[	mood	|	bored	]
[	music	|	The Who - Young Man Blues	]

I've just completed a circuitous circuit of Borders, where I've chosen to rest briefly after a Henry Fordian meal. I'm in the area thanks to a Vietnamese watchmaker, who despite his curmudgeonly air was kind enough to exorcise my posessed watch rotor and only charge me $20 for the ritual. I've thus managed to save a net forty-odd dollars over what it would've cost me to get a new one, not counting other theoretical discounts that would close the gap even further. On top of this bout of cheapness which managed to bite me on the top of  my hand, however light a nip it was, I bought nothing during my hurried retreat from materal tempatations that was my walk around Borders, not even grabbing anything off of the bargain bin. This misery, and not solely in the tightfisted sense of the word, is as ingrained as any doctrine backed by some primordial fear, and even in my relative prosperity right now, I can't seem to shake it. A dollar spent, screams the unseen harridan, is a dollar not invested, one that could be put towards the future, especially if it is placed in the trustworthy hands of a banker or a fund manager, and never mind the opportunity cost or discount factor. They say that the sign of a mature mind is the ability to overcome irrational impulses with a stream of rational thought, so I start on that path. To begin with, I naturally start with a simple question: what is money?

I can't stand the usual responses to that inqury, which must be said with a metallic edge in the voice so as to shut up the eager child asking that question, because none of them make sense on their own. Like an attempt to behead the Hydra, these answers only serve to cause ever-more questions to grow in the wake of the original. It's a means of exchange. Oh, you mean like trading things? Yes, except it doesn't have any value of its own. Why do we use it then? We use it because we think it works. Why do we think it works? Because there's nothing better out there. Why isn't there anything better out there? Stop asking questions!

The distillation of the concept of money into the modern day fiat money, with only the slimmest of lines between it and ethereal nothingness, parallels the degeneration of language into that most basic of information, binary code. Only the infinite balancing power of the 1 bit keeps the entire concept from breaking down into a sea of zeros. Despite this, the consequences and power of barely-existent money are easily seen in the vast superhuman organism that is the world-girdling civilization we live in. If ever the Gaia hypothesis could be said to be true, it is seen in the systems of life that connect the clumps of cellular humans throughout the globe. On a no less awesome scale, a vastly finite jumble of ones and zeros manifests itself in the most incredible ways, whether as a beautifully rendered four-dimensional graphic, a near-perfect reproduction of sound, or a memory of a construct awaiting replication. Fiat money, then, like binary code, is at once dependent on the context within which it resides, and also an indispensible part of that context, which would fall apart without it.

Would the world as we know it, by which I mean human civilization and not the dumb rock we reside on, fall apart if the character of money were to drastically change? I would posit a very definite yes; as so much relies on the solidity of the assumptions upon which money is founded, any change of those assumptions would disrupt those dependents. This is a trivial observation, of course. A shock to the fundamentals of any system would disrupt it. In any case, I am tired of this line of questioning, for it does not scratch that great inner itch which money causes within me.

The above definition of money as a currently necessary language of exchange, exists in a vacuum of its own making. Without a concrete link to the physical world in which we live, I am apt to fear its nonexistence as a fiction that is bound to fall apart under the inevitable scrutiny. After all, that is the definition of fiction, something that cannot withstand a certain amount of scrutiny. I am suggesting that the line between fact and fiction is nonexistent, and that they are in fact the endpoints of a continuum, but that bit of metaphysics can wait. Since we are beings at the mercy of energy and all its forms, and with energy comes its nemesis, entropy, I am driven to the hypothesis that money is in fact a representation of order in the chemical and physical sense. I don't just mean the order inherent in say the crystal of a diamond, whose worth is itself artificially inflated by a South African cartel, but the macroscopic society in which the concept of money is found and is a part of. In a sense, money is a measure of both the matter whose exchange and transformation it fosters, but also the bond energy of the structure in which that matter resides. It's as if money describes both matter and energy in a relativistic sense. Putting a money value to a system is about as easy as observing a free graviton, but no discipline is without its undiscovered countries.

Even after all this rambling, the link between still-fictional money and solid ground that I can feel is hardly strong nor trustworthy. Tenuous concepts are as rickety bridges to me, and I have been a comfortable science bod for too long, growing up in a house of solid facts and unshakeable relationships. At present I have neither the instinct nor the experience to survive in this world of fragile concepts and unreliable equations. I must either strengthen the bridges upon which I must travel, or accustom myself to uncertainty and incompleteness.