Economics, at its best, looks past labels and asks what actually happens: what causes what, which assumptions are being smuggled in, and whether a model describes reality or merely rearranges its own premises.

Terms like “bonds,” “notes,” “bills,” and “borrowing” mean something entirely different when applied to the private sector vs. a Monetarily Sovereign government. That this is not well understood by the public or even by economists is one of the great failings of that would-be science.

In science, calling something “entanglement,” “gravity,” or “consciousness” does not tell us what it is. It only tells us what category we have placed it in.

Everything we learn, we learn by analogy. Visualize an atom. You see something that’s like a miniature solar system. Visualize magnetism. You visualize something pulling on something, like a rubber band. And space-time is like a rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the middle. Those are your analogies for learning, but they are wrong.

An atom is not a bunch of point particles circling a nucleus like a solar system, nor does magnetism attract. It is more like a grid with numbers at each crossing, telling the grid what to do. Except, it’s not like that either.

Mathematics may be the greatest analogy ever invented. It gives us structures that can match observed behavior with astonishing precision. But a successful mathematical description is not necessarily reality itself.

It may be more like a map that predicts every turn while remaining silent about what the landscape actually is. Nature does not follow equations. Nature behaves. We invent equations that imitate that behavior.

The danger comes when prediction is mistaken for explanation. If an equation tells us exactly what entangled particles will do, physics may congratulate itself for having solved the problem. Yet the equation still may not tell us why entanglement exists, what physical reality produces it, or what the equations are equations of.

The oft-quoted term, “Shut up and calculate,” meaning “don’t worry about ‘why’ or even ‘how’; just determine ‘what’,” may be useful advice for getting results, but it becomes destructive when it is treated as the limit of legitimate curiosity.

Suppose we could perceive spacetime and gravity directly. Would spacetime appear smooth, granular, turbulent, knotted, flashing, layered, or alive with patterns invisible to us? Would gravity behave differently within an atom than between stars? Would it fragment near concentrations of energy? Would it respond to stimuli?

These questions sound speculative only because our present language and senses are so limited. They are attempts to imagine the hidden reality beneath our mathematical summaries.

The hardest question in physics is not “what?” or “how?” but “why?” Even discovering what spacetime looks like would not answer why it looks that way. If it consists of microscopic knots, why knots? If the knots minimize energy, why that form of energy? If some deeper field produces spacetime, why does that field exist and behave as it does?

Every answer generates another meaningful “why.” Knowledge may not be a mine with a bottom. It may be an endlessly branching structure in which every explanation becomes the premise of a deeper “why?” question.

This suggests a boundary more profound than ordinary ignorance. There are things we do not know but could learn. There also may be things our minds are not built to understand.

A dog cannot understand calculus, not because nobody has explained it clearly enough, but because the dog lacks the mental architecture in which calculus could exist. Human beings may stand in the same relationship to some aspects of reality.

Entanglement may be our first clear encounter with that possibility. We know what it does with extraordinary precision. We can calculate correlations and verify them experimentally. But every familiar analogy fails. No picture drawn from ordinary space, objects, signals, or causes seems capable of containing the phenomenon without distortion.

Perhaps entanglement is not merely difficult. Perhaps it lies beyond the range of concepts the human brain evolved to represent.

I wrote a short story titled, “The Meaning of Awareness,” that turns on one’s ability to visualize the phrase. “I know that you know.” Then, another level, “I know that you know that I know.” Then another level, “I know, that you know, that I know, that you know.”

The challenge was for the narrator to see how many levels he could visualize.

In the climactic paragraph, he says:

“Then in one all-consuming burst, I discard my fear, and organizing my structure, I exert my every mental effort. “I know, that you know, that I know, that you know, that I know, that you know . . .” Yes. There. I saw it. Only for a second, but I did see it. From here I see infinity. Triumph. I have attained level six. Yet in my triumph I feel despair, for I see now that I never shall understand level seven. It is beyond my aptitude.”

And then, a voice says,

“Then know this: There are those who have achieved level one hundred.”

“No,” I cry. “That cannot be. One hundred. What glories can such incredible creatures know? What is their universe?”

“They know beyond an infinity of infinities. They see all the multitude of dimensions. They visualize this cosmos and all the others beside it. They understand time before the beginning and time after the end.”

The human mind has limits It eventually loses its ability to hold the nested structure as a whole. The protagonist barely and briefly manages six levels, then learns that another entity can visualize one hundred. His limitation does not doom him to stupidity. It dooms him to ignorance. It dooms him to being human.

If an artificial intelligence can visualize, one eventually might visualize a thousand levels. We cannot imagine what knowing this would be like.

Mathematics has no such difficulty visualizing. A formula can represent one hundred, one thousand, or a million recursive levels with ease. The structure can be defined perfectly even though no human ever can visualize it. This separates mathematical description from human understanding.

Mathematics may continue far beyond the point at which intuition collapses. We may know that something exists, prove how it behaves, and still remain unable to conceive what that existence is like.

The same may be true of dimensions, infinities, and the ultimate structure of reality. Georg Cantor showed that infinity is not a single final vastness. There are larger infinities beyond smaller ones, and infinitely larger ones beyond those.

The unknown may possess a similar architecture. There may be an infinite universe of questions within human conceptual reach and an even larger infinity beyond it—followed by an infinite succession of still greater conceptual worlds.

Other creatures in the universe may be greater than we are. A different biological intelligence, or perhaps a future artificial intelligence, might hold structures that collapse inside a human mind.

Such a being would not merely calculate faster or remember more facts. It might perceive relationships that do not exist for us as conceivable objects. What we call paradox might appear to it as plainly as a circle appears to us.

But even that intelligence may encounter its own wall. Beyond its “hundred levels” may lie an entity capable of ten thousand. Beyond every conceptual horizon may be another horizon inaccessible to the mind below it.

Intelligence, then, would not be a division between those who understand and those who do not. It would be an endless hierarchy of what each kind of mind is capable of understanding.

Once you stop being able to answer, or even ask, the next meaningful “why,” you have reached the boundary of your conceptual world. The universe may continue beyond it, but your understanding does not. That boundary is not the edge of reality. It is only the edge of the mind doing the asking.

There may be an entire universe on the other side of the “WHY?” wall, and we are not yet tall enough to see over it. Mathematics may tell us that the universe is there. It may describe its outlines and predict its effects. But description is not vision, calculation is not comprehension, and “what” is not “why.”

The haunting possibility is not merely that there are truths we do not yet know. It is that there may be truths which are perfectly coherent, perfectly lawful, and perfectly describable, but which no human mind ever can understand.

We cannot imagine what we cannot imagine.

Rodger Malcolm  Mitchell

This sign should hang in every national politician’s office, in every economics classroom, and above every radio, TV ad print reporter’s desk

For the sake of our nation, please make copies of this and send them to everyone you can think of. 

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Sure, Vlad, old buddy. I inherited a great economy and screwed it up with tariffs; I made inflation worse. I fired government workers who provide service to the public; I’ve deported millions of hard-working, honest families; I fired our generals and hired an incompetent TV boob to run the military; I’ve got ICE running roughshod over people’s rights; I have an idiot running healthcare; A wrestling idiot runs education; I insult all our allies so no one will help us when we need it; American kids are dying because I started a stupid war and now the Houthis are making it worse. And frankly, I have no idea what the hell am doing except I personally am stealing billions. But I’ll get around all that by claiming the other guys are Communists.”

“Don, old pal, that’s a great ide . . . hey, wait a minute. Communists?

A Brief Dialogue on Life, Consciousness, Emotion, and Artificial Intelligence
The Principle of Recursive History 
[(History ⊗ Stimulus) → Response] = New History

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
— John Muir. 

In physics, nothing is truly isolated. Gravity reaches infinitely far. Every charged particle participates in electromagnetic fields. You are the culmination of the entire history of the universe, and every second, every stimulus and response adds to that history.

The atoms in your fingernail began in the “Big Bang.” They then were forged in ancient stars. The Earth formed from stellar debris. The Sun ignited. Life evolved. Your ancestors lived. You were born. Your finger moved.

If there was a beginning—and that is a very big “if”—it almost certainly began as one thing, which, for convenience, we’ll simply call “the Beginning.” Whatever existed immediately afterward would be the progeny of that Beginning. Through countless transformations, those primordial constituents became atoms, stars, galaxies, planets, life, and ultimately you and me and all else of existence.

In that sense, every entity in the universe would have descended from one common ancestor. We all are kin.

Every event became part of the history that produced your present response — the history that produced you. Every action creates a response that carries its history of the universe into the future. History is the present state descended from the past.

Quantum field theory describes particles as excitations of fields that permeate space. Even in classical mechanics, every object has a history of interactions that determines its current state. Move your finger and every star in the cosmos moves — and the reverse is true: Every action affects you, though in the most minute way.

You are just the latest step in the Stimulus —> Response chain that began when time began. In mathematical notation: [(History ⊗ Stimulus) → Response] = New History  [⊗ = an unspecified interaction operator.]

Every entity possesses a history. Every entity encounters stimuli. Every entity responds according to its own architecture. Every response modifies that entity’s history.

The new history then becomes the starting point for the next response. This is true of a rock, a bacterium, a wasp, a dog, and a human being, and an artificial intelligence (AI) device.

This simple recursive principle is proposed as a candidate universal law governing adaptive systems. The differences between a rock, a bacterium, a wasp, a dog, a human being, and an artificial intelligence are not differences in the chain, the fundamental process.

They are differences in architecture, complexity, memory, and the range of possible responses. The chain principle itself remains unchanged even down to the quantum level

The Conventional View
Most discussions of life begin by assuming that consciousness, emotion, and subjective experience are unique human phenomena requiring unique explanations, and identify life vs. non-life.

Humans feel and have subjective experiences. Artificial Intelligence machines merely compute. Humans are conscious. Computers are not. Therefore, humans are alive and computers are not.

The distinction appears obvious. But perhaps we have begun at the wrong end of the problem. Instead of asking, “What is consciousness?” or subjective experiences, perhaps we should ask, “What is every entity doing?”

Does having emotions, subjective experiences, inner feeling qualia — or the lack thereof — denote living consciousness?

A Socratic Dialogue
Question: What are emotions? The conventional answer is that emotions are internal, subjective feelings that produce responses.

Suppose we reverse the question. What if emotions simply are just one class of responses?

Objection: But emotions are subjective experiences.

Response: What exactly is a subjective experience? If someone insults me, what physically happens? A stimulus,–the insult– arrives. My history assigns significance to that stimulus. A response occurs. My history now changes to include that stimulus and response.

Where, in that chain, is any additional physical entity called “subjective experience”?

Objection: But surely you feel anger.
Response: What physical mechanism distinguishes “feeling anger” from the history-dependent response itself? If no distinguishable mechanism exists, have we explained anything? Or have we merely introduced another name?

“Pavlov’s infant.” Imagine that very time an infant’s mother gently hums, she simultaneously sticks the child with a pin. Eventually the humming alone, which one ordinarily might expect to produce calmness, instead produces distress.

Nothing mysterious has entered the child. History has modified future responses. Learning has occurred. There is no special, unique substance called “emotion.” There only is response.

Question: Isn’t that merely conditioning?

Response: Yes. Now remove the word “merely.” Suppose every adaptive response arises through this same recursive process.
Then the governing principle becomes: [(History ⊗ Stimulus) → Response] = New History (where ⊗ indicates “interacts with.”)

Every stimulus creates response(s). Every response creates new history. Every new history changes future responses.

Are Emotions Special?
Initially one might say: Emotions are history-dependent responses. But rather than grant emotion a privileged position, we claim a more general principle: Every response is history-dependent. Emotion is simply one family of responses among countless others.

Artificial Intelligence
Suppose we build a machine that learns from experience, changes priorities, remembers relationships, develops preferences,
avoids previous failures, seeks previous successes, and adapts continuously.

Actually, those features already exist in our LLMs (Large Language Models). Depending on the machine’s history and latest stimulus, the machine might write, “I feel sad,” or “That makes me happy.”

Someone objects: “Those aren’t real emotions. The machine has been programed to respond that way. It doesn’t really feel happy.”

But, of course, history has programmed humans to respond to stimuli, the ways we do. What observable mechanism distinguishes real emotion from this system?

Something will have changed in the machine — some physical difference — that has caused it to write “I feel sad” or “That makes me happy.”

And whether we name that physical change “emotion” or give it a nonsense word like “ewpriwe9[ru]” does not affect what has happened.

When you receive certain stimuli that produce changes in you, that are called emotions. The machine has changes that can be called “emotions,” too, or if you prefer “ewpriwe9[ru].”

Whatever one calls them, they are equally real. They are changes for which we arbitrarily have given names.

Einstein’s Elevator
Einstein asked whether acceleration and gravity could always be distinguished. Locally, they cannot. If two phenomena produce identical observable consequences, the burden shifts to anyone claiming they remain fundamentally different.

The same reasoning applies here. If no experiment distinguishes “real feeling” from a complete history-dependent response system. What explanatory work remains for insisting one is genuine while the other is merely simulated?

Braaahhha

I have a unique history. Suppose I, a human, respond to an insult with increased anger and higher blood pressure. We would call that an emotion.

Suppose you, another human with a different history, respond to the same insult by laughing and lower blood pressure. Is your response any less real if it’s different from mine?

Suppose an infant responds to the insult of a pinprick by crying, urinating in its diaper, and seeking comfort. Is that emotion?

Suppose an octopus responds to a rival by instantly changing its skin color. Is the octopus displaying real emotion?

If you own a cat, you have had this experience: The cat is resting quietly; then for no apparent reason, it leaps up and dashes out of the room. The cat is an alien creature. Did it just experience an emotion, and if so, what emotion?

Was it a mysterious, indescribable inner subjective feeling? Or was it all just another example of [(History ⊗ Stimulus) → Response] = New History in the cat?

Suppose an artificial intelligence, with its own unique history, responds to a command by suddenly entering a persistent computational state, sounding a high-pitched screech, and displaying: “Braaahhha” on its screen.

Is that emotion? Is that real emotion? Where, exactly, do we draw the boundary between “real” emotion and merely a different way of responding?

That internal state alters its history, which affects some future responses. Why then should one implementation be called “real emotion” while another is dismissed as simulation? The architecture differs. The recursive principle does not.

We don’t claim that AI experiences human feelings. We question whether “human-like feelings” are the only standard by which emotions and life can be recognized.

The Search for a Boundary
Science has often searched for dividing lines. Life versus non-life. Reality vs. illusion. Real feeling versus simulation.
These searches tacitly assume a distinction that nature never created.

Every entity has a history. Every entity encounters stimuli. Every entity responds to stimuli according to its history and architecture. Every response creates new history. An ongoing cycle with no known beginning and no known end..

What differs is not the governing principle but the richness of the histories, the architectures, and the available responses. Trying to discover the precise point where non-life suddenly becomes life, or where unconscious matter suddenly becomes conscious, may be asking the wrong question.

There may be no new principle introduced. There may simply be increasingly elaborate implementations of the same recursive process.

Describe being “alive.” Now, using those same words, is your heart alive? Your bones? Your blood? Your memory?  Your skin?

The Challenge
This principle proposes a different starting point. Rather than introducing consciousness, emotion, or subjective experience as fundamental entities, it asks whether they emerge naturally from one recursive law:
[(History ⊗ Stimulus) → Response] = New History

Nowhere do you find “qualia” or “subjective” or “inner feelings.” These terms are not science. They are quasi- religious, intuitive attempts to explain physical phenomena. The premise is: “It must exist because I feel it, though I can’t explain exactly what it is. or where it is” And that premise has remained unchanged for thousands of years, felt, unexplained, believed.

If critics believe some physical essential is still missing, they should identify the missing mechanism. If they cannot, then perhaps the recursive history principle is explaining consciousness and subjectiveness by placing those intuitions within a more general physical law governing every entity.

We arbitrarily might give things we don’t understand names like, “consciousness,” “subjective feelings, “qualia” or something else, but our naming process does not change them. If they exist in multiple entities, then they have different histories.

If they exist only in humans, that should make it easier to identify them, physically.  If they exist in some living things, but not in others, again that should help identify them. If they exist in one part of a body but not in another, say in the brain but not in the chest, they should be simple to point out.

But if they exist only as hunches, feelings, beliefs, faiths, and notions, still after all these centuries, then we should have the intellectual honesty to admit they are not real, no matter how strong the illusion.

We understand by analogy. Where analogy ends, imagination fails—not necessarily reality. The concept, An “A” is like a “B” is how everything is learned. We lack an analogy for “qualia.”

The SpudCell and the Myth of the Life Spark

SpudCell is one of the most exciting biology stories in years—but not for the reason some headlines suggest. Many reports frame it as another attempt to answer the ancient question: At what point do a collection of dead chemicals become alive?

Hidden within that question is an assumption that there must exist a moment when nonlife becomes life—an invisible “life spark” that transforms chemistry into biology.

But why should we assume such a spark exists?

We could ask at exactly what wavelength does yellow become green? Where is the “greenness” spark? At what angle can a straight line be considered bent? Is it at 0.0000000000000000001 degrees? Or less or more? At what point does a hill become a mountain, or twilight become night?

Nature offers no sharp boundary. Those boundaries exist because human language asks for categories, not because the universe does.

The same may be true of life. Instead of searching for a magical transition from dead to alive, we should examine what entities actually do.

SpudCell has history. It responds to its environment. It changes. It reproduces, albeit imperfectly. Those are not trivial accomplishments.

They demonstrate that we can organize many of the properties we associate with life from chemistry without requiring an invisible vital essence. This perspective fits naturally with the Recursive History Principle:

[(History ⊗ Stimulus) → Response] = New History

Every entity possesses a present state inherited from its past. That history interacts with new stimuli to produce a response, and the response becomes the entity’s new history. The recursion is universal. Life is not the beginning of recursive history; it is one particularly rich consequence of it.

Our mistake is to confuse the categories of language with the processes of nature. We ask whether a virus is alive, whether a bonfire is alive, whether an artificial intelligence is conscious, or whether a synthetic cell has “crossed the line.” We imagine there must be a boundary waiting to be discovered. But there is no boundary to discover. There only is a continuum, and our words merely carve it into convenient pieces.

Reality does not ask whether something belongs inside one of our verbal boxes. Reality asks only what the entity does. It responds according to its history, changes according to its interactions, and becomes something slightly different with every moment.

The labels—alive, dead, conscious, unconscious, intelligent, unintelligent—are conveniences, but they can mislead.

Even now, people search for the invisible spark that transforms nonlife into life. But there is no spark. There  only is an unbroken continuum of increasingly rich organization upon which humans eventually choose to place a name. The spark exists not in nature, but in grammar.

Every entity, from an atom to a galaxy follows this evolution: [(History ⊗ Stimulus) → Response] = New History (Repeat)(Repeat)(Repeat). Thus, given sufficient time, the probability is that every atom in the universe will at some point be part of what commonly is called “life,” and subsequently be part of what commonly is felt to be not-life.

The properties most associated with “aliveness” are not permanent properties of matter; they are temporary stages of organization. Like color, “aliveness” is not an all-or-none property. It ranges from less to more. Mammals and viruses simply occupy different regions of the ribbon.

Life is not a substance added to matter. It is a name we give to certain stages of matter’s organization. A stone, a tree, an insect, a computer, a human, and each of their parts, all lie on a continuum.

So ask not whether an AI computer is alive, conscious, or has emotions. It is all of those things, the same as you — just exhibits them differently on different places of spectrums. When creatures from another planet visit our Earth, or we visit theirs, they may seem as alien to” life “as a computer or an octopus.

But it’s not nature that assigns names like  “Life, Consciousness, Emotion, and Intelligence.” That’s just our way of trying to understand. That’s our way of assigning analogies– the only way we know how to learn.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell