Volume 14, Issue 2, 2016

Mr. Market’s Mind: A Collective Consciousness
Patrick Schotanus, Kames Capital Management Ltd., Edinburgh, UK

The individual human mind is a complex adaptive system that interacts with similar systems which gives rise to a collective consciousness. The latter is manifested in capital markets. Specifically, the market's mind consists of investor minds connected via physical extensions and infused with intersubjectivity. Price discovery, the self-organizing process in capital markets aimed at value creation, is modern society's psychophysical bridging. Prices are discovered symbols which capture the information that is realized both physically and phenomenally. Among its goals, this paper hopes to stimulate the exploration of markets and their data from the mind-body perspective rather than the flawed machine perspective which has dominated research. The recent financial crisis has underlined the need for such new thinking. This proposition is also relevant in light of extended cognition as well as the mind-body problem, a complex problem that is usually only discussed from the individual perspective. Still, it is likely that a permanent solution to this problem remains elusive. In fact, it is preferable for both our health and our wealth.


Vanity Fairs: Competition in the Service of Self-Esteem
Georg Franck, Department of Digital Methods in Architecture and Planning, University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

Vanity is an intriguing motive for competition. Whether you take it to mean excessive self-regard or just craving for attention, it denotes a drive that is both strongly self-centered and eminently social. It is self-centered since it is, in the last analysis, pursuit of self-esteem; it is eminently social since the self-esteem we can afford depends on our income of appreciative attention. The pursuit of self-esteem thus includes that one has to compete for attention. Vanity fairs are socially organized competitions for attention.
Competition for attention is no one-way affair. You have to offer something if you want do be paid attention. This means that the organization of vanity fairs can be functional regarding the generation of some sort of supply. Vanity fairs thus wait to be utilized by society as exchange systems where goods and services are exchanged for attention instead of money. Since the pursuit of self-esteem is both tending to high standards and highly capable in mobilizing energy, vanity fairs wait to be utilized by society as markets for particularly challenging demands.
The paper goes into two cases in point: modern science and post-modern celebrity culture. Both scientific communication and advertisement financed media are information markets where information is not sold for money, but directly exchanged for attention. Scientists working for publication work for the "wage of fame", celebrities are the new class of attention rich who live from the masses of attention collected by media leaving the exchange of information for money behind. Both science and media culture lie at the base of contemporary culture in economically advanced societies. The paper is on the constitutive role that vanity fairs play for this culture.


Second Generation Cognitive Science. Promises True Heideggerian Artifical Intelligence
Paul G. Joseph, Department of Information Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA and Haim Levkowitz, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA

The basis of second-generation cognitive science is a large body of empirical research that evidences a strong dependence of human reasoning on th particulars of human embodiment. This embodied view of the mind suggests that at minimum, human intelligence consists of sensorimotor, affective, and cognitive/analytic components that interact seamlessly and dynamically with each other and with the real world. This paper presents the initial results of efforts at modeling such a system, using a virtual agent. The agent has analogs of a sensory motor system to accommodate environment inputs and internally generated motor commands, a limbic system to model affect, and a cognitive system to perform analysis. The claim is that agents built using this architecture, founded on and situated narrowly in understandings from second-generation cognitive science can construct their own ontology and "view of the world" by interacting with the objects in their world. This ability to adaptively build their own worldview allows agents to flexibly handle a wide range of contexts. Such agents meet key requirements of Heideggerian artificial intelligence.


How I (Freely) Raised My Arm: Downward, Structural, Substance Causation
Michele Paolini Paoletti, Department of Philosophy, University of Macerata, Italy

I develop and defend a model of downward causation denoted as downward, structural, substance causation. This model is based on the idea that higher-level, strongly emergent substances can cause something at lower levels by imposing certain structures on lowerlevel goings-on. After providing a sketch of the model and of its ontological assumptions, I apply it to the analysis of how free mental causes can structure neural goings-on. I defend three theses following from such an analysis, and I test the empirical plausibility of the model. Finally, I anticipate some objections and replies


Last revision: 20 January 2016