We often use the metaphor of the market as a "collective brain" or "super-organism." We talk about the "market's beliefs" or how it "panics." This is usually just a poetic shorthand. But what if it's not? What if the mathematics that describes a single, goal-directed agent (like a brain) is genuinely the same mathematics that describes a collection of agents (like a market), just with different settings?
This post sketches a framework called the Typed Free Energy Game (TFEG) that attempts to make this claim mathematically precise. The goal is to build a single formal object that sees a brain as a "game with one player" and a market as a "game with many players," all following the exact same underlying rules.
This isn't just for philosophical kicks. If true, it would give us a powerful new tool: a single "potential function" that we could, in principle, measure for the entire economy—a kind of economic "potential energy" whose gradient