Spartan_Warrior wrote:Praxeology requires "that humans engage in purposeful behavior, as opposed to reflexive behavior like sneezing and inanimate behavior."
brute thinks there's a subtle difference in how Mises uses "rational" in Human Action to define Praxeoloy. this is what trips up haters that don't read further than the word "rational", like Dragline, and they keep bringing up the Homo Economicus strawman ("HUMANS ARE NOT RATIONAL ZOMG").
if Spartan_Warrior reads Human Action, he'll discover that Mises uses a very pragmatic approach to define rational. it goes something like this:
- given a human in a certain situation, with X different ways of action, the human chooses exactly 1 type of action
- therefore, something about that action must have struck the human as preferable
- were someone to take that action away in the same situation, the human would have a next-best favorite, and so on
- therefore, for any given human in any given situation, it can be said that there's an "internal ordinal preference scale", i.e. favorite option is 1, second favorite is 2, ..
- Mises is big on this scale being inconvertible and incomparable between humans. it's not "Steak has 10 utils and pork has 5 utils", it's "steak first, then pork". and it's meaningless to say something like "brute likes steak better than Spartan_Warrior likes his grandmother". these things cannot be intrinsically compared, as they exist in different situations (brute doesn't have the option to like Spartan_Warrior's grandmother like a grandson).
- for Mises, money and free-market prices are therefore the only option to regulate how much humans want certain things. if brute is willing to pay $10 for the steak, but Spartan_Warrior is not, then brute "likes it more", in effect.
none of these observations ("humans seem to pick SOMETHING, so there has to be some kind of preference scale") break down in the face of determinism. in fact, even a thoroughly deterministic computer program could be said to have an ordinal internal scale, hard coded by its programmer. the only requirement for these observations to be valid is that the subject is somehow an "agent".
Mises only writes about humans in Human Action (maybe his sequel, Animal Action, would've been a huge hit!). but brute doesn't see a reason not to apply these concepts to animals or robots or AI, if they seem to fit.
for brute, reading Human Action was a similar revelation to reading ERE (only it came before ERE for him). suddenly, a veil was lifted, and brute understood humans much better. so much better, indeed, that it was not merely a quantitative difference, but a qualitative one. brute could now see humans (and animals) as preference-resource-matching-automatons. and not in a derogatory way, but in a loving way. ever since then, brute has much better empathy for humans and their actions: no matter what action a human takes, at that moment, it seemed like the best option. by definition, as otherwise, he'd have taken a different action.
edit:
for clarification maybe, a counter example. brute doesn't remember if Mises actually gives this in Human Action, but that might be where brute got it from.
for Mises, "rational" means that given a human desires X, and believes that action A will lead him to X, the human will take action A. this is not an assumption, it's a derivation - if the human picked another action B that led to Y, then the human obviously either wanted Y more than X, or was misinformed about the result of actions A and B.
what would it mean to be irrational, then? it would mean that a human desires X, and knows action A would take him to X, but decides to take action B that leads him away from X. say, a human desires chocolate, and has the option to buy a chocolate bar or a fruit bar. knowing that chocolate bars contain chocolate and fruit bars contain fruit, the human then chooses the fruit bar. this doesn't mean the human is acting irrationally, it means the original description of the setup was incorrect. obviously, the human desired fruit more than chocolate.
there is also no Descartes' Error (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error) here: Mises doesn't say that the human "really" wanted chocolate but saner heads prevailed and he decided to go for what he believed was the healthy option. Mises treats the human as a black box. if the human picked fruit, the human wanted fruit.
it is therefore by definition impossible for humans to be irrational as described by Mises, because he defines it differently than most humans think about it. this is because most humans make Descartes' Error, or have some kind of thinking/emotions duality in their theories of mind, where "rational" means thinking in numbers and liking money, whereas going with the flow and taking a year off and eating chocolate are "irrational".
brute strongly sides with Mises on this.