The modern world has become wonderfully complex, with very diverse roles for each of us to take. Beyond mere survival, our simple drives to create, to understand and to communicate are at the core of what makes us human.

These three drives unite very interestingly in the archetypal roles of the Tinkerer, the Theorist and the Teacher. And recently, a whole new such uniting role appeared, that of the Programmer — in many ways familiar, but also excitingly new.

1. The Tinkerer

Our bodies are nimble: shaped by evolution to move, to eat and to manipulate our environment very precisely. We make things around us into body-extending tools or charming decorations. Discovering the art of manipulation and object-composition - creation, the Tinkerer is born.

A tinkerer's crafted artefacts are effective or beautiful in themselves, but they are also beautiful physical manifestations of the knowledge the tinkerer had to learn to create them. A good tool came to be because the toolsmith applied their intuition of materials back onto the universe of materials.

When reliable recipies of creation are shared with others, communication enters the mix, enabling the spread of successful artefacts, way beyond the direct environment and limited lifetime of their original creator.

Once artefacts become bigger and more elaborate than a single person can handle, communicationenables the coordination necessary for collaborative work and specialisation with shared goals, ushering in the age of civilisation.

In the extreme, artefacts become so big and elaborate that a single person cannot even imagine them in all detail. This is when communication has to reach a new level of sophistication in the form of collaborative planning  —  the enabler of all the greater wonders of humanity. Tinkering becomes a group-effort.

As such, the Tinkerer represents the first interesting union of understanding, creating and communicating.

2. The Theorist

Noticing patterns in one’s concrete understanding happens very naturally. The Tinkerer will soon find themself not only constructing but also abstracting: a multitude of observations are captured by only a few rules. Our brains seem to be extremely good at remembering rules, in fact it seems easier to remember rules and relationships than a lot of individual facts.

The obvious effect of this alleviation of mental burden is that everything becomes simpler: remembering and communicating the gist of a whole lifetime of observations and learnings becomes feasible. This in turn allows us to venture further and further: Our first-level rules become the new ground facts and we can try to formulate a yet higher level of rules. This process can yield ever more profound understanding.

With this powerful step of abstraction, we steadily approach the divine. There is a fine line, however, between useful theories and hallucinations. How shall we know which rules to create, which patterns to see? Our saviours in this regard were two extremely important invention-inventions, both not appearing until recent human history.

First, the discovery of logic and mathematics gave us reliable rules for the derivation of rules themselves. Similarly to how the laws of nature define the properties of a material and what can be done with it, these rules of derivation give knowledge iteself a rigidity and malleability. The first Tinkerers of Knowledge appear, and born is the Theorist.

Second, the scientific principle gave us the mechanism and the duty to forever ground our understanding of nature in the basic observations of nature itself. Adding communication between Theorists, the precious cultural phenomenon of the scientific community emerges.

And like this we encountered the second interesting union of understanding, creating and communicating — the creation of new knowledge, in the process of science.

3. The Teacher

Obviously, there is an increasing demand for coordination and communication coming from both Tinkerers and Theorists  —  ad-hoc sharing of knowledge and ideas becomes too cumbersome to achieve anything.