The economy's body is people

An intelligence requires an embodiment, and unconventional intelligences are often hard to recognize because they have unconventional embodiments. Insofar as intelligence is the manipulation of a body to achieve a goal, then recognizing both the existence and goals of an unconventional intelligence requires that we develop a much more general concept of what a body is than is usually required for daily life.

The economy is one example of an unconventional intelligence, so we need to know what its body is. The human body is the connected system of autonomous parts whose tendencies are manipulated by the cognitive glue to achieve high-level goals. In the economy, those autonomous parts are the human beings who participate in the economy. Therefore, humans—when connected through the price system—are the body of the economy. This is an example of an unconventional embodiment.

In active inference, a body is the system that does the data collection for perception and the moving for action. E.g., in a human, the body is the system of eyes and ears that take in data, and the system of limbs that swing and reach and grasp and so on. Perception consists of the transformation of sense data into interoceptive signals that update the expectations of the internal model, and action consists of the resulting bodily transformations to fulfill the updated plan or comply with the expectations of the internal model as implied by the transformations of sense data into interoceptive signals. According to this view, the body is the material over which interoceptive signals are constructed and transmitted.

In the economy, the interoceptive signals are the price signals. Price signals are constructed and transmitted thorugh the interactions between people. This makes humans the material over which the interoceptive signals of the economy are constructed and transmitted, meaning that people are the body of the economy. It is also people who take in the data that is transformed into price signals through their behavior, and it is people’s behavior that is updated by updated price signals. Again, people are the body of the economy.

Unconventional embodiments such as a collection of human beings connected by price signals challenges ordinary conceptions of what a body is. For example, we ordinarly think of a body as being a phsyically connected, continuous piece, but people in the economy are only connected by price signals—they don’t physically touch each other. Humans in the economy also don’t conceive of themselves as the parts of a body—they just do whatever they want, and because their plans depend so much on price signals, doing what they want ends up contributing to the plans of the economy itself. People are also not the puppets of the economy: the economy depends on their autonomous behavior to provide data to update the price signals, so the economy’s body is autonomous and not in any sense the slave of the economy, instead merely guided by the signals provided by the economy. Many more suppositions about bodies are probably falsified by the example of humans as the economy’s body.