The purpose of this paper is to suggest that in many social and economic contexts, self-awareness of agents is of little consequence. The complexity of many such systems is very high. No matter how advanced the cognitive abilities of agents in abstract intellectual terms, it is as if they operate with relatively low cognitive ability within the system. This can be the case even when the emergent properties of the system are known to individual agents. Examples are given from macroeconomics, the evolution of firms, financial markets and games.
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