At the end of a review of a Skidelsky's new book on the British economist Keyens, the reviewer, the American economist Krugman, gets to his point, a point which has in it something that almost reaches (and possibly enters) the magic circle a truth:

Most strikingly, Skidelsky declares that the traditional division between microeconomics and macroeconomics, which is based on whether one focuses on individual markets or on the overall economy, is all wrong; macroeconomics should be defined as the field that studies those areas of economic life in which irreducible uncertainty, uncertainty that cannot be tamed with statistics, dominates. He goes so far as to call for a complete division of postgraduate studies: departments of macroeconomics should not even teach microeconomics, or vice versa, because macroeconomists must be protected "from the encroachment of the methods and habits of mind of microeconomics".

How far should we be willing to follow Skidelsky in this? I think we must trust the biographer in his assessment of Keynes himself; Skidelsky argues persuasively that Keynes spent much of his life deeply focused upon, even obsessed with, the question of how one acts in the face of uncertainty...

Even Krugman points this out:

...[Some behavioural] economists... drop the assumption of perfect rationality but don't seem much concerned by the essential unknowability of the future, [and] have done relatively well at making sense of this crisis...

One answer to this can be found in Brain Science, a podcast hosted by Ginger Campbell. Near the opening of podcast 48, the guest, a neuroscientist named Gary Lynch, explains what "point-to-point mapping and the random access circuits are":

Gary Lynch: ...So there's a map of the entire body up there. There's an area of the cortex that represents the hand and then an area that represents the wrist and then the forearm - all those areas are actually sitting adjacent to each other pretty much in the same form that they actually are in the body. This means that the fingers are projecting, in order, to an area of the cortex, and right next to that area is an area that the wrist is projecting to. OK, so that's point to point.

GC: Right.

GL: It's called topographic. It's like you have a map - you have a grid map here and you just
superimpose that grid map on the wall. It's just one point to one point.

The random access networks, which are certainly real - so for example, if you go into the olfactory
cortex you find none of that point to point stuff. In fact the olfactory system - some of the things that
launched all this - the olfactory system in fact throws it away rather aggressively. It is point to point design starting from the nose to the first stage of the olfactory system but beyond that it throws it away - it takes all the organization and it's as though it throws it all up in the air and makes it random Everything goes to wherever it wants to go, and nothing is point to point. And what we're arguing is, that basic olfactory design actually set a template for the evolution of the association regions of the cortex. OK.. so now why - what do you get with the point to point? Well, it's pretty straightforward. If this area of your cortex lights up suddenly you know that in a spatial map something happened in this region.

you have - your retina is a map of the external world there's something in the visual cortex on grid square x 1 y 3 lights up. The brain knows that there's something happening at 11 o'clock. There's
spatial information tells you where things are and it tells you a lot more than that. But what do you get with a random design? And what you get there is the ability to associate anything with anything else. See what I mean?

GC: Yeah.

GL: ...That ability to associate anything with anything else, that is in our argument a key ingredient of what we experience as cognition. Consciousness.

We are biologically wired to experience or encounter the unknown. A level of the brain's map of the body ("the mind is the idea of body") is open to the new. This is so because it can connect "anything with anything else." The unknown (anything) can become known (something), that is why we can live with a future that is partly unknown. What we might fear, then, is not the unknown as such, but the encounter with it. We fear the moment of translation or transition. I will deal with this fear in another post.