I CAN identify the rules. Sometimes I have to use biology, sometimes analysis of behavior, other times math and so on to best describe the functional relationships of what’s going on.

By “If I can”. I meant, if I had the resources (microscope, lab, skinner box, time, whatever…), I can find the controls.

Sorry for the confusion.

There’s no autonomous man. We are under control, always of some rule set.

>>>>If I can drill down on your indetermined system enough I will like find your “rules” that drive it. That’s my conjecture. Send me a system, and we can discuss. (markets, DNA, whatever you want).

>>>>Human behavior exists in this world of determined and the unpredictable. Reinforcers/consequences, conditioned stimuli, unconditioned stimuli, discriminative stimuli — (biology + genetics + nervous system + environment) — control the behavior. Layers of rules applied to a complex biological system. It’s all weirdly determined but completely unpredictable.

For, in the first sentence, “If I can drill down…” we see the familiar autonomous man with something inside that is hidden and not obvious that is different from, and arguably more interesting than, what makes up that organism’s behavior…

The paragraph that follows that minor thought experiment… “behavior exists in a world of determined and the unpredictable” we see the loss of autonomous man or the ghost of the homunculus and the emergence of the tough stuff not covered with sugar plumb fairies or religious – cultural – or political dogma laying nude.

Genetics, the environment and the nervous system contain the map for the adventurer willing to look though the proverbial telescope. But note: even those adventurers that came before this time and these challenges needed to be reinforced [known as support]. The pioneers weren’t operating in a vacuum and neither can we.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So what does that do for you as an analogy?