Editorial
The process-based approach to study social and economic issues opens doors to include ethics and values as endogenous variables in socioeconomic formalism. This is not possible in mainstream economic methodology because of the lack of process in economic reasoning, whereas it is there in social phenomena but remains unexplained. The reason for this debility in mainstream methodology is the optimal and steady-state worldview that is upheld as against complexity where learning is fundamental. Hence ethics and values enter as parameters that learn under the impact of knowledge embedding.
In mainstream economic, social and scientific inquiry, knowledge is replaced by time, no matter how time is interpreted. In economic analysis particularly,time is simply a datum. Hence change over time is mute to the more fundamental premise of learning, unifying, complementing and evolving. Here, even evolutionary economics has failed to provide the answer because of the continuation of the optimal methodology and non-learning parameters of the reasoning, modeling and analysis underlying evolutionary economics. The truth is that Darwinian mutation is another way of explaining conflict and competition that must be premised on the neoclassical postulate of marginal rate of substitution.
All of these postulates and orientations are criticized and alternatives presented in Humanomics. Humanomics examines learning inter- and intra-systems as relational organism. Consequently, the variables and their relations in Humanomics experience circular causation. The parameters of the models are dynamically evolved by such learning impact. Policies are formed by simulation concepts of models that are now opposed to optimization and steady-state equilibrium, except as concepts existing to contend with. Ethics and values are thus formally investigated in the emergent forms of socioeconomic and socio-scientific models in the perspective of relational learning and systems.
The mind of Humanomics is of the neuro-cybernetic type as opposed to the closed and thus linear world of mainstream socio-scientific analysis. There is much to be initiated by and in such a Scientific Research Program that mainstream reasoning has been unable to penetrate. The domain of intellectual inquiry and applications is rich and wide.
The papers of this issue of Humanomics, the International Journal of Systems and Ethics (HIJSE) present a diversity of analytical and socio-cultural views ranging from methodology in philosophy of science to cultural vintages and decision-making. Some of the ideas presented may still be critical in the eyes of Humanomics. But this is a matter for the intellectual community to criticize and proffer alternative shades of opinions.
The discourse continues.
