Schizophrenic

In Theory of Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued consciousness, as we understand it, is a process based on metaphorical language, not an inherent property of the human brain. Even as recently as 10,000 years ago, humans, he posits, were not conscious in the way we are today — instead they experienced “auditory hallucinations” directing their actions. Were such a person transported to the present day, he might be diagnosed as schizophrenic.

The consciousness we experience — the idea that I am Chris Liss, I grew up in New York and I live in Portugal now — is habitual for us. We have stories about ourselves with which we identify to varying degrees, and a self-conception.

Many of us know from philosophy and Eastern religion that the idea of self (or ego) is a fiction. The person I imagine is me is just a story, a narrative I’ve concocted about my life that serves the purpose of navigating society. I need to have this story about myself because you have a story about yourself (and a much less detailed one about me), and it allows us to have common ground.

But these stories are thin summaries of a past that no longer exists and in any event is interpreted through the lens of social convention and convenience. They are not “true” any more than what shows up in the local newspaper could be said to be a true rendition of all that takes place in the area. It’s highly edited, narrowly selected toward what it deems to be the interests and preferences of the audience. It’s a biased, incomplete account of reality that serves its purpose — to create a narrative about oneself that works (to varying degrees) for the person espousing it.

But as fraudulent as our ego-narratives are, what would happen if we were to lose the ability to craft them entirely? According to Jaynes’ theory, we might present as schizophrenic. (This is not the same as having the tool, but identifying only lightly or provisionally with it — that’s what many would call spiritual enlightenment. I am talking about not even having the ability to identify with a metaphorical ego-self at all.)

I thought about this the other day in the context of society as a whole, rather than merely on the individual level. People wistfully recall the days when Walter Cronkite or some other trusted purveyor of the news — society’s shared narrative — would come on TV and explain what was happening. People might have disagreed about what it meant or how to respond, but the “facts” themselves, whether or not they were actually true, were not largely in dispute.

Shared narratives are necessary for society to function at scale. The notion of the Dunbar Number is that we can only know at most 150-odd people well enough to trust them personally. (There is dispute as to whether 150 or 300 or 500 is the real number, but it’s definitely not 10,000 or 10 million.) But narratives (“we’re all Americans” or “we’re all Christians” or “we’re all Yankees fans”) allow us to cooperate with large numbers of our fellow humans we don’t personally know. The narrative isn’t actually real — “American” or “Yankee fan” is arbitrary. You might reside within America’s legally drawn borders, or cheer for the players in pinstripes, but maybe you are also brown-eyed and over six-feet tall, and you don’t identify yourself as part of those groups.

What happens though when these narratives, even if flimsy, provisional and arbitrary, break down? What happens when we can no longer agree on a shared set of facts? Maybe it’s similar to an individual lacking a cohesive notion of self — a schizophrenia of sorts writ large. There is no widely agreed-upon story, no shared higher purpose, no objective agreement even on fundamental matters. Perhaps, this is the Tower Of Babel parable, God scattering the ability of humans to organize at scale via shared narrative, and I’m circling back to the same thoughts regarding the broken, infinitely printable money, the distorted language of value and all the downstream insanity that flows therefrom.

The same process by which an individual loses his mind — dissociates from the metaphorical self — might govern the way a society loses the ability to organize itself at scale. The mechanism — a centralized narrative mediated by the relevant authorities, whether the church, the king or the nine o’clock news — has broken down in the information age, where society’s phony stories are so easily debunked and its authorities permanently divested of credibility.

I do not think Humpty Dumpty can be reconstructed, the “good ole days” are gone for good. The question, then, is how we can settle upon a shared reality, where the definitions of even basic words and concepts, are not in dispute. The Bitcoiners would say, “fix the money, fix the world,” and that would certainly be a start.

I wrote about this a few months ago:

I read somewhere (can’t remember where, otherwise I’d provide attribution), that money can be seen as a language. When you spend money you are expressing your preferences, indicating the thing you are purchasing has value to you. Every dollar or euro you spend gives its recipient the message that what he has on offer is worth the amount you are willing to pay. The economy, then, can be seen as a vast communications network of sorts, buyers telling sellers what goods they want produced, and sellers modifying, matching and adapting those goods based on the information received. Just as a good language facilitates the possibility of clear understanding between speakers, a good money allows for well-allocated goods and services in society based on the preferences of its citizens.

When value must be earned rather than conjured into thin air by centralized authorities, the incentives will better align with a market-based reality than the whims of a few technocrats managing central banks. Perhaps it really is that simple:

Entire industries spring up around money creation and servicing the money creators. The best and brightest minds head for Wall Street (money creation) rather than productive enterprise (science, engineering.) The goods and services that would be demanded by a gold-backed, limited-supply currency still have some demand, but nations that can print also spend on things like wars (enriching war-profiteers), corporate bail-outs and subsidies for industries that money-printing enables to capture regulators and politicians. Consider we put a person on the moon in 1969, built the national highway system over several decades and had transatlantic flights at supersonic speeds via the Concorde in the 1970s. The 1968 movie 2001 Space Odyssey contemplated interplanetary travel by the turn of the century. Little did Stanley Kubrick know that we would barely advance on that front at all. On our tower to the heavens, so to speak, we scarcely laid another brick.

A hard-money standard whether gold, or the superior modern version, bitcoin, would reverse this trajectory by fixing the language of money and allowing people to invest their energy on creating value rather than chasing its easily-manipulated measurement.

Just as the modern form of consciousness emerged spontaneously from an earlier era, and modern narratives like the notion of inalienable human rights likewise sprung into being, perhaps aligned incentives downstream from sound money will restore a connection to reality.

Every choice will have a cost, every outcome the expression of what someone values, backed up by physics — the electrical energy necessary to represent value. Someone will have to have expended that energy, i.e., paid for that choice, by forgoing another energy use in its stead. Just as millions of phony social media accounts can be created via algorithm to gin up perceived enthusiasm for a given agenda, billions of dollars can be printed to the same effect. But put a real cost on creating each bot account, and phony campaigns would all but disappear. The principle is largely the same — when money can only be earned through energy expended or value offered, it will be nigh impossible to sell the populace on a war of choice, or a giveaway to some favored industry.

People would still have different preferences and philosophical disagreements, of course — they will be disappointed in many of the policies and choices for which their fellow citizens opt. But at least they would be dealing with real rather than manufactured disagreements, actual fact-based preferences instead of astro-turfed ideologies. Such a state of affairs would be a vast improvement wherein the patient would pass from a state of psychosis to mere neurosis, from hallucinations to garden-variety interpersonal conflict, a situation wherein he once again has the tools to work it out.