reply to John:
I read in The Economist some time ago about neuroeconomics. It appears as a
reductionism driven to absurdity. The magnet resonance of the brain of a
decision maker may be a nice playground, but it excludes what is most
important in understanding individual behavior, his wider cultural context,
the relevant institutional framework (the system of rules, habits and norms
in which an individual makes decision) and his personal mental models (how
he puts together the items from the previous two cultural/institutional
systems). Even if they find stable and coherent patterns in the brain waves
according to specific decison-making contexts, what will be the contribution
to social sciences and to our understanding of human behavior?
The best
Igor
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Collier" <collierj@ukzn.ac.za>
To: <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2005 12:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Econophysics
> At 05:57 PM 2005/06/01, you wrote:
>>I may have missed it, but I have been surprised that the recently
emerged
>>discipline of econophysics has not yet received much attention during
this
>>FIS session. This discipline is being forged by the work of physicists
>>like Eugene Stanley and economists like Brian Arthur, and it is
founded on
>>the notion that economies can be better understood as self-organizing
>>complex dynamical systems governed by the rules of physics. I am
>>personally optimistic about the value of this approach to
understanding
>>economics, but I don't know enough about it to make a good argument
for it
>>here. I hope that this post will help to stimulate some discussion
about
>>econophysics in this forum.
>
> Another fairly recent approach to economics is so-called neuroeconomics.
> The idea is to see what is going on inside the head during problems like
> gambling decisions, and in general to understand the neural basis of
> decision making. Three of my colleagues of a grant to do fMRI studies on
> gambling cases. So far the field is just getting off the ground, but my
> feeling is that so far it is quite reductionist, and it pays little
> attention to information flow or processing (I hope to correct that).
> Secondly, the current assumptions tend to lead to looking for reward
> increases and decreases rather than reorganization and emergence of new
> patterns. I suppose that is OK for a new field. In any case, the
> neuroeconomists think they might eventually have something to say to
> economists about the nature of economic decision making.
>
> John
>
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Received on Thu Jun 2 12:54:13 2005
