+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html)
+--- Forum: General Discussion (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-48.html)
+--- Thread: Economics Should Return to its Roots (/thread-425.html)
Economics Should Return to its Roots - C C - Dec 30, 2014
http://theyoungsocrates.com/2014/12/08/economics-returning-to-its-roots/
EXCERPT: Economics explains how people interact within markets to accomplish certain goals. People; not robots. And people are creatures with desires, animalistic urges that guide them into making conscious – but also unconscious – decisions. That sets them apart from robots, which act solely upon formal rules (If A, then B, etc.). [...] humans are biological creatures who (might) have got a free will, an observation which makes their actions undetermined and therefore unable to captured in terms of laws.
[...] Don’t we never ‘just want’ to go out, ‘just want’ to buy a new television, ‘just want’ to go on holiday? Yes we do: it seems that – sometimes – we just happen to want things: we don’t know why, we don’t have explicit motives for our desires. [...] how on earth could economists know – let alone capture these actions in laws? That’s only possible if you make assumptions: very limiting assumptions.
Rational choice theory is a framework used within economics to better understand social and economic behavior by means formal modeling. But if this sense of understanding – that is possible only through formalizing humans’ behavior – is only possible by treating humans like robots, what then is, on a conceptual level, the difference between economics and artificial intelligence...