3. Division, addition and multiplication of meanings

Activity and efficiency

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).

The programming of phenomena is done by constructing causal models—event patterns and action programs. In an event pattern, the cause is related to the phenomenon; in an action program, the action is related to the effect.

Material technologies are based on material phenomena. For example, the efficiency of a watermill depends on how it uses the fall of water under gravity. The undershot wheel can be placed directly in the water flow, simplifying the design of the mill but increasing the likelihood of breakdowns. The overshot wheel requires the construction of a dam and canal to bring water to the top of the wheel. Historically, undershot wheels preceded overshot wheels and were long considered more efficient until John Smeaton showed in 1759 that the efficiency of overshot wheels was 52 to 76 percent, compared to 32 percent for the best undershot wheels (Smil 2017, p. 152).

Social technologies are based on social phenomena—for example, we will show that money is based on the phenomena of use and exchange value.

Abstract technologies are based on abstract phenomena. The Antikythera mechanism, with its gears and algorithms, is based on the phenomena of celestial mechanics. This mechanism, developed in the 2nd century BC and recovered from a sunken ship in 1900, made it possible to calculate the dates of 42 astronomical events, including the dates of future solar and lunar eclipses.

The same level of complexity may be characterized by different levels of efficiency: there can be more and less effective workers with the same skills and tools. Increasing efficiency does not require greater complexity. But increasing complexity requires greater efficiency. Based on the principle of least action, people increase the complexity of their activities only when it is necessary to increase efficiency. The complexity of meanings increases to the extent necessary to increase their effectiveness, that is, to more extensively master phenomena.

By economy we understand the relationships between people with respect to technology, and the activities that arise from these relationships. The economy is the process by which people accumulate, select and apply technologies: it is the result of a long history of the division of activities or, as it is commonly called, division of labor. It must be clarified that the division of activities consists in a multiplication of material, social and abstract technologies. The division and addition of activities is not reduced to specialization and cooperation: every day new features of this or that activity appear, but not all of them are retained in the socio-cultural order as separate types of activity. Economic activity is not limited to production, it also includes consumption and circulation—insofar as they arise from relationships related to technology and its products.

Social production cannot be based on chance, it requires repeated results and is based on cultural experience and socio-cultural order. Historically, to determine the relationship between needs and products of actions, a notion of normal activity was developed. The norm is a socially determined action that must be performed to reproduce meaning. The plane of the norm connects the plane of content and that of expression and includes both figurae of content and figurae of expression. There is a temptation to equate minimal actions with meanings as such. However, an individual meaning s should not be reduced to the minimal action s*, since it always includes “redundant” figurae of expression and content—the remains of the past and the sources of the future, mistakes and successes of learning or creativity.

We call the mass of meaning the number of figurae in a single meaning, that is, the length of the string L(s) that includes the “redundant” figurae. On the one hand, the mass of meaning depends on the individual characteristics of the acting subject. On the other hand, the necessary mass of meaning depends on the general standard of action. The socially necessary mass of meaning corresponds to the notion of “normal” productivity, defined as the relation of complexity, efficiency and intensity of meaning, where intensity is the number of repetitions of an action per unit of time.

Productivity is the relation of the result of an activity to its actor, process and means. It is a juxtaposition of meaning against itself, a comparison of an action and its result. The nature of meaning implies a certain contradiction, a consistency or inconsistency between an action and its result. One could say that productivity is an indicator of meaningfulness—insofar as meaning can be reduced to the result of an action.

To increase productivity often requires more action, but people are generally unwilling to do more. The principle of least action is one of the fundamental laws of human history:

“Once a particular agricultural system reaches the limits of its productivity, people can decide to migrate, to stay and stabilize their numbers, to stay and let their numbers decline—or to adopt a more productive way of farming. The last option may not be necessarily more appealing or more probable than the other solutions, and its adoption is often postponed or chosen only reluctantly because such a shift almost invariably requires higher energy inputs—in most cases of both human and animal labor. Increased productivity will support larger populations by cultivating the same (or even smaller) areas, but the net energy return of intensified cropping may not increase and may actually decline. Reluctance to expand permanently cultivated land (a choice that entailed higher energy inputs, beginning with the clearing of primeval forests, the draining of swamps, or the building of terraced fields) led to much delayed reclamation of marginal lands” (Smil 2017, pp. 49-50).

Every technology requires the use of energy, but changes in complexity do not depend on changes in the amount of energy used. Mastering more energy does not necessarily lead to an increase in meanings: technologies, organizations and psychologies. “…A deterministic linking of the level of energy use with cultural achievements is a highly arguable proposition” (Smil 2017, p. 3). The fact is that the complication of meanings is often based on social and abstract technologies, the development of which does not require large energy inputs:

“But even in much simpler societies than ours a great deal of labor was always mental rather than physical—deciding how to approach a task, how to execute it with the limited power available, how to lower energy expenditures—and the metabolic cost of thinking, even very hard thinking, is very small compared to strenuous muscular exertion. On the other hand, mental development requires years of language acquisition, socialization, and learning by mentoring and the accumulation of experience, and as societies progressed, this learning process became more demanding and longer lasting through formal schooling and training, services that have come to require considerable indirect energy inputs to support requisite physical infrastructures and human expertise” (Smil 2017, pp. 18-19).

An increased complexity of meanings is not necessarily the result of increased energy use, but the opposite is the case: changes in energy use depend on changes in the complexity of meanings. Increasing complexity requires a more efficient use of energy (cf. Smil 2017, pp. 417-418). Applied to culture-society, the principle of least action is first and foremost an information principle and only then an energy principle.

Productivity improvements are aimed at increasing the efficiency of activity and reducing the volume of activity required to meet needs. This can be done in two ways:

(1) by excluding redundant figurae, that is, by bringing the mass of an action closer to the possible minimum (economy of action);

(2) by complicating the meaning in a way that increases its effectiveness and/or reduces its intensity.

Productivity growth means increasing efficiency and saving labor, including through the use of indirect or roundabout production methods and tools: domestic animals, machines and mechanisms, etc.

The means of activity are an integral part of minimal actions: metal, furnace, hammer, and anvil are necessary elements of blacksmithing; wool and a spindle (or spinning wheel) are necessary for spinning. The elaboration of the means increases the complexity of the action: if means are lacking, one must first expend activity to produce them. In other words, the complexity of minimal production actions (e.g., blacksmithing or spinning) includes the complexity of the actions to produce their means of production. Similarly, the complexity of minimal consumption actions includes the complexity of consumer articles: before goods can be consumed, they must be produced.

The phase of technological development that began with the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming, brought with it a decrease in the intensity of activity and an increase in its complexity. Agricultural evolution was also the evolution of man himself: it reduced the intensity of his activity and changed his skeleton:

“A great deal of traditional farming required heavy work, but such spells were often followed by extended periods of less demanding activities or seasonal rest, an existential pattern quite different from the nearly constant high mobility of foraging. The shift from foraging to farming left a clear physical record in our bones. Examination of skeletal remains from nearly 2,000 individuals in Europe whose lives spanned 33,000 years, from the Upper Paleolithic to the twentieth century, revealed a decrease in the bending strength of leg bones as the population shifted to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. This process was complete by about two millennia ago, and there has been no further decline in leg bone strength since then, even as food production has become more mechanized, an observation confirming that the shift from foraging to farming, from mobility to sedentism, was a truly epochal divide in human evolution” (Smil 2017, p. 53).

In contrast to small foraging groups, large agricultural communities are more complexly organized and can better reduce labor intensity through the allocation of labor and energy. Productivity growth in traditional farming is based both on more intensive use of land and on more complex labor through the use of draft animals, irrigation, fertilization and crop diversification:

“No quest for higher yields could succeed without three essential advances. The first one was a partial replacement of human work by animal labor. In rice farming this eliminated usually only the most exhaustive human work as tedious hoeing was replaced by deep plowing using water buffalos. In dryland farming animal labor replaced human labor and sped up considerably many field as well as farmyard tasks, freeing people to pursue other productive activities or to work shorter hours. This prime mover shift did more than make the work quicker and easier; it also improved its quality, whether in plowing, seeding, or threshing. Second, irrigation and fertilization moderated, if not altogether removed, the two key constraints on crop productivity, shortages of water and nutrients. Third, growing a greater variety of crops, either by multicropping or in rotations, made traditional cultivation both more resilient and more productive” (Smil 2017, p. 65).

The use of draught animals, irrigation and fertilization make activities more complex, as they require growing fodder, building canals, collecting fertilizer, etc., so the size of the minimal action strings increases. At the same time, the intensity of agricultural labor decreases, which is reflected in the human skeleton.