Affording Cathedrals:
Bitcoin as Cultural Layer 1
The following is the first in a series of longer form articles exploring themes related to the cognitive science of worldviews. Specifically, the series will examine our relation to technology and how it forms the layers of our individual and distributed cognition. Being a former student of John Vervaeke, a Cognitive Scientist at the University of Toronto, I owe a great debt of gratitude to him for in-forming my mode of thought, and for creating one of the layers of my cognition. Inspiration and influence for this piece also owes to Robert Breedlove’s ideas in his podcast series with Vervaeke, on the What is Money show.
Some ideas are so powerful, that they become taken for granted. They become backgrounded as a base layer of collective thought. But the power of an idea does not necessarily give credence to that idea. Cartesian dualism, the idea that there is a clear separation between the mental and the physical, though they somehow still causally interact, is an example of a powerful idea that has been updated in modern cognitive science by much more embodied theories of cognition. But its power as a backgrounded base layer of our worldview still perseveres. You do not need to know who Rene Descartes is to have integrated his ideas into your worldview. One day you might not know the name Satoshi Nakamoto, but Bitcoin may have formed a base layer of your worldview regardless. To the extent that Bitcoin can become backgrounded as a part of our distributed cognition, it will have been a success.
We can think of our worldview, our perspective and cultural embeddedness in the world, as having cognitive layers. We are constitutive of these layers, to some extent, either as individuals, or as a society. We construct our environments, and those environments afford us a set of opportunities for action. Environments incentivize us toward some actions and away from others. The concept of affordances was introduced into evolutionary psychology by James J. Gibson, most notably in his 1979 book “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”. For example, sight, or the act of seeing, is afforded not just by the “things” to see. And it is also not afforded simply by the functioning eye, it exists in the relationship between the eye and the environment.
“The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what
it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. ... It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment”
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke often illustrates affordances with the example of grasping a bottle. Your hand allows you to conform to the shape of the bottle, and the shape of the bottle allows your hand to conform to it, allowing for grasping. The grasping is not a feature of either the bottle or the hand, but the dance between them.
We can think of affordances at the level of biological functioning. Our physical bodies have an affordance relationship to our co-created environments. Climbing is an affordance between myself and the tree, opening up opportunities for food gathering, or keeping watch for predators. But we are also cultural beings who inhabit a cultural environment, with it’s own set of affordances. At the cultural level, our constitutive role becomes even clearer. We participate in the creation of culture through building memes and memetic propagation. It can be hard to realize that you are actually a co-creator of culture because we swim in it. Culture is our water.
Money as Psychotechnology, Psychotechnology as Culture
Marshall McLuhan viewed technologies as an extension and amputation of man. The car can be seen as an extension of ourselves and an optimization of our transportation, but in a sense it is also an amputation of our legs. This alters our relationship to our environments. Technology shapes our culture through affording new ways of being.
“...the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. “
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Vervaeke uses the term psychotechnology to refer to a cognitive technology, a cognitive tool. Literacy, mathematics, and the concept of money, can be seen as psychotechnologies in how they become systems of cognitive extension. Money sort of sits on the boundary between technology and psychotechnology. It has a technical, real world element to represent a store of value or medium of exchange. That might be the use of mined precious metals, the purposefully confusing federal reserve system, or a distributed ledger technology. But it’s conceptualization of the material technology that becomes the psychotechnological. These technologies extend us, and wed us to a mode of distributed cognitive functioning, with their own set of affordances, or incentives. They mediate our relation to one another in how we transact. They are the base layers of our worldview, and vehicles for culture.
We have to also take into account the amputations of our technologies. The technologies we use, and their externalities shape our cultural environment, and the set of affordances inherent within it. The fiat money system extends credit, and “progress” (and seemingly endless wars). It allows for those at the lever of control to extend themselves to their own ends, and by proxy, amputates the “legs” of society through the devaluation of their money. This is the devaluation of their expended energy, and their precious time. The externalities of the fiat system, the amputations if you will, create a maladaptive incentive structure, or set of affordances.
The parable of the winemaker illustrates this well. A winemaker sells a bottle of wine for $20. One day, the state decides to double the circulating money supply, inflating the currency, and driving up prices. In this situation the winemaker is faced with three options.
Do nothing. Eat the newly increased production costs to make his bottle of wine and continue to sell it for $20. His profit margin decreases.
Double the price of his wine to $40, incentivizing less people to purchase the wine at the increased cost, possibly resulting in him being accused of price gouging.
Switch to lower quality, cheaper ingredients to keep his bottle of wine at $20 to keep his profit margin, while sacrificing his craft and the value provided to the customer.
I would argue that the 3rd incentive is the stickiest, and most likely scenario. This is one of the ways in which a fiat system incentivizes the market to be dishonest. And this extends to all consumer goods, leading to shorter lifespans of products that need to be replaced more often. It is inherently high time preference, focusing on benefits today, rather than long term value. Lower quality items do not persevere through generations and this creates a sea of worthless junk. Bitcoin on the other hand is inherently low time preference and prioritizes the future. This affords multi-generational projects as long term success is prioritized over short term profit.
McLuhan states that the content of every medium is always another medium. Take electric light, it is a medium without a message, he says. It is pure information. If you in-form that pure information, and build a lettered, neon light sign for example, you have introduced the medium of literacy. The content of that sign is literacy, the content of literacy is speech, the content of speech is non-verbal thought.
Bitcoin is electric light.
It is a pure information layer, and human energy is the content. The storage of human value, our energy expenditure, our proof of work, in a uncorrupted protocol affords us to think long term because we can be sure that our time and energy is not being purposely devalued through manipulation. Bitcoin incentivizes us to build cultural cathedrals.
The great architectural cathedrals were built over centuries, with people labouring in a multi-generational project, knowing that they would not live to see the project through completion. Bitcoin is a project we are participating in, in one form or another, knowing we will not see the full potential realized in our lifetime. That’s not to say there won’t be visible progress. It is a project that binds us through generations.
Bitcoin can be seen as a cultural cathedral in and of itself. But Bitcoin as a monetary standard can also facilitate the building of cultural cathedrals through the societal affordances it creates. The cultural conceptualization of Bitcoin (Bitcoin as psychotechnology), extrapolated from Bitcoin the protocol, forms one of the base layers of our worldview. It is a remodelling of not just the financial system, but an alteration on the cultural-cognitive environment that structures our reality.
Bitcoin and the Normative Structure of Reality
Philosopher of biology, Denis Walsh, a colleague of Vervaeke’s at the University of Toronto, presents a plausible integration of norms and the natural world in his discussion of Normative Naturalism, and Constitutive Perspectivalism. Allow me to unpack the philosophical jargon. By norms, let’s for now take that to mean an evaluative standard by which we measure outcomes as more or less in line with that standard. And by naturalism, I’m referring to the extent to which we can integrate occurrences in the world into the natural order of science. Cultural norms have tended to be conceptualized as being outside of natural norms, and left to the realm of moral and ethical philosophy to sort through.
Walsh uses the concept of affordances to integrate norms into the natural order of things. Essentially, he argues that in order to experience a norm, you must be able to take the perspective out of which that norm arises. For example, take the classic premise from Thomas Nagel in his 1974 paper “What is it like to be a bat?”. Nagel, in his exploration of consciousness, takes into consideration the echolocation capabilities of the bat. To experience what it’s like to be a bat, we need to be in the seat of consciousness that the bat inhabits. We must be in that perspective to understand the set of affordances created by the physical attributes of the bat, and the environment (a cave). The bat navigates it’s environment, it becomes an agent, through that set of affordances. Walsh would say that the particular perspective is constitutive of norms (Constitutive Perspectivalism), that it inaugurates new facts in the world.
While Walsh sticks with “entry-level agency”, as in simple organisms, I think we can extrapolate from his ideas and bring it to the level of culture. The base layers of our culture, like the psychotechnologies we integrate, create affordances, or incentives, that become the norms of our natural cultural world. And since we co-create our culture through memetic propagation, the normative structure of our reality is derived from the quality of the memes we produce.
It is inherently maladaptive to have a cultural base layer like fiat currency since it orients us away from truth. It incentivizes actions within that cultural environment that would look pathological from outside that system. Devaluing the currency through inflation incentivizes spending over saving. It is a misallocation of resources. It is a misallocation of your efforts. Instead of building cathedrals, people are saddled with large amounts of debt, and little to no savings, struggling to get by. And since the fiat system is backgrounded, you accept it as the way things just are. When you can’t grasp why things seem to be getting worse, you look for a scapegoat. This leads to more social unrest, fuelling culture war dynamics.
Cartesian dualism posited a separation between mind and body, but we are waking up to an embodied cognition. The fiat system posits a separation between money and creation. It’s time adopt an embodied theory of money that extends your efforts into the future.
Bitcoin is not a panacea. It does not create a utopia. There is no set of doctrines we can impose top-down on a society that creates prosperity for all. The promise of Bitcoin is that it’s a bottom-up solution. It is a parallel system at its core, that has the ability to become an adaptive, backgrounded cultural base layer, incentivizing long term creation. Bitcoin affords cathedrals.