Paul Jorion

Paul Jorion (born 22 July 1946 in Brussels) is by training an anthropologist, sociologist with a special interest in the cognitive sciences. He has also written seven books on capitalist economics. Paul was born and raised in Belgium, and has been a professor at the universities of Brussels, Cambridge, Paris VIII and University of California at Irvine. He was a visiting scholar of the "Human Complex Systems" Program at UCLA from 2005 to 2009. He currently lives in France, where he runs a popular blog on financial and economic matters. In 2012, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel made him holder of the newly created "Stewardship of Finance" chair. A student of Claude Lévi-Strauss and of French mathematician Georges-Théodule Guilbaud in modeling kinship systems with algebraic models, Jorion has made several contributions to the field, solving in particular the marriage pattern of the Pende of the Congo (in collaboration with Gisèle de Meur and Trudeke Vuyk), reconciling also conflicting interpretations of the kinship system of the Australian Murngin (from research done jointly with Edmund Leach, his teacher at Cambridge University). Collaborating with Douglas R. White he has published several papers in the formalization of kinship algebra. In an article published in 1999, Jorion offered a new theory of consciousness which goes beyond the Freudian notion that some of our decisions have unconscious motives by suggesting that in fact all our decision-making has unconscious roots, revealing freewill to be an illusion. Consciousness is shown to be a consequence of a mechanism allowing us to perceive as simultaneous the sensations produced separately by our five senses, a necessary preliminary to creating memory traces, that is, also, the prerequisite to any learning process. Drawing the consequences of an observation made by Benjamin Libet, that intention is an artifact as it springs to consciousness half a second later than the action it is supposed to have generated, Jorion further suggested that consciousness errs when it assumes to be the cause of human actions while it is nothing more than an ancillary consequence of the registration process that allows memory to accrue.