything that is not being. A thing must be being to be being. A thing that is not being, is not being. A thing that is not being cannot even be consistently thought to be a thing. A thing that is not being cannot have any properties or do anything whatsoever.

I realize this seems inane. Well, it is. It is a tautology, like T=T, not(T)=not(T), and not(T=not(T)).

Unfortunately, there are being some people who maintain that there is being such a thing that is not being. Continental philosophy following Heidegger maintains the contradiction that T=not(T) and T. This is why Continental philosophy does not rely on logic. It views logic as a mistake, and instead appeals to narrative satisfaction, or story logic.

In Heidegger's inaugural lecture, 'What is metaphysics', he asserts that science defines itself as the study of being, and not anything else. Heidegger emphasizes this 'not anything else', or nothing, and claims that science cannot define itself without it. Heidegger rejects that 'nothing' is a null result obtained by negating the totality of all being by asserting that negation depends upon experience of this 'nothing' before we can use it in the first place. Heidegger then claims to find an experience of this nothing withdrawing into itself and away from all things in the experience of angst. This, for him, is enough evidence to prove his assertion that an experience of 'nothing' is required for the act of cognitive negation. He concludes that logic is a mistake and all science that follows the rejection of this 'nothing' is a mistake.

Heidegger is mistaken.

Science does not have to appeal to 'nothing' in order to define itself. Science is the empirical examination of being. Adding that science does not examine what is not being, while consistent, is hardly necessary.

'Nothing' is the null result obtained when one considers the negation of the totality of being. Negation does not depend upon an experience of 'nothing'. All that is necessary for understanding negation is an experience of some difference. Negation is simply the cognitive recognition of difference. This is not that. Red is not blue. You are not me.

Heidegger may genuinely find something that seems to withdraws in itself and away from beings in the experience of angst; however, 'nothing' is not something, and cannot be or do anything whatsoever. As this 'something' he finds withdrawing into itself and away from beings is not 'nothing', he is mistaken in identifying it as such, and anything that follows from this acceptance of contradiction is built upon a mistake.

Those who follow in this mistake are equally mistaken. This is not to say there is no value in their work. There is value in phenomenology. However, by identifying something experienced phenomenologically with a concept developed rationally they are making a categorical mistake. This mistake seems to me to be motivated by the desire to promote phenomenology by denying rationality.

In any case, science is not mistaken in examining what is being and not bothering with an examination of what is not being. Heidegger failed to demonstrate that there is being such a thing that is not being, and so has everyone else.

I lament how common it is in philosophy for a philosopher to declare all that preceded them was a mistake, and that only their new novel way of thinking can rescue us from this mistake. Heidegger was not the first, and shall not be the last, to make this ridiculous claim. Despite this major point of difference, I think Heidegger does make some valuable insights. I especially like his emphasis on experiential knowledge obtained by doing.

I apologize for the diversion. Allow me to get back to the point of this section. It is a mistake to consider that there is being such a thing that is not being. A thing that is being is being. A thing that is not being is not being, and cannot even be considered a thing. Thinking that there is being such a thing that is not being, and that this thing somehow is or plays some role in what is being is a mistake. It is the exact same thing a statement which mixes truth and falsehood. When a statement mixes truth and falsehood, the statement fails to state truth. If we mix being and nothing in an understanding, the result is not an accurate understanding of being.

If a thing cannot participate in any relationship, that thing is not relative.

For a thing to be relative, that thing must be able to participate in some relationship. If a thing cannot participate in some relationship, that thing is not relative.

I hope you find these two statements uncontroversial.

For a thing, If there is not any thing that is not the thing with which the thing can relate, the thing cannot participate in any relationship.

For a thing to participate in any relationship, there must be some thing that is not that thing with which the thing can relate. If there is not any thing that is not the thing with which the thing can relate, the thing cannot participate in any relationship.

Again, I hope you find these two statements uncontroversial.

I have run into some opposition on this point though. There are being some people who consider it possible for a thing to relate with itself. I do not consider such self associations as relations. I consider them identities. So, if you consider such self associations as relations, keep in mind that I do not.

Being is not relative.

For being to be relative, being must be able to participate is some relationship. If being cannot participate in any relationship, being is not relative.

For being to be able to participate in any relationship, there must be some thing that is not being with which being can relate. If there is not any thing that is not being, being cannot participate in any relationship.

There is not any thing that is not being. Being cannot participate in any relationship. Being is not relative.

On the non-relativity of being.

We generally understand things by their relationships. For instance, we could understand a Louisville Slugger baseball bat as a wood club made by the Louisville Slugger Company for batting in the game of baseball. This baseball bat does not compose itself, but is composed of something that is not itself: wood. This baseball bat is not itself a club-like form, but has been shaped into the form of a club. The baseball bat itself is not the Louisville Slugger Company, but was manufactured by the Louisville Slugger Company. The baseball bat is not itself batting in the game of baseball, but is used for batting in the game of baseball. We could go beyond these four basic relationships and explore further. One who is not born into a culture where the game of baseball is played would not even be able to identify the baseball bat as a baseball bat. The baseball bat's meaning as a baseball bat depends upon an incredibly complex web of relationships.

As being is not relative, being is not and has no substantial, efficient, or final principles that we could use to understand being. There is not anything to compose being, nor could being compose anything. There is not anything that could have produced being, nor is there anything that being could produce. There is not some purpose that being could seek, nor is there anything that is not being that could seek being.

The formal principle includes many different relationships.

Being cannot change. A change of being would require that it is being that being is being, and it is being that being is not being. Whether you place being first or second in the sequence of this change, being is still being on both ends, and no change has actually been described.

Being cannot move. Motion is a relationship of positional change with some reference. There is not being any reference with which being's position could change.

Being does not have anything beyond it in any way. There is not anything that could be above, below, left of, right of, ahead of, behind, before, after, or in any other way outside of being. There is not anything that could be in any way inside of being.

Being cannot separate anything as space separates the stars. Being cannot be separated by anything as stars are separated by space. For this reason we can state that being must be altogether, continuous, and one in number.

Being cannot vary in density. Being cannot be thicker here and thinner there, as there is not anything to thin being as water thins wine. For this reason we can state that being must be everywhere full of only itself, without any variation.

The form of being seems elusive as there is not being anything with which we could in any way contrast with being. This did not stop everyone from trying to solve the form of being. Both Parmenides of Elea and Melissus of Samas tried.

Parmenides concluded that being possessed finite spatial extent, and no temporal extent. While Parmenides discovered the non-relativity of being and made the first deductive argument, not all of his arguments were as grand. Living west of Greece during the 6th Century BCE, Parmenides had no concept of zero distinct from nothing. Since Being cannot be not, he naturally concluded that being could not possess no extent, as that would amount to the contradiction of being not being. Today, we are more prepared to consider a thing with zero length, even if we still consider a quantity of zero as no real quantity.

Parmenides also argued that the infinite was in need of all things, and that being is in need of no thing, so he would not allow himself to think that being extended infinitely. This argument against the infinite is weak, and I suspect Parmenides motive was to avoid having his conception of being associated with the theory of Anaximander, who considered the material of all things as Apeiron, without limit, or the infinite.

This left Parmenides with only one option for the spatial extent of being, some finite extent. Seeing as being possessed a limit, and that there is not anything beyond being to impede being, being must extend equally in all directions forming a spatially extended sphere.

Curiously, Parmenides had no difficulty doing away with time: “Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one.”

Melissus of Samos later sought to correct these inconsistencies. He felt that Parmenides had been unjust in treating space differently than time. Furthermore, Melissus was not biased against infinite extent, and saw the weakness of Parmenides argument against the infinite. While Melissus did not state his case as well as Parmenides, the solution of Melissus is more consistent. Melissus concluded that being ever was, and ever shall be, infinite with both space and time. However, this infinite being still did not permit for any variation or change.

Melissus was correct in considering the dimensions of space and the dimension of time as dimensions and treating them the same. Without any higher maths available, Melissus had no reason to consider the possibility of more dimensions. In his time, stating that being possessed infinite extent with both space and time amounted to stating that being possessed infinite extent with all dimensions. So, with that minor adjustment, the solution of Melissus is logically consistent. Being could, with logical consistency, form a completely unvarying continuum with infinite extent in all dimensions.

Parmenides solution was inconsistent. A finite extent is necessarily relative. If there is some finite extent, it has a limit, one naturally asks: what lies beyond the limit? Furthermore, any finite form has internal complexity. As Plato had Parmenides say in 'The Parmenides', the center of a sphere differs from the surface of a sphere, as well as other points within the sphere. A finitely extended being is simply inconsistent with the non-relativity of being.

Had Parmenides treated space as he treated time, he could have arrived at a logically consistent solution. Being could, with logical consistency, form an point, without anything beyond it: a singularity with zero extent with any dimension.

Even with the correction to Parmenides solution, both of these solutions suffer a fatal defect. Neither solution allows for any sort of variation or change. We live in a world full of variation and change. We cannot accept either solution without denying ourselves and the world in which we live. This is what both Parmenides and Melissus seemed to do. Both considered the world presented to us by sense as somehow mistaken or illusory. Even if I were to concede that the world in which we live is an illusion, by what mechanism could either of these solutions to the form of being possibly produce this illusion? I cannot consistently accept either solution.

Where does this leave us? Being could form a singularity or a flat continuum. Neither solution can permit the world of variation in which we live. Short of conceding that being has no form, we have only one more alternative to consider. If being could form a singularity or a flat continuum, and being does not form either a singularity or a flat continuum, perhaps we are dealing with an inclusive or, and being forms both a singularity and a flat continuum.

Perspectives of being are relative.

How could this one being form two such different forms? These two different forms are simple solutions to the form of being. We can synthesize these simple forms into a single complex form. Topologically, the two forms are identical. After all, it is topological considerations that led us to them. In both cases, the forms possess no sides, internally or externally. We are dealing with one form, a topology, with at least two ways of looking at it, or with at least two perspectives.

With at least two ways of perceiving being, we have enough difference to build up a theory of relativity. Not difference of being itself, but difference in the way being is perceived.

This brings us to a tricky question: What perceives these different solutions so that relativity can arise? The solution is rather simple, if a bit astonishing. There is not being anything that is not being to perceive these different solutions to the form of being. Only being itself could perceive these different solutions to the form of being. What is it like for being to be being? If being can be being in more than one way, being would have to be being in all the ways that it can be being.

This forces us to consider the rather bizarre notion that some sort of primordial form of awareness is inherent in being itself. Only with such an awareness could being perceive itself in many ways, and only in perceiving itself in many ways can being give rise to the relativity of perspectives that leads to perspectives of being like our universe.

Then I would have to go into my crude dynamics and it becomes more of a crude scientific theory touching on general relativity, black holes, photons, and a bit of quantum strangeness based on this metaphysic.

What did Rosedale really say?

Little over a month ago Loki (Lokifluff Clarity) and I were listening to Philip Rosedale’s (SL name Philip Linden) presentation. Rosedale is the founder and former CEO of Linden Labs. He was talking about what Second life could offer for corporate customers. It appears that LL has decided to start marketing SL more to corporate customers from now on. But after listening to Rosedale I was rather puzzled, how does LL intend to actually approach companies? Does SL have anything to offer to the RL companies? I thought I have to write down some of my thoughts, beacuse it was so confusing.

It seems that I’m not the only one wondering the same question. Christiana Zenovka gave me at PH a link to an article, discussing how corporations are actually abandoning second life today http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/technology/5078444/Second-Lifes-span-is-virtually-over-as-firms-decide-to-get-real.html . Here is also another article discussing the same thing http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10217315-36.html and google found many more. The corporate exodus seems to be really happening… and I think it’s easy to understand why: If you are a second life citizen, how much time do you spend in some dull corporate sims that promote their boring products. I have visited Gibson guitar company sim once and collected a bunch of freebie guitar imitations there (very nice looking btw), but that’s about it.

Now LL’s new approach is to offer SL as a platform for corporate communications, and that’s what Rosedale seemed to be talking about, too. You can actually check it out yourself, since I found out that his talk is available at http://blip.tv/file/1853232 . If you look at 27:30, the camera turns so that you can see me and Loki in the front row! There are also records of the talkback in local chat at http://www.gronstedtgroup.com/pdf/philip%20linden%20talk%20-%20back%20chat%20-%20Notepad.pdf . If you search for me or Lokifluff there, you can find our questions. Unfortunately Rosedale did not answer either of us :-(

I and Loki listening to Rosedale (Philip Linden). The picture doesn't show it, but we had our GMT now! group tags on us :-)

Now what did Rosedale offer to companies? Not much (if anything) I would say. On the contrary, I would criticize his presentation in many ways:

- He was mostly talking about the user experience; SL would supposedly be great for corporate use because it allows the participants to have a visual interaction. Visual interaction would make it more engaging for brains compared to normal teleconferences (….sounded a bit weird to me, but Loki said that in principle he was making kind of sense)…. But hold on! I have every now and then video-conferences and I use MS-netmeeting to share presentations. And I don’t really need anything more remarkable than a camera and skype to establish that. So there is quite enough visual connection and it would be with rl personas rather than avatars. When I am dealing with rl businesses, it would seem even preferable for a serious person like me (…..awww don’t laugh!), so I wasn’t impressed by Rosedale's claims.

- Security is of course a main concern for companies. Without some kind of a guaranteed security and advanced VPN system there is hardly any chance to make a company to discuss it’s internal businesses in SL. And what if someone is able to spy anyway, who will be responsible? I wasn’t sure from Rosedale’s speech whether VPN works already in SL or are they only planning for it. But I think that if LL wants to promote SL as a communication platform for internal meetings, it cannot tolerate one single industrial espionage incident, or it will be abandoned by everyone immediately. Does this sound like a lucrative prospect from LL's point of view? Is internal corporate communication really that interesting business, that it would be worth the risk and investment?

- Rosedale was making also some very soft arguments about how internal promoters of SL, working inside companies could plead to CEO’s “vanity” in making her/his company to be one of the pilot users of SL. Come on Philip, don’t be childish! Even the most vain CEOs will always want to have a good financial justification why would they invest in something risky and new like SL still is. If you are not able to show where the value is in terms of hard cash calculations and what is the return on investment and that there aren’t risks….I doubt it is very hard to get any CEO to signoff for an SL type of an experiment, especially these days when cost control is everywhere tighter than ever. To be honest, I would personally advice LL to cut that kind of cheap sales talk completely when talking to actual business people working in actual corporations, since although some well presented but silly nonsense might sell to VCs (= vulture capitalists known also as venture capitalists) that are specialized in buying and selling “visionary” start-up stories, real world business people will always want to look at the substance, too. LL need to be able to show clearly what is the expected ROI, show successful case studies or a clear demonstrations of getting measurable strategic value, like getting ahead of competition. I would think that soft sales talk, like pleading CEO’s vanity, would only scare away corporate people.

- I was actually very surpised that Rosedale didn’t tell any concrete success stories about how SL has been used in business. I mean although there aren’t probably very many such stories yet, there must be some at least. For example, I heard from Nirak Treschichot at PH how SL has been used to test the functionality of hospital designs by creating making 3-D models in SL and then making avatars to use it as if it was in actual hospital use. Why did Rosedale not refer to any such cases? There must be other successes, too? If LL does not use successful cases as examples in their marketing towards corporate world, I find it very unlikely that they actually win any new corporate customers. I think that this was a big flaw in Rosedale’s presentation. If I was LL, I would collect a portfolio of success stories and use it as the key marketing collateral when approaching actual companies.

- I was also somewhat put off by the format of the event. Although there was obviously a humorous quirk in how Rosedale’s avatar Philip Linden was in the spotlights, like some kind of a messias bringing the joyous message of SL and tens of “fanboys” (Smoke Wijaya’s expression) cheering every word, I think it was somewhat tacky. The fanboys spammed so much that I didn’t notice any critical or more interesting question to get an answer really. Not good enough Philip! If you want to get serious with corporations….get serious first, answer also the difficult questions.

So based on that presentation, I didn’t get at all convinced that LL will make any progress with the corporate world, at least with the approaches they seemed to have today in selling SL to companies. On the contrary, I got the impression that they have run out of ideas… which I think is a pity! Although I am not planning to use SL for anything else but for socializing, I’m still very interested in how it could be used for business purposes, too. There is something magical with SL, as all of us SL citizens know. We love it and we hang in there an unbelievable amount of time…so I think we all would like to see SL grow and flourish.

But could it be that LL is going astray when trying to to win the RL corporate world? I think they might be. Although I’m sure that the LL management talks about this daily and like in most US companies have zillions of time wasting and badly conducted strategy meetings, where people come unprepared and talk mostly off agenda, …ooops, sorry…. hem….*calm down Q* … they should ask once more if the RL corporate scene is really worth the effort, with things like visual skype as a competitor? Where is the business model for avatar based visual corporate communication, really? SL as a marketing scene by making boring business sims has been proven to fail already.

And then there is the question of the sex scene in SL. Most RL corporations don’t want to be associated with the adult scene….since you never know that if you setup a serious corporate sim serving a conservative clientele, that suddenly there wouldn’t be a porn sim right next to your location =). So now LL is planning to move all adult content to a separate continent, where the users would need to show age verification. Perhaps that would be a good idea in principle, but it should have been realized at the beginning of SL. Pushing the separate continent idea at this point will certainly not get through without huge protests. And what’s the worst, the protesters would likely be among the oldest and probably the best paying customers from LL point of view. So if I was an LL business planner, my first reaction would be to be very cautious throwing away the old customers, before there is a clear concept how you are going to attract the new ones….but based on what I have seen so far there doesn’t seem to be much on the table when RL corporations are concerned.

The second point I think LL seems to be missing with it’s new strategy, is that the main attraction for many is that SL can be a true Second life! It allows a person to have a second identity that is not connected directly to the responsibilities of the first one. For example I, Quintessential Sorbet, can be much more straightforward with many issues related to corporate world than my counterpart in meatspace. She needs to think what her employer might think of her activities as an economical columnist, and she has so many personal boundary conditions here and there….poor girl =). I think that the concept of a concrete Second personality was on of the key elements in the original vision when SL was created. I would not abandon that vision for the sakes of hypotethical RL corporate customers, especially when given the competition from skype and other netconferencing systems, the opportunity seems very questionable. Why not rely on the original SL vision, allow people to develop their second identities and build SL businesses that are truly derived from the platform’s opportunities. Phil Ember had found me a link about an SL clothing factory http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/at-sundance-a-second-life-sweatshop-is-art/ whics seems almost like a sweat shop, actual people slaving on a moving belt, creating IP for the company. Check it out, it’s pretty amazing!

Cheers
Quin

I added Christiana's original link. Thanks for finding it for me Loki!

What’s wrong with the contemporary economics, Part II: Futility of utility

Most of the contemporary microeconomic theories rely one way or the other on the concept of utility. Wikipedia defines utility as a measure of the relative satisfaction from, or desirability of, consumption of various goods and services. Given this measure, one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility, and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase one's utility [1].

My original plan was to write about how difficult the concept of utility is from a practical economics point of view. I have not seen “utility” booked in any balance sheet, written in any law that governs commerce in any country or written in any real life contract. Utility is obviously a purely theoretical concept, but is it useful for anything, or can it even be well defined? I (among many others) doubt that it can.

But it turned out that there was already so much material on the internet about the criticism of the use of utility that I think it’s ok just to refer to [1] for the most part, becuase criticism was based partly on what someone had wrote there: Another criticism [about utility] come from the assertion that neither cardinal nor ordinary utility are empirically observable in the real world. In case of cardinal utility it is impossible to measure the level of satisfaction "quantitatively" when someone consume/purchase an apple. In case of ordinal utility, it is impossible to determine what choice were made when someone purchase an orange. Any act would involve preference over infinite possibility of set choices such as (apple, orange juice, other vegetable, vitamin C tablets, exercise, not purchasing, etc),
where cardinal utility is the magnitude of utility differences as an ethically or behaviorally significant quantity and ordinal utility describes just ranking and not strength of preferences.

Now maybe utility would have some use in philosophy, sociology or behavioral science, (…I don’t know…). But in economics it just seems like a messy concept. People have tried to quantify utility so that it could be used in economics by postulating an expected utility hypothesis, which defines utility as a function of expected return on investment (ROI), risks, and personal preferences….sounds rather good at first hearing, doesn’t it? But it has been shown to lead to a several paradoxes like St Petersburg paradox [2], Allais paradox [3] or Ellsberg paradox [4] for starters.

And what’s worse, people just don’t think in terms of utility in practice. On the other hand concepts like (expected) ROI, risks and personal or strategic preferences are real things that people use in their decision-making. So why would it be so difficult to postulate a utility function that would work as a “preference relation” over a set of possible decisions? In fact making such a relation in theory is not so hard. The great mathematician John von Neumann together with economist Oskar Morgenstern already did it (see for example [5]…although there are surely easier to read references somewhere, too =), and their theory looks quite convincing at the first glance….but is it really of any use? I think not, because
a) the concept of “utility” is still messy. Although people do take into account ROIs, risks, and personal preference, I think it is hard to think of a universal relation that would apply to all people in the same way.
b) In order for the expected utility theory to truly describe real life, people are expected to make decisions always rationally….but in practice they do not. People act also “irrationally” or unpredictably, even in corporate decision-making.
c) Making decisions in business is never dependent on one party alone. In order for commerce to take place, you need at least two parties in each individual transaction (see my quantum theory of economics :-)). Thus there is always also the element of negotiation present in every transaction.
d) Even if we would not care about a)-c) the paradoxes of [2]-[4] would still be there. That alone should be a logical proof that an expected utility function is not a satisfactory concept to derive higher level economic theories. Logically one should scrap it!

So why do we use Utility at all? Wouldn’t it be ok just to operate with more easily definable entities like ROI, risks, personal preferences, reference valuations, negotiation strategies, etc….? I think yes it would be and that’s just what is happening in practice too. For example, if you go to Nasdaq internet pages, and take a financial analysis of any given company, you can see the quarterly balance sheet valuations, ROI, risk and other analyses and make your own judgments based on that. But utility has been hypothesized in order to get started with a theory, that would enable a way to connect theories in a vertical dimension, from the micro to macro level. But perhaps there is also something in the rigidity in the ways we like to think. To me it seems that in the history of thought we have had a tendency to create unnecessary concepts like “god” or “space-time ether” or “utility”, that would explain the behavior of the world around us, even if the concept used in the explanation would be fictitious or a fallacy ;-)

So I would propose to free our minds and get rid of the concept of utility in making economic theory. I propose to view this as an analogy to the development of physics theory since wouldn’t it be a little similar to getting rid of the ether hypothesis a hundred years ago? As it turned out there was no need for a universal space-time ether or universal co-ordinates, and in the same way I think there is no need for a universal expected utility function.

Well, maybe the space-time ether analogy is disputable, but I would still like to comment one statement when comparing physics and economics that I have heard many times both in rl and sl, namely the claim that economics would be somehow more difficult to model than physics… but is it really?

If you take the microscopic “quantum” approach to economy, I think the processes in economics are very well defined, because they are defined in the law! The laws governing individual transactions are usually reasonably unambiguous whereas I think the physical theories are constantly challenged. Namely how well are the elementary interactions between elementary particles known really? Aren’t they actually under continuous study in particle colliders and nuclear physics? Perhaps one could claim that the mechanisms of economic interactions are even better known, since they are defined in writing!

Of course the operators in economics are people, who are complicated creatures, but on the other hand, if you think about how the natural science experiments are interpreted...isn’t it also people who operate as cognitive processors making observations, interpreting results and making judgments? And if we talk about technology, isn’t it the often irrational people who design the various gizmos for different purposes, and these purposes are defined by human imagination…sounds rather complicated to me!!!I have not thought very thoroughly how good these analogies to physics really are (or if the analogies actually serve any purpose for that matter) but intuitively it would seem to me that there are grounds to challenge the statement “economics is harder to model than natural sciences”. I think there are good arguments to claim the opposite!

Ursäkta om jag verkade lite provokativt den här gången, men det var bara ivrigheten att få dessa idéer utskriven nånstans =).
Hälsningar till alla SL vänner!

Quin

References:

[1] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility, April 6th 2009
[2] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox, April 6th 2009
[3] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox, April 6th 2009
[4] internet page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox, April 6th 2009
[5] internet page http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/essays/uncert/vnmaxioms.htm, April 6th 2009

thanks again for help Strider