THE FUTURE OF POST-HUMAN DECISION THEORY
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Are humans really so rationally optimal that, as Adam Smith (1986) once famously claimed, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”―which later led to the idea of “homo economicus, or economic man,” as “the concept in many economic theories portraying humans as consistently rational and narrowly self-interested agents who usually pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally”? (WK 2017u) This rational view on humans can be contrasted with the opposing one by Bertrand Russell, who observed instead that “it has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.” (TE 2017)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), decision theory (in relation to optimality and non-optimality—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no optimality without non-optimality (and vice versa), to be explained by the “optimality-nonoptimality principle” (and other ones) in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Surely, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that decision theory is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to decision theory)—such as economics, game theory, statistics, psychology, biology, artificial intelligence, political science, sociology, social science, philosophy, technological studies, cultural studies, and so on—should be rejected. (WK 2017) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of decision theory (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between optimality and non-optimality (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the theory of post-optimality) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about decision theory (in relation to the dialectic relationship between optimality and non-optimality—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.