Underneath the concept of money lies Numericalism, the idea that things from real life can be quantified. The Code of Hammurabi might be the oldest famous artifact we know of reflecting this way of thinking. And combined with the idea that we can standardize on fair and credible value measurements, we get the invention of Money, an objective way to measure the value of things.

Numericalism is an essential part of almost any epistemology. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” But there is a loss of information when we count things. Mapping things to numbers will never be bijective: my house will never be “one house”, my wife will never be just “a wife”, proteins can come from many sources and the way they are stored have different properties. Taoists know this; that’s why they distrust “the ten thousand things”.

Numericalism is here to stay. Wigner’s famous essay explores this. Numbers give us superpowers. They’re incredibly efficient. Numbers are more universal than English or any other human language. Even in rural agricultural self-subsistence, you need to know how many days are in the year to plan how much surface to plant. There’s no escape; we forgot how to live without numbers long ago.

Computers are much better at numbers than we are. The Transformer architecture, deep learning’s greatest success, is essentially a matrix of numbers crunched in a particular way. It’s starting to understand the world with a generality humans can’t match. When the computer understands patterns better than any human, what leverage do we humans have left? Perhaps the same we’ve always had: the irreducibility of what we actually value. The parts that resist the bijection.