nice (long) Hayek article in the Globe

[xatalantax]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/01/11/friedrich_the_great/

Friedrich the Great
Dismissed by critics as a free-market extremist, economist Friedrich Hayek is gaining new attention as a forerunner of cognitive psychology, information theory, even postmodernism. A reintroduction to one of the most important thinkers you've barely heard of.

Comments

[bostonista.livejournal.com]

I have a question about cogsci (cogpschy?). To put it inelegantly and broadly, is the underlying tenet of cogsci that it's all nurture/self-determination over nature/brain chemistry?

Because that would link into Hayek quite nicely.

[atalanta.livejournal.com]

oh no, not at all.
the pairings of nurture with self-determination and nature with brain chemistry are not quite right too.

hayek's ideas about minds were largely about self-organizing systems. most cognitive psychologists (and other mind/brain researchers) do think that the mind/brain is a product of some form of self-organizing system. the main battles are between those that think this organization works mostly on an evolutionary timescale (which leans more toward "nature" since evolved brain structures are present at the birth of each individual) and those that think this organization works mostly on the timescale of individual lives, within individual brains (which leans more toward "nurture"). everyone agrees that there are elements of each kind of organization - you can't reasonably deny either one - so the controversy is over exactly which types of things happen when and how.

so, hayek's ideas are applicable pretty much across the board, though he was mostly concerned with self-organization within single neural systems.

here's the steve pinker quote from the article (i am a bigger pinker fan after discovering that he's a hayek admirer):
"Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals," says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. "Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names `connectionism' and `parallel distributed processing.' Remarkably, Hayek is never cited."

[bostonista.livejournal.com]

Very interesting.