Within The Algebra of Life, the domain of “Food” includes much more than what we choose to eat and drink.

It includes everything that goes into our bodies.

But even the Foods we choose to eat can be conceived in different ways.

Humans and animals have broadly similar biological relations with Food — we require it to survive so we must work to acquire it, whether directly or indirectly.

But in addition to the wider range of Foods that humans eat, we also speak and think about Food with a richer knowledge base and vocabulary.

On one hand, there is Food as we know it, or the “colloquial conception” of Food.

This is the basic, everyday language we use to describe the things we choose to eat and drink.

These are words like breakfast, lunch, dinner, eggs, pizza, apple, hamburger, or Coca-Cola.

This is the most common way that modern humans think and speak about Food.

But there is also Food as nutrients or harmful substances: the “scientific conception.”

This language is more detailed, relating to the specific physical substances entering our bodies which may provide — or interfere with — the nourishment needed for growth and the maintenance of life.

With the scientific conception, we use words like proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, but even these are only starting points.

Although broadly compatible with science, these terms ultimately still represent categories of substances within which there is great variety.

For example, carbohydrates include both watermelon and watermelon-flavored candy. But our bodies will produce very different chemical reactions for each item.

Food “as a domain of life,” Food “as we know it,” and Food “as nutrients or harmful substances,” are not distinct categories of Food, but different ways that humans can conceive or think about Food.

Unlike animals, our species conceives Food not only biologically, but also through cultural, psychological, and economic lenses.

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While some animal species like the Koala or Giant Panda are limited to a single Food — eucalyptus and bamboo, respectively — for a purely biological purpose (survival), humans fall on the other end of the spectrum.

Food has taken many different physical forms throughout our species’ history, but the concept has also been imbued with different meanings:

• Food as medicine: In both India and China, ancient systems like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine have long emphasized the role of diet in healing, disease prevention, and wellness.

• Food as art or entertainment: In the more expensive restaurants of modern cities, the act of eating has become a curated, multi-sensory experience, where meals are designed to create excitement.

• Food as culture or identity: Preparing local, customary Foods can be a vessel for heritage and belonging by preserving indigenous histories and celebrating religious holidays.

• Food as comfort: If we’re feeling sad or stressed, Food can be used for psychological soothing, particularly if the Food is associated with childhood or home cooking.

• Food as connection: The act of eating can be treated as an opportunity or catalyst for bonding, such as with business dinners, romantic dates, family barbecues, or holiday feasts.

• Food as politics: We’re the only species that uses Food choices to reflect our political or ethical values. For example, eating “vegan,” seeking out “fair-trade” products, or shopping locally to minimize our “carbon footprint.”

• Food as status symbol: Going beyond art or entertainment, the inclusion of rare or expensive ingredients and exclusive restaurant reservations have long been a signal of wealth or social standing.

Apart from the ancient conception of Food as medicine, these other conceptions of Food relate to the human mind.

But our minds and bodies relate to Food very differently. And since our minds don’t have to follow the same rules as our bodies, many of these varied conceptions of Food are relatively new to our species.

Food was much simpler for our early ancestors.

This difference is best captured by introducing two distinct conceptions of Food that are based on the purpose of their production.

Traditional Food is produced to be eaten. Trade Food is produced to be exchanged for Money.

Just as Time was broken down into “Measured” and “Human,” Food must be broken down into “Traditional” and “Trade.”

This distinction goes beyond modern conceptions and is fundamental to The Algebra of Life.

Previous post: What Makes Something Food?

Chapter 2: Food

“Whatever supplies nourishment to organisms”

“Any nourishing substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain life, provide energy, promote growth, etc.”

“Material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrates, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, vital processes, and to furnish energy”

“Something that people and animals eat, or plants absorb, to keep them alive” “Anything serving for consumption or use”

“The things that people or animals eat”

- Selected definitions

All humans and animals require Food to survive, but what is Food?

More specifically, what makes something Food?

This question was featured in Part I’s Introduction to help us distinguish between “categorical” and “conceptual” thinking.

We eat things because they are Food — not the other way around.

This basic principle is reflected in the timeless warning from new parents to their child: “don’t put that in your mouth!”

We ascribe many different meanings to the physical objects we encounter in our external world, but recognizing Food is among the most ancient and fundamental classifications that humans can make.

It took millennia of survival by trial-and-error before our species understood which plants and animals could safely be eaten as Food in their respective environments.

Nature was not a grocery store.

Our earliest ancestors had no choice but to develop their conceptions of Food from first principles.

Why do we eat it?

What are our goals?

How are these goals best served?

When thinking about Food categorically, however, the quality need not be considered. Food can simply become “the things that people or animals eat.”

While an accurate description of Food, this would be a dangerously misleading definition.

And as with concepts and categories, this is an important distinction to make.

Descriptions are simply accounts of a person, object, or event. They reflect the perspective of the describer and may diverge considerably from other descriptions — even when the exact same thing is being described.

With descriptions, you can include or omit whichever characteristics you choose.

Definitions are different.

They are attempts to state the exact, general meaning of a word, without regard for a specific perspective. A good definition would extract the most broadly accepted meaning from the totality of characteristics.

This is different from describing something, even if the description is accurate.

We eat things because they are Food. But what makes something Food?

How can we define it?

Whether something qualifies as Food should depend on whether it sustains or enhances life.

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But our earliest ancestors could not know this in advance.

They had to learn the hard way.

We are the fortunate beneficiaries of our ancestors’ trials and errors.

Just as each plane crash makes future flights safer, it was our ancestors’ “errors” that generated the most useful knowledge with regard to Food — often at the expense of the individual.

Given the risks associated with eating unknown plants and animals, it was better for early humans to copy existing diets rather than experiment for themselves.

This was the original “risk management.”

It’s normal for humans to think of Food as “what people eat” because this is an ancient survival strategy, allowing us to benefit from the risk-taking of others while avoiding the potentially lethal pitfalls of experimentation.

In the business world, this is called a “second mover advantage” — innovation is copied rather than initiated.

But although this may be a relatively safe rule today, we couldn’t set out this way. Someone had to experiment and discover new Foods before their actions could be observed and copied.

Our Food decisions have always been shaped by what we see other people eating, but mimicry cannot inform our conception or definition of Food.

To “eat what others eat” does not capture the full meaning of Food.

Our species’ unique physical capabilities and capacity for planned action causes human mimicry to produce more varied results than animal mimicry.

Narrowly focused on survival, animals might mimic each other for millennia without meaningfully changing the initial behavior or results. The variety of Foods from which they can choose remains essentially unchanged.

But when humans start copying each other, something entirely different happens.

We use our observations of other people’s actions to help us conceive what is possible.

And we don’t stop here.

By remembering further back and thinking further ahead, our minds work to expand our perceived possibilities. And unlike with animals, these new discoveries could be passed down to each successive generation through language, and eventually writing.

This is a major difference between “Animal Time” and “Human Time.”

Modern humans conceive of Food in many different ways relative to animals.

But after millennia of mastering the question of what is possible, our species’ relationship with Food has become so complex that it’s increasingly difficult to know what is best.

To master The Algebra of Life we must learn to recognize and understand these divergent conceptions.

Next post: Modern Conceptions of Food

Previous post: Time, Consciousness, & Our Bodies

Scientists can hardly agree that consciousness exists, much less understand it.

Serious discussion of the topic seems to be reserved for specialists — although this has been changing in recent decades.

The future is uncertain. Even the past is uncertain, to our minds.

We’ve previously described the past and future as being separated by the present, but this doesn’t prevent our memories from interacting with our hopes, dreams, fears, or expectations.

The boundaries between these cognitive layers are porous.

Our present is chaotic.

We may have negative experiences which “scar” us, leaving lasting memories which dampen our hopes or dreams in some way.

On the other hand, positive experiences may enhance our conceptions of what is possible or which is best.

Our past and our future only exist within our minds, where they can’t help but interact with each other.

Consciousness may come from the interactions between our “past” and our “future” — the interplay between our memories and expectations. But since neither can be measured or observed, the interactions between them are even harder to analyze.

That our consciousness may be a synthesis of our perceptions of the past and future is an untestable theory, but it’s a sufficient approximation for our purposes.

Learning to use consciousness to our advantage is more important than being able to precisely define it.

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Although it originates within our minds and cannot be directly observed, our consciousness serves as a vital link between our species’ experience of Time and our physical bodies — particularly with regards to Food.

Unlike our thoughts or feelings, our bodies must adhere to the laws of physics while also complying with the natural rules of many other chemical and biological systems.

Chemistry is the science of matter, while biology is the science of life.

Physics is about energy and force.

All of these apply to both humans and animals.

Our chemical Foods interact with our biological bodies. But since humans consume a much wider variety of increasingly complex Foods relative to animals, our bodies’ interactions with these Foods is also more complex.

As a species, we can physically access virtually any Food that can be found in nature.

We’ve invented a seemingly infinite number of synthetic “Food products.”

And the medical, dental, and pharmaceutical industries have introduced many of their own non-Food chemicals to our bodies over the years.

Remember: within The Algebra of Life, the domain of Food includes everything that goes inside our bodies — not just what we typically think of as “Food.”

Animals certainly feel how Food affects their bodies, but only humans can become consciously aware of the biochemical mechanisms through which their Food interacts with their internal systems.

Modern humans are uniquely capable of becoming aware not only of how certain Foods makes their bodies feel, but also why.

If you pay attention to your body, you can feel what you eat.

And if you pay attention to the underlying science, you may begin to understand why. But it can also be a rabbit hole. Not everything is settled.

Eating or drinking too much will produce certain feelings in the short-term, but there are also longer-term considerations: the next morning, month, year, or decade.

We also don’t want to run out of Money — but that’s a topic for later.

The relationship between the Foods we eat and our experience of Human Time will be returned to in Chapter 4 (Time & Food). For now, know that it exists.

By synthesizing our brain’s perception of our bodily states, consciousness is what connects our experience of Time to our physical bodies.

But before the more complex relationships between Time and Food can be analyzed, we must first introduce the second “variable” of The Algebra of Life.

What is Food?

How should we think about Food?

These questions will be addressed in the next Chapter.

Next post: What Makes Something Food?

Previous post: The Mysterious Nature of Human Time

Unlike Measured Time, which humans have mastered through science and technology, Human Time is among the least well understood aspects of our existence.

We have inherited many different branches of specialized knowledge to help us understand and explain the external world, but reliable knowledge about our internal worlds is much harder to come by.

Treating broken bones is different from treating a broken heart.

Human consciousness remains a scientific mystery due to problems of observation and measurement. Applying scientific methods to our minds is exceedingly difficult because of the mysterious nature of Human Time.

The shortcomings of various academic fields can be traced to this concept.

Within economics, the void left by the omission of Human Time was filled by another of Adam Smith’s creations — the concept of the “rational man.”

Smith conceived the idea of an all-knowing, all-calculating, Money-oriented and perfectly self-interested human during The Enlightenment period, fulfilling his desire to apply science to human behavior.

Auguste Compte had a similar desire but, unlike Smith, he believed that isolating a single economic variable — Money — would distort the true science of society. He rejected the “rational man” concept.

By conceiving human nature in this way, however, Smith greatly simplified the math of economics. It could now look more like physics.

But applying science to human behavior is very different from accurately describing it.

And while Smith’s earlier works demonstrate his awareness of this, it wouldn’t matter.

The ideas we inherit are rarely understood or applied as intended by their creators.

Quantifying the non-quantifiable simplifies math while jeopardizing accuracy. But making useful predictions is different from making accurate predictions, and professional economists are generally paid to do the former.

The difference between a useful prediction and an accurate prediction is that the former may still be used to make Money in some way, even if it doesn’t turn out to be accurate.

Think of celebrity sports-betting sponsorships.

Unlike predictions within “hard” science, the creation and distribution of economic predictions is intended to shape the future rather than to foretell it.

Our most famous economic theories use the “rational man” as a workaround for Human Time, but the marketing and public relations firms whose corporate aim is to shape our human beliefs and decisions — they certainly don’t believe in this concept.

They know there is much more beneath the surface.

Human Time is impenetrable to professional economists because its “units” are not measuring units, but cognitive layers: the “past,” “present,” and “future.”

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Measured Time can be broken down into standardized, quantifiable units of measurement (e.g., days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc.).

Human Time breaks down into three separate cognitive layers, each a distinct concept.

We may use each terms with reference to Measured Time, but this doesn’t capture what they mean to us as concepts within our minds.

Knowing which day of the week it is, or which month of the year, doesn’t capture our experience of the “present.” How we experience and understand our own “past,” “present,” and “future” is highly emotional and subjective.

We cannot change past events or reliably predict future ones — the laws of physics must be obeyed — but it’s natural for humans to experience their past, present, and future differently.

Our species’ mental worlds are under no obligation to form a coherent whole in the same manner as our shared physical world.

We experience our past through memories: the “remains” left within our minds after an experience. They may be positive, negative, or neutral.

We might deeply regret some past actions while looking back on others with great pride or satisfaction. But unlike the economists’ “rational man,” our minds do not capture “reality” for our later, on-demand use.

They are not video recorders. Life is not Netflix.

We now know that memories are created by our minds. But since Human Time is involved, the specific process remains a scientific mystery.

Past events may be unalterable, but the laws of physics can’t stop us from changing how we feel about them. Since they only exist within our minds, our memories are far more malleable than we may wish to acknowledge.

The contents of our memories may depart significantly from the original experience, adapting themselves for some new purpose.

The “past,” as we experience it in the present, is scientifically uncertain.

The future is uncertain for a more obvious reason: it hasn’t happened yet.

Our memories relate to the past — but our hopes, dreams, fears, and expectations are future oriented. Our memories ultimately relate to certain past events, but these future-oriented feelings relate to our uncertain prospects.

The “present” is not just what separates the past from the future.

It is what separates our past from our future.

It is deeply personal.

Our experience of the present is closely related to another scientifically mysterious concept: human consciousness.

Consciousness implies not just physical presence, but also a state of awareness. And like our experience of Human Time, no two humans can be conscious in exactly the same way, or of exactly the same things.

The concept of Money exhibits a similar paradox as our consciousness: it plays a central role within our lives, and yet we only vaguely understand it — but that is a topic for Chapter 3.

The Algebra of Life will not resolve any longstanding scientific mysteries regarding consciousness. We can, however, explore how consciousness connects our experience of Time, and our consumption of Food, to our physical bodies.

Next post: Time, Consciousness, & Our Bodies

Previous post: The Trouble with “Science”

So far, we have divided the concept of Time into two types — Measured Time and Human Time — and briefly described their treatment by several academic fields.

Physics and economics relate more to Measured Time, while philosophy and sociology relate more to Human Time.

Modern economics has mimicked physics’ emphasis on objectivity and precision, while sociology has followed the philosophical tradition of exploring subjective experience.

But economics can never be as objective as physics because dollars are different in nature from minutes, hours, or kilograms. The same Money can be worth different things to different people, in different circumstances.

Using Money to measure value is different from measuring Time, mass, or distance.

Physics and chemistry are understood as “hard” sciences: branches of knowledge where facts and theories can be precisely and definitively tested — and proved.

Economics does not fit into this category for several reasons.

First, the complexity of our behavior (Human Time) makes it impossible to conduct conclusive, lab-controlled experiments on large populations.

Second, the fundamental difference between monetary value and physical mass — one being a variable, the other a constant — makes economic measurement inherently indeterminate.

If the number of centimeters contained within a meter were constantly in flux, or if the ability of steel beams to bear their loads “crashed” every four years, then all modern construction would be futile

And yet, during the mid-twentieth century after the first nuclear proliferation, many prominent economists became afflicted with “physics envy.”

Using numbers and equations gives economics the appearance of a “hard” science, where facts and theories can be definitively tested — but this is only an illusion.

Economic calculations may be useful in the near term, but economists will never be able to make accurate predictions about human behavior in the same way that physicists can predict the movement and interactions between particles.

Neither can sociologists, but they don’t usually claim to. Sociology is, by its nature, a social or “soft” science.

This means that humans are involved.

Labeling “hard” sciences like physics or chemistry as “physical” or “natural” sciences can be misleading, because humans are also physical and natural.

We just happen to also be social.

The core difference between “physical” and “social” science is the involvement of humans and our behavior. Once our species’ incomparably wide scopes for planned action are added to the mix, everything changes.

With so-called “physical” sciences, behaviorally “simple” entities like atoms and molecules are studied, and their interactions can be modeled with great precision. Causation can be binary: theories may be definitively tested (transformed into either fact or fiction) by having “peers” attempt to replicate the study.

This is how scientific knowledge in fields like physics and chemistry has traditionally been created.

The “social” sciences aim to understand far more complex behaviors. While atoms and molecules rigidly adhere to our known laws of physics, the behavior of humans, particularly when in large groups, is inherently unpredictable.

Since our behavior is so difficult to analyze in a controlled manner, the “physical” and “social” sciences have drifted apart.

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Taken together, the problems of observability and measurement mean that causation within the social sciences can never be conclusive. Theories from social science cannot be definitively separated into fact or fiction.

The economist cannot test their ideas in the same way as the physicist or the chemist.

This critical difference makes each “science” amount to a fundamentally different activity: the physical sciences use testable theories to produce verifiable facts, while the social sciences use verifiable facts to produce untestable theories.

These are essentially opposite processes, and yet we label both as “science.”

Most people know what science means generally, but even scientists cannot agree on the details.

“Science” is often defined as a systematized body of knowledge that is organized in the form of testable explanations and predictions. But dictionaries remain silent on how testable or how accurate the predictions must be.

To see why this is a problem, consider the following:

Imagine applying “science” to the task of understanding which variables determine an Olympic gold-medal performance in speed skating, and figure skating, respectively.

Both competitions involve “skating,” but the testability and accuracy of our explanations will diverge considerably.

With speed skating, a single physically measurable variable — speed — offers both a good explanation and predictive certainty, assuming the rules of the competition are followed. The fastest speed skater will win the gold medal.

Figure skating is not so simple.

To determine the winner, a panel of human judges must consider various criteria associated with the performance. The variable of “falling” may help us to rule out competitors, but differentiating among the best performances is a more complex task.

And this complexity is the perfect cover for human figure skating judges to accept Money bribes from other interested parties in exchange for altering their scoring.

With figure skating, external variables may play a hidden role.

But speed skating outcomes are more difficult to influence with Money.

The point isn’t that one type of “science” (or ice skating) is superior to the other, but to show how fundamentally different they are when it comes to making testable and accurate predictions.

This matters because we’re regularly encouraged to follow “the science” but our sciences often don’t follow each other.

With “hard” science (speed skating), results are so apparent that they cannot be sensibly argued about.

But with “soft” science (figure skating), reasonable people can disagree — or be paid Money to pretend that they disagree, and with plausible deniability due to problems of measurement or observability.

It’s not “science” that humans should follow, but knowledge derived from testable explanations, particularly those that can be used to make accurate predictions.

We are a complex species, and this has caused trouble for science.

The “physical” and “social” sciences are better framed as “simple” and “complex,” with the involvement of Human Time and as the dividing line.

Next, we’ll learn to better appreciate the deeply mysterious nature of this concept.

Next post: The Mysterious Nature of Human Time

Previous post: What is Social Welfare?

Within The Algebra of Life, the concept of social welfare can be separated into two broad domains: Time, and Food.

Time is what our bodies go through.

Food is what goes through our bodies.

Time is the overarching “variable,” encompassing both the Foods we eat and how we spend our Money. But these are special subsets of the many ways that humans use and experience their Time.

To make better sense of our modern world, we must treat these concepts as three distinct decision-making domains.

When conceived sufficiently broadly, the quality of human life is a direct function of Time and Food, with Money playing an indirect, intermediary role.

We are fortunate to have more control over our Time and Food than animals.

Our species faces many different decision sets and resource constraints, but the choices we make directly affect both what happens to our bodies (how we spend our Time), and what goes inside of our bodies (Food).

Pigou’s conception of economics is brought to life when social welfare is broken down into the domains of Time and Food.

The Algebra of Life involves exploring how Time and Food can be brought into relation, either directly or indirectly, with the measuring rod of Money.

Pigou addressed the thorny issue of economic measurability by considering both the direct and indirect forces. These correspond to the objective (measurable) and subjective (non-measurable) relations between Money and human life.

For example, the price of Food is an objective and direct relation to Money, but the price-driven motivation, or incentive, to buy or sell certain Food items, is a subjective and indirect relation — it happens within our minds.

Money prices are objective because they are external to the human mind and can generally be observed by everyone. The effects of prices, however, are subjective and will be different for different people.

Despite being central to how we conceive our own “social welfare,” how we feel about the amounts of Money we receive for our Time, and which we must pay for our Food, receives minimal attention from professional economists.

Part II (Dualisms) will bridge this gap by exploring both the direct and indirect relations between Time, Food, and Money. Prices themselves, which are objective and measurable, will be distinguished from their subjective and non-measurable effects.

How prices influence our actions is different for each person, but the choices we make in the domains of Time, Food, and Money have profound implications for our social welfare throughout our lifespans.

Within The Algebra of Life, exploring the interrelations between Money and anything else requires considering both the measurable, objective prices and their non-measurable, subjective effects.

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When grappling with decisions that may promote or detract from our social welfare, the field of economics may lead us down the wrong path because it cannot adequately consider subjective phenomena such as human motivation and experience.

But sociology does not take Money seriously enough, depriving the field of structure.

When it comes to navigating our increasingly overburdened and expensive lives, we risk being misdirected by economics, and lacking direction altogether with sociology.

The French philosopher who coined the term “sociology” would have been disappointed. Auguste Compte (1798 — 1857) envisioned a “grand science” that would incorporate many disciplines.

He sought to integrate all fields of knowledge into a unified whole, believing that the physical sciences needed to further develop before progress could be made on the more challenging task of using science to analyze human activity.

This vision never materialized for several reasons.

Much of the future advancement of science, particularly regarding human behavior, has been executed by corporations for the purpose of making Money — not to realize some grand intellectual framework.

Human activity and behavior cannot always be measured or observed, which makes it difficult to apply scientific methods.

The Scientific Revolution (1543 — 1687) was aimed at explaining the physical, external world. It greatly enhanced our material condition by expanding our knowledge of the physical world, and of Measured Time.

During “The Enlightenment” (1715 — 1789), our species turned its attention to its inner world. Liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the sovereignty of reason, and constitutional government are all Enlightenment ideas.

The Enlightenment period gradually changed how our species understood Human Time, enriching the non-material and more subjective parts of our lives.

During the Industrial Revolution (1760 — 1840), European exploration and exposure to foreign cultures caused more humans to begin seeking scientific explanations of their social world. This would prove difficult.

In addition to the problems with economics and sociology, there is also trouble with science.

Next post: The Trouble with “Science”

Previous post: Using Money to Measure Time

Measured Time and Human Time can be broadly mapped to physics and philosophy, respectively. But they can also be linked to two newer disciplines where Money and the human experience are central topics — economics and sociology.

Money will be introduced in Chapter 3, and its interrelations with Time and Food will be considered in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively. But it’s worth introducing economics now, as a way to further explore Measured Time and Human Time.

The word “economics” derives from the Greek “oikonomia,” but this earlier term referred to household management — not the broader “economy” as we know it today.

Economics became an academic discipline around 1776, when the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723 —1790) published “The Wealth of Nations.”

Remembered as the “Father of economics,” Smith is best known for the concept of the “invisible hand” of the market. He viewed economics as the “science of wealth,” believing that the goal of every country should be to increase its riches and power.

The subject matter was not happiness, but wealth.

Some later economists would take issue with Smith’s conception of their field.

For Alfred Marshall (1842 — 1924), treating economics as the “science of wealth” erred by failing to consider the quality of human life altogether. To Marshall, economics was “on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other and more important side, a study of man.” Wealth was a means to the end of human welfare.

Other economists sought to distance their field from the concept of human welfare.

To Lionel Robbins (1898 —1984), economics was the science that studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means. It was about making choices in a context of scarcity.

Building on this idea, Paul Samuelson (1925 — 2009) would offer a more comprehensive explanation:

Economics is the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources which could have alternative uses, to produce various commodities over time, and distribute them for consumption, now and in the near future, among various people and groups in society.

By treating Money as being optional to the task of resource deployment, Samuelson seems to be paying homage to our foraging ancestors.

Hunter-gatherers possessed a single scarce resource that could be used in many different ways: their Time.

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We’ve already established that Money has become fundamental to modern human life. Conceiving of an economics without Money made little sense in 1961, when Samuelson was writing, much less today.

But his economics textbooks became bestsellers anyway.

Money enables humans to indirectly exchange goods with each other, mitigating the many logistical challenges associated with “barter,” where goods and services must be directly exchanged for one another.

This social innovation greatly expanded the human capacity for trade, forever altering the organization of our species. Our early use of Money set in motion tectonic shifts in how our species could, and would, use our Time.

Hunter-gatherers could use their Time in many different ways relative to animals. But while modern humans also require Food, we can use our Time to acquire Money in a seemingly infinite variety of ways.

This doesn’t mean it is easy to become rich — only that there are many different ways to convert one’s Time into Money, even if only a little.

Man has been described as “the measure of all things,” but Money is how our species measures the goods and services we produce and consume.

And this includes the use of our Time.

Economics is about measurement. Production, consumption, and the allocation of resources can all be measured with Money. Considering this, the economist Arthur Pigou (1887 — 1959) defined his field as:

that part of social welfare that can be brought directly or indirectly into relation with the measuring rod of money.

Money is one of two primary units of economic measurement. The other is Time.

The concept of “finance” — a profession which emerged from Money and banking — will be introduced in Chapter 5 (Time & Money). But before any investments can be made by bankers or corporations, the “goods” must first be conceived of by humans.

At some level, Human Time underlies all corporate production. But only the duration of Human Time can be measured.

We may use our subjective experiences to produce objective goods that can be measured with Money, but this is not a direct measure of our Human Time. And since Human Time can’t be measured, the concept is ignored by professional economists.

Within the field of economics, there is only Measured Time.

On the other hand, sociology is an academic discipline that explicitly concerns itself with human experience.

Quantitative methods may be used, but sociologists aim to understand things that are hard to quantify with Money: our behaviors, relationships, and institutions. They explore how humans experience their lives, and the causes of social change.

Both economics and sociology are concerned with human problems, but they diverge in their treatment of the concept of Time.

Economics casts the net too narrow by ignoring Human Time, while sociology casts the net too wide by attempting to synthesize many non-quantifiable aspects of social welfare, without sufficiently integrating the concept of Money.

No single academic field can help us navigate the complexity of modern living.

The Algebra of Life bridges this gap by taking an interdisciplinary approach that integrates both the quantitative (measurable) and non-quantitative (non-measurable) aspects of our lives.

To master this framework, we must strengthen our understanding of how our species’ social welfare is affected by Money, both directly and indirectly.

This begs the question: what is “social welfare”?

Next post: What is Social Welfare?

Previous post: Measured Time vs. Human Time

Within The Algebra of Life, the concept of Time is separated into two distinct types: “Measured Time,” and “Human Time.”

Measured Time has to do with clocks and calendars: years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

Human Time relates to personal experience. Its duration may be measured, but how we experience Time cannot. We may spend our Time with others, but we experience Time individually, within ourselves.

Our species invented Measured Time by creatively applying their Human Time to the problem of precisely dividing the passing of days. We invented clocks for this purpose, but their output is really just a reference to our changing position relative to the sun.

In some parts of the world, humans adjust their clocks twice a year to better align their waking hours with the Earth’s rotations (daylight saving). This inconvenience does not apply to animals, for whom direct exposure to the rising and setting sun is sufficient to order their lives.

Measured Time is a human concept, but Human Time is more than this.

It represents our experience of life itself.

Humans have invented countless techniques to measure Time with extreme precision, but these scientific endeavors do not help us manage or enjoy our Time any better.

Apart from duration, Measured Time and Human Time are wholly independent concepts with very different characteristics.

Measured Time is universal (at least within our universe), non-physical (you can’t touch it), unending, and can be applied to all physical things.

Human Time is personal.

Its duration may be measured, but Human Time captures what we feel.

It’s our qualitative experience of life itself, which is only felt individually.

Pleasure, pain, happiness, sadness, regret, satisfaction, fulfillment, sorrow, love, hate, anger, laughter, hunger, boredom — and many other states, emotions or sensations — are why Human Time is so difficult to quantify.

The duration of these feelings can say nothing of their content or depth. It would be like judging a book by its number of pages.

Human Time doesn’t come from the sun, but from our minds.

Brains exist physically as organs of soft nervous tissue within the skull of vertebrates, functioning as the coordinating center of cognition and sensation.

Minds, however, do not exist physically.

And yet, our minds are what enable our species to become aware of the external world and our experiences, to think, and to feel.

Our minds are the source of human consciousness and thought. All humans have both a brain and a mind, but only our brains can be observed. No two human brains are identical, but many general traits are shared.

Human minds are more like “black boxes” unto each individual, producing an output that can only be experienced by its owner. As a product of our lived experiences, each human mind is unique.

Although Human Time must begin and end for everyone, it’s experienced differently by each person. Just as our inner worlds cannot meaningfully alter the planetary rotations upon which Measured Time is based, Measured Time cannot see the inside of our “black box” minds.

But Measured Time may affect our experience of Human Time.

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If we’re running late for an important meeting, we might experience an increased heart rate, begin to sweat, and will usually alter our behavior accordingly.

The concept of Human Time includes how we feel, think, and act.

Only our actions are observable to other humans, but gaining awareness may change our experience, which can cause us to change our actions.

For example, we might have been lost in thought or conversation before our glance at the clock spurred us into action. As we scramble to avoid being late, what was formerly a relaxed state has suddenly turned frantic, as we become all too aware of the Measured Time.

It may feel like Time is moving faster, but only Human Time can “speed up.”

The response of our nervous system to this situation, and the sensations it produces, are completely unrelated to the speed of planetary rotations around the sun.

This effect can also go the other way.

If we are looking forward to some future event, Time may feel slower. For a student in a classroom on a Friday afternoon who is looking forward to the weekend, their glance at a clock may produce an entirely different internal response.

The Measured Time is now earlier than they had expected (or hoped).

Time is not passing fast enough, nor is it “standing still.” It seems to be “crawling.” We are, once again, all too aware of the Measured Time. Only now we wish it would “speed up.”

How “fast” or “slow” we experience Human Time is closely related to how focused or interested we are in whatever we’re doing.

Time may “speed up” as we rush to our meeting, “slow down” once we’ve arrived, and then begin to “crawl” once we become bored. Everyone experiences Human Time differently.

Part II’s exploration of the interrelations between life’s three variables will consider both Measured Time and Human Time. Their main features can be summarized as follows:

Next post: Using Money to Measure Time

Previous post: The Specialists’ Blind Spot

Chapter 1: Time

“The measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues”

“A non-spatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future”

“A person’s experience during a specified period or on a particular occasion”

“A moment, hour, day, or year as indicated by a clock or calendar”

“One of a series of recurring instances or repeated actions”

“The hours or days required to be occupied by one’s work”

- Selected definitions

“Time” is one of the most common words in the English language.

It can be used as a noun (to identify persons, places, things, or concepts), as a verb (to describe an action, state, or appearance), or as an adjective (to describe or modify nouns).

“What time is it?,” “Can you time my lap around the track?,” and “He arrived on time” are examples of each use.

We can also have good Times or bad Times.

The word serves many functions, but these meanings are ultimately rooted in the idea of Time as a concept. As the selected definitions suggest, this meaning is multi-faceted.

Time can be as simple as a clock or as complicated as our most profound experiences. In this mysterious domain of human life, specialists can offer minimal assistance.

“Time” is not something you can “go to school for.”

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Academic philosophers may write about the “meaning” of Time, only to conclude that humans ultimately know nothing.

On the other hand, physicists are more objectively extreme. They conceive of Time in the language of math and physics, only to discover that it doesn’t really exist. Their equations suggest that life is meaningless, and that “free will” is illusory.

One famous physicist has even described our species as “just a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet.”

But professional academics are, unfortunately, no longer well positioned to create new information that would be useful to regular people. With few exceptions, tenured professors at modern universities generally prioritize their own careers.

This is a very different goal.

At the end of the day, these professionals are exchanging their Time for Money.

But modern academics have long departed from the traditions of ancient Greece, where leading public intellectuals were known to apply their knowledge to the practical matters of daily life.

Today, the pursuit of status and credentials seems to have displaced curiosity and truth-seeking as the basis of most academic effort — and not just among the students, but their teachers as well.

Most modern university professors are neither capable nor incentivized to generate practical insights for regular people.

They would not receive any more Money for their Time.

Professional academics work primarily to impress only their peers, or perhaps the large corporations who may be funding their research. But creating “trade secrets” that can be owned and used by corporations to make Money is different from making contributions of knowledge to human civilization.

And our modern world — especially when it comes to Food — is heavily tilted towards promoting the former.

By writing about narrow topics in arcane ways, and with “peer review” as the only quality control, professional academics generally operate within their own exclusive communities. But these “ivory towers” are lined with mirrors rather than windows, and the few who make it inside can rarely see over the top.

The situation is not so different from the ancient walled kingdoms, whose military dominance over the rural peasantry exempted them from having to use their own Time to produce their own Food.

The cultural dominance of modern universities has, in many cases, caused them to become detached from the “real-world” which the rest of us live in. The modern academic is physically provided for by those on the outside, but what do we get in return? Shouldn’t our lives have become easier by now?

Our institutions of higher learning have largely abandoned the process by which humans have obtained new and useful information throughout our species’ history: real-world experience. When it comes to the concept of Time, the message of academic philosophers and physicists amounts to this:

We cannot know anything. And even if we could, we cannot decide anything.

But the pessimism of these specialists merely reflects the mysterious, interdisciplinary nature of Time.

Using a single lens from a specialized field will not produce a clear picture.

To broaden our understanding of Time, the most fundamental “variable” within the “algebra” of human life, dictionaries are only the starting point.

Next Post: Measured Time vs. Human Time

Previous Post: Concepts vs. Categories

Our earliest ancestors engaged primarily with local knowledge.

When they received new information, they knew exactly where it was coming from and why it was being shared.

We must now grapple with heavy flows of information from all over the world, but with minimal or competing context. We can access more “news” than ever before, but we’ve never known less about the sources or their motives.

For both hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists, information gathering was largely “hands-on.”

But in our era of information overload, we usually receive most of our information from institutions that are foreign to our households, communities, or even our nations.

We know little of their goals or incentives, and yet we trust them.

It often feels like there is no other choice.

But without more context, without truly understanding why we are being provided with which information, it has become impossible to make sense of our modern world.

What does it all mean?

There are too many different sources of information and, to make matters worse, they often conflict. Human knowledge has become severely disordered.

Our transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists irreversibly shifted human life from an “algebra” of two “variables” — Time and Food — to an “algebra” of three: Time, Food, and Money.

From here, our lives have only become more complicated.

As the most cognitively overburdened species, our deep need to organize the knowledge gained from nature led humans to begin categorizing things.

“Categories” are divisions within a system of classification. They are how our minds organize information.

By grouping together related aspects of the external world, our species could better process and store the massive flows of new information brought about by the First Agricultural Revolution.

Only by categorizing and sub-categorizing could our minds handle these new cognitive challenges.

For example, “salmon” is a sub-category of “fish”, which is a sub-category of “animal”. A “fish taco” is a sub-category of “Mexican Food”, which is a sub-category of “Food”. But salmon is also a sub-category of Food.

Systems of categorization allow our species to manage the specificity with which we think and communicate.

At the highest level of detail is scientific language. Here, salmon is not merely salmon. There is “Salmo salar” (Atlantic), “Oncorhynchus tshawytscha” (Chinook), “Oncorhynchus kisutch” (Coho), “Oncorhynchus nerka” (Sockeye), among others.

Scientific language operates alongside everyday speech but is typically only used by specialists. For most people, simplicity is more important than scientific precision. We want other people to understand us.

Categorizing and sub-categorizing our external world facilitates more efficient and effective communication between humans. But before Time, Food, and Money can be explored as concepts, we must first distinguish concepts from categories.

Each term relates to a distinct way of thinking.

To think “conceptually” is to evaluate something in and of itself against some guiding criteria. This involves determining how well something meets the criteria, which allows us to consider and rank many different options.

To think “categorically” means determining whether something falls into a category, without regard for how well.

With “conceptual” thinking, the criteria of evaluation are multi-faceted and must be fully engaged with, but “categorical” thinking requires only the information needed to assign things to their categories.

Both conceptual (slow) and categorical (fast) thinking are vital to how humans develop and retain our understanding of the external world. The difference between them is best understood by considering the following two questions:

1. Is something “Food” because we eat it? OR

2. Do we eat things because they are “Food”?

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The problem may seem obvious, but can you tell which question relates to which mode of thinking?

With the first question, the meaning of “Food” would have to be subsumed by, and exclusively confined to, a category: things that we eat. This may be an accurate description, but it would be an absurd definition.

Things do not become Food simply because we eat them.

This is among the earliest bits of knowledge that new parents work to instill in their children: putting something into your mouth does not make it Food.

Only the second formulation makes any sense. What humans choose to eat is determined by our conception of Food. In the first question, Food is a category. In the second question, it is a concept.

Assigning the label “Food” to anything that humans eat, no matter what it is, would be categorical thinking. But to think conceptually about Food requires asking:

Why do we eat? What are our goals?

And finally, which Foods best serve these goals?

All humans require Food to survive, but we often think of Food in different ways, and for different reasons. Assigning items to broad categories is very different from prioritizing categorized items because the latter task requires more detailed criteria.

To move beyond categorization and categorical thinking, the specific meaning of each conceptual “variable” must be well understood.

This is the aim of Part I, which will introduce Time, Food, and Money, as concepts.

Begin Chapter 1: Time

Previous post: What is Possible? Which is Best?

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Chapter 7: Time, Food & Money

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Chapter 5: Time & Money

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Part 1: Concepts

“Something conceived in the mind”

“A principle or idea”

“An abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances”

“An idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars, a construct”

“A directly conceived or intuited object of thought”

“An idea for a new product or a way to sell a product”

- Selected definitions

Concepts only exist within our minds, but we use them to relate to the external world.

They can be neither touched nor felt, yet they underlie all that we do. Before humans can act, we must think — at least minimally.

Concepts lie at the core of human thought and action. Before an action can be undertaken, it must first be conceived or conceptualized. This is not a matter of prudence, but of possibility.

If we cannot imagine, or conceive ourselves doing something, we simply cannot do it.

To act in the world, we must first believe that we can. This type of thinking must always precede our actions, but this is not what is meant by “think before you speak.”

This warning relates more to the aftermath of our actions: is this the best way to act?

But before choosing an action, we must consider our options.

By conceptualizing the future, our minds discern the range and scope of our possible courses of action and their expected results, based on our experience and imagination. Only then can we decide.

What is possible? Which is best?

These questions are interrelated because the prospect of a bad outcome may cause our minds to generate alternative courses of action. Or the prospect of a good outcome may prevent us from exploring alternatives.

But our decisions can still be broken down into two stages:

(1) Determining the possible courses of action, and

(2) Choosing the best one.

Answering these questions feels so difficult today because of how far we’ve departed from our hunter-gatherer heritage.

At one extreme, we might spend our lives considering every available pathway and never pick one to follow — a life without direction.

Or we might commit to a certain path before we understand the available options.

If the first decision-making stage is performed too hastily, an illusion of simplicity sweeps over the latter: the fewer choices we can perceive in different situations, the more confident we can be in having chosen correctly.

If our perception of what is possible is constrained by a lack of imagination, or for any other reason, we might end up on the wrong path without ever looking back — a misdirected life.

Modern humans must constantly make decisions which impact the “direction” of their lives, but whether we are “living the right way” cannot be confirmed with a compass. We might confidently err in some areas of our lives, hesitantly choose correctly in others, while being paralyzed by indecision in others still.

Without a first-principles system of living, it can be hard to tell how you’re even doing.

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The Money we accumulate means something, but not everything.

More than any other life form, humans reflect on their decisions and the subsequent outcomes, with the aim of achieving better futures. We’ve always been pattern recognizers, but many ancient patterns either don’t make sense anymore or have been turned against us.

“Luck” may also be involved — good decisions may lead to bad results and vice versa — but better decision-making generally leads to better outcomes.

We cannot change the past or predict the future, but we can always become better at determining what is possible and choosing which is best.

To answer these questions throughout our history, humans began to think.

To avoid living without direction, and to avoid being misdirected, our species began to think for ourselves. This is our primary defense against pain and suffering, but it can also lead us astray. In our complex world, we may “think” our way into a wide variety of circumstances, both positive and negative, all in one lifetime.

The material world and our productive capacity (“the economy”) have dramatically expanded and are becoming more interconnected. Internally, our brains and minds are also evolving. With each passing generation, our inner and outer worlds develop in tandem, each affecting the other.

Our species and civilization evolve together.

The world changes us, we change the world, and so on. But since we can only live for so long, each child inherits a world they have yet to affect. And their struggle to make sense of it all is vital to our species’ collective learning and development.

To learn is to think in such a way that knowledge is both created and stored for some beneficial future use.

Our earliest ancestors were limited by oral communication and human memory, but communications technology has advanced considerably: writing (~3400 BC), paper (~800 BC), the printing press (~1440), the telegraph (1844), the telephone (1876), email (1971), and mobile instant messaging (2007).

Global digital communication is now seamless and essentially free. Computers enable us to both store and access virtually infinite knowledge. Yet humans remain biologically constrained.

We only have so much Time, and we still require Food.

New technologies will continue to outpace the evolution of our bodies and brains. But even if innovation keeps changing the answers, humans will always be confronted with the same, timeless questions:

What is possible?

Which is best?

Next post: Concepts vs. Categories

Previous Post: The Algebra to Heal Our Broken Understandings

Post 8: What is Possible? Which is Best?

Post 9: Concepts vs. Categories

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Chapter 1: Time

Post 10: The Specialists’ Blind Spot

Post 11: Measured Time vs. Human Time

Post 12: Using Money to Measure Time

Post 13: What is Social Welfare?

Post 14: The Trouble with “Science”

Post 15: The Mysterious Nature of Human Time

Post 16: Time, Consciousness, & Our Bodies

Chapter 2: Food

Post 17: What Makes Something Food?

Post 18: Modern Conceptions of Food

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Chapter 3: Money

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Post 2: How Should We Spend Our Time, Now?

Post 3: From Imagination & Experimentation to Importation & Exportation

Post 4: Why Money Belongs Alongside Time & Food in The Algebra of Life

Post 5: Scoping the Variables of The Algebra of Life

Post 6: Corporations: Where the Variables of Human Life Mean Something Different

Post 7: The Algebra to Heal Our Broken Understandings

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Modern human life has increasingly become a game of incomplete information.

We face too many different choices in too many different areas of our lives.

It has become overwhelming. We’re tired, and things are getting more expensive.

Living amidst this social complexity, we are repeatedly forced to answer three exhausting questions:

1. How should we use our Time?

2. Which Foods should we eat?

3. How should we spend our Money?

As a species, we have never had so many choices, but this has impaired our ability to choose wisely.

Animals seem to have it so much easier.

Lacking any conception of Money, their Time must be used to directly acquire Food. And without our big brains and opposable thumbs, they only have so many ways to physically do this.

Animal life is so much simpler because the “algebra” of their lives only has two “variables”: Time and Food.

Humans are the only life form that uses Money to intermediate between Time and Food, giving the “algebra” of human life a third “variable”: Money.

Since our transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, and especially since the Second Agricultural Revolution, the concept of Money has become increasingly fundamental to human life.

We can no longer be hunter-gatherers, yet we long for their cognitive simplicity.

Over the past decade, I have come to believe that modern humans are losing touch with the meaning of these ancient concepts to our species. This is a problem because if we aren’t clear on what they mean, we cannot hope to understand the interactions between them.

But this is precisely where many of life’s secrets are hiding.

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Most people treat decisions in the domains of Time, Food, and Money separately, but this is a big mistake. We must deeply understand how these concepts relate to each other if we hope to make life-enhancing decisions across all three domains.

The Algebra of Life framework was created to address this problem by isolating the specific meaning of each “variable”, for the purpose of exploring the implications of their two-way interactions.

To make sense of our everyday lives, I believe the concepts of Time, Food, and Money must be understood together. That is the overarching goal of this publication.

Part I will introduce Time (Chapter 1), Food (Chapter 2), and Money (Chapter 3) as concepts, to isolate their core meanings to our species.

With this foundation complete, Part II will explore the two-way interactions between each dualistic pairing: Time & Food (Chapter 4), Time & Money (Chapter 5), and Food & Money (Chapter 6).

Finally, Part III will apply The Algebra of Life to our modern decision-making context, so that we might improve our lives across the three domains of Time, Food, and Money (Chapter 7).

The 7-Post Introduction: Our Evolutionary Arc

The first 7 posts will introduce The Algebra of Life by briefly tracing our species’ history from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, so that we can better understand both where we came from, and how we got here. They are sequenced as follows:

• Post 1: What makes us human and how has that changed? — How our mind-bending evolutionary trajectory made life a game of incomplete information.

• Post 2: How should we spend our Time, now? — How early agricultural Food surpluses expanded the frontier of human minds.

• Post 3: From imagination & experimentation to import & exportation — How the Second Agricultural Revolution irreversibly brought Food into relation with Money.

• Post 4: Why Money belongs alongside Time and Food in The Algebra of Life — Reframing the meaning of Money to humans in our modern world.

• Post 5: Scoping the variables of The Algebra of Life — Why these three domains of decision-making are broader than you realize.

• Post 6: Corporations: where the variables of human life mean something different — Introducing the ‘middlemen’ between nature and our stomachs.

• Post 7: The Algebra to heal our broken understandings — Why the concepts of Time, Food, and Money must be understood together.

Publishing Rhythm

This 7-post introduction is only the beginning. Foundational core posts drop every Wednesday and Saturday until Part 1 is complete (30 total posts), and every Wednesday thereafter, until all 60 have been released. To establish the baseline philosophy, all core posts of The Algebra of Life framework will remain free and open to the public.

Join the Equation

Nobody is going to solve the “algebra” of your life for you — especially not the specialists. Time, Food, and Money are not well-explained in school, so we must take matters into our own hands.

Subscribe now to unlock your freedom by rediscovering these concepts and decoding their interactions. Join us in applying ancient relationships to modern problems.

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What is the meaning of life? How should one live?

Humans have been wrestling with these questions for thousands of years.

It is really more like mixed martial arts.

We have developed and deployed numerous techniques to aid us in our quest for answers. In our collective encounter with the unknown, kickboxing and jiu-jitsu are replaced by religion, philosophy, and science — each a distinct domain of inquiry.

But while the mixed martial artist must integrate numerous combat techniques into a unified system of fighting, our species’ deepest religious, philosophic, and scientific pursuits usually happen separately, in isolation from each other.

Too often, we lack a system of living.

Life is short.

We only have so much Time to pursue and acquire new information, so we often specialize in a narrow field.

And in our increasingly complex and confusing world, this trend has only been accelerating.

Ideas can long outlive their creators, so the intellectual contributions of each passing generation will slowly pile up, but not always with cohesion. The knowledge available to our species has dramatically expanded, but our lifespans and mental capacities have not kept pace.

As we acquaint ourselves with an ever-shrinking proportion of existing knowledge, modern human life has increasingly become a game of incomplete information.

It is also a game of decision making.

But having too many choices to make, in too many different areas, impairs our ability to choose wisely. We have traversed the “information age” and entered an era of information overload. It’s rarely talked about, but we can all feel it.

How should we use our Time?

What Food should we eat?

How should we spend our Money?

The modern possibilities are endless.

Our individual options will differ and are not equally distributed amongst our species. But as a group, we have never had so many choices.

This is usually a good thing, but it can also become overwhelming.

Consider animals.

They don’t use Money, so their Time must be used to directly acquire Food. Unable to purchase what cannot be acquired directly, animals are materially constrained in ways that humans are not.

And lacking our species’ special combination of “software” and “hardware” (big brains and opposable thumbs), there are only so many ways that each animal species can use their Time to acquire Food.

Animals have no choice but to accept the nourishment that nature offers directly, and which they are physically capable of obtaining.

This bug or that bug.

This grass or that grass.

But things are very different for humans.

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Hunter-gatherers lived nomadically in small groups and worked together to convert their Time directly into Food, with little to no use of Money. They hunted or gathered the Foods they required, but with orders of magnitude more choice than animals.

Our physical and cognitive advantages allowed us to both alter and learn from our environment, leading to the discovery of ever-more ingenious ways to hunt and gather.

By adapting inherited ancestral knowledge to their current challenges and environments, early humans gradually broadened the range of possible courses of action that could facilitate survival.

By learning to identify, hunt, gather, and prepare many different types of Foods from nature, humans became more biologically resilient, further differentiating ourselves from animals.

Once we discovered how to farm and raise livestock (First Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000BC), our species’ resiliency relative to animals was extended even further.

But while growing or raising Food can now be considered a practical use of Time — though perhaps a boring one for modern city-dwellers — the situation was very different for our “founding farmers”.

Imagine being in this position.

Your hunter-gatherer life was centered around two, basic ways to acquire Food.

Time could be spent either hunting animal Food or gathering plant Food. There were some options within each category, but you ultimately had to accept what nature offered. This was how life worked, dictating the “way of being” for your whole social circle — until a series of strange encounters with members of neighboring tribes.

One day, your tribe is approached by a small, visibly shaken group who has fled their own tribe because their leaders had become possessed by magic and superstition.

They explained how their leaders, after ingesting some unknown substance, started to believe that Food could be willed out of the ground — so long as the proper rituals involving sun and water were observed.

There were even rumors of controlling animal behavior. It was all too much.

Dismayed by their leaders’ rash abandonment of tradition and blatant descent into witchcraft, this small group of dedicated hunter-gatherers went their own way.

Your tribe initially ignores this unusual encounter.

But after a series of similar meetings with the same warnings being shared, a profound realization begins to dawn on your own leaders:

New methods of Food acquisition have been discovered that were unknown to our ancestors.

They involve harnessing nature to our advantage.

This called into question the completeness of our inherited ancestral knowledge.

Human minds began to open, and we’ve never looked back.

Next post: How Should We Spend Out Time, Now?

Early hunter-gatherers could use their Time to acquire Food in two ways:

Hunting or gathering.

Ancestral knowledge was not entirely stagnant, but it could only develop incrementally as each generation adapted their inherited Food-finding techniques to the then-present conditions.

With minimal accumulated knowledge, the earliest humans were forced to navigate by “trial-and-error”. Only once we understood what qualified as Food could we begin to refine our methods.

After learning what to eat, our species proceeded to master the issues of when, where, and how to acquire Food.

This knowledge would be passed down to the next generation, who would then adapt and apply it to their own circumstances. These repeated efforts are what gradually formed a shared knowledge base concerning Food, safeguarding the future viability of our species — and serving as our primary protection against famine or disaster.

But as this information accumulated over Time, it became increasingly difficult for individual humans to make new and meaningful contributions. To a “late” hunter-gatherer, the best techniques seemed to have been discovered and refined long ago.

Agriculture changed all of this.

Learning how to farm and raise livestock was a major step-change in our species’ development.

Unlike the deeply entrenched hunting and gathering knowledge, which could be improved only slowly and incrementally, the emergence of agriculture opened a vast, unexplored frontier.

The rules were yet to be written, making anything possible.

We then scattered the globe to find the most suitable land for agriculture, launching an era of experimental farming that took root within the imaginations of our “founding farmers”.

Our species learned to grow and raise region-specific Foods in accordance with local climates, developing highly specialized expertise in the process.

This gave rise to cities.

Agriculture enabled large numbers of humans to live permanently in fixed locations. Hunter-gatherers had traditionally moved with the seasons and built only temporary shelters — but agriculture made permanent settlement advantageous.

Our ability to produce surplus Food dramatically changed what it meant to be human.

We still had to accept what nature offered, but our biological fate was increasingly something that our species could take into its own hands. We could not fully control nature, but we were beginning to harness it to our advantage.

Most farming is rural today, but cities were born out of agriculture.

Cities offered security and facilitated a more efficient production of Food.

As we transitioned from hunter-gatherer to agricultural lifestyles, the simultaneous rise of cities and Food surpluses had profound and lasting effects on our species’ development:

First, it forever altered our politics and social relations.

Leadership was directly observable in nomadic tribes, which promoted accountability. The exercise of power by city rulers is inherently less transparent. The provision of Food still mattered in a city, but stored surpluses removed the immediacy of this concern.

With cities, there was more Time available to plan for and worry about other things.

As secrecy became possible, deception became practical, and human politics became far more exclusive and complex. For the first time, the lifestyles of rulers at the top of human hierarchies began to diverge considerably from those at the bottom.

Second, it reinvigorated our relationship with ideas.

Agriculture freed our species from the shackles of ancestral knowledge, opening our minds to new ideas in general.

If Food could now be willed out of the ground, anything was possible.

The rise of cities caused new information to quickly germinate and spread. There were now both new things to talk about and new people to talk to.

As strangers from distant lands exchanged information, early cities became hotbeds of innovation and melting pots of culture. As the first iteration of a “marketplace of ideas”, these cities were instrumental in shaping the trajectory of human thought and civilization.

As new Foods entered our bodies, new ideas were entering our minds.

Finally, agriculture revolutionized our relationship with Time.

Unlike hunting and gathering, which are oriented more in “the present”, farming and raising livestock require long-term planning as well as careful, consistent cultivation.

Our species’ transition to agriculture caused the future to occupy a growing space within our minds. We began to think ahead, delaying gratification to improve our futures.

Human life gradually became less dominated by immediate Food-finding concerns.

Large-scale production and stored Food surpluses freed up a great deal of Time, which granted some humans the freedom to pursue things like religion, philosophy, science, or art.

These are uniquely human endeavors because animals are too busy surviving.

Next Post: From Imagination & Experimentation to Importation & Exportation

Previous Post: What Makes Us Human and How Has That Changed?

The First Agricultural Revolution began approximately 12,000 years ago.

And as alluded to in Posts 1 & 2, this was a period of dramatic, humanity-shaping change.

We’ve since had a second one.

The “Second”, or “British” Agricultural Revolution began in the mid 1600’s — a full century before the economic transformations that later became known as the Industrial Revolution.

Though perhaps less revolutionary than the First, the Second Agricultural Revolution also came to fundamentally change how humans use their Time.

Sharp increases in land and labor productivity, combined with the enclosure and privatization of “common” land, caused British Food production to soar.

The availability of cheap and plentiful Food spurred massive population growth, a precursor to the industrial changes that would soon follow.

The British Empire’s subsequent global preeminence can be traced to these earlier agricultural improvements. They dominated the seas and controlled all channels of passage between Britain and her overseas colonies.

Though hardly a “free market” and certainly not “fair-trade”, the purpose of this hegemonic, global shipping network was to exchange goods in foreign lands.

These goods were often Food.

Whether it was salted cod fish from Newfoundland, cane sugar from the Caribbean, or Indian spices, British citizens had unprecedented access to foreign goods — which could be neither produced nor found at home.

Military and manufacturing supremacy allowed British merchants to secure favorable deals abroad by offering goods that could be cheaply produced at home, but were coveted elsewhere (e.g., guns and alcohol).

This was highly profitable for British merchants, who could then fund further voyages.

Given the lack of refrigeration and their vulnerability to Time, only certain Foods could be exported around the world on British ships.

Despite these technical challenges, however, the importation of exotic Foods became a European trend as Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish fleets each developed their own trading networks. As global trade intensified, each of these nations’ wealthier citizens began to consume an ever-expanding selection of imported Foods.

All these goods had prices: the amount of Money required to receive the item.

The more Money you had, the greater your options.

This was all very different from hunter-gatherer life, where both Money and commercial variety were lacking. Social status may still have determined the specific allocations of Food, but all tribe members were essentially eating the same plants and animals.

Money may be a primary marker of social status today, but what commanded respect and warranted prestige amongst hunter-gatherers was the use of Time to directly acquire Food for their group.

And this Food was always meant to be eaten rather than to be sold for Money.

While European citizens were beginning to source their Foods from all around the world, a hunter-gatherer’s life was dominated by the direct acquisition of locally available Food.

Some people still maintain small vegetable gardens, and many humans work in the Food production industry, but modern humans now access the Foods that we eat only indirectly:

We exchange our Time for Money, and we exchange our Money for Food.

We will return to the concept of Money later.

For now, we must only remember that Money is how humans intermediate between that which we possess (our Time), and that which we require (Food).

The First Agricultural Revolution was all about going “from zero to one”:

We discovered entirely new ways of using our Time to acquire Food, allowing us to break free from our nomadic pasts by means of cities and stored Food surpluses.

The Second Agricultural Revolution was more about going “from one to many”:

Advances in science and technology made agriculture a highly profitable commercial activity, transforming British land ownership from a symbol of prestige for the nobility to a serious matter of production and profits for the merchants.

From this latter group’s perspective, it was Money that could now be willed out of the ground.

This shift in mindset that started with a small group of wealthy British landowners would soon spread to many other parts of the world.

In the ensuing centuries, our species’ relationship with land was irreversibly changed.

We shifted from using “common” land to acquire different Foods for the purpose of our nourishment — to using a combination of private land, Money, and human labor (Time), to produce a single type of Food that could be profitably exchanged for Money.

The Second Agricultural Revolution and the global ascension of private property have made the concept of Money irreversibly fundamental to human life.

We can no longer be hunter-gatherers.

Next Post: Why Money Belongs Alongside Time & Food in The Algebra of Life

Previous Post: How Should We Spend Our Time, Now?

The word “Money” carries a lot of baggage.

Some people believe it is the root of all evil, while others may develop an unhealthy obsession with it.

In the Bible, Jesus is reported to have thrown the “Money Changers” out of the temple. And gambling — wagering or playing games of chance to either win or lose Money — has traditionally carried a negative social stigma.

But even if all of this is true, it does not change the core meaning of Money to our species:

It is how we intermediate between Time and Food in the modern world.

Losing sight of this has already caused much human suffering throughout our history, but things could get worse if we forget altogether.

This uniquely human function of Money has been taken for granted amidst a modern preoccupation with the corporate and political functions of Money: profit and control, respectively.

The meaning of Money to humans has also been obscured by being subsumed within the overly broad and technical economic definitions that some people learn about in school.

Money is, of course, used as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account.

This description is not wrong.

There are clearly many other uses of Money besides our species’ intermediation between Time and Food.

But from a human perspective, this doesn’t tell the whole story.

By being so inclusive as to cover all types of value transactions by both living (humans) and non-living transacting entities (corporations, governments, etc.), the economists’ standard explanation of this ubiquitous concept fails to capture the fundamental relationship between Money and human life.

Time and Food were the original “supply” and “demand” curves governing early human economics. We all possess Time, and we all require Food.

And ever since the Second Agricultural Revolution, virtually all humans must use Money to intermediate between the two.

There are exceptions, such as where the activity of prior generations causes some humans to be born into situations where there is already enough Money to provide Food for a lifetime.

But in most parts of the world, and in most neighborhoods, this is uncommon.

Our species’ intermediation between Time and Food is what makes the use of Money a uniquely human characteristic, relative to all other life forms.

Prominent in all advanced civilizations, the use and recognition of Money is a key difference between humans and animals, reflecting our incomparably wider scope for planned action.

Modern systems of Money facilitate the global exchange of many different non-living and inedible products, such as stocks, bonds, currencies, gold, oil, digital assets — or, for that matter, anything made of plastic.

Non-living transacting entities certainly do most of the trading, and the dollar value of these transactions likely dwarfs that of the human exchanges of Time for Money and of Money for Food.

But it is only these latter transactions, the “Trading Pairs” of human life, which capture the core meaning of Money to our species.

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This framing does not capture all of Money’s different uses, but it captures something that is conceptually more important than all these other uses combined.

Our species’ intermediation between Time and Food is the foundation of everything that came after our hunter-gatherer heritage.

No matter your politics, and no matter how you might personally feel about what you know as “Money”, the relevance of this concept to modern human life cannot be denied.

This is why Money belongs alongside Time and Food as the third variable within The Algebra of Life.

But the order is also important: Time, Food, and then Money.

If Money is how humans intermediate between Time and Food, then the meaning of Money to our lives derives exclusively from the extent to which it enhances our lives in either of these domains.

For all humans, Money is only useful to the extent that it ultimately enhances our lives in the domains of our Time or our Food.

But as we will soon learn to better appreciate, these are extremely broad domains for humans.

Next Post: Scoping the Variables of The Algebra of Life

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