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作者：慕容青草 |
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留言时间：2013-05-25 18:37:14 |
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寡言好！
谢谢分享。。。历史是一部极端复杂的动力学演义剧，其数学关系远超过任何前端物理学的公式。。。但是，科学的功利性的成功使得人们常常会忘乎所以，以为那么了不起的科学都不在话下，社会问题还能难住他们吗？所以在对社会的基本动力因素还缺乏基本的了解的情况下，就拿着非常有限的科学工具跃跃欲试想要用科学来解决社会问题，其实是很可笑的。。。。。。。
我每个月都会收到什么计算经济学，计算社会学的会议征文email（搞不清楚我怎么上了他们的名单的）。。。其实，这是很可笑的。。。以我对社会动力的了解来说，我都敢藐视今天世人对社会问题的基本了解。。。在这种情况下，就以为凭着高科技的手段能算出社会的答案？。。。玩笑啊！ |
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作者：寡言 |
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留言时间：2013-05-25 18:04:42 |
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维金人由于人口压力南侵犯过很多罪行，这是事实。
另一方面，某些北欧国家（冰岛，挪威)和瑞士一些地区从未有过奴隶制度和农奴制度，这又是历史的另一方面。
一个原因可能是北欧养奴隶是很不合算的事情。 我不太清楚瑞士为什么没有奴隶制度或农奴制度，也许也和贫瘠环境有关。总之，这些地区原始社会影响很深，原始民主传统也比较强。
从未失去自由者的后代和“从未享受自由”者的后代当然有全然不同的意识。即使同样的词汇, 比如“自由”在两者身上也有全然不同的意义。一个具有过去时态，现在时态，将来时态。一个只具有将来时代，还可能是将来虚拟时态。
对不起， 请删掉上面乱码贴， 谢谢。 |
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作者：慕容青草 |
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留言时间：2013-05-25 07:07:22 |
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最近因有人建议，我对那篇“Chaotic order --- The Economic Relativity”的引言进行了修改，修改的过程中发现了本文所讨论的问题。下面是我的“Chaotic order --- The Economic Relativity”一文的新的引言，其中有对本文所讨论的问题的更详细的讨论：
For the past decades there have been many writings on the topic of chaos and order, and thus it is necessary for me to clarify the meaning of chaotic order in this context before any further discussion. Around 30 years ago when I took the "Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics" course, the first class was about the Baker's transformation. Although much mathematical complexity has been attached to this issue as the name itself might attest, the so called Baker's transformation has a simple and clear practical background from our daily life. When a Baker works on a dough in a traditional handy way, after a few times of repeated rolling (stretching) and folding, the flour of the dough would be irreversibly very well self-mixed [1]. A good indication of this is that if he add a teaspoon of salt at one spot of the dough at the very beginning, after quite a limited number of above mentioned operations, the whole dough would become equally salty everywhere. Here what is relevant to the sense of chaos in everyday life is the disorder or randomness in the sense that after a few handy operations the distribution of salt completely loses its initially recognizable spatial orderliness. But what draws special interests of scientists about this chaotic issue is the fact that it only takes very limited (instead of unlimited as might be previously conceived a few centuries ago) number of well defined operations to make an ordered system into a completely disordered system, which they call as deterministic chaos. To add a little more scientifically salty flavor to this deterministic chaos, we might want to point out that as we could not predict the exact position of each salt particulate in a dough during the baker's operation, in general, deterministic chaos is referring to processes that are the deterministically generated but with unpredictable details. Furthermore, although the final salty equilibrium of the dough is obviously foreseeable, in general, the end state of a nonlinear dynamic system that exhibits some chaotic behavior could be very sensitive to the initial condition and thus unpredictable.
Almost thirty years passed, the writing of this article brought me back to the subject of deterministic chaos again. While it might sound much closer to everyday life (especially to nominally random and unpredictable economic events all over the world) than some other mind changing scientific discoveries fashioned in last century, such as relativity and quantum physics, chaos theory seems still very much remain as a fancy ivory decoration in scientist possessions. Even though chaos theory does unarguably provide valuable insights into the dynamics of Nature, after countless number of new literatures have been added to those familiar jargons such as strange attractor, bifurcation, fractal and so on [2], it is somehow a disappointment that not much practical fruits have been reaped from this golden tree [3 and 4] .
This practical futility of chaos theory brings up an interesting philosophical issue. As Wittgenstein stated [5], "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language. " The philosophical issue behind this practical futility of chaos theory is indeed a language issue in the first place; and thus we might first look into this issue from its language perspective.
Regardless its sophisticated academic meaning, the strict scientific term chaos obviously has its origin from the casual usage of chaos in our daily life. The fundamental reason that people did not choose harmony or order or anything else but choose chaos instead as it is used in chaos theory is clearly related to the ordinary meaning of the word. More specifically, the reason that makes scientists believe that they could help to solve social issues including financial or more general economic problems clearly has its linguistic cause: one would describe social issues as chaotic for its highly disorderliness and unpredictability, without the need to know anything about chaos theory. But on the other hand, in their scientific contexts, professional scientists have been constructing the so called chaos theory by using the word chaos in a much narrower sense with some quite strict restrictions which might involve some mathematical measurement.
Now we see the clash: the temptation of applying chaos theory to solve complicated real life problems and the limited applicability of the theory itself. The temptation is largely due to the linguistic implication that this (ordinary) chaos is that (scientific) chaos; but whenever people wants to apply the theory to real life issues, they would clash with the incompatibility between the real life chaos and their theoretical chaos with some strict mathematical specification. Nonetheless, the temptation is extremely high, not only because so many great names of scientists have been attached to the theory, but also because of the astonishing mathematical beauty that has been displayed from the works that could be titled as chaos theory. As a result of this great temptation, we have witnessed a very interesting phenomenon that people have spent decades not for applying the chaos theory to solve problems but for finding problems that could be a good fit for the chaos theory. However, the intrinsic linguistic mismatch between the real life chaos and the scientifically canonized chaos has led to a huge disappointment so far for people who have been struggling to bring up some practical fruits of theory.
If we have enough faith in the unity of truth, then we might need to believe that the beauty we have seen so far from chaos theory should be a reflection of something deep in the general nonlinear world, which warrants some continuous efforts on bridging the theoretical beauty with everyday life reality. But on the other hand, we should also take the hitherto practical futility of chaos theory and the knowledge about the related linguistic clash discussed above as an alert that we might not have a good enough understanding about what is behind the word chaos for its most fundamental meaning as perceived by human beings throughout the history.
As a matter of fact, since the pioneer work of Edward Lorenz [6] on butterfly effect, the philosophical impact of the chaos theory upon human civilization has much exceeded its mathematical advantages for practical problems. The general nonlinear nature of this world and its long term unpredictability due to its sensitivity upon initial conditions has become a common knowledge even for high school students. This common knowledge, like relativity and quantum physics, has fundamentally altered the world view of average people, and is an important reason for many to stop choosing the reductionism, which was once the norm in western philosophy, as the only way of thinking. Similarly, people would no longer consider the stochastic process as the only reason for the disorderliness in nature.
Nevertheless, philosophy and specific sciences are functioning in quite different ways. Philosophy changes the way of thinking, no matter for grand ontological questions or for detailed personal life management concerns. Therefore, even though throughout history people have witnessed countless cases when profound philosophical thinking could bring up direct solutions to practical problems, in general, philosophy aims to directing the thinking in a more efficient and profound way instead of laying out the specific protocols to get things done. But on the contrary, verifiable protocols for verifiable outcome are generally the basic requirement of any specific science, including the science of applying the mathematical utility of chaos theory to solve social or natural problems.
Moreover, even though philosophy could also be characterized for the preciseness and subtlety in its conceptual expressions, compared to the utilitarian goals of specific sciences, philosophy is more interested in acquiring profundity and extensiveness about the nature of being(s). This is indeed where the true power of philosophy lies and this is why and how the development of specific sciences could get help from philosophy. In this sense philosophy is more realistic than sciences since it could always reach certain type of goals while sciences, as we have witnessed in the case of chaos theory, might be over idealistic when constructing the theory but lack of applicability in reality.
The difficulty of making practical use of chaos theory due to the linguistic clash between ordinary meaning of chaos and the professional scientific term of deterministic chaos could tell that we might need deeper and wider understanding about the real life chaotic issues before we could more efficiently bring chaos theory to reality, which further suggests more philosophical thinking on the side of real life problems instead of the side of chaos theory.
On the other hand, even though persistence on theoretical endeavor might bring up great achievement in the future, we should never confuse ourselves by losing our vision on the end value of any theoretical endeavor: the real world issues. While the knowledge of scientifically identified deterministic chaos might lead to some potential solutions for economic problems, we should never forget that the real world common sense chaos is what makes all those theoretical endeavor meaningful.
For all the reasons discussed hitherto, the goal of this writing would not be another scientific discourse on how to apply chaos theory to economic events; instead this writing would be a writing to demonstrate some dynamic nature behind the real life economic phenomena by philosophizing through some logic involved in economic systems. In other words, this writing is aiming at helping solving real life economic issues instead of providing more thoughts of how to develop chaos theory. While I do believe in the long run a better understanding of the general chaotic phenomenon would definitely benefit the effort of applying the chaos theory to real problems, this writing itself is not coupled with any chaos theory conclusion.
Correspondently, hereafter in this writing, the term chaos or its adjective version chaotic would be used in its most common sense, or we may say in its phenomenological sense, without regard to its scientific specification or dynamic reasons according to the chaos theory. For further clarity, when it comes to economy, the word chaos would be referring to the status (phenomenon) that the intentions, products or consequences of economic activities of different parties, sectors, or areas are not in synch with each other. In this sense, we might say the economy is in chaos when the general market demand could not be satisfied by the general supply, or the general supply could not be consumed by the general demand, and when there are enormous waste of human and material resources as a result of daily activities in the economic system, or when many people could not have a chance to work for living. As a synonym to chaos, economic disorder might also be used in the text for the same purpose, and the opposite to the chaos or disorder might be described as order in the text.
One of the key parameters behind the degree of economic disorder and order is what we called as interest, collective interest or personal interest. The pursuit of interest could set the local economy into order and the conflict of interests might drive the global economy into chaos. This is the economic relativity discussed in this writing and the adjectives local and global in this context are of relative sense as well. This economic relativity determines that the meaning of a good economy would be very relative when judged from different social positions and domains. For this very reason, a general solution to the question like "When the economy would be good?" would not be intended to answer by this writing, not only because the idea of getting a literal answer for such question is too much idealistic for any academic writing for today (since for otherwise we would not have to face the global economic crises that we are still facing to this moment given that so many Nobel prize winning economists as well as professional bankers and politicians are trying to resolve the issue), but also because that would be against the central theme of this writing: economic relativity.
Although the main interest of this writing is to philosophize the dynamics behind the real world economy in a way similar to the methodological nominalism postulated by Karl Popper [7], it is understood that a relatively clear definition could be helpful for readers to understand the discourse in the text. Therefore, herein I would lay out the meaning of a good economy to an individual as the capacity to access and dispose resources (including material and human resources). Accordingly if everyone in a society could enjoy a good capacity to access and dispose resources then the people in that society are enjoy a good societal economy.
The chapter structure is therefore as follows.
Section 2, "Chaotic Order of Economy" introduces and discusses the fundamental dynamics behind the economic relativity. It is further divided into four subsections: "Interest based economic relativity" in which economic relativity is introduced and discussed in terms of the idea of conflicted interests; "Economic wellbeing and fairness" in which the relationship between economic wellbeing and fairness is discussed; "Economic relativity examples" in which the example of Chinese economic development and Eurozone crisis issue are discussed to demonstrate the universality of economic relativity; and "The challenge" in which the ethic and economic challenges brought up by economic relativity is discussed. This is followed by Section 3, "A myth" in which a common linear way thinking that might mislead people to ignore the economic relativity is criticized. And finally the Section 4 concludes the whole writing by reiterating the importance of philosophical thinking in dealing with the economic challenges we are facing today globally.
[1] Chaotic Dynamics: An Introduction Based on Classical Mechanics By Tamás Tél, Márton Gruiz, Cambridge University Press, 2006
[2] The Impact of Chaos on Science and Society, by Grebogi, Celso, Yorke, James A, United Nations University Press, 1997
[3] Chaos Theory and its Application, by Haim H. Bau and Yochanan Shachrnurove, December 2003. University of Pennsylvania: Center for Analytical Research in Economics and the Social Sciences Working Paper. URL: http://www.econ.upenn.edu/Centers/CARESS/02-02.pdf 12/03.
[4] Chaos Theory and its Importance and Applications in Economics, by Levent Baykan Bayar, 2005. T.C. Marmara University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Economics. URL: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.114.6606&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[5] Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, § 109
[6] Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, by Lorenz, Edward N. (March 1963). Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (2): 130–141
[7] The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Raimund Popper, Routledge, 1945 |
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作者：慕容青草 |
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留言时间：2013-05-24 17:56:39 |
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寡言好！
谢谢评论。。。
语言对包括哲学在内的所有文化的影响首先是在心理的层次上然后是社会的层次然后反映在不同形式的文化上。。。。。。
北欧的文化确实是有它的特点。。。可能与语言有关，也可能与历史的轨迹有关。。。以前没有怎么太注意北欧的历史。。。直到得知今天美国的陪审团制度是由Viking传给英国然后由英国清教徒带到美国的才开始让我对北欧的文化稍微注意起来。。。曾经思考过他们的简单或许就是他们文化优势。。。。。。另外当初Viking社会的一个特定是男人出外杀戮抢劫女人在家操持一切，每逢收割时男人回家帮忙，所以在内女人的权力很大，这种男女相对平等的历史可能也是今天北欧女人权力较大的一个原因。。。不确定芬兰是否也是当年的Viking。。。只知道他们今天70%的政府高官好象都是女的。。。。。 |
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作者：寡言 |
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留言时间：2013-05-24 13:45:22 |
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好， 顶一下。
语言一旦被说出来就变成一种多少独立的东西，影响人们的行为。更重要的是，不仅引导人们的行为，而且有种极具“煽动性”的魔力诱惑人去尝试。
同样，腐败，革命等也如此，一旦在历史的地平线上出现，就很难再扭转。从这个意义，“天真”是一种无法复回的状态。人有重覆祖辈行为的趋势。
在这个意义上，冰岛，挪威，芬兰等国的体制是无法“学习”的。用我们常用的话说，那些国家“傻瓜”太多，而他们的体制有赖这种“傻气”。 |
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