One of the more surprising advocates of early connectionism was Friedrich Hayek, best known today as the father of neoliberalism. Forgotten for many years, but making a recent comeback among Austrian-inclined neuroscientists, Hayek wrote The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology in 1952, based on ideas he’d formulated in the 1920s. In it, he outlines his belief in a fundamental separation between the sensory world of the mind and the ‘natural’, external world. The former is unknowable, unique to each individual, and thus the task of science – and economics –
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