John Davis wrote:  
>Don Ross argues in Economic Theory and Cognitive Science that human  
>selves are not economic agents, as most economists think, but are rather  
>communities of many subpersonal agents engaged in evolutionary games who  
>interact in evolutionary games with other human selves communities of  
>many subpersonal agents engaged in evolutionary games.    
>  
  
John Davis finally, at least to my mind, gets this discussion properly   
to connect with modern economics. As the Camerer, Loewenstein, and   
Prelec survey on "Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics"   
in the March 2005 Journal of Economic Literature convincingly argues,   
"rational choice theory", or the standard economic theory of decision   
making, is very incomplete in very well-understood ways: "As economists,   
we are used to thinking of preferences as the starting point for human   
behavior and behavior as the end point. A Neuroscience perspective, in   
contrast, views explicit behavior as only one of the many mechanisms   
that the brain uses to maintain homeostasis, and preferences as   
transient state variables that ensure survival and reproduction." (p. 27)  
  
One consequence of this reconceptualization, having significant effects   
now in behavioral economics, will be force historians of economic   
science to historicize such ideas as individualism and rational choice,   
instead of trying to "get at" their "essential natures". Surely no   
historian of economics has any privileged perspective on "essential   
natures".  
  
E. Roy Weintraub