Intersubjectivity

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes about three kinds of phenomena. There are objective phenomena, which are true regardless of what we think about them. We don't have to believe that a rock exists for it to be so. We call those phenomena objective. Then there are subjective phenomena. They live and die with an individual. If someone believes that an odd rock is valuable, then that notion exists only with that person.

The final and most interesting kind of phenomena, at least in this discussion, are intersubjective phenomena. Intersubjective phenomena are those that exist only because many people believe in them. They don't exist only with one individual. But should all of society disappear, intersubjective phenomena would also disappear. Intersubjective phenomena are often important, because many believe in them, by definition. Most of the phenomena that relate to culture and society such as money, hierarchy and laws, belong in this category. One person doesn't have the power to change these phenomena, yet they exist only in the minds of people.

Objective phenomena exist in the real world. Information about them is "stored" there. We might record something about an objective phenomenon and store it in our minds. But the real world is always the ground truth. Subjective and intersubjective phenomena, on the other hand, exist in the brains of people and that is where the ground truth is. From an information-storage perspective, Intersubjective phenomena are inefficient since many copies of information need to be stored in different brains. But since an intersubjective phenomenon must not live and die with one individual, redundancy is necessary. Therefore, it is more efficient from an information-storage standpoint to only store that which is necessary as an intersubjective phenomenon.

Take money, or wealth, as an example. Although there exists a shared belief in money being valuable, there is no shared belief in how much wealth each person has accumulated. The intersubjective phenomenon is thus constrained to the idea itself rather than the details of how the idea is used. The intersubjectivity lies in the idea that money is valuable, not in how much each individual owns.

In our society, the wealth of every person is either an objective or subjective fact. The fact that someone has cash at home under the mattress is objective. But the fact that said cash is valuable is, again, an intersubjective one. Today, as this way to store wealth is rather unusual, it is mostly a subjective fact that someone has wealth. That subjective fact is held by an institution, in this case, a bank. If the bank suddenly disappears, there is no one else that should believe and live according to the fact that you had money deposited in the bank.

Intersubjective phenomena are often like this: the high-level rules are intersubjective, while the details within those rules are either objective or subjective. But that is not always the case. We humans and many mammals with us are prone to have implicit social hierarchies in society, which are intersubjective phenomena. Here, not only is the idea of a hierarchy an intersubjective phenomenon, but the hierarchies themselves are intersubjective. They are not written down, nor is one person typically elected to determine everyone's hierarchies. They just emerge and evolve. Hierarchies come very naturally to us, and our brains can store this kind of intersubjective phenomena together with all the related details without much effort.

I can think of a world similar to ours where people use a currency that has no backing in the physical world, just like on earth, but with the difference that the people in this world are savvy with numbers and equipped with good memory. They process this kind of information a lot more efficiently than humans do. In this world, people don't have banks. In fact, they don't have any institutions to govern money or wealth. The amount of money everyone has is simply an idea that exists intersubjectively in the brains of people, just like hierarchy was stored intersubjectively in old human societies. Every day, people read in the newspaper which transactions and exchanges have occurred and all the people get an up-to-picture of the financial world. In this way, a consensus is maintained about who has what money, without any institutions necessary. If you wonder about the amount of wealth that any person has, you just ask anyone.

This is what intersubjectivity all the way through looks like. It is, of course, not what we do on Earth. But maybe there exists a species of people with a mind for numbers who run society like this.

But it doesn't matter. Because we humans have never limited ourselves to the capabilities that we are born with. Humans build tools, and what we can accomplish using tools is just as much within our capabilities as what we cannot.

So consider not just a human, but a human with paper and pencil. Suddenly this person is capable of storing an enormous amount of detailed information, including numbers. A society of such people would have no trouble storing the intersubjective phenomena of value, including everyone's wealth, as an intersubjective phenomenon. Each person would maintain a ledger of who owns what and update it when the daily newsletter of transactions arrives. If you are unsure, you can just ask anyone. If any single person disappears, the system is still intact.