Accounting for Human Activity Through Physics

Accounting for human activity through physics does not require anything more than a switch of mind. Objectivity needs first to be recognized as an epistemological principle that should mostly be ignored when modelling human activity, lest it is decided that methods from physics should not apply to man out of principle. Secondly, it needs to be understood that two dimensions of human activity are specific at coordinating behaviour and should be regarded in earnest as of a physical nature. The notion of field is appropriate when referring to both language and the economy. Language needs to be analyzed as a field allowing "action at distance"; the way it provides the economy with its structuring process needs to be fully acknowledged and explained. After all why should the way mathematics is used to talk about people differ from the way it’s used to talk about planets. (Sneed 1979: xxiii) Aristotle was a thorough-paced scientific man such as we see nowadays, except for this, that he ranged over all knowledge. As a man of scientific instinct, he classed metaphysics, in which I doubt not he included logic, as a matter of course, among the sciences, sciences in our sense, I mean, what he called theoretical sciences, along with Mathematics and Natural Science, natural science embracing what we call the Physical Sciences and the Psychical Sciences, generally. This theoretical science was for him one thing, animated by one spirit and having knowledge of theory as its ultimate end and aim. (Peirce 1992 [1898]: 107) It has now become possible to encompass most aspects of human activity within the scope of theoretical physics. Bringing this task to fruition requires but a slight change of perspective in the way all manners of human activity are currently envisaged. As a way of introduction, a brief portrait of theoretical physics is depicted in such a manner that the expansion of physics into the human realm becomes evident in the process of exposition. Theoretical physics is defined here as a composite model of the workings of nature (ancient Greek physis) whereof the four main components are classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and relativity theory. The reason for distinguishing these four components is double. Firstly, the combining of them is currently not seamless; secondly, it is the rationale underlying the current imperfect articulation of these four components which surprisingly opens physics to its expansion into the human world. Historically and conceptually, quantum mechanics lies in the continuation of classical mechanics: the discovery by Max Planck that there is an irreducible size for units of energy came as a surprise when tackling a specific problem (black-body radiation) using methods otherwise typical of classical mechanics. Thermodynamics and relativity theory are what Einstein aptly characterised as "principle theories" : theories which do not derive from the necessity of accounting for a discrepant experimental fact, but do generate a novel all-encompassing framework within which to recompose a picture wherein existing theories are rearranged with but modest modification. To this extent, thermodynamics and relativity theory are of a nature similar to that of the heliocentric model of Copernicus (Reichenbach 1970 [1942]: 122-123). In an oversimplified view of the two main theories of knowledge pervading theoretical physics, positivism which holds that ideally physics should content itself with measurement of natural phenomena, and philosophy of Nature which holds that ideally physics should be generated on a deductive mode only, classical and quantum mechanics lean convincingly towards the positivist perspective while thermodynamics and relativity theory lean decisively towards a philosophy of Nature standpoint (Meyerson 1995 [1927]: 676-683). 1 "The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results. The example I saw before me was thermodynamics.... The laws of physics are invariant with respect to the Lorentz-transformations .... This is a restricting principle for natural laws, comparable to the restricting principle of the non-existence of the perpetuum mobile which underlies thermodynamics." (Einstein 1949: 53, 57). "Einstein makes the distinction between constructive theories and 'theories of principle'. Einstein cites as an example of the latter, the relativity theory, and the laws of thermodynamics." (Holton 1973: 252). Accounting for human activity through physics As a whole, the integrated body of theoretical physics remains inextricably committed to both measurement and deductive reasoning in equal parts. The encounter of quantum mechanical and relativistic approaches when dealing with gravitation demands an interface where, at a certain scale of energetic exchanges, the curvature of space produced by the proximity of a massive body which accounts for gravitation within the relativistic framework transforms into the dual wave-particle of the graviton which accounts for gravitation within the quantum mechanical model. Hence the necessity for considering that certain thresholds of a quasi-”transition phase” nature exist in the physical world and require appropriate description. The recent "science of complexity" deals especially with such borders between energy strata of the physical world. In the idiom of "complexity", emergent organisation amounts to the particular non-linear ways in which transition occurs on such structural borders within the physical world. The non-linear modelling provides with the "interpreter" translating what takes place on the lower side of the border into what takes place on the upper (Kauffman 1993, 1995, Stein 1989). Such borders between adjacent strata are not to be seen as "hardwired". "Coherent" phenomena provide examples where energy borders are trespassed upwards due to the collective and co-ordinated behaviour of elements belonging individually to a lower level. The maser and laser constitute compelling examples of quantum mechanical behaviour displayed at a macroscopic level where the principles of classical mechanics apply otherwise. Roger Penrose suggested (1989, 1994), after Hameroff and his collaborators, that "consciousness" in human beings is of such a nature, i.e. a beam of coherent energy quanta travelling through the cytoskeleton of microtubules of cells and of neurones in particular. Coherent phenomena no doubt undermine the clearcut picture of a fully stratified world of nature, each stratum displaying its own ways of operating; they do not lead however to the thoroughly "intricate hierarchies" that some have been suggesting. Coherent phenomena irrupt higher on the structural ladder than their natural energy level, in a way not dissimilar to that of a geyser erupting intermittently from the entrails of the earth. No more disruptive of the overall picture are the gravel pits of "chaos" which, independently of scale, remain self-similar through their full depth, producing at every degree of magnification fractal paths of invariant dimension within their phase space, or, the dissipative systems among which, most prominently, living creatures managing through a constant drain of external energy to keep at bay entropy within a restricted space and for a finite time span only (Glansdorff & Prigogine 1971, Prigogine 1980, Nicolis & Prigogine 1977, 1989). The reason why attempts at accounting for human activity within the framework of theoretical physics have failed so far derive from misgivings about physics’ endeavour. Mechanics, especially in its Modern Times beginnings, put a premium on objectivity understood as the staging of experiments within controlled environments where human interference is reduced as much as can be to a minimum. Such were the constraints for making measurement meaningful. The concern for objectivity was so pervasive that in the early stages of quantum mechanics one common interpretation for the puzzling nature of complementarity was indeed that of a breach of objectivity: the human observer, so the story went, "cannot help" interfering with the experimental set-up once the minuscule energy scale where quantum phenomena are taking place has been reached. Although objectivity pertains to the sound methodology of physics, it is independent of its aim of modelling the world of nature. Those who have attempted so far to build a physics of human activity, have failed in their large majority to make such a necessary distinction. They have tried to maintain objectivity at all costs, studying man with the self-contradictory and evidently self-defeating concern of precluding any human interference with the reality being studied. In so doing, they have shown themselves oblivious of the fact that the phenomena they were examining were in no way disturbed by human actors but purposefully generated by them. Resorting to linear algebra or, in earlier versions, to calculus, price has been presented as resulting from the crossing of twin curves standing for supply and for demand similar to mechanical forces such as gravitation or electromagnetic forces. Price results in actuality and as everyone effectively knows from the encounter of buyers and sellers, human actors located within a social hierarchy and intending to either make a profit or to reduce their costs. Such purposeful behaviour is intrinsic to the facts and cannot be dismissed as an extraneous factor likely only to blur proper modelling. Similarly, formal logic has been constructed as an ortho-modular algebra by theoreticians content to regard truth as a simple multivalued variable, and to build models purified from meaning, equated here with extraneous "noise". Theoreticians have this time shown themselves oblivious of the fact that logic is a praxeology, beyond the noncommittal nature of mathematics, the land of empty symbols. Theoreticians should have been made aware of this by the observation that logic provides metamathematics with its tools ("meaning" makes its presence inescapable at the foundational level of mathematics at least). The program of an expansion of theoretical physics to things human requires that additional strata of structuring be considered, imposed, first by the fact that humans speak and listen, second by the fact that 2 The actual explanation does not involve any "disturbance" of the type. In the terms of Niels Bohr, one of the early actors in the history of quantum mechanics: " ... any measurement of the position of an electron by means of some device, like a microscope, making use of high frequency radiation, will, according to the fundamental relations (E = hν and P = hσ), be connected with a momentum exchange between the electron and the measuring agency, which is the greater the more accurate a position measurement is attempted" (Bohr 1949: 208-209). humans have an economy embedded within that speaking nature, implying in particular that goods circulate as to their price. A simplistic example relying on commonplace evidence will be presented first, then a more sophisticated one resulting from the author's own empirical research. The image of an army marching in step recurs in textbook explanations of the behaviour of light. The example may be taken literally and then reversed: indeed an army marching in step can be regarded as a coherent beam of bodies moving collectively and in synchronicity. That such a "beam" displays behaviour that neither the individual bodies are able to display taken individually, nor a similar collection of them when not acting collectively in a coherent manner, is revealed by the fact that a regiment is able through the harmonics produced by the coherent shock waves of its synchronised step to make a bridge crossed by it to collapse. The coherence in behaviour has in this instance triggered a "generalised catastrophic" process which in circumstances where no human beings are involved only natural phenomena mobilising considerable levels of energy are likely to provoke, such as a hurricane or an earthquake. To pursue further with the army example: armies are able to bring levels of destruction which are only partially attributable to the sheer mass of men involved, the moving force lies here in fact essentially in the co-ordinated effort of the participating actors. Now for a somewhat more sophisticated example. Human populations are constrained just as any other living population by the carrying capacity of their environment. In the slash and burn type of agriculture, human dwellings meet at some point of their demographic development the diminishing returns linked to too remote fields having to be tilled. At such point in time, fission of villages occur and part of the population emigrate to colonise more distant land. The fact remains that slash and burn agriculturists lack the reflective skills which would allow them, firstly to become fully aware that they have exhausted the carrying capacity of their environment, and secondly, to take the rational decision of splitting. What is observed in practice (see Jorion 1987) is that in the period that precedes village fission, witchcraft accusations flourish, more especially between chief sons who are the most likely candidates to ultimately either conduct an emigrating party or to take the lead of the part of the population which stays at the original dwelling. Similarly, I have described (Jorion 1982, Delbos & Jorion 1984) effects of economic pressure due to growing families ending up in the fission of European fishing boat crews (mutual accusations of sabotage taking here the role played by witchcraft accusations in Africa). 3 About Huygens’s explanation of refraction, Michael Sobel writes: "Or thinking of an analogy, ranks of marching soldiers crossing a boundary from concrete to sand. " (Sobel 1987: 11). 4 More recently, for Great Britain's 2001 "Science Day ", children of school age managed to trigger a measurable earthquake by jumping up and down for a minute over the whole country. Now about the need for adding new strata to a representation of the physical world due to the special nature of man as a speaking, working and trading animal. Let us think of a particular type of marching army, that of a crusade. The regiment crossing the bridge is being commanded: there is a commander yelling orders and making sure when some start walking out of step, that a co-ordinated step is regained. Commands generate the type of action at a distance, which has been the source of much puzzlement in the history of mechanics. When it comes to human beings, non-local effects due to the usage of language are so familiar that they have ceased to be a source of amazement. Words constitute the main spring for coordinated behaviour in human beings. It may be supposed that a contemporary army only walks in step because of a considerable degree of coercion being exercised onto its members. Let us leave aside here the hypothesis that the crusades which shook the West and the Near-East in the Middle Ages played a role of fissioning larger communities in an environment where carrying capacity was depleted (as described above) and let us concentrate on the fact that crusades involved armies essentially moved by a common belief. (This applies more especially to these spontaneous crusades such as the "children crusade" which ended pathetically in drowning in a process reminiscent of the coherent behaviour of lemmings in their frenzied and often ill-fated race towards an environment where a carrying capacity untapped by their species remains). From a physical point of view, belief systems are nothing more than "words" organised in a particular way and attached to emotional values: words which have grown "natural" connections between them, which we label their "meaning". Words only hold the pervasive powers which is theirs because of the human disposition to "believe" in them, to let them "gain the soul" as the ancient Greeks used to say, or to adhere to their meaning as we would state in modern parlance (Jorion 1990a). Human beings in their capacity of speaking creatures behave to a large extent in the way expected from particles in a field. Of course the field of language has no materiality, the older philosophy would call it "spiritual", but no less than for instance an electro-magnetic field. There is no substrate to language other than the bodies of the speaking humans, in the same way as it was proven at the beginning of the twentieth century that there is no "ether" required to carry the electro-magnetic field (Balibar 1992). To command is to express commands, but commanding as Adam Smith observed, is also "passing commands", i.e. ordering goods (Smith 1976 [1776]: 48). As had been noticed before Smith by Quesnay, commanding goods can only be done through making advances. The type of societies wherein we live happen to be themselves stratified in such a manner that it is the same individuals who are in a position both to command as do army chiefs and command through making advances. Reviving a suggestion made initially by Aristotle I have in several instances (Jorion 1990b, 1992, 1994a & b, 1995, 1998) shown that prices are being formed in a way which reflects fully the social forces which permeate human societies and which the relative status of buyer and seller allows to measure exactly. From the situations of barter that Aristotle had in mind down to the contemporary financial markets, prices are fixed by the objective forces of buyers and sellers and determined in such a manner that the relative status of the social groups involved is automatically reproduced in its status quo ante. The "fields " of words and of prices shape in their own ways human activity in our contemporary human societies. The specificity of these fields needs to be fully investigated and determined as physics would do with other natural forces: a universe of inquiry opens up where the power of words is shown to shape the working activity of the human animal.