At one point in Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory, the main character (a troubled teenager called Frank) makes the following observation:
Usually we do the opposite, trying to represent many agents as a single one. In the context of Brexit, that approach has been stretched to breaking-point. The phrase “the will of the people” attempts to conflate the electorate (a multitude of agents) into a self-contained purposive entity. Is Brexit the will of the people? Yes, in the same sense that getting a hung parliament is the will of the people. The people seem to want to make life difficult for themselves. UK politicians and commentators have discussed negotiating Brexit with the European Union as if the EU is a self-contained purposive agent. This has led to the unfortunate idea that the EU may want to punish the UK for leaving, in order to discourage other states from leaving. It views the EU as a single entity motivated by the desire to survive and grow, and assumes that it will take actions that run counter to the goodwill of EU leaders. Likewise, we have recently heard a great deal about how Parliament has said what it doesn’t want, but not what it wants. If Parliament is modelled as a single agent, then it ought to want something, but as soon as we acknowledge that it’s not a single agent, there is no particular reason to suppose that there is something that it wants. Given, say, three alternatives, there could perfectly well be a Condorcet cycle.
Returning to Frank, it may be useful to model an individual as a multitude of internal agents. In economics, it could be a new an interesting way to model individual irrationality, which is a perennial challenge that has been taken up in a rather patchy way, and deserves more attention. Finally it may even constitute a way to model emotions: in Frank’s case it is guilt that is represented this way.
Often I’ve thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the very least, a city.He then compares his moods and thought processes to political moods that countries go through:
…For example, there has always been a part of me which has felt guilty about killing Blyth, Paul and Esmerelda. … But I liken it to an opposition party in a parliament, or a critical press; acting as a conscience and a brake, but not in power and unlikely to assume it.Frank is modelling a single self-contained agent (himself) as the embodiment of many separate agents. It is common in literature for someone to have a struggle between, say, the admirable and the less admirable parts of his nature, but the above is the best example I can recall of this kind of modelling.
Usually we do the opposite, trying to represent many agents as a single one. In the context of Brexit, that approach has been stretched to breaking-point. The phrase “the will of the people” attempts to conflate the electorate (a multitude of agents) into a self-contained purposive entity. Is Brexit the will of the people? Yes, in the same sense that getting a hung parliament is the will of the people. The people seem to want to make life difficult for themselves. UK politicians and commentators have discussed negotiating Brexit with the European Union as if the EU is a self-contained purposive agent. This has led to the unfortunate idea that the EU may want to punish the UK for leaving, in order to discourage other states from leaving. It views the EU as a single entity motivated by the desire to survive and grow, and assumes that it will take actions that run counter to the goodwill of EU leaders. Likewise, we have recently heard a great deal about how Parliament has said what it doesn’t want, but not what it wants. If Parliament is modelled as a single agent, then it ought to want something, but as soon as we acknowledge that it’s not a single agent, there is no particular reason to suppose that there is something that it wants. Given, say, three alternatives, there could perfectly well be a Condorcet cycle.
Returning to Frank, it may be useful to model an individual as a multitude of internal agents. In economics, it could be a new an interesting way to model individual irrationality, which is a perennial challenge that has been taken up in a rather patchy way, and deserves more attention. Finally it may even constitute a way to model emotions: in Frank’s case it is guilt that is represented this way.
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