TL;DR

This article explores the profound nature of money and language as relational tools that shape human cognition and civilization. It examines how the pursuit of a “theory of everything” may be misguided, with the axiom that humans are purposeful actors being a more useful foundation. The article discusses how love, faith, and freedom are essential to human progress.

Understanding Money

Money and language are the most important relational tools that humans have created to scale their rationality and connect their minds across space and time. While often taken for granted, examining these tools closely reveals deep truths about the nature of reality itself.

Money as the Language of Human Action

Just as natural language allows us to communicate our thoughts and experiences, money is the language of human action. It enables us to signal who has provided useful production to society and to what degree. Money abstracts the complex realities of human productivity into a common tongue that facilitates trade and collaboration on large scales.

However, both language and money have their limitations. They are data compression tools that necessarily omit information as they encode meaning. The map is not the territory, as the saying goes. This demands a certain humility and avoidance of totalizing ideologies built on the false belief that reality can be perfectly captured.

The Axiom of Purposeful Human Action

While modern physics strives for a “theory of everything,” a more useful axiom may be that humans are purposeful actors who use means to pursue valued ends. Any attempt to argue against this axiom requires using the means of argumentation to pursue the end of refutation, thereby demonstrating its truth.

This has profound implications. It suggests that the value and meaning we experience emerge through the goal-oriented actions of agents, not via some fundamental substance. Reality seems to be deeply relational, with identities and properties arising through interaction rather than existing in isolated, static forms.

Love, Faith, and Freedom as Foundations

Fascinatingly, love and faith appear to be foundational to all human endeavors. To truly understand anything, one must open oneself to it and have faith in the unknown and unknowable. Love powers the reciprocal process of revelation. Even fields like particle physics rely on acts of empathetic projection.

From this view, maintaining faith in human freedom is paramount. Attempting to rigidly control complex, ever-changing systems is a fool’s errand. For human civilization to progress, we must have faith in the natural manifestations of freedom – life, liberty, and property. This requires sound money that governments cannot manipulate.

If reality is fractal in nature, with the micro replicating the macro, then our financial and political systems should mirror the free, open-ended dynamics of the cosmos itself. Bitcoin represents a momentous step in this direction.

As the old saying goes, the truth shall set you free. By unflinchingly examining our most fundamental tools and assumptions, we can move towards a more harmonious alignment with reality. In a world of rampant deception funded by fiat money, this is the most radical and important task before us.

Thank you for reading “Understanding Money“.

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Sources:

• “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• “Where Mathematics Comes From” by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez
• “How Things Shape the Mind” by Lambros Malafouris
• Economic Science and the Austrian Method by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
• Discussions with Dr. Jordan B Peterson and Vervaeke