Yesterday, I launched my first ever 1/1 writing NFT collection. I chose to work with Quest of Evolution for this because I love their design work and frankly I believe that their simple primitive is top-notch Web3 innovation. 

The game is this: Architects create short written pieces called Sparks, which launch with 1/1 NFTs that control access to add new content to the resulting Crypto-Novels. Anyone can go read any Crypto-Novel at https://www.thequestofevolution.com/novels, any time they like. The project makes money by charging a small royalty each time the 1/1 NFT is traded. Writers make money by contributing valuable text and by selling the NFT for more than they paid for it. Architects get a total of five seats on the royalty board, just as subsequent writers get one seat. Each seat gets 200 $QEV tokens when it is initiated. 

With this simple monetization scheme, the Quest of Evolution team have launched a beautiful website and begun supporting authors such as myself as we dash to showcase our work on the platform. It will be interesting to see how the experiment plays out on many levels, none more so than the interaction facilitated by this new relationship between audience and author. 

Worldview Ethics

Worldview Ethics is a project it took almost a decade to write, with core concepts such as Antonio Damasio’s arguments for the centrality to consciousness of having a point of view taking until 2018 or even later to become available to me for incorporation into the growing body of research I was integrating. The key insights are that the foundation of rationality’s self-justification is associated with metabolism, i.e., Godel-completeness is a feature of conscious thought in every instance of its occurrence; and that cooperation between human bodies is being enhanced by rapid cybernetic development. 

In Worldview Ethics, we’ll unpack the significance of a variety of recent developments around the fields of technology and neuroscience to furnish a theory of moral philosophy that begins with physics and ends with increasingly complex accounts of cognitive action. The goal of the work is to situate the reader firmly in the maelstrom of rapid developments from artificial intelligence to cognitive neuroscience, at once providing a detailed account of the self as we know it from empirical evidence and also building toward an understanding, even in the moral realm, of why that self is how it is. 

I am elated to be working with Andrew and the team at Quest of Evolution on this groundbreaking project. When I first heard about The Quest of Evolution on the PageDAO Show, it stuck with me. I spent a few sleepless nights dreaming up this concept I called the knowledge base hypergraph, in which representations of texts could be endlessly linked together to add a new dimension to the way people interact with the bodies of work that comprise the sciences. I had a quick chat with Andrew about it and he loved the idea so much that we came right out of the gate after the first Quest of Evolution collection had launched and just got right down to it. 

Moral Philosophy & The AI Panic

The AI Panic Letter of 2023 What is it about artificial intelligence that has the world in such an uproar? An open letter is being circulated (Future of Life, 2023) after being signed by heads of industry and famous thinkers including Max Tegmark and a number of other respectable minds.

https://www.thequestofevolution.com

The coming weeks will bring many opportunities to get involved with Worldview Ethics and get your hands dirty with some real-life science, if you are up to the challenge! Follow me here on Paragraph.xyz to stay in the loop.