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Hayek writes:

[P]rices can act to coördinate [sic] the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan.

Hayek argues that any one man always knows very little about the economy as a whole. But the price system will tell him the little he does need to know.

I wonder how far the similarities between the economy and a single mind go. If the price system is a way for parts of a decentralized system to communicate, and the mind is a decentralized system, does the mind have something like a price system for its different parts to communicate?

A mind is vast, full of ideas. Any part of it always knows very little about the rest. In this sense, ideas in a mind are like men in an economy. So how do these ideas coordinate efficiently? Do emotions act like a price system inside the mind? Ayn Rand writes:

Emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man's values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

The fun criterion is surely relevant in this context, too. Hayek writes that a rational economic order is about “conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans with those of others.” That sounds like common-preference finding, which essentially works the same across minds as it does within a single mind.

Are prices inside the mind involved in finding common preferences?

#3509·Dennis HackethalOP, about 14 hours ago