The nervous system works in (at least) 2 ways: as well as sending impulses for action, it also receives sense information. This relates to the numbness you talk about, and thus the question: how do we restore response-ability?
For me there is a lot in ideas of decentralised (and deeply interdependent) intelligence and selfhood that we as humans can express, contrary to the individualised separated cell-hood encouraged by our culture. The identities we have been taught to assume are defensive and disempowering postures which deny connection and are founded on blind (or numb) spots. As developed in the ecological and mycelium thinking of such as Sophie Strand, and this essay: https://hmirra.medium.com/holotropism-1cdf99c00b74 (I'd be interested to hear how this lands for those who don't particularly feel 'autistic' - my sense is it has something of the universal about it)
And questions of how I, as some sort of individual conscious focal point, node, or perhaps 'cell' interdependent with infinite and infinitesimal connections, part of organisms at many scales greater and smaller, can best act to increase health.
Awareness of the systemic wholes feels necessary to make visible the hidden patterns of connection and energy flow which have kept me limited and disempowered. The more I can see the ecology of my impact and interconnections, the more I can take responsibility for them - and the more attention I can bring to the health of my immediate surroundings.
I guess I'm feeling my way to the fine balance and interdependence between the big picture, and the hyperlocal. Health seems to be a good flow and rhythm of both...
Thank you! She comes up occasionally on my YouTube thread, and you put words to my intuition. There is so much spectacle and flashiness out there meant to alarm people but not really help them understand.
Hi Erica. Well she's saying things that superficially sound plausible, but - at least to me - she's making a lot of errors in the process. She's leaping between a whole series of very vaguely related things, and weaving a story about how they're concretely related. I personally call this approach an 'intellectual DDOS attack' - it's where a person lays out a long string of individual facts and arguments, each of which would take hours to unpack, but then crams them into a sequence that superficially seems to link up, but which is impossible to verify because it would take days or weeks to actually check the connections. So people just get carried along with the narrative, because each link in the sequence is just plausible enough to not set off any alarm bells
In general, I'm a person who does systemic analysis, which means all her references to X or Y person who once worked for X or Y corporation and then moved to X or Y government department etc is kinda irrelevant to me. I don't think we can explain the world, or big things like carbon markets or CBDC etc, with reference to single people like she does. She's peppering in references to critical progressive causes like preventing land-grabs etc, all of which are real issues, but I'd say the way she's weaving this all together is actually kinda manipulative towards her audience.
That said, it's also probably just the way her brain works - there are a lot of people in the world who have this style of thinking, where they place a lot of weight on individual connections between things, rather than trying to see broader systemic processes
HI Brett. I highly enjoyed reading this piece and your descriptions. You reminded me of one day on the steps of the old Zen Center on Bush Street in San Francisco, Silas Hoadley, Zen Center Treasurer, and Richard Baker, Zen Center President, were holding forth to a bunch of us young Zen students. Silas said in answer to a question about financing Zen Center, "Money is energy." That insight allowed him to raise more than enough money to purchase Tassajara for a mountain monastery and for a new Zen Center. I have repeated this idea from time to time, and always receive blank looks or even derision. Thanks.
"Big Finance might operate like a motor cortex, but the financial crisis of 2008 made it very apparent just how deranged this motor cortex can sometimes be. Hundreds of thousands of workers were mobilized into constructing real estate that would stand empty, while precarious people were pushed into debt to buy it. Their desperate promises to pay back were bundled into packages and sold to mega-funds across the world. The financial sector was orchestrating a tragic dance, turning the global economy into something akin to a veering drunk losing their motor functions"
And yet, the houses were built. Which means we had the resources to build them, and once built, it was a 'sunk cost' (in resources terms). And, there clearly was a demand for the housing as they were occupied, with families and lawns and real neigbourhoods of people enjoying life. And then interest rates rose, and loans became unaffordable, and people walked away, and the homes deteriorated, and the lawns became overgrown with weeds and the neighbourhoods became deserted and the property values fell even more, and then they were sold to some rich dudes for a bargain, wth the government stepping in to keep the banks afloat, while the vacant properties continued to decay, or were rented in some cases to the same people who once owned them and still needed a place to live. Instead of forcing sales, the Government should have guranteed banks on conditions that the banks write down their loan repayments to a level where the borrowers could continue to afford the repayments. Then people would have remained housed, the lawns mowed and the neighbourhoods vibrant. And in time, property values would have recovered. The 'loss' was only 'money'... and the Government has no lack of money... as QE proved
Thank you for a very thought provoking piece of writing.
Money as a nervous system and finance as a is as interesting and as deficient as any other analogy that is used to describe any system. It is actually the deficiencies that make the anologies more interesting and perhaps, useful. For example when you speak of money as credit, you are quite close to truth but still bit farther from truth because you stop short of noting that if is credit, it must have a creditor and therefore a debtor too. The society may well be akin to an organism but isn't it more than that, like, a whole is more than the sum of parts? For example, credit operates in a system that lets it accumulate and accumulation is unevenly distributed - is concentrated in a few hands. The accumulated credit leads to wealth which in trun leads to power residing in fewer hands. The edifice of the society stands on not just the individuals but also on the way the system that binds the individuuals. We all know that everything is not right with us as a society because we do not treat the constituents of the society with the same equanimity as the human body treats all its 30 trillion cells.
Hence I think that we need to pay more attention to the systemic issues (such as consciousness, justice, exploitation, power, wars etc) and go beyond what the anologies suggest.
Thanks, Brett - while some may quibble with aspects of the analogy I’ve always thought of the extended metaphor as an exploration of an idea and not an exact match. In terms of it demonstrating the role of money as a messenger rather than the message itself it works for me.
The resources element seems to me to be important in two respects. First in its role in exchange and second as an imperative to our continued existence on this planet which sits outside of the economic system. It is arguable in economic terms that resources have no value until they are put into circulation via the labour of individuals. In these times of increasing mechanisation and computerisation, however, the individual is being substituted by the body of the corporation and the scale of consumption has amplified the cost of ignoring the externalities to the point where we must now treat all resources as having critical inherent value. Not doing so has resulted in the body housing your dysfunctional nervous system wasting away, expending far more energy than it is taking in.
Whatever ‘money’ was previously it is clearly now an expression of debt. As such, it is an extremely useful device for facilitating the process of exchange - the neural impulse in this system. Some may prefer the arterial analogy as it acknowledges the de facto use of money as a commodity itself with the increased financialisation of debt. This seem akin though to the snake eating its tail or in your analogy, the firing of synapses with the sole aim of stimulating other synaptic systems without any intention to stimulate muscles into doing useful work. I imagine this as resulting in a series of nervous ticks and other involuntary actions further depleting the body’s energy stores with no concomitant benefit.
The use of cash as a disruptor in a more localised system of exchange put me in mind of a recent podcast about the right wing nationalist rioting in Britain this past week. The point being made was that while the violence itself was not widely supported there was a lot of sympathy for the issues behind it. The speaker was suggesting that (instigators aside) this was an expression of the loss of the cultural norms that could be seen as identifiably British. The loss of these cultural norms has been a result of the mass adoption of American culture during the 50’s and 60’s (and onward) as well as the rise of corporations either absorbing or displacing smaller independents and homogenising the high streets across the country.
Coupled with the movement of wealth to those already wealthy and an increasing feeling of precarity in the minds of the population it is unsurprising that migrants are targeted. Unfortunately, it is not the poor souls fleeing war or destitution arriving on our shores that are the problem but rather the migration of control over essential aspects of our lives to largely unaccountable governments and even more unaccountable corporations. For much too long we have not had our cultural and moral values reflected back to us where we live and the god of profit has left us all poorer.
After reading your position, I would argue that money is BOTH the nervous and circulatory system. Humans need money much like cells need oxygen (carried by red blood cells) in order to survive within society (global collective body of humanity). It is just that in the case of oxygen in the body, this oxygen doesn't come with information associated to it (for instance, moving the muscle). Oxygen is what enables the "orders" of the nervous system to be carried out. But money is the nervous system without a brain, because when people spend money, it is like cells directly exchanging information between themselves (more like a "wisdom of the crowd" effect) than creating a "brain" with higher order instructions which creates a kind of "magical" coherence at the global level. For instance, when your brain instructs you to dance, sending commands to the body, your body doesn't bang itself on the walls. Whereas the "instructions" coming from global finance, in the way they spend money in the economy, and thereby set humanity's collective "body" into motion, a lot of cells end up hurt. That is why I prefer to say that the Internet is the nervous system, and eventually, AI will represent the brain, that is, a kind of "super intelligence" that can make sense of all the "data" (human generated information) that courses through its circuits (much like the bodily feedback you get from your cells, that courses through your brain, and your brain has to find a coherence in all that "data", and then send higher order instructions that enables shifting the collective body of cells in such a way as to create harmony). So basically, because humanity sits a fractal above biology, biology remains a kind of universal "template" for humanity to organize their collective systems (like the Internet or the circulatory system), but it gets mixed up because each fractal level above, things get much more complex. A forest isn't a tree, and a tree isn't a leaf, but they all share certain fractal properties, nevertheless. What's more important, is what you DO with the metaphors you use. The reason why it's best to use the circulatory system idea, is that it fits well with certain ethical concepts, like universal basic income. Each one of your cells receives the oxygen it needs to survive and do what it's supposed to do, no questions asked. It isn't controlled by the heart administration bureau to verify that it has carried out its daily toil. This doesn't work very well when using the nervous system as a metaphor. Each cell/human is granted the basic... what? Impulse? Market signal? To equally instruct humanity's "collective organism" to move into a certain direction? I know that at this level of reality, money isn't just "oxygen", it's also a market signal, and also information, since whenever a human spends money, he/she is essentially "voting" for the endured existence of a good/service. Finally, all these metaphors should be used consciously, understanding that if you use the "superorganism" metaphor, you can't just use them and pretend like this superorganism doesn't have a mind of its own, or that humanity's own development doesn't follow some kind of universal template or direction. That's why I wrote my book: "mother Earth's final push", because I believe that we grew on this planet much like a baby developed inside the womb, and that "legacy" debt based finance was the perfect financial system to "grow" humanity fast in an exponential way (just like the growth of a foetus, where every organ has to grow in sync), and that we are nearing the point where we are ready to form a functional global organism, which translates as "birth", at which point the baby separates from the placenta (cutting the umbilical cord) and transitioning to another system altogether (lungs + stomach) which equates to a simultaneous financial system transition and energy transition.
However, when you really analyse it, money is a form of information, whereas oxygen is matter. The distinction is important because information can be replicated almost at will at low-to-negligible cost, whereas matter can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed, and then with the use of energy.
I agree the ‘money is nervous system’ analogy isn’t quite right, money is like the nerve impulses transmitted by the nervous system, which means the analogue to the nervous system must the the payment system, the system that moves money around.
Yes. I believe money is basically fused oxygen and nervous system impulses all in one. But then there is the question of the Internet and of the future of money. I like the Star Trek episode where a bunch of people from the 22nd century are woken up from cryosleep and one of them wants to check the value of the stock market, thinking he's the richest man alive.. Only to find out that in a post-scarcity economy/world with replicators, there is no stock market/money. :-D
In this view, the current monetary system is only temporary. The nervous system metaphor then transforms into a (hopefully) benevolent AI (which symbolically represents the collective "brain" of humanity) sending signals to humans via the Internet to "move" the collective body of humanity in one direction or another, and each human is given whatever resources needed (via blockchain and crypto-assets for instance) to carry out whatever actions he's supposed to carry out.
I just read some interesting comments on money as water and blood in the last chapter of Making Money by Christine Desan. She points out that the water metaphor suggests the political neutrality of money.
> Money isn’t like blood pumping through veins. It’s like nerve impulses jolting muscles into movement.
I wouldn't dismiss one metaphor in favour of another with such force and rectitude. I would have liked some explanation why money is like nerve impulses.
Your diagram suggests that money connected all the small social structures together, leaving them intact, whereas I would argue those structures no longer exist.
Matthew, it’s maybe clearer (but also more abstract, which doesn’t suit everyone) if we think of money as information.
Thus, the nervous system analogy is quite good but we also see the problem with the analogy, and how to I prove it. The nervous system transmits information around the body. So it would be more accurate to say that money is the nerve impulses, while the nervous system is the payment system. Then we start getting all sorts of insights. There is no limit to the number of nervous impulses that can be generated, just as there is no limit to the amount of money that can be created. But the utility of both depends on a real physical resource being able to react to the information by doing something with matter and energy to create a useful service.
When you refer to "money" what exactly do you mean? Is it your idea of money or is it everyone's idea and if the latter, how do you know? Is it a logically valid notion and if so how do you test/determine that it is?
I think this is the first of your posts I am uneasy with.
Are you not implying, with your characterisation of prehistory, that without 'money' there are no large complex societies? I guess what kind of "money' is the question here, and of so this complicates your metaphor... I ask because you are aware of recent work outlining other kinds of prehistoric society...
The other query is how there seems to be an implication that an alternative nervous system is a universal one? My understanding from area studies and schismogenesis is that universalism is a false pretence? To take your metaphor, there is never one system or hegemony at play but inter relating ones..
Just some immediate feelings :)
(Apologies haven't replied to your kind emails yet, just got back from fieldwork, soon!)
First, there exists no independent definition of "money" possible i.e. money has no independent existence of its own, neither have we provided a valid ratified standard definition of it as an arbitrary artifice in conjunction with the real world [1]. Moreover, the common notion of "money"assumed in everyday practice is formally proven to unequivocally constitute a logical incoherence, for which it is referred to as "money's misrepresentation" [2].
Given these facts and in order to say "money is a nervous system", we must first fully comprehend "money" something that is impossible if we have not yet agreed on a definition and subsequent (coherent) normative specification for its use.
Therefore, neither money nor finance can be assigned any coherent organic function with respect to anything, other than a foreign contaminant or intoxicant not unlike a narcotic or a poison. Particularly when the common notion of it constitutes a logical incoherence i.e. a misrepresentation.
Your notion that there exists no independent definition of "money" actually comes from the Lords of NeoClassical Economics and is meant to confuse and dissimulate what everyone knows or should know to be true about money. If you want some definitions of money over history that actually work, read David Graeber's DEBT: THE FIRST 5000 YEARS. Hint: money belongs to credit systems.
Of course. Money is what we make of it. Historically, there is blood money, bride money, tally sticks, coins of all kinds and specie, fiat money, digital money. Then there is the 'funny money' of fictitious capital. But levels? I don't have an idea what you mean, nor do I see how 'levels' can be relevant.
while it's true that money takes many forms historically, the concept of levels in the money view isn't about historical types of money, but rather about the structure of the modern financial system. The relevance lies in understanding how different forms of money interact, their relative stability, and how financial crises can propagate through this structure.
I read this Brett Scott article before. But your original claim was that there was no "independent definition" of money, then you proceed to offer a definition. My remark was to claim that "no one understands what money is" is an argument made by the NeoClassical and Post-Keynesian economists when in fact there is a vibrant (but powerless to make policy) community who really does understand money.
The comments above do not address the fact that there is no formal definition of the currency symbol. Moreover, there is no logically evaluable ratified formal definition of money as a concept. To rebut such a claim all that is required is to cite a formal ratified definition, but there is none.
As for the common notion of money applied in lieu of any formal definition as required, "money" contracts regularly refer simultaneously to multiples of currency units symbols as both records/measures of value AND articles of trade charged on a unit by unit basis. Any serious ontological analysis will show that such a conflation is logically inconsistent and therefore invalid.
So the point I am making, is that in order for a simile to hold it must be homologous to what it claims to illustrate. But for that, we must use clearly defined similes, the money system is not well defined nor does it have independent (natural) existence, as a consequence it cannot serve as a simile to any real world phenomenon.
Thanks Brett, extremely... stimulating...!
It reminded me of these images https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-many-lives-of-the-medieval-wound-man/ thinking also of giants, and us as part of some sort of mega power ranger ;)
The nervous system works in (at least) 2 ways: as well as sending impulses for action, it also receives sense information. This relates to the numbness you talk about, and thus the question: how do we restore response-ability?
For me there is a lot in ideas of decentralised (and deeply interdependent) intelligence and selfhood that we as humans can express, contrary to the individualised separated cell-hood encouraged by our culture. The identities we have been taught to assume are defensive and disempowering postures which deny connection and are founded on blind (or numb) spots. As developed in the ecological and mycelium thinking of such as Sophie Strand, and this essay: https://hmirra.medium.com/holotropism-1cdf99c00b74 (I'd be interested to hear how this lands for those who don't particularly feel 'autistic' - my sense is it has something of the universal about it)
And questions of how I, as some sort of individual conscious focal point, node, or perhaps 'cell' interdependent with infinite and infinitesimal connections, part of organisms at many scales greater and smaller, can best act to increase health.
Awareness of the systemic wholes feels necessary to make visible the hidden patterns of connection and energy flow which have kept me limited and disempowered. The more I can see the ecology of my impact and interconnections, the more I can take responsibility for them - and the more attention I can bring to the health of my immediate surroundings.
I guess I'm feeling my way to the fine balance and interdependence between the big picture, and the hyperlocal. Health seems to be a good flow and rhythm of both...
Thank you! She comes up occasionally on my YouTube thread, and you put words to my intuition. There is so much spectacle and flashiness out there meant to alarm people but not really help them understand.
Love the cell and nervous system analogy - really helps.
Glad you find it useful Charles
Hi Brett, this isn't the most relevant to your piece, but curious to know what you think of this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5QqzIGGRwU
Hi Erica. Well she's saying things that superficially sound plausible, but - at least to me - she's making a lot of errors in the process. She's leaping between a whole series of very vaguely related things, and weaving a story about how they're concretely related. I personally call this approach an 'intellectual DDOS attack' - it's where a person lays out a long string of individual facts and arguments, each of which would take hours to unpack, but then crams them into a sequence that superficially seems to link up, but which is impossible to verify because it would take days or weeks to actually check the connections. So people just get carried along with the narrative, because each link in the sequence is just plausible enough to not set off any alarm bells
In general, I'm a person who does systemic analysis, which means all her references to X or Y person who once worked for X or Y corporation and then moved to X or Y government department etc is kinda irrelevant to me. I don't think we can explain the world, or big things like carbon markets or CBDC etc, with reference to single people like she does. She's peppering in references to critical progressive causes like preventing land-grabs etc, all of which are real issues, but I'd say the way she's weaving this all together is actually kinda manipulative towards her audience.
That said, it's also probably just the way her brain works - there are a lot of people in the world who have this style of thinking, where they place a lot of weight on individual connections between things, rather than trying to see broader systemic processes
Anyway, that's what I think :)
HI Brett. I highly enjoyed reading this piece and your descriptions. You reminded me of one day on the steps of the old Zen Center on Bush Street in San Francisco, Silas Hoadley, Zen Center Treasurer, and Richard Baker, Zen Center President, were holding forth to a bunch of us young Zen students. Silas said in answer to a question about financing Zen Center, "Money is energy." That insight allowed him to raise more than enough money to purchase Tassajara for a mountain monastery and for a new Zen Center. I have repeated this idea from time to time, and always receive blank looks or even derision. Thanks.
Really glad you liked it, and thanks for sharing
"Big Finance might operate like a motor cortex, but the financial crisis of 2008 made it very apparent just how deranged this motor cortex can sometimes be. Hundreds of thousands of workers were mobilized into constructing real estate that would stand empty, while precarious people were pushed into debt to buy it. Their desperate promises to pay back were bundled into packages and sold to mega-funds across the world. The financial sector was orchestrating a tragic dance, turning the global economy into something akin to a veering drunk losing their motor functions"
And yet, the houses were built. Which means we had the resources to build them, and once built, it was a 'sunk cost' (in resources terms). And, there clearly was a demand for the housing as they were occupied, with families and lawns and real neigbourhoods of people enjoying life. And then interest rates rose, and loans became unaffordable, and people walked away, and the homes deteriorated, and the lawns became overgrown with weeds and the neighbourhoods became deserted and the property values fell even more, and then they were sold to some rich dudes for a bargain, wth the government stepping in to keep the banks afloat, while the vacant properties continued to decay, or were rented in some cases to the same people who once owned them and still needed a place to live. Instead of forcing sales, the Government should have guranteed banks on conditions that the banks write down their loan repayments to a level where the borrowers could continue to afford the repayments. Then people would have remained housed, the lawns mowed and the neighbourhoods vibrant. And in time, property values would have recovered. The 'loss' was only 'money'... and the Government has no lack of money... as QE proved
Thank you for a very thought provoking piece of writing.
Money as a nervous system and finance as a is as interesting and as deficient as any other analogy that is used to describe any system. It is actually the deficiencies that make the anologies more interesting and perhaps, useful. For example when you speak of money as credit, you are quite close to truth but still bit farther from truth because you stop short of noting that if is credit, it must have a creditor and therefore a debtor too. The society may well be akin to an organism but isn't it more than that, like, a whole is more than the sum of parts? For example, credit operates in a system that lets it accumulate and accumulation is unevenly distributed - is concentrated in a few hands. The accumulated credit leads to wealth which in trun leads to power residing in fewer hands. The edifice of the society stands on not just the individuals but also on the way the system that binds the individuuals. We all know that everything is not right with us as a society because we do not treat the constituents of the society with the same equanimity as the human body treats all its 30 trillion cells.
Hence I think that we need to pay more attention to the systemic issues (such as consciousness, justice, exploitation, power, wars etc) and go beyond what the anologies suggest.
Thanks, Brett - while some may quibble with aspects of the analogy I’ve always thought of the extended metaphor as an exploration of an idea and not an exact match. In terms of it demonstrating the role of money as a messenger rather than the message itself it works for me.
The resources element seems to me to be important in two respects. First in its role in exchange and second as an imperative to our continued existence on this planet which sits outside of the economic system. It is arguable in economic terms that resources have no value until they are put into circulation via the labour of individuals. In these times of increasing mechanisation and computerisation, however, the individual is being substituted by the body of the corporation and the scale of consumption has amplified the cost of ignoring the externalities to the point where we must now treat all resources as having critical inherent value. Not doing so has resulted in the body housing your dysfunctional nervous system wasting away, expending far more energy than it is taking in.
Whatever ‘money’ was previously it is clearly now an expression of debt. As such, it is an extremely useful device for facilitating the process of exchange - the neural impulse in this system. Some may prefer the arterial analogy as it acknowledges the de facto use of money as a commodity itself with the increased financialisation of debt. This seem akin though to the snake eating its tail or in your analogy, the firing of synapses with the sole aim of stimulating other synaptic systems without any intention to stimulate muscles into doing useful work. I imagine this as resulting in a series of nervous ticks and other involuntary actions further depleting the body’s energy stores with no concomitant benefit.
The use of cash as a disruptor in a more localised system of exchange put me in mind of a recent podcast about the right wing nationalist rioting in Britain this past week. The point being made was that while the violence itself was not widely supported there was a lot of sympathy for the issues behind it. The speaker was suggesting that (instigators aside) this was an expression of the loss of the cultural norms that could be seen as identifiably British. The loss of these cultural norms has been a result of the mass adoption of American culture during the 50’s and 60’s (and onward) as well as the rise of corporations either absorbing or displacing smaller independents and homogenising the high streets across the country.
Coupled with the movement of wealth to those already wealthy and an increasing feeling of precarity in the minds of the population it is unsurprising that migrants are targeted. Unfortunately, it is not the poor souls fleeing war or destitution arriving on our shores that are the problem but rather the migration of control over essential aspects of our lives to largely unaccountable governments and even more unaccountable corporations. For much too long we have not had our cultural and moral values reflected back to us where we live and the god of profit has left us all poorer.
Thanks Brett. I have myself used the circulatory system metaphor in an article I wrote on Medium and in my book. https://medium.com/@marma-developer/practical-spirituality-2-keeping-the-heart-beating-1a393aecce66
After reading your position, I would argue that money is BOTH the nervous and circulatory system. Humans need money much like cells need oxygen (carried by red blood cells) in order to survive within society (global collective body of humanity). It is just that in the case of oxygen in the body, this oxygen doesn't come with information associated to it (for instance, moving the muscle). Oxygen is what enables the "orders" of the nervous system to be carried out. But money is the nervous system without a brain, because when people spend money, it is like cells directly exchanging information between themselves (more like a "wisdom of the crowd" effect) than creating a "brain" with higher order instructions which creates a kind of "magical" coherence at the global level. For instance, when your brain instructs you to dance, sending commands to the body, your body doesn't bang itself on the walls. Whereas the "instructions" coming from global finance, in the way they spend money in the economy, and thereby set humanity's collective "body" into motion, a lot of cells end up hurt. That is why I prefer to say that the Internet is the nervous system, and eventually, AI will represent the brain, that is, a kind of "super intelligence" that can make sense of all the "data" (human generated information) that courses through its circuits (much like the bodily feedback you get from your cells, that courses through your brain, and your brain has to find a coherence in all that "data", and then send higher order instructions that enables shifting the collective body of cells in such a way as to create harmony). So basically, because humanity sits a fractal above biology, biology remains a kind of universal "template" for humanity to organize their collective systems (like the Internet or the circulatory system), but it gets mixed up because each fractal level above, things get much more complex. A forest isn't a tree, and a tree isn't a leaf, but they all share certain fractal properties, nevertheless. What's more important, is what you DO with the metaphors you use. The reason why it's best to use the circulatory system idea, is that it fits well with certain ethical concepts, like universal basic income. Each one of your cells receives the oxygen it needs to survive and do what it's supposed to do, no questions asked. It isn't controlled by the heart administration bureau to verify that it has carried out its daily toil. This doesn't work very well when using the nervous system as a metaphor. Each cell/human is granted the basic... what? Impulse? Market signal? To equally instruct humanity's "collective organism" to move into a certain direction? I know that at this level of reality, money isn't just "oxygen", it's also a market signal, and also information, since whenever a human spends money, he/she is essentially "voting" for the endured existence of a good/service. Finally, all these metaphors should be used consciously, understanding that if you use the "superorganism" metaphor, you can't just use them and pretend like this superorganism doesn't have a mind of its own, or that humanity's own development doesn't follow some kind of universal template or direction. That's why I wrote my book: "mother Earth's final push", because I believe that we grew on this planet much like a baby developed inside the womb, and that "legacy" debt based finance was the perfect financial system to "grow" humanity fast in an exponential way (just like the growth of a foetus, where every organ has to grow in sync), and that we are nearing the point where we are ready to form a functional global organism, which translates as "birth", at which point the baby separates from the placenta (cutting the umbilical cord) and transitioning to another system altogether (lungs + stomach) which equates to a simultaneous financial system transition and energy transition.
However, when you really analyse it, money is a form of information, whereas oxygen is matter. The distinction is important because information can be replicated almost at will at low-to-negligible cost, whereas matter can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed, and then with the use of energy.
I agree the ‘money is nervous system’ analogy isn’t quite right, money is like the nerve impulses transmitted by the nervous system, which means the analogue to the nervous system must the the payment system, the system that moves money around.
Yes. I believe money is basically fused oxygen and nervous system impulses all in one. But then there is the question of the Internet and of the future of money. I like the Star Trek episode where a bunch of people from the 22nd century are woken up from cryosleep and one of them wants to check the value of the stock market, thinking he's the richest man alive.. Only to find out that in a post-scarcity economy/world with replicators, there is no stock market/money. :-D
In this view, the current monetary system is only temporary. The nervous system metaphor then transforms into a (hopefully) benevolent AI (which symbolically represents the collective "brain" of humanity) sending signals to humans via the Internet to "move" the collective body of humanity in one direction or another, and each human is given whatever resources needed (via blockchain and crypto-assets for instance) to carry out whatever actions he's supposed to carry out.
I just read some interesting comments on money as water and blood in the last chapter of Making Money by Christine Desan. She points out that the water metaphor suggests the political neutrality of money.
> Money isn’t like blood pumping through veins. It’s like nerve impulses jolting muscles into movement.
I wouldn't dismiss one metaphor in favour of another with such force and rectitude. I would have liked some explanation why money is like nerve impulses.
Your diagram suggests that money connected all the small social structures together, leaving them intact, whereas I would argue those structures no longer exist.
Matthew, it’s maybe clearer (but also more abstract, which doesn’t suit everyone) if we think of money as information.
Thus, the nervous system analogy is quite good but we also see the problem with the analogy, and how to I prove it. The nervous system transmits information around the body. So it would be more accurate to say that money is the nerve impulses, while the nervous system is the payment system. Then we start getting all sorts of insights. There is no limit to the number of nervous impulses that can be generated, just as there is no limit to the amount of money that can be created. But the utility of both depends on a real physical resource being able to react to the information by doing something with matter and energy to create a useful service.
When you refer to "money" what exactly do you mean? Is it your idea of money or is it everyone's idea and if the latter, how do you know? Is it a logically valid notion and if so how do you test/determine that it is?
I think this is the first of your posts I am uneasy with.
Are you not implying, with your characterisation of prehistory, that without 'money' there are no large complex societies? I guess what kind of "money' is the question here, and of so this complicates your metaphor... I ask because you are aware of recent work outlining other kinds of prehistoric society...
The other query is how there seems to be an implication that an alternative nervous system is a universal one? My understanding from area studies and schismogenesis is that universalism is a false pretence? To take your metaphor, there is never one system or hegemony at play but inter relating ones..
Just some immediate feelings :)
(Apologies haven't replied to your kind emails yet, just got back from fieldwork, soon!)
Or another way to put it more bluntly, i think singularity folks would love this :)
First, there exists no independent definition of "money" possible i.e. money has no independent existence of its own, neither have we provided a valid ratified standard definition of it as an arbitrary artifice in conjunction with the real world [1]. Moreover, the common notion of "money"assumed in everyday practice is formally proven to unequivocally constitute a logical incoherence, for which it is referred to as "money's misrepresentation" [2].
Given these facts and in order to say "money is a nervous system", we must first fully comprehend "money" something that is impossible if we have not yet agreed on a definition and subsequent (coherent) normative specification for its use.
Therefore, neither money nor finance can be assigned any coherent organic function with respect to anything, other than a foreign contaminant or intoxicant not unlike a narcotic or a poison. Particularly when the common notion of it constitutes a logical incoherence i.e. a misrepresentation.
[1] https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-summary
[2] https://www.moneytransparency.com/core-misrepresentation
Your notion that there exists no independent definition of "money" actually comes from the Lords of NeoClassical Economics and is meant to confuse and dissimulate what everyone knows or should know to be true about money. If you want some definitions of money over history that actually work, read David Graeber's DEBT: THE FIRST 5000 YEARS. Hint: money belongs to credit systems.
Or from the money view put forwrd by Perry Mehrling,Money exists in a hierarchical structure, with different forms of money at different levels.
Of course. Money is what we make of it. Historically, there is blood money, bride money, tally sticks, coins of all kinds and specie, fiat money, digital money. Then there is the 'funny money' of fictitious capital. But levels? I don't have an idea what you mean, nor do I see how 'levels' can be relevant.
while it's true that money takes many forms historically, the concept of levels in the money view isn't about historical types of money, but rather about the structure of the modern financial system. The relevance lies in understanding how different forms of money interact, their relative stability, and how financial crises can propagate through this structure.
I read this Brett Scott article before. But your original claim was that there was no "independent definition" of money, then you proceed to offer a definition. My remark was to claim that "no one understands what money is" is an argument made by the NeoClassical and Post-Keynesian economists when in fact there is a vibrant (but powerless to make policy) community who really does understand money.
That was the claim from Marc. I am saying there are clear defintitions of what moeny is.
"I don't have an idea what you mean, nor do I see how 'levels' can be relevant."
Its very relevant.
Brett speaks about these levels as layers.
https://www.asomo.co/p/paymentspotting
The comments above do not address the fact that there is no formal definition of the currency symbol. Moreover, there is no logically evaluable ratified formal definition of money as a concept. To rebut such a claim all that is required is to cite a formal ratified definition, but there is none.
As for the common notion of money applied in lieu of any formal definition as required, "money" contracts regularly refer simultaneously to multiples of currency units symbols as both records/measures of value AND articles of trade charged on a unit by unit basis. Any serious ontological analysis will show that such a conflation is logically inconsistent and therefore invalid.
So the point I am making, is that in order for a simile to hold it must be homologous to what it claims to illustrate. But for that, we must use clearly defined similes, the money system is not well defined nor does it have independent (natural) existence, as a consequence it cannot serve as a simile to any real world phenomenon.