The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings
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What could be the cause of the limitations of the mind? Thinking combines instincts, practices and reason, which are developed to varying degrees by natural and cultural selection. Actions based on instincts and the consistent learning of many generations of people are performed faster and more easily than actions that have emerged relatively recently or require reasoning. Daniel Kahneman calls fast intuitive thinking System 1, and the slow conscious thinking System 2. System 1 is associative, metaphorical, deterministic thinking that comes easily and is automatic, and System 2 is probabilistic statistical thinking that requires a lot of reasoning and reflection. Humans strive to reduce problems to what they supposedly know, to automatic associative and causal correlations. The limitations of reason and our deviations from rationality are explained not by instincts or emotions interfering with reason, but by the mechanism of thinking itself, in which reason is only a later, albeit important, element. This prevents us from recognizing “a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in” (Kahneman 2011, pp. 13-4).
According to Ken Binmore, rationality is not determined by the ability of humans to foresee the consequences of their actions, but by whether these actions enable humans to reproduce themselves:
“Even when people haven’t thought everything out in advance, it doesn’t follow that they are necessarily behaving irrationally. Game theory has had some notable successes in explaining the behavior of spiders and fish, neither of which can be said to think at all. Such mindless animals end up behaving as though they were rational, because rivals whose genes programmed them to behave irrationally are now extinct. Similarly, companies aren’t always run by great intellects, but the market is often just as ruthless as Nature in eliminating the unfit from the scene” (Binmore 2007, p. 2).
In this case, we are dealing with the other extreme, the opposite of Snooks’ views: an individual need not be rational, a population is rational. Populations can make mistakes and still evolve, but individuals do not evolve: unlike populations, individuals are mortal. One extreme exalts reason, reduces all of history to the results of free choices, and does not recognize the evolution of strategies. The other extreme reduces reason to consistent activity: individuals simply follow programs to maximize utility, and evolution selects the most successful programs.
The limitations of thinking are no cause to deny people their ability to make choices, although instincts and practices that have fused together over hundreds of thousands and millions of years are a set of powerful programs that people follow. Human thinking is a combination of selection and choice, of strategy and reason. “The mixing of custom and choice at any one time produces, almost tautologically, the existing culture” (Jones 2006, p. 261).
Like biological evolution, the evolution of meaning does not seek the “best” or “maximum” solution; it only seeks the “sufficient,” “minimum” solution. This applies equally to making, communicating, and thinking. Evolutionary rationality is not based on utility and its maximization, but on preferences and propensities that allow us to choose a necessary and sufficient option. Moreover, utility is only one of the types of meanings between which a person chooses—along with morals, dreams, ideals and other meanings that are not always ordered among themselves. People’s needs and thinking are shaped by culture-society, and people behave rationally not only when they maximize utility, but also when they strive to comply with norms—that is, with the socio-cultural programs they have internalized:
“Rational conduct means that man, in face of the fact that he cannot satisfy all his impulses, desires, and appetites, foregoes the satisfaction of those which he considers less urgent. In order not to endanger the working of social cooperation man is forced to abstain from satisfying those desires whose satisfaction would hinder the establishment of societal institutions” (Mises 2005, p. 163).
Evolutionary rationality does not assume that reason is limited, but rather that reason and choice play different roles at different stages of socio-cultural and personal development. A child’s mind begins with an uncritical perception of another person’s actions, but as it matures, critical ability develops. The human brain and intelligence did not evolve to choose, but to persuade others, but now we try to use reason to make decisions:
“In what is already recognized as a major advance, in The Enigma of Reason Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber show that reason itself has evolved for the strategic purpose of persuading others, not to improve our own decision-taking. Motivated reasoning is why we developed the capacity to reason, and how we normally use it. Yet more fundamentally, the massive brain expansion of the past two million years has been driven by the need for sociality” (Collier 2018, p. 35).
Traditional choice accelerated the progress of meanings compared to cultural selection. Nevertheless, it still was constrained by customs, traditions, and other practices transmitted through cultural learning. Cultural evolution increased the sophistication of reason and enabled people to solve complex problems. However, in the race against uncertainty, the complexity of problems also grew. At the limits of traditional thinking, customs and other practices became an obstacle to cultural evolution. Simple self-reproduction ended when meanings proved to be an obstacle to their own growth and culture-society found ways to overcome this obstacle.
The rise of traditional complexity and its limits
Simple self-reproduction is characterized by a relatively slow growth of both human population and meaning complexity. In a traditional culture-society, productivity hardly improves; population growth regularly tops production growth. At the same time, the uncertainty of the natural and socio-cultural environment causes fluctuations in the volume of production, primarily food, which from time to time prevents the culture-society from maintaining the achieved socio-cultural complexity and leads to its collapse.
The complexity of culture-society grows along with the complexity of the persons who compose it, although the rate of growth is not comparable for society and persons. Over the last few thousand years, the properties of the human brain have remained practically unchanged, while the complexity of both learning and culture-society has increased. At the same time, the complexity of personal active power has increased, mainly due to the lengthening of learning time. The main contribution to the increase in aggregate complexity lies in the division of order, the specialization of activity, and the complication of the means of activity, that is, in socio-cultural rather than personal complexity.
As we have seen, the difference between the complexity of a culture-society and the complexity of the persons who compose it is the source of surplus activity / product. In an agrarian society, the vast majority of the population is employed in agriculture, so the surplus is predominantly in the form of agricultural activities and their products. The agricultural surplus was a prerequisite for the development of cities and non-agricultural activities:
“Though most farmers and peasants individually produced very little surplus, the aggregated surplus of millions of agricultural workers was easily enough to support a large number of towns and to foster the development of industry, commerce, and banking. Much as they admired agriculture and depended on it, the Romans literally identified ‘civilization’ with cities (civitates)” (Lopez 1976, p. 6).
The slow complication of traditional culture-society led to the stagnation of agricultural surplus and thus to the stagnation of non-agricultural activities—crafts and trade—and of the cities in which these activities were concentrated.
Why did traditional culture-society reproduce itself in a simple way, why did its complexity and productivity increase so slowly? There were several reasons for this:
? Low sociality / isolation of communities, limited communication outside a narrow circle of acquaintances and relatives;