Rational Philosophy

On abstraction and the real world.

It’s been nearly 150 years since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. The NY Times reports on a new exhibition that provides insight into Darwin’s scientific life and work. We learn that Darwin, inspired by musings on the natural world around him, tested out his ideas on the plants in his garden. He cross-pollinated plants with complementary anatomical parts, for instance, and found that the hybrids were more robust than their parents.

Through his inspiration from life, experimentation with life, and abstraction from life, Darwin derived the theory of evolution, forever changing our understanding of the world we live in, and bringing scientific understanding forward in one huge leap.

My teenage daughter has the most difficulty with science and math when she’s required to apply newly learned abstract concepts to “real world” problems. I expect she’s not alone. A new study indicates that people learn abstract concepts more successfully if taught the abstract theory first rather than expecting them to learn by deduction from “real world” examples. The conclusion: “Real world” examples aren’t as effective as a thorough briefing on the equations and theories concerned.

What surprised me about this article was not the conclusion (since it seems to make common sense — Darwin spent many painstaking years deriving his theories from real world examples, and the results are only obvious because he abstracted them!) but the realization that anyone ever thought that real world examples could effectively impart complex abstract knowledge. It’s useful to tie abstract concepts back to real world examples, of course, but this step is tough and challenging because it requires the additional skills of distilling the pertinent information and understanding how to apply the appropriate theory.

Studies of language and reasoning underscore this lesson: Children who have no language for numbers can count up to three instinctively. Primates have the same skill. But with larger numbers our ability to count without language diminishes rapidly. As the article points out, language can help enormously in processing problems.

Mathematics and scientific concepts provide a rich, inclusive language that abstracts the concepts of space, time and causality: This language helps us process the abstracted workings of the real world. Without it we would be fumbling around anew with each new problem. As with anything in the real world, though, discerning and holding on to sound ideas and methods provides its own challenge. At each turn there are those who want to forge on on new paths, or turn back down old ones.

Footnote: When I wrote the back cover blurb for my book a couple of years ago I made the apparently extravagant claim that in its contribution to human understanding it was the most important book since Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This offended some people. For a while I was embarrassed to have ever claimed such a thing. But today as I read about Darwin’s methods and saw how he’d sketched out his evolutionary ideas, I felt a renewed sense of conviction that when we can understand how evolution relates to the fundamental principles of space and time we will have taken another big step forward. And I am still convinced that Life! achieves this feat.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

(My computer erased my first attempt at this post. A circumstance I’m trying not to take to heart.)

In writing yesterday’s post (”The Joy of Sexual Reproduction“) I came across the work of Herbert Spencer, who apparently first coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” after reading about Darwin’s theory of “natural selection.” While Herbert Spencer’s ideas seem to have much soundness in some respects (that all organic and inorganic stuff must exist according to the principles of space and time, for instance) they are run through with an idealistic belief that evolution has an end point, at which life will have reached a state of perfect equilibrium. A thrust that comes across implicitly in his spin on Darwin’s theory of natural selection in his misleading use of the absolute term “fittest.”

(I love Wikipedia’s choice of this marvelously sinister-looking photograph of Spencer.)

I didn’t set out to write about Spencer. It occurred to me though that a parallel may exist between the Spencer-like utopia of a perfect evolutionary end point, and the common belief that markets should be left to freely find their form; that a theoretically perfectly free market (which is impossible) would ultimately most benefit society. I don’t want to get stuck in attacking or defending absolutes, just examine whether flawed idealism might be doing us a disservice.

It’s easy to pick on George Bush, but in this case (as in so many others) he serves as a great example of what may be wrong with freely advocating a free market. While it’s hard to imagine that he ever had anything to do with actually writing a book, he did put his name as Author to one called “A Charge to Keep.” Herein we find a quote that will be perfect for our discussion: “A free market promotes dreams and individuality.” (I must add that I found this quote elsewhere; I didn’t read the book. But I can readily imagine Bush subscribing to this perspective.)

It’s easy to point to failures in the market — for instance the recent shakiness caused by subprime loans. But it’s also easy for a free market proponent to point out that poor choices cause these problems and that they are actually examples that indicate that the market isn’t yet operating transparently or efficiently enough. As Alan Greenspan argued: “the securitization of home loans for people with poor credit - not the loans themselves - were to blame for the current global credit crisis.”

If we get into debates between free market advocacy and free market opposition, we’ll never get anywhere (that’s just politics as usual).

Instead, I’m wondering whether there may be a philosophical basis for understanding whether a free market is necessarily good or bad. I’ll try to explain what I mean. If we consider the free market as a concept it must rest on the two concepts of impulse and friction. Market changes require impulse or friction. An impulse initiates a market motion or activity based on an expectation of return or profit. A friction or counter-impulse provides inhibition to the momentum of the market in a particular direction. I’m being deliberately abstract. But we quickly determine that nowhere in the concepts for a free market do we come across any concept of virtue or goodness, other than the reflexive concept that freeness is virtue.

To be more specific. Let’s say a person engaging in commerce spies an opportunity for profit. He or she pursues that opportunity freely, responding to the impulse to benefit from the profit. And let’s say that in a perfectly free and transparent market, another person or group responds to that action by providing friction, thereby reducing or sharing in the profit, or generating an alternate profit for themselves.

A free and transparent market consists of a multitude of such transactions. Each person operates always according to impulse or friction. Never, in free market terms, does any subjective desire to act virtuously enter the equation.

Now, if we look again at Adam Smith (the father of the free market concept?) we find that he firmly believed that selfishness was immoral and that the individual would a act in accordance with the good of themselves and the good of all, since society is required for the market to exist.

But I go back to this idea of impulse and friction. People have coopted the concept of the free market as a virtuous mechanism. But a perfectly free market just “is.” People act and it responds, not according to any virtue, but according to its internal structure (which can never be perfect).

As the real market (synonymous in some ways with the stock market) becomes more abstract and more remote from the worldly barter and trade that Adam Smith witnessed, we lose the very connection to humanity that transforms a morally neutral market into a socially responsible market.

People love to tout the idea of the free market because it notionally frees them from worrying about the fiscal responsibility of the government in ensuring that markets operate responsibly and sensibly. Bush may be right in saying that a free market promotes dreams and individuality, but if we think that’s a good thing, we should perhaps think again.