This leads us to a fun but silly thought experiment: Can an economy feel joy? Suppose we define an economy as the connections (trading, informational, formal, and informal) between individuals. So defined an economy is affected both by internal and external factors. It is able to perceive external factors including weather conditions, the actions of other economies, sources of new resources and supplies; and through the influence of these external factors it is able to both interpret and react to these factors (for example, by producing more wheat in response to a global shortage, responding to both explicit and predicted price signals).
To a certain extent it is even able to consider the reasons for its own actions – read through the financial pages of the newspaper and you’ll find a form of reflective metacognition. To be able to think about own thinking is one definition of consciousness, so sense we can say that our toy economy has a form of consciousness – although we’ve cheated slightly by making our economy include its constituent conscious minds.
– “Can an Economy Feel Joy?”
It’s something I have thought about a few times. Whether a sufficiently complex system of decidedly inanimate entities displays signs of life, or even consciousness. And if so, if it is inevitable or if that complexity must be of a certain type.
Cities are one example of a simple life form. They grow, consume resources around them, have a circulatory system without which they would not function, even have a digestive and excretory system, interact with other similar life forms for exchanges of value, and either thrive or die depending on how successful this internal and external value exchange is.