Strong choice
A strong intelligence like the economy has to make choices about what to do as events unfold. What does choice look like for a strong intelligence?
The familiar picture of choice begins with a prepared space of alternatives. An agent is presented with a menu of options, compares those options according to some preference order, selects the best one, and then acts. Call this “weak choice”.
Weak choice is the standard picture of economic choice. Suppose you are buying ice cream. The weak choice story says that the menu provides a set of alternatives: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and so on. Your preference order ranks these alternatives from most favorite to least favorite. Choice consists in comparing the available options to your ranking and selecting the highest-ranked one. After that, the motor act of pointing at the flavor and saying, “This one, please,” is treated as a trivial downstream consequence. The important work is supposed to have happened inside the chooser, where preference determined selection.
Ironically, the economy itself doesn’t make choices like this. It does not inspect a predefined menu of possible futures, compare them to a stored preference order, and then implement the best one as a motor plan. There is no central economic mind standing outside the system and deciding what the economy should do. The economy chooses by reconfiguring.
Consider price formation. There is no central menu of possible prices that the economy consults and ranks. There are inventories, budgets, expectations, production constraints, transportation bottlenecks, substitute goods, labor costs, debts, contracts, weather events, technological changes, and countless local plans. “The price” emerges as the resolution of these dynamics, a temporarily pattern that stabilizes as the system reconfigures. This means that the set of alternatives, the preference order, and the choice are all simultaneously constructed via the same general process of categorizing ongoing and anticipated events. Call this “strong choice”.
In weak choice, preference explains choice since the action that carries out the preference is assumed to be trivial. In strong choice, preference is one aspect of the choice process: the mind wills what it wants, and the body obeys. In strong choice, the system discovers, through its own dynamics, which configurations are viable, stable, and worth maintaining.
A strong intelligence therefore makes choices by maintaining and transforming its own organization. A set of alternatives emerges naturally because the economy is at all times constructing many quasipatterns: dynamics and trajectories that could be realized into a larger behavior. Thus, the economy is engaged in a process of multiconstruction: it contains many competing dynamics that could be resolved into different global patterns. Competing dynamics become ranked according to processes such as affordance competition, where the absorption of novelty into the system’s cognitive glue biases it toward some patterns rather than others. At the same time, this competition resolves into an outcome, a global pattern constituting perception-cognition-action, i.e., a choice.