Numerals, Words and Bitcoin

I came across something odd yesterday while preparing to teach my son about Roman numerals. I wanted to add some peripheral info to the lesson to make it more interesting. One thing I wanted to mention was the convention of brackets used to denote big numbers. E.g. 5 = V, 5 thousand = (V) and 5 million = ((V)). My son will never be asked about this, but it's a cool bit of extra information that illustrates that the Romans were perfectly capable of expressing large numbers. But how about fractions? I wanted to add that too, so I went online to see what I could find, because I've never learned about this myself.

That's when I stumbled upon something unexpected. The Romans didn't express fractions in general terms. Such numbers were always linked to something in the real world, like money or angles. If a fraction wasn't used, it didn't exist. Their smaller denomination coins were divided into 12, so money could be expressed in fractions of 12, but not in fractions of 10. The idea of 1/10 had no meaning in the world of money. Similarly for angles. They were given names, like the right angle. They were fractions of a circle. Angles had to add up to 360 for a full circle. For smaller measures, they had arch minutes and seconds that had to add up to 60. To talk of one tenth of a degree would have been considered eccentric and nonsensical.

Our habit of talking of fractions as something detached from anything real has come about after the Romans, and it struck me that this coincides with our habit of using words with little to no descriptive meaning. For instance, the word neighbour used to literally mean person-who-lives-near. This type of direct link between abstractions and the real world is fading. There's something going on in the general psyche of society in which abstractions are taking on a life of their own. Things have meaning, even when detached from the physical world.

This split between the real world and our abstractions has recently accelerated further. Not only can abstractions exist in a vacuum void of any link to the real world. Abstractions can have value in and of themselves. A whole generation of people see nothing strange in paying hard earned money for Bitcoin. Many will gladly spend hours of labour to attain a fraction of a number. This fraction can never be held in our hand. It has no physical properties. It cannot be used to make anything. Yet it commands a price.

It remains to be seen if this latest development will be sustained into the future, but value has for now taken on its own life in the sphere of abstractions. It's also clear that this would have been seen as extremely strange by the Romans. The Romans would never have accepted the idea that Bitcoin has value. They would also have rejected the idea of unbacked paper money. At most, they would have accepted a credit note issued by a reputable citizen and backed by something physical. But even that would have traded below par with gold or silver.

What this suggests to me is that we're on a path away from reality, and if we use God as a synonym for nature, we can see where this might be headed. There's the story of Babel that tells us that artificial constructs of society-wide proportions have a tendency to fall apart, and I very much sense that this is what's going on right now. We are drifting away from reality. Like Icarus, we're flying too close to the sun. There will be a fall and a return to reality.

MDCXXX

By Fritzbruno - Own work, Public Domain, Link