The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 57

However, as we saw above, the fate of the Franklin expedition shows the limitations of the minds of people of the industrial age compared to the cultural experience of hunter-gatherers, accumulated by many generations of people and meanings. Rational strategies of individuals lose out to simple learning algorithms. Algorithms of socio-cultural self-reproduction do not imply individual decision-making, but a whole evolutionary process of division, addition, multiplication, complication and increase of meanings. The increase of meanings, including activity, its norms and active power itself, is aimed at overcoming uncertainty.

The same action can bring different results depending on the circumstances in which it is performed and the natural and cultural phenomena on which it relies. If the same seed is thrown on a rock or on fertile soil, it can yield two different effects. But the complexity of the result will be the same in both cases. The effect can be the result of chance (as in Robinson Crusoe who threw the seed in a good place) or of necessity revealed by knowledge, that is, in a causal model:

“The archetype of causality research was: where and how must I interfere in order to divert the course of events from the way it would go in the absence of my interference in a direction which better suits my wishes? In this sense man raises the question: who or what is at the bottom of things? He searches for the regularity and the ‘law,’ because he wants to interfere” (Mises 1996, p. 22).

Knowledge reveals the causes of phenomena and enables people to master them and turn them into effects. Every technology is based on the transformation of natural and cultural phenomena into effects:

“… The base concept of a technology—what makes a technology work at all—is always the use of some core effect or effects. In its essence, a technology consists of certain phenomena programmed for some purpose. I use the word ‘programmed’ here deliberately to signify that the phenomena that make a technology work are organized in a planned way; they are orchestrated for use. This gives us another way to state the essence of technology. A technology is a programming of phenomena to our purposes” (Arthur 2011, p. 51).