[1] Miscellaneous Contributions to A Debate on Spontaneous Order

Dear Timothy,

Recently, I met one of Germany's leading brain researchers. The guy was pretty unhappy about the resonance to his conclusions from long-standing research. One of his major insights is that there is no location of the "I". Personality, sense of identity, intelligence seem to be the outcome of vast interactive processes in the brain (and of course, between brains and the brain and its non-cerebral environment). So, on this level, too, it appears misleading to look for a single repository of intelligence, personality, identity etc. It is more fruitful to search for the way in which multifarious elements work together to form an outcome that it is tempting but wrong to regard as the result of a central agent. The resistance that this researcher is facing from his colleagues seems similar in nature to the unwillingness to accept that a powerful free economy or, indeed, a great society is the result of interactions so varied and complex that no single mind could bring them about, while people, who follow their own knowledge for their own purposes can - so long as they heed general rules instrumental in maintaining a decentralised order in which experimentation and utilization of dispersed knowledge is carried out with much greater effect than would be possible if people were restricted to acts ordained by a central authority.

I seem to remember that the brain researcher discovered no striking differences in the functionality of parts of the brain found both in animals and human beings, except that human beings had "more of the same" - which triggered in me the intuition that the brain may be in some important respects like a market. The larger it is, the more extensive it is, the more powerful the outcome - the range of fruitful associations expands, the range of yet unknown, potentially beneficial permutations open to discovery is larger - there is more to be discovered, more hidden goods and more hidden good available for the seekers.

(Also, compare two peoples - as in North and South Korea - consisting of fairly similar human beings and enjoying comparable environmental circumstances, except that one people is not allowed to benefit from markets while the other is. Those with markets engender far more intelligent solutions in terms of the satisfaction of needs.)

This might suggest that a quest for the "authorship" of intelligence, that the notion of a "mind" or other "entity" encapsulating intelligence may send us in the wrong direction. And that we will learn more about the phenomenon if we focus on the decentralized production of it and the rules of interaction which bring together the countless contributors to intelligence.

Relatedly, there are rules of conduct which will further this beneficial decentralized production, while other rules or more rule-less patterns (compare: consistent protection of property vs. insecure property rights) will cramp intelligent outcomes. The distinguishing stance of classic liberalism is that it favours reliance on rules (protecting individual freedom and benefiting from a vaster market in intelligent solutions) rather than authoritarian ruling (which subjects the community to the power of a necessarily narrower intelligence, the intelligence of the few who command the many).

The insight that by obeying certain impartial rules consistently we can achieve a far richer society than by following the partial decrees of a governing body (representing a very narrow cross-section of individual knowledge and preferences) is so young compared to the history of human beings that it is still perceived by most as counter-intuitive, implausible and not credible - even though most of the advances made by man in the past few centuries are due to a spontaneous order (consider world markets or the progress of science) capable of enhancing and utilizing the benefits of decentralized production of intelligence. Misery (look at Africa) and decline (look at the forceful suspension of free trade after the WW I) put in an appearance when such a spontaneous order is forced to retreat, destroyed or not allowed to develop.

This is what Hayek called the "fatal conceit", the dangerous illusion that large societies can be directed like a tribe by a leader and his visions of immediate expediency, rather than understanding that they can be maintained only by careful cultivation of general rules designed to protect and further the resourcefulness of every member of society.

Kind regards,

IGTU