My reason for investing so much time into the creation of Formal Dialectics was that it seemed philosophy could be used to improve decision-making at the highest levels; it appears the world is not yet ready to engage in such quality cognition.

The Case For Optimism, Even In The Present Day Though it sounds pessimistic at first, the message here is one of optimism. In Formal Dialectics and elsewhere, I speak with some dismay of an academic system that seems to be falling apart in the United States. True to the form of postmodern anxiety, I never really answered any of my deeper questions about academia to any degree of satisfaction. I spent most of 2019 working in biotechnology and have been quarantined since March in 2020, writing articles for various online outlets to avoid exposing myself and thereby my family to the deadly pathogen that permeates our environment here in West Texas, where nobody seems capable of orchestrating anything like a coherent attempt at widespread mask-wearing.

Despite my great interest in philosophy, it is likely that I will not have another opportunity to obtain a post at a university as a teacher. And our society has much, much bigger problems to deal with than the higher education funding problem that leads to atrocious working conditions for adjunct lecturers in the humanities as well as the sciences. Introduction level science classes have long been so bad on the average that even qualified students avoid them.

Instead of having a moment to deal with these issues, we Americans are beset by a plague and by a disgraceful authoritarian President who still refuses to admit he lost the election this year. The myriad crises will likely keep even first lady Dr. Biden, an education advocate, from making much headway on education-related issues in the near term.

The absurdity of the historical moment is so vividly apparent that it’s difficult to even conceive of a philosophy book as anything like relevant, but the most bizarre realization for us here is simply the growing recognition of the fact that our absurd choices at the collective level directly led to the absurdity we’re all experiencing individually.

So how do we end up at anything even resembling optimism in the midst of a pandemic?

Why, dialectically, of course.

The character of rationality itself is one of continuous development towards a particular goal: better predictions that lead to better consequences when we act. In The Plague, Albert Camus recognizes what he calls the feeling of absurdity in the soliloquy delivered by the character Tarrou, who I characterized in an essay as the hero of the story. In the speech Tarrou delivers to Rieux, the physician, we see the virtue of the individual man’s action as an absolutely central mainstay to the survival of the collective; yet he dies, alone and virtually unthanked for his service!

And yet…. the character of the dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective has never been so clear as it is in these stark passages. In such a large mass of individuals, bad ideas and hence regrettable actions are inevitable. In a deep understanding of the works of Camus, we see the twin threads of hope and despair are largely made of the same components; what separates them is a combination of attitude, character, and understanding. What makes us good is service to the greater whole, yet at times the best way to serve the human collective is precisely to oppose the ones who hold power.

And the struggle is one of life and death. The survival of social humanity is contingent upon the general trend toward increasing social consciousness and responsibility, yet many people are unable to perform the basic ethical calculation necessary to function on the rational autonomous axis of human behavior at all. The constrictions of illusory economic opportunity and an unprecedented level of debt have made the case in favor of changes to the centerpieces of our economic structure impossible to deny.

That’s where the optimism comes from. We eventually reach a tipping point, if this continues, and a transformation follows. What emerges ought to be better than what we left for it, at long last.

The Future Of Formal Dialectics In Formal Dialectics, I disputed Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous claim that the world was headed for a new dark age on the grounds that the internet stands to facilitate increasing communication between people who live in different places-the opposite of a dark age. Yet here we are, having lived through four years of a Trump presidency that did an untold amount of damage to humanity’s effort to mitigate the ill effects of climate change and the global order itself. During this time, the internet has shown us its dark side by enabling bad actors to obtain power by misguiding the masses via social media. Of that there is no question. But perhaps the tide is turning.

Soon, we may see a more resilient, more democratic, and more powerful avenue for political expression in online networking. Our lifestyles are only increasing in terms of connectedness. Perhaps we will eventually all learn to live together. And perhaps the time of a popular Formal Dialectics is coming. It is a beautiful book and the argumentation it contains has withstood the test of time thus far. I believe in this little book, full of powerful proofs and honest dialectical reasoning. It seems that some on the religious right are opposed to the very concept of dialectics itself, and I look forward to conversations with such people because I believe their view is self-contradictory.

Dialectics is nothing to be afraid of, and it is not “against god” anymore than building an iPhone or going to the moon is against god. The sorts of conversations that can be had, using the dialectical method, are the type of thing that creates answers to even the most difficult questions, not by providing simple axioms, but by providing the dialectician with a multifaceted view of the entire situation. The reason preachers are against dialectics is that dialectics is an activity in which the individual is forced to think for himself; this makes people less easy to control and makes many religious people uncomfortable because the whole religious game we humans like to play so much is a game about social cohabitation more than anything else.

The Catholic Church, in particular, has struggled to keep up with the times as dialectical reasoning has progressed. It could be argued that the Recovery of Aristotle was such a monumental event historically as to lead to the excommunication and later canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas precisely because it reintroduced the dialectical component of The Philosopher’s thought into the school system the Church had developed. It is my firm belief that dialectical engagement with the subject is the method by which excellence can be reached.

A dialectician is not interested in being the argument’s winner, or in being right all of the time. Rather, dialectically inclined thinkers like to know about the possibilities, about the arguments that can be made by various involved parties, and hence we are interested in the people, the situation, and the solution to whatever problem we may be looking at.

The result?

A deeper grasp of the situation that leads to, not trolling and winners or losers, but a greater understanding of the situation itself and the motives of the actors taking part in it.

With this thought in mind, I am proud to announce that I will be creating a series of videos about Formal Dialectics. I’m still fine-tuning my home studio to produce quality content for everyone who is interested in the book, but within a few weeks my YouTube channel will feature them. Go ahead and follow it to be notified as I release the Formal Dialectics Video Series.

It has been two very full years since Formal Dialectics came out, and now over six years since the concept exploded into my mind. I don’t know what hasn’t changed: I’m experimenting with new media and on a new, freelancing-oriented career path that keeps steering me toward blockchain and cryptocurrency. One thing remains the same: I’m still working on Dialectics of Liberation, with no end date in sight. I suppose it also still seems feasible to provide a material reductionist account of ethical decision-making. Were this thesis to be borne out by time and thought, it could signal the end of the postmodern era and the beginning of a new age, with its own archetypal patterns and a different set of shortcomings.

In these as well as many other things, time will tell.

It has now been almost three years since this essay dropped! There is a new Formal Dialectics in town as well (with a new cover!), which you can check out here:

https://www.bonfire.xyz/epicdylan/FormalDialectics

https://www.bonfire.xyz/epicdylan/FormalDialectics

-Marjan Moghaddam

Recently, I had the privilege of connecting with an old friend in a new way. Marjan Moghaddam, a famous digital artist I’d actually been friends with for several years, is a deeply fascinating person. I reached out to her about NFT art to see if she had heard of the medium yet. I had seen posts about her digital and AR (augmented reality) art, and was impressed with it. Over time, I became familiar with the trials and tribulations with the technology despite having a state of the art studio.

Though I’d vaguely had a sense that she was involved in some cool and interesting projects, I was both surprised and quite pleased to learn that she had already generated over 26ETH in sales on Superrare in the 4 months since she has been on the platform. I immediately told her I wanted to interview her for the NFTWriter magazine, and she agreed. During our conversation she raised an interesting question: Is crypto art today a new Renaissance, or is it instead another Rococo?

My Conversation With Marjan Moghaddam

One of the first things that came up during the conversation was the potential of Crypto Art, and Marjan pointed out that many NFT evangelists are fond of calling it a new renaissance, mostly as a figure of speech. The point she made was simple: if the Renaissance (of Art History) was all about visual spectacle it would need to be called the Rococo. The movements, she explains with a comfort level that suggests a lot of practice, were quite different in character.

The Rococo was about an up-and-coming merchant class of people who commodified art with an excess of visuals, filigree, and embellishment that eventually became highly kitschified; whereas the Renaissance was about the resurrection of the ideals of Greek Philosophy and Liberal Humanism through the humanities, arts and sciences, which has endured the test of time as a great moment in civilization. She further explains that in fact the whole concept of High Art, as opposed to art that is merely decorative or visually appealing, was born during this time. Michelangelo, who was more well versed in Greek Philosophy than many of the top scholars of his time, would have been horrified by the idea of creating art in order to get eyeballs for our current attention economy, and “he would’ve ranted about it in his diaries for days” she emphasizes. She concludes, “In fact he exercised a great degree of visual restraint not just in terms of Mannerist posing, but also color, composition etc. in an attempt to avoid merely appeasing the eye in order to deliver for a higher Neoplatonic type of an “eye” and level of contemplation.” I’m deeply enjoying it.

The fun of this call for me, as a philosopher, was to have the experience of beholding an honest-to-god practitioner of what is in some sense the practical side of the day’s philosophical zeitgeist. Marjan teaches mostly studio based CG classes, not Theory, but deals with theory and philosophy extensively in her own decades long art practice. Her works fetch a high price because they represent over four decades of respected and innovative digital art and animation practice. Marjan knows the value of her work, primarily because it is situated within this history, which she describes as continuing “the trajectory of art history” aesthetically and philosophically.

What Does 4 Decades In High Art Mean? Prior to crypto, Marjan had an established collector base, had won top awards, was widely exhibited in galleries, art centers, museums and top festivals. These included the world’s premiere Computer Graphics and Animation Festival Siggraph a total of 4 times. Marjan exhibited AR at the Smithsonian, had seminal digital art projects funded by the likes of the Rockefeller Fund, was selected for the top AR Art list from Forbes, was an Artist-In-Resident for Adobe, went viral with her work multiple times, was an influential featured artist of the early Internet 1.0 era. The list of accomplishments goes on and on. She is even a Tenured, Full Professor of CG, Animation and XR at LIU/Brooklyn campus. Her value amongst traditional and crypto collectors is also derived from her unique style. As Crypto Artist Stellabelle observed in a video segment on her favorite 3d CG artists in crypto art “If Picasso was around today he would be doing Marjan’s 3d CG style”. Marjan’s award-winning style of animation is globally recognized as original and unique, adding to the value of her work.

Since 2016, Marjan has pioneered yet another form with her internationally acclaimed #arthacks on Instagram which have been featured in dozens of publications. She started the #arthacks as a way of redefining form for digital art, radicalising curation, and democratizing the exhibition space, by hacking her original and unique style of figuration and animation which she hashtags with #digitalbodies using a new artform she has termed #ChronometricSculpture, into found and shot exhibition footage along with her artistic dialog. But mostly she adds, “to hack is merely transgressive, but to do so with a critical discourse is transformational”, and this is what she’s mostly after.

I ask a loaded question: “What is art?”

Marjan defines everything from a design created by a child with ketchup and mustard on a plate, to the latest monumental installation by Anselm Kiefer, and everything else in between as art.

“I worked as a production artist doing computer animation for various studios in NYC for many years, while doing Fine Arts work for exhibition on the side, so I respect the Applied Arts, probably a lot more than many people in the Fine Arts world do, because of my many years of work in the industry. But I don’t believe they’re the same, and delineation and distinction matters within the greater umbrella term of art.”

So, what Marjan refers to as Capital-A Art or High Art is art which utilizes, to the greatest extent possible, the aesthetics and technology of its day to express and convey the highest and most important ideas, philosophies, and reflections of its time.

Marjan is a fan of the sublime in Art, and the various philosophers who have championed it from Kant and Schopenhauer, to Eagleton and Lyotard. She knows the aesthetics here far more deeply than I do, and I actually used to teach college philosophy. I’m no aesthetics expert, but I know enough to recognize one. Marjan offers the juxtaposition of 2 artistic depictions of women from the middle of the last century (below). On the Right is De Kooning Woman from MOMA, and on the left is a Vargas Girl that recently came up for auction. Both are considered art.

Marjan explains that the Vargas Girl totally represents the ideals of beauty for her time, it’s designed to appeal to the eyes, while addressing the sexual longing and desire for which it was intended.On many levels it is considered as an illustration, as a point of distinction from the pictorial composition of painting. Meanwhile, De Kooning’s is an unapologetic, bold, and complex depiction of a woman as a painting that allows for a layering of complex ideas based on the high art aesthetics and ideas of its time. One limits the meaning to specific functions, the other expands it until it encompasses many ideas causing contemplation and reflection about greater meaning and Being. One will get respectable prices today in auction within a certain type of a collector market that collects pop ephemera from various eras, the other will fetch the highest prices from the world’s top collectors and collections which go after the greatest works. Guess which is which? We know that the Vargas Girl or its contemporary equivalent would fetch bids in the crypto art space, but what about the De Kooning or its equivalent? Which will get the highest Crypto bids? That’s the question that the crypto art ecosystem may be answering in the next few years, one way or another.

Is there a Marjan work that is more in line with De Kooning, than a Vargas girl? Yes. Her #Lordess, see the next tweet.

https://twitter.com/TrufflethKing/status/1352601055079628805?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1352601055079628805%7Ctwgr%5E6e8eca1fd16abfcced5d2ded20e1bbc94f5142d6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FTrufflethKing%2Fstatus%2F1352601055079628805image%3D

Marjan believes that most new media technologies start with a basic formula for bread and circuses entertainment and monetization. As significant as radio was, as an innovation in the 20th Century, it did not produce the greatest artistic works of the 20th century. Neither did it produce the most enduring resellable works. “You don’t see Sotheby’s auctioning anything from any point in radio history for over $65 million,” she says. And she proves her point: early TV used a G-rated Burlesque formula of musical comedy, until the greater, more substantial works ushered in the Golden era of Television, which also coincided with the highest dollar amounts it earned. So what a medium or media produces as an innovation isn’t always the greatest cultural capital of its time.

There is a relationship between a lasting work of art and appreciating value derived from merit and the financials.

-Marjan Moghaddam

The point here, dear reader, is that art prices are a complicated but functioning market whose purpose is to effectively and efficiently allocate value! It sounds familiar to me, because this is what we’re beginning to see in the NFT art market — the only problem is the noise. So many people are interested, and curation is so broken, that people are actually buying art they don’t like. Noted collectors are, with Marjan, observing the trends in terms of valuation as they decide what to think of the opportunities available. And many people are extremely excited about these opportunities!The issue is that, at the highest levels, intentionality needs to become more established.

“With the internet, the problem gets much more complex, because the internet produces more forgettable and dispensable ephemera per minute than entire periods in history,” she explains. “take the Annoying Orange for example, 10 years ago it had awesome metrics, but do we really consider it as something that expressed the highest values of its time?” I agree, quickly. I want to hear where she’s going next: “So there is a relationship between a lasting and appreciating value derived from merit and the financials.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Much of history bears this out. I enjoy speaking with artists because they approach these problems from a perspective which is complete, despite the inadequacy of language to create completeness. As a philosopher of language, this fascinates me. As an investor, the markets’ emerging behavior patterns fascinate me. My mind is racing as I struggle to keep up with the tremendous volume of information Marjan can cite to support her conclusions — and it’s mainly evidence I was familiar with. I may have spotted the trend eventually, but this conversation has shortened that journey for me by months, I feel certain, listening.

“Are NFTs and Crypto Art just a new way of collecting baseball cards, psychedelic posters, celebrity merchandising, editorial illustration, album cover art, and the ephemera and memorabilia of our time, or will it expand to also include the highest artistic expressions of our time which can change the course of history?”

-Marjan Moghaddam

The Emerging Crypto Art Community

It sounds like an amazing time to be a crypto artist. I gather that we’re not in the midst of a new Renaissance yet for a different reason, but the camaraderie that emerges from the transparency that blockchain builds into all of the interactions is something Marjan has a positive view of. I’ve noticed that as well. Marjan’s #GlitchGoddess of Art basel Miami 2018 with Picasso and Wood #arthack, a clearly feminsit digital art piece went viral in 2018, alongside her Baiser at Mary Boone in Glassish Waxish which she will be tokenizing for Valentine’s Day 2021 on Superare The animation was additionally also selected for Nowness’ Cultural Programming, Pioneers in Media Arts. She notes that there is more reason for optimism: serious conceptual feminist art is seen as acceptable content online these days and has an audience, the Internet has matured. So, while this represents progress and while we do see this on a variety of fronts, “we’re not seeing a heavy focus on the highest expressions of the culture,” in the NFT art world yet, according to Marjan. Although she has been deliberately, slowly and intentionally releasing some of her best works in the NFT space, as she finds her way in this new art ecosystem.

Marjan’s own work, some of which has already appeared on Superrare, is about having difficult conversations during our troubled times. In a way which smacks to me of Simone de Beauvoir, her pieces deal with questions of beauty and time, of identity and race and color. She claims to avoid the superficial Identitarian layers of meaning derived from these constructs, and is more interested in the deeper and more profound aspects that go beyond the triggering aspects. “It’s in the deeper layers of meaning that humanity is revealed as a far more unified phenomenon than our tribalism denies”, she explains. The project for Marjan that emerges is at the root a humanist one. It can be challenging at times and for some reason Nahuatl terms such as pachacuti are the ones that spring to mind here; that back-and-forth conception of progress somehow reflects the ultra-thorough thought process which governs the changing images of beauty and ugliness, ultimately reinforcing both notions enough to conjure something lifelike and communicative from them.

Marjan’s first sold piece on Superrare was Taking the Knee with GAN generated paintings. Derived from her June 4th Art Basel 2020 #arthack, the piece spontaneously celebrated the global protests in solidarity with #BLM after the George Floyd tragedy. She does the #arthacks during the artfairs as they are happening in a spontaneous and improvisational manner. “It was a beautiful and important moment that I wanted to capture, people of different nationalities and races showing their solidarity, a truly transcendent moment in our world”. Capital with GAN-Generated Paintings was designed to show a difficult birth and transition as art financials and cultural capital moves to Ethereum, in part as a result of the pandemic, which itself acts as commentary, what is cultural capital in the 21st century? Her #Lordess with Blue and Green Voxelized GAN Paintings plays with ideas of beauty derived from the physical world and sexual longing, by combining it with its polar opposites in her signature fluid style of Chronometric Sculpture which blends the ideals of animation with that of sculpture. “How do we depict a woman, if truly freed from the physical and its boundaried confines when moving to the digital?” she asks. “Here the juxtaposition of desired and undesired ideas in a new way is the expansion of the potential not just artistically but also intellectually.”

The thing which stands out to me about the position Marjan has taken here is that it supports the NFT art movement while challenging the people producing these works to think more, to put more into it, and to create better art. This is the role the ideals played during the Renaissance the historic movement, as opposed to a renaissance as a figure of speech. “the Medicis didn’t fund crap. Free and uncorrupted critical evaluation of artworks is something that has fallen off these days, most art press has too chummy of a relationship with the galleries to be truly objective and authentic as opposed to spammy. And everything in our world is increasingly spam, as opposed to a living authenticity with being and presence,” Marjan elaborates. There’s a walk-the-talk taking place here which I find quite interesting: Did Marjan just show us how to approach art criticism in a healthy way, at scale?

What Would NFT High Art Look Like?

Asking this question involves a sort of Renaissance-esque restraint on the part of the artists and their collectors that rightly situates the work. Of COURSE NFT art can produce the highest expression of our culture! we want to exclaim, but then we catch our breath and realize that it is possible that things could go another way. Another few deep breaths and we can understand that in fact things have been going this way for awhile. “NFT art has the potential for expressing the highest levels of our culture, or becoming a more efficient way of monetizing eyeballs through the blockchain”, Marjan claims.

The core challenge facing the NFT art world today is a question: can NFT artists accomplish things artists using other mediums are not able to replicate?

Put another way: Will the NFT art community produce the highest expression of our culture?

My tribulations in the traditional publishing industry are a sore contrast to the rave reviews my works have gotten from the handful of people who’ve chosen to read them. I know there are others out there, skilled and qualified, yet disenfranchised by the broken curation system of the day.

At the moment, it’s still possible to hear about collectors buying art they don’t actually even like all that much just to complete a set of tiles, or drawings, or whatever the case may be. I would even go so far as to argue that some of the algorithmically generated art fits into this category too; the trick is that people have to make it communicate something to others. Right now, the entire industry is rose-colored and cleaning your glasses won’t help. It may stay this way for some time, and that’s not even necessarily a problem.

But, if crypto art is to truly unseat other mediums to host the highest expression of today’s culture, it has a ways to go yet. “Art has much higher to go,” Marjan says, as we wrap our call. She ends by explaining that commercialization and a lack of public grant funding has resulted in a lack of freedom for the best artists of the day and a monopoly on power for those who can afford to purchase the commodity that the artist’s heroic journey has become.

In the patronage we see in the NFT space, however, Marjan sees the potential for a long-overdue Renaissance to restore some texture to our flattened culture. “Patronage has brought about the most important works in art history,” she says.

I nod in agreement.

I am hooked.

NFT art has the potential for expressing the highest levels of our culture, or becoming a more efficient way of monetizing eyeballs through the blockchain.

-Marjan Moghaddam

Digital Embodiment Part 1

https://twitter.com/TheMarjan/status/1349389454591586305?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1349389454591586305%7Ctwgr%5Efcce010e8168270e2e582e3f977ffe9969574ede%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FTheMarjan%2Fstatus%2F1349389454591586305image%3D

Part 2

https://twitter.com/TheMarjan/status/1351556731546046466?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1351556731546046466%7Ctwgr%5Ebbdaa7b59679a2499a00e7c32ccfedc1bcd1a367%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2FTheMarjan%2Fstatus%2F13515567315460464663Fref_src3Dtwsrc255Etfw257Ctwcamp255Etweetembed257Ctwterm255E1351556731546046466257Ctwgr255E257Ctwcon255Es1_c1026ref_url3Dhttps253A252F252Fwww.voice.com252Fnotificationsimage%3D

All thanks to Marjan Moghaddam for making this beautiful piece possible. @TheMarjan

Originally published at https://www.voice.com. (now defunct

I have to explain a bit about myself, my own weirdness, for this to work. But I will keep it brief because I’m just one person, and PageDAO is composed of many people. My name is Thomas Dylan Daniel, and I go by epicdylan (a username I made up when I was much younger) online. In my life, I’ve never quite fit anywhere, which causes me no end of heartbreak as life continues. I have always struggled to earn money, just as I struggled in school when I was younger. My brain works well to solve problems, but in some professional contexts my drive to always get at the root of the matter makes me difficult to employ. I published a peer reviewed philosophy book - a monumental accomplishment! But I cannot seem to find the means to support myself by my first professional love, teaching philosophy.

The story of my academic background is full of broken dreams - I studied philosophy as an undergraduate because I wanted to be a lawyer, which didn’t work out. Then I went to work selling cell phones, which was a great fit until the world adjusted to the omnipresence of these devices, and the pay collapsed. I went to graduate school, aiming for a Ph.D in philosophy, but wasn’t able to get into a top program. I taught for a few years, but had to leave because I made far more money Ubering than I could earn in the classroom. And every step of the way I acted in good faith, learned as much as possible, and treated people with respect.

I got pulled into the Austin startup culture once I left the philosophy classroom, and from there things have only gotten weirder. I worked as a researcher for the publishing arm of Keller Williams and got introduced to the publishing industry I had been flirting with, learned about the scams and shams authors pulled to make their books work. The publishing industry was repulsive, and I was soon fired. I got a month of severance and used it to fund the finishing touches on Formal Dialectics, which seemed like a good idea but completely flopped as many academic books do. Then it was off to my first startup, which also flopped, and on to my first glimmer of light: a biotech company–I held the distinction of being the first employee–called Zeta Biolongevity. We raised money, built a scientific theory, got a patent, but ultimately folded.

Then, in 2020, when shelter in place came along, I began to dig into Web3 with gusto. The tools writers needed to get their work out there and get paid for it seemed within reach.

I became  friends with EZINCRYPTO, a lovable and omnipresent host in the crypto world, and we did a podcast together. We decided to create a magazine behind a token gate. Soon the idea blossomed; watered by our creativity, optimism, and openness, it shifted and changed. We decided to build the Library of Alexandria on the blockchain.

I dove into  books and research, studied the concept, and found it to be incredible - in ancient times, this library hadn’t served as a mere book repository. It had been much more. Agents from the library sought out books in the cargo holds of ships in port in Alexandria. They would copy and translate whatever they found. This tradition continued over the centuries and eventually led to the Recovery of Aristotle–considered by many scholars to be the most significant moment in Western Philosophy’s long history, when Aristotle’s works were translated into the modern European languages and discovered by St. Thomas Aquinas, whose work helped end the Dark Ages and usher in the birth of modern science.

The Library of Alexandria was more than a library; it was a culture. It funded scholars’ work, and it supported their interests. It was burned down many times, not only by Julius Caesar, but also by many others who were threatened by it. Knowledge is power, and sometimes people who are in charge want to take power away from others. Every few decades the Library would burn.

In many ways, these repeated conflicts resemble the modern publishing industry, which itself can be a sort of enemy of free knowledge. Modern publishing uses algorithms and advertising to compel authors to write something other than what  they have  an interest in, to do it the marketing way instead of  the writer’s way. This truly is a sort of burning, destroying works before they’re even created. A burning of the inner muse.

Funding for research should be a sacred thing. It should not matter what you want to research or how good a politician you are - instead, it should be as it was in ancient times, when your own interests were taken to be the best guide. This is fundamental to the way human minds work, and after a long life of not fitting in and never having basic economic stability for myself, I was ready to give whatever I had to give so that this dream could become a reality. And let’s be entirely honest here: I want to make enough money that I don't have to worry about my parents’ medical costs or paying my bills - in fact, I want to make enough money to live a luxury lifestyle if possible - I want to be comfortable! And let’s face it - that isn’t an easy thing to do.

I remember a verse from my days studying the Bible that seems relevant here - it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into Heaven. It means a variety of things and can be read in a variety of ways, but I take it to mean that making a lot of money in an ethical way is next to impossible. Making money in contemporary America as a writer or scholar is next to impossible because our culture prizes money and derides ethics. PageDAO doesn’t work if we forget about ethics, though, and neither would the Library of Alexandria. What we need is a system that positively reinforces good behavior and also manages to be financially rewarding for its users.

How PageDAO Formed

The route to PageDAO was a circuitous one. We started with a whitepaper about the Alexandria concept, then dropped that name and pivoted toward something more technical and decentralized with Libernet. The idea was to get people running something like IPFS on Raspberry Pi microcomputers and build out this decentralized system to facilitate learning and knowledge around the world. The end of Libernet came when I joined an accelerator based in Austin and realized we needed a C-Corporation to receive funding, start a bank account, set up health insurance for employees, and perform all those other basic support functions that are so necessary to build quality technology. We couldn’t show enough potential economic upside to Libernet to justify the existence of a C-Corporation around it to investors, so soon the concept fell off and we got our first look at the new publishing + technology company we would be building: WIP Publishing.

This next iteration, shortened to WIPP and soon given a mascot - an anthropomorphic book affectionately dubbed Wippy -  was named after a joke; work-in-progress publishing. It worked for technology and for written works equally well! We published a few books during the height of NFT mania and rapidly discovered that we weren’t going to be able to make that business model work - people were buying ‘dickbutts’ but they weren’t buying books. We wanted to support self-publishing authors more than we wanted to contribute to the cesspool of shady modern publishing, so that summer we discussed DAOs endlessly and came up with the basic core concept of our first major product, the PageDAO.

There have been a million very frustrating things along the way, but the worst is definitely fundraising. Either it’s some disinterested goon who only cares about turning less money into more money, or it’s some wannabe coach who gives you advice and you don’t get anywhere even if you follow it, all they want to do is feel empowered by getting attention from you. Neither is particularly helpful.

Anyone with some money can be an investor, so the variety among investors in terms of personality, goals, and temperament is massive. At my biotech startup back in 2018, we raised a lot of money in a short period. I thought I had it figured out going into WIPP – we just needed a good lead who gave a shit about the project. That person could come in essentially as an employee alongside us and help push things forward, and we could really get some results that way. Though we’ve searched and searched for that special person to help lead PageDAO fundraising efforts, we have simply not found anyone who quite fits the bill and that has left us struggling to serve the DAO - and it makes me feel like the proverbial square peg to try to fit into the round hole of fundraising.

As a DAO, we did a few things – we released the $PAGE token, which we did not want to become a security, and its lack of security-ness has essentially made it the sort of thing people don’t want to buy. A recent Bankless episode equates bullishness with security-ness, and that seems to resonate given what we’ve learned with the Page token over the years. But all is not lost, and we still take meetings with investment firms who have varying levels of interest in providing liquidity against $PAGE, which is important because it lets people swap our native cryptocurrency for others.

We’ve pursued nearly every grant offer in Web3, but so many of them are merely gambits by teams who want their chain to see greater adoption and not altruistic investments in the future of the ecosystem. We  ended up chasing our tail over the “value proposition” to the ecosystem in question each time, and ultimately they didn’t end up writing the check despite our best efforts.

What really rankled my nerves here was the way in which people struggled to connect the dots to see how they could get a return on their investment instead of seeing the value of the functional community we were working to create. People with a lot of money generally don’t care what your idea is and how it works, but sometimes you get lucky and find a great one. Back in my biotech days, I got firsthand experience with a really good investor who came in and did the work and pushed the ball forward right alongside me. We didn’t get there, though. The research got too heady for my friend and our company suffered. Without someone willing to wade into the research beside me and support the efforts of the project, it wouldn’t work, we couldn’t even decide what to do anymore. Thus, the rubber never quite met the road even though we went through all sorts of experiments in our lab and spent a great deal of money building and testing things.

With PageDAO, everything is open source and the project addresses two 9-figure markets (Books, $100B+ and Content Marketing, $400B+). There are opportunities here for people to invest their money and earn more. However, when we were shopping WIPP around and talking to people about backing us in that for-profit venture, the issue was primarily  that we couldn’t get people hyped up about it. People don’t care about books very much in today’s world. That’s why we shifted gears to PageDAO, and while $PAGE is not a security, it is nonetheless quite capable of funding the DAO thru issuance if the price would stabilize and liquidity levels would increase. The mechanism that makes this happen is called utility. Mainly what happens is we issue $PAGE to people and they dump it in the liquidity pool because they’re writers looking to earn money by writing, or community builders seeking to pay for things in their lives. We don’t yet seem to have an exciting enough roadmap or the necessary hype that leads to the people who can afford to hold huge amounts of our token to actually pull the trigger and buy in with gusto, but there are market forces that $PAGE can tap into that will help anyway - and we can build them together.

There’s a cargo cult thing here somewhere. We see people create companies and fund them, we see people start cryptocurrencies and others get excited about them, but when we do these things the money just never shows up. Why? Well, it has a lot to do with our networks, our personalities, and our general demeanor - but at the end of the day, some of it just boils down to luck. Luck in meeting the right people at the right times, luck in them deciding to trust our fledgling team and join us and have input, and luck in choosing good ones and not bad ones for the long-term health of the project.

Behind the scenes in most successful business plays is a network of wealthy or at least comfortable people working together to move an agenda forward. We don’t have that, we are a network of creatives and misfits. To raise funds successfully, money people have to be excited – and that’s tough to do without having money people already involved, regardless of utility, technology, or traction. It’s a tough task made harder by the sorry state of current American cryptocurrency laws. We can’t simply go the security route and file with the SEC because there is essentially no guidance, a fact made more obvious by big well-funded operations like Kraken just cutting off that part of their business in the US. What is our little literary project supposed to do when there are essentially no rails? Our intention is and has been to build an international organization, but I’m American and so are most of the money people I know.

We started the DAO July 28, 2021. Since then, we’ve built some amazing technologies together, gotten feedback from the market and users, and iteratively designed and built new structures to address the needs we uncovered.  We don’t know exactly what to build, but we have a very good idea of where to go next at any given point. Still, under the present regulatory framework, we’re just not able to make the clear ROI pitch we need to win the money people over. When someone says “Here’s $XX amount, I want 10x back and I see how that can happen here,” we have to say wait a minute, you’re treating the token as a security, and it isn’t that.

All of this has been ongoing the whole time we’ve been at it with PageDAO, but that initial meme, the indestructible library, has kept us motivated and moved us forward despite the lack of money.

The positive side to all of this is that we’ve essentially constructed an indestructible DAO that sits on the sidelines and watches as other projects come in and build things we can’t afford to build. A dose of humble pie never hurt anyone, but for the people in the trenches building with little or no financial support, the taste is poor indeed. The good news is that we had the unbelievable lucky break of recruiting an incredibly talented programmer who has single handedly fought Moloch and won, over and over again. Between our team and the other teams hard at work in Web3, the future of this new generation of FOSS looks bright.

Aside from the money issues, PageDAO is fun. And every day we are learning more about what it is going to take to solve this problem of a publishing industry that takes as its purpose the pure and simple exploitation of writers. Eventually we will be able to create a powerful market offering capable of taking a real solution to the writers who need it.

Just as Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part. Personally, I’ve put everything I had behind this project in one way or another, got hit by the $LUNA collapse, and now I’m broke. I’ve been looking for work – surprise! – it’s impossible for me to get my foot in anywhere. My qualifications and personality aren’t quite what anyone is looking for. Oof.  I’m stuck in Web3 and my project can’t raise money and I haven’t found anyone who wants to pay me to write!

The truth is, sometimes I really do just feel hopeless. Even so, I know the story always has happy moments coming up again. It’s almost impossible not to fall into a well of depression with major uncertainties looming from Russia’s absolute barbarism and nations like China somehow supporting their unconscionable acts of violence, hate, and genocide. The instability to markets has simultaneously been a direct blow to me and to most of the folks who would help if they hadn’t also been negatively impacted. There is a liminality to every level of our existence these days. Nuclear war, World War 3, regulatory opacity from the US Government, extremely low wages for writers in general, and a publishing industry that essentially consists of a client list owned by publishers who control pursestrings and choose writers who get a chance and mostly don’t make it…

Has there ever been a time that something like PageDAO was needed more?

Preserving & optimizing the world’s written knowledge using decentralized tech seems like a prime area for exploration. Our strategy, to use the new tools brought to us by cryptocurrency to create a micro-economy with rules designed to make it more rewarding to be a writer, is a very compelling one. And some of our problems can start to fade as we find traction moving forward. Raising a lot of money would help us solve the regulatory clarity issue by enabling us to defend ourselves in court should the need arise, but flying under the radar with a low market cap provides its own sort of protection.

The fundamental issue of PageDAO seems to be the need for money to defend, build for, and to benefit writers - balanced on the knife’s edge against all of the potential downsides that can result from doing the wrong thing or working with the wrong person to get this money. Can we find a way to fund this project without signing a deal with the devil? A bad investor could take massive control over the project, force bad business decisions, steer the project away from its intended purpose to help writers, etc. So at some point, raising money the wrong way is the surest possible way to kill PageDAO and burn the library. We need to find someone who understands the importance of openness in research and is willing to start the flywheel spinning; from that point the project will grow and build itself via the DAO/community structure. Or, perhaps we can bootstrap it if we just keep at it long enough. The issues are complex, but that’s enough discussion of the financial difficulties for now. Whatever the future specifcally holds, it is bright because of the team that has crystallized from a growing community of writers excited about Web3.

PageDAO’s All-Stars

I’ve written about the struggles I faced personally, here, but PageDAO is far larger than simply me. I have had incredible luck in finding dedicated, hardworking, talented people to work with on this project and none of this would exist without them.

Robbie Pollock - Indefatigable

At the top of the list, Robbie’s name should show up. He’s been slogging away in the trenches since the WIP Publishing days, digesting the Web3 components and the technical bits that have to be set up just right to make any of this work at all. In the beginning of the project, I searched high and low for a talented Web3 developer and couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t simply looking for money I didn’t have. And then I met Robbie, who cares about publishing and people. Robbie is the brain behind the DAO, and he’s taught me almost everything I know about Web3 technologies. Without Robbie, PageDAO would be nothing.

CD Damitio - Vagobond

CD is a dedicated, talented former radio host whose love of wacky literature has led him to write book after book. A disenfranchised enthusiast like myself, CD’s books haven’t sold millions of copies or been made into major motion pictures, but CD has a gift for Web3 project tracking that nobody else I’ve met seems to equal. He works tirelessly to stay on top of the space and somehow manages to pull incredible talents into his projects from Vagobond Magazine to Bald Jesusism. CD had his own Web3 publishing project called LitEther when we first met, and though that project has spun down, the clarity of sight it gave him has made him a very powerful PageDAO core contributor.

Rionna Morgan

Rionna Morgan is the only member of the main PageDAO team who has managed to sell many books at all. She outsold Stephen King at one point! I remember meeting her through CD and instantly recognizing her love of literature and community. Her dedication to the mission of author empowerment is second to none, and her endless support has made it possible to take DAO elements such as the PageDAO Show to new heights. Her strength as a marketer is unequaled by anyone else in the DAO.

Ezra Levinger - EZINCRYPTO

EZ, as we call him around the DAO, is perhaps the most godfatherly PageDAO member. With connections and projects all over the Web3 space, EZ manages to somehow keep his schedule together despite the absolute torrent of content he produces. The brain behind Pass the Pen, EZ writes lots of stories and has one of the most creative minds in the DAO. He’s also been here since the very beginning, standing up for the little guy around the world. His other projects include Cipher Collectible Hip Hop and the Key to Crypto onboarding events he has been known to run in Latin America.

Greg Fishbone - Cryptoversal

Cryptoversal is another publishing talent from the Web2 world. A lawyer and a writer with impeccable prose and grammar, Cryptoversal manages to stay on top of a wide variety of daily tasks and has the distinction of being the first to create a Web3 NFTBook store. His Wordlers project has grown massively since he first took it up, and Cryptoversal is always involved in whatever the DAO is up to. Most recently, he appeared on Pass the Pen, as the first guest since EZ’s break concluded.

Nathan Gulka - Dragonate

Dragonate is a longtime friend of mine since the good old days in late 2019 when I first discovered the Cent social media platform. A TokenSmartie from the get-go, Dragonate frequently attends the WIP Meetup and helps PageDAO get its complicated Discord server working properly. Over the years many PageDAO members have come and gone, but Dragonate has been a constant presence helping keep things secure and safe for PageDAO members, who have not had to suffer many hacks or compromises thanks to his diligence.

Philip Loyd - PhilofAustin

Phil has been my friend for the better part of a decade now. A product guru and web technology expert, Phil has stepped out for a little while to build in Web2 with a steady paycheck and to focus on his family, but we never would have gotten the Readme Books NFTBook Minter put together without him. Phil is the mind behind our first Minter, and his strength in a team environment comes from a powerful personality who also has an innate ability to organize people around goals.

Cam Hejazi

Cameron Hejazi, founder of Cent, is the only investor the project has been able to attract thus far. Cam’s genius is mainly occupied with Cent, but he has provided guidance aplenty for myself and Robbie as we struggled to figure out how to raise money, what to build, and just generally where things should head from here. Cam is a partner at WIP Publishing as a result of his generous early investment, without which we would not have been able to build the Readme Books NFTBook Minter.

Mike Smart - Smart Digital Payments

Mike Smart, founder of Meta-Builders, contributed a great deal of support to PageDAO last fall. We worked to get a DeWork board put together and managed to write dozens of articles together with writers from around the world, but in the end it wasn’t quite enough. Or perhaps we were too early. Mike has a strong mind for business and is a big fan of the PageDAO concept, so we haven’t seen the last of him. The team at Meta-Builders will always be friends of PageDAO.

There are so many more people who deserve shout-outs that it seems a bit impractical to tell the stories of them all. Plus, PageDAO has a fairly open door, which means that people leave and come back and leave again as they like. We’re a creative organization full of creative people who have loads of projects, ideas, and commitments. The beauty of the DAO structure is that there are no contracts or obligations in place; people are free to come and go as they see fit. We are always grateful for their beautiful contributions.

Aside from the issue of fundraising, things are coming along quite nicely, more than nicely actually. PageDAO’s second generation minting technology has made it up the hill, despite the lack of interest in supporting it expressed by venture capitalists and grant purse string managers alike. Our very own Indefatigable truly has earned his nickname, and thanks to his efforts it is unlikely that funding problems will be able to force PageDAO to shut down. The Second Generation PageDAO NFT Minter is now in testnet phase. Released February 20, 2023, this unique decentralized application enables the user to bring a manuscript and create a unique NFTBook asset with a variety of never-before-seen features. To find out more about the second generation NFTBook Minter Technology, have a peek at our announcement here:

https://mirror.xyz/epicdylan.eth/pbLPo3hGo38CjOB42PPiXh763ZPgNe_nMPrqTxmkSlw

Keep in mind that I never made a dime from Formal Dialectics until it became an NFTBook, supported by Page Open Source Project technologies. I’m the founder of the PageDAO, and it is with great enthusiasm that I make this announcement: the concept of what a book is, is changing! This has happened a number of times in the past, most recently with the advent of the eBook, but (both) printing press(es) and written word are also in this category for scale.

Observe the new NFTBook here:

https://opensea.io/assets/0xE7F967Ed990C4db5262b592A3e5B70e29Dd585c3/2

We are changing what a book is by adding an entirely new, heavily social dimension to it. Previously, there was a book that was written and launched, and the text became ossified in the sense that it was no longer able to change. This sense of static content, that applied to books from the handwriting period to the ebook’s era, entailed a text that was printed and released, and occasionally reprinted - but due to the constraints of technology in those times, secondary literature came and went as the collective consciousness of humanity digested the content and people consumed & discussed it.

The book itself is often the easiest cultural artifact related to the author’s efforts for subsequent generations to exhume, primarily due to the property of provenance. Books are big, and they contain many words, which made them valuable in a most persistent way dating all the way back to the beginning of what we think of as civilization. They are the original form that social media took, and for millennia were the most powerful means by which ideas could spread across the world, reaching new human minds.

But not all media contains this level of value or provenance! In fact, it is a problem dating all the way back to the beginning of the Western academic tradition in Ancient Greece. While we have Plato’s Republic, we do not also possess the responses it drew from its contemporary cohort of scholars. And that can change now, if we so choose - behold, academics, a vehicle suited to sharing not only your own thoughts but also those who come along later and wish to join the conversation.

In the case of Formal Dialectics, users who wish to become involved in the conversation around the work may submit responses to the Serious Philosophy Optimism Collection for inclusion at the end of the Maintext as an ordered component of Appendix A. Social media users may submit their posts and responses to Appendix B if they wish. It is the intention of the author to put substantial effort into the maintenance of the collection, enabling Formal Dialectics to grow as large as its audience wishes it to.

Today onward, holding a Formal Dialectics NFTBook enables the user to not only view the entire Maintext file anytime they like, it also provides the user with access to token-gated content only available to NFTBook holders and a stream of secondary discussion and author essays. Time will tell what the Formal Dialectics NFTBook will ultimately come to contain, but for the first time since the advent of the book, the author now has the ability to create and maintain the work in a fashion that can truly be called dialectical.

Mint your copy today, from my Bonfire homepage:

https://www.bonfire.xyz/epicdylan/home

But, first, a story — back in about 2014, I was a young grad student looking for information about cognitive processes in general. I spent the summer trying to find my way into a magazine called Synthese, which I admired. I was interested in cognitivism — the idea that human minds and their thought processes are not black boxes, but in fact can be understood in great detail if we know which parts of them to poke and prod upon.

I remember discovering one single paper on distributed cognition, which fascinated me — I was coming at this from the standpoint of my recent introduction to cognitive neuroscience and then philosophy of mind angle that I had been led to by my talented professor, who had the great presence of mind to share with us the work of Antonio Damasio.

At the time, it was both incredibly passé and simultaneously somehow revolutionary to think that cognitive processes could take part in individual minds on one level, and on groups of minds at another. Being a bit of a lone wolf, at least in terms of my studies, I didn’t think a lot about the ways in which other minds could directly help me solve problems. I was more content to read the things they’d written down, then try to find my way to a meaningful contribution if I could.

I remember being disappointed when my searches of the usual databases came back generally empty, and I spent some time working toward an ethics book I still haven’t written almost ten years later which is intended to take as its philosophical input the revolutionary concept that ethics is not about norms or good and bad, but rather about coordination of individual human beings around shared goals.

One of my goals was to answer a core ethical theory question that has been around at least as long ago as Aristotle’s time:

Why does every individual person act as virtuously as possible and still end up surrounded by a vicious society that devalues our virtue and causes us pain?

If we’re all trying to do the right thing, shouldn’t we have had success in creating a more nurturing environment for ourselves?

With these thoughts in mind (there will be more on them to come, I promise I haven’t given up the idea of the book!), it seems fitting now to reveal the content the computer created in response to my prompting:

Distributed cognition is a term used in cognitive psychology and the study of human intelligence to refer to the idea that cognitive processes are not limited to individual brains, but can also be distributed across individuals, tools, and other external components in a cognitive system.

In other words, distributed cognition describes the way that people, objects, and technology can work together to solve problems, make decisions, and perform other cognitive tasks. This can include using tools or technology to perform cognitive tasks that would be difficult or impossible for an individual to do on their own, or collaborating with other people to share knowledge, ideas, and expertise.

For example, consider a group of people working together to solve a complex problem. Each person in the group brings their own unique knowledge, skills, and experiences to the table, and they use these to generate ideas and come up with solutions. The group may also use tools, such as computers or whiteboards, to organize their thoughts, share information, and test out different ideas. In this way, the group’s collective intelligence is distributed across the individuals, the tools, and the interactions between them.

Distributed cognition is a useful concept for understanding how people and technology can work together to solve problems and achieve goals. It can help us to design systems and technologies that support and enhance human cognitive abilities, and to understand how these systems can be used to support collaboration and problem-solving.

For example, distributed cognition can help us to design technology that is easy to use and understand, and that helps people to perform tasks more efficiently and effectively. It can also help us to understand how people collaborate and communicate in teams, and how to design systems and technologies that support and enhance these processes.

Distributed cognition can also help us to understand the limitations of human cognition, and how these can be overcome through the use of technology and other external components. For example, humans have limited memory and processing abilities, and can struggle to process large amounts of information or solve complex problems. However, by using tools and technology, we can offload some of these cognitive tasks, and extend our cognitive abilities in ways that would not be possible on our own.

Overall, the concept of distributed cognition provides a useful framework for understanding how people, objects, and technology can work together to support human cognition and problem-solving. By considering the ways that cognitive processes can be distributed across individuals, tools, and other external components, we can design systems and technologies that support and enhance human intelligence, and help us to solve complex problems and achieve our goals.

The quality of the prose is fairly strong, and the computer’s search apparently went far better than my own all those years ago! I was pleased enough by this result to write this article, but one final thought begs to be written: this sort of AI can greatly enhance the searchability of vast tracts of human literature, and skilled scholars will find their academic experience improved by it.

In fact, I might go so far as to argue that the purpose of AI that primarily interacts with people is, at the end of the day, to work on that same old ethical problem — the problem of distributed cognition. To some extent, I do think the algorithm just put the words together and defined them. The descriptions aren’t really all that deep (perhaps soon though!) and in general there is plenty of room for progress… but my philosophical journey through this life keeps pushing me in one direction — not DAOs and not blockchains and not AI but the human culture, writ large. I’m pretty sure most of what we find meaning in has to do with one form of distributed cognition or another, and perhaps even philosophy itself could end up being thought of as a species-wide metacognitive process; understandable, sensible, distributed through time and space.

If you liked this article, you may also enjoy this preview of Formal Dialectics.

https://opensea.io/assets/0xe7f967ed990c4db5262b592a3e5b70e29dd585c3/2

Visit my Bonfire page to learn more.

https://www.bonfire.xyz/epicdylan/home

Thanks for reading!

Our health is impacted heavily by stress, and our work needs to be a source of stability. Success is simply a good life in which there isn’t too much stress from a career that doesn’t sit well or bills that cannot be paid because there is not enough money. By improving our skills regarding self-teaching, we can learn to make choices that are consistently good — that is, choices that will consistently take us closer to things we want and diminish our stress load, while also meeting our needs. We can also learn new skills quickly by harnessing the power of our own curiosity.

Have you ever been in a situation, perhaps in a classroom, where someone expected you to learn something you just didn’t care about?

What were the results like?

For many of us, the results aren’t great in this sort of situation. But, to take comic book fans as an example, many fans can recite absurdly large amounts of memorized lore. The difference is that the comic books are something people care about. Forced learning, like the sort we’re often subjected to in school, doesn’t let us pursue our real interests. It dictates the subjects we should learn to us, hoping to cover the bases and educate us in sort of a well-rounded way that may simply not speak to our interests. Many very bright people have trouble in school. So we assume we’re dumb and try to find a job where we can squeak by, maybe. Forced learning doesn’t work — see Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire if you’re skeptical of this.

The good news is nobody’s dumb. True variance in intellectual capability is actually a fairly small amount between human beings — we’re so genetically similar to each other that this almost certainly explains NOTHING in terms of the differences between success in school. Unless you have a serious handicap, the problem is most likely that you aren’t being exposed to something that you care about — or perhaps you’re not in an emotional place where it is possible to succeed.

Interest is a major predictor of academic success.

Everyone has a favorite thing, and we all know our favorite thing better than almost anyone else. This happens because we learn quickly when we care about what we’re learning. In this article, we’ll walk through the self-teaching process in a general way and develop a few principles of autodidacticism that anyone can use to improve their self-teaching skills.

Technological progress is rapidly outpacing the old standards. We all need to learn new skills and adapt, just to keep up. And frankly, it’s a tough process that hurts a lot — just admitting when we’re wrong can be very painful and difficult! Imagine being great at school and excellent at work all your life, then realizing suddenly that you need a new tool to continue to succeed in the contemporary workplace.

Disorienting, jarring, disconcerting — it isn’t a fun experience. Many of us have gone through it. You might feel like you’re not good enough, but really you’re just in a place where something is broken. Perhaps the most healthy way to think about it is to simply acknowledge that you need a minor software update to be more successful.

I’m an intriguing case in some ways, having avoided scientific coursework as a youth only to get sucked into the scientific realm as an adult. I taught philosophy classes, sold phones, and led a biotech company’s research department — quite the unique resume! But, combine a refusal to settle for less with a unique passion and you’d be surprised what can come of it all. Everyone has unique passions, so the only nudge any of us could possibly need is the grit it takes to refuse the first ten thousand “no” responses to get to the “yes” at the end of the tunnel.

Rolling with the punches I learned a lot online. The online forums of the early ‘00s were a treasure trove of information to technically-inclined people, as engineers and professional mechanics explained their results and the relevant theory. This situation led to the rise of the person who could choose a goal, innovate the simplest and most cost-effective way to get there, and build incredible machines for remarkably small investments of time, labor, and money.

Yes, I’m arguing that you could say that my success in building over-performing loudspeaker setups for parties when I was in college and my ability to use nitrous and computer software to create winning setups that were reliable at the drag strip both stem from an underlying cause: I am an autodidact. My interest guides me, which is more blessing than curse, although it has caused the occasional problem for my GPA.

To become an autodidactic creator, whatever the interest blooms into, the trick is to give in to your inner child. You have to find out what the most interesting thing in the world is and learn to invest your time in it to yield a return.

For me, there are a few big ones: philosophy is the backbone of our worldview, health is the single greatest determinant of our happiness, and technology is our ability to manipulate the world around us. I’ve made my living in all three of these fields, and have recently begun to experiment with creating narratives that draw from all three sources. This seems to be a major breakthrough for me, but I struggled for years and even earned an advanced degree in philosophy. No doubt is left in my mind: grit is the key to eventually finding the one thing you can do better than anyone else.

Whether you want to figure out what matters to you and build a life that allows you to pursue that, or if you already have your end goal in mind, the steps to mastery of self and life are remarkably similar.

The autodidactic approach Autodidacts don’t have anything all that special about them aside from the basic human characteristics we all have in common. They’ve only learned one real skill: they know how to find out what speaks to them. This quick tutorial won’t change your life, but if you find yourself interested in it, it may help you feel a bit more secure in the process of living the sort of life you choose for yourself.

If you’re reading this for the tutorial, you likely already have an idea of what you’d like to teach yourself — but if not, don’t worry. You can always come back to the article when you’ve answered that question. You can also think through multiple different possibilities and compare the results you get if you like.

First, investigate the direction you’ve chosen (or gauge your interest in different directions by doing this process for a few things) with these two questions:

• What’s the most interesting thing in the world to you right now?

• Why is that the case?

You’ll want to put some thought into the first question to save yourself time on the second one. It may be that there’s some small problem that’s caught your attention and you’d be better served by focusing on other areas. That’s a part of managing your time. But if you find that your view seems justified upon investigation, you’ll want to read on.

Now that you’ve identified the subject of your study, you’ll need to lay out your knowledge to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses relative to it:

Explain the basics to yourself by writing a short essay or speaking aloud into a recorder app. Review your creation. How could it be more thorough? Are there serious problems or areas where you don’t have the knowledge you need to answer open questions? Having identified a goal, the basic concept here is simply to define a path that will lead you to completion of that goal. When you’ve determined what it is that’s keeping you from being where you want to be, you’ll be able to divide the task up into smaller chunks and this will help you figure out how to solve each problem along the way. In some cases, you may not be able to get where you want to be due to financial or other concerns that are not easily overcome. In this case, you may want to choose a new goal.

The key process here is self-critique. You want to use critical thought to refine your answers until you’re completely satisfied with them — then forget about it, wait a month, and review them again. More questions will come in handy during this part of the process:

• What’s changed?

• What’s the same?

• How close do you actually feel to having some tangible goal that will lead somewhere you want to go?

We all have a lot to learn by stating our views, or essentially creating how-to guides that explain our thought process. The next trick, once you’ve got a handle on the general way you want to go, is to make it social.

Other people have different thoughts than we do, and if we let them help us refine our views, we end up stronger as a result. This involves finding like-minded people and working with them to identify differences between your views on relevant subject matter, then reconcile it all by resolving any contradictions.

Other benefits You’ll also find that opportunities to work with people in your network may arise from time to time. They may not all be a perfect fit, but what your task has been up to this point is to work out which way to go — so you won’t have much trouble choosing unless you get a great set of options, and that’s a problem you want to have, if you have to have one!

You’d be surprised where this process can take you. Some people master crafts, others become famous. Others are just entertained and engaged in life. For me, there has been a sort of ascent as I developed my ability to explain various concepts at a remarkably high level. The problems that let you know you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge always push you to expand that knowledge base, and in so doing you may eventually find yourself reading scientific papers and trying to create novel explanations of things that matter to you. When you’re able to create such a thing and provide strong evidence for it, you’ll be able to earn a living by doing it — and that’s the dream!

None of this is to say it is easy to become an autodidact. The need for others to share your interest is somewhat constrictive at times as well. And society recognizes expertise over logical explanations because there are so many unknowns wherever new research is ongoing, so be sure to factor any necessary credentials into your planning.

I’ve recently finished up a cellular and molecular biology course which included the mechanisms by which CRISPR Cas9 is able to be used to modify DNA, for example, and much of the course content was not known last time I went through my basic science classes back in 2002 or thereabouts. I am glad I’ve had the opportunity to return for these classes, because I will be much better prepared for medical school with a fresh grasp of all of the material.

Staying on top of your field, even if you’re an expert when you start out, will be a lifelong journey whether you’re in medicine, technology, or “pure” science, including the liberal arts— and keeping up with these subjects will make you happier and healthier and more financially fit even if you do something else for work.

My path: an example I started off as an economics major when I first enrolled in college. Finding the subject matter tedious and irrelevant (Assume perfect information? You’ve got to be kidding me!), I made my way to the political science department and then began to study philosophy. My interest in the “big questions” such as free will and theology led me to a deeper level of engagement with the subject matter of my courses, which elevated my GPA in turn.

Upon graduation, I had a plan: law school. But I became ill with anxiety when taking the LSAT, and took that as a sign. I threw my plan away and worked retail for a few years, where I sold cell phones and learned about what made them tick. This was 2010, and the new smartphones were on the rise. I made a lot of money but I also found myself deeply interested in the various components and operating systems available, which led me to join the community at XDA Developers and could have resulted in a career as a developer if I hadn’t made the mistake of moving to Dallas for a promotion. To escape this misdeed and the misery that came along with it, I went back to school for a master’s in philosophy.

The plan in getting my MA started off as the Ph.D track, but funding cuts and general frailty in the philosophical discipline cut me off there. I went back to my tech roots after teaching for a year. I worked for Tesla and Keller Williams and became convinced I could build a successful company, so I started Paradigm Automation in 2017 and had my first close brush with success. In 2018, I was asked to help start a new company called Zeta Biolongevity with the basic goal of bringing a new kind of supplement to the market and getting it FDA approved to treat diseases such as kidney disease.

The effort broke down when we had difficulty agreeing upon which route to take in the lab, and I had to eat a lot of paste because my CEO didn’t believe I was right. So he listened to our biochemist and our major investors, and I got to learn about how important qualifications are and why. The short answer there is that people trust letters. And experts. So a home-grown master of a given subject can be as good as you like, but investors and executives (even scientifically-inclined ones!) won’t follow your logic. They’ll ask questions sometimes, but they’re people who do not understand that certainty doesn’t exist. They don’t want to help solve the hard problems involved in building a technological product, they want to pay a lot of money to someone who will do that for them and make it look easy.

That isn’t what happened at Zeta. We hired a CRISPR expert who schmoozed our leadership into doing a bunch of low-hanging-fruit experiments and trying to raise more money without doing anything that took us closer to our goals as a company. I remember the moment I knew I was leaving: our main investor, who I honestly liked a lot for his hands-on and extremely helpful role most of the time, listened to my plan to prove we could manipulate the mechanism in two weeks. He didn’t seem to understand. He just shot me a blank look and said “that’s five or six years out.”

That’s five or six years out.

I was dumbfounded. I’d just told him how to get it done in two weeks. I reasoned that he didn’t want to risk the project failing, and gave him the benefit of the doubt, but we had to do something and they chose to let the Ph.D lead. Her projects all failed, and I left the company to attend medical school so the next group of investors I work on a project with will allow me to actually do what I do best and innovate.

There have been a lot of difficult emotions on the journey. It has been a painful process, learning all these hard lessons about human nature and what it takes to succeed in the business of science.

However, I have many great reasons to believe that success is just around the corner. Not just for me, personally, but for all of the online autodidacts who are willing to take the risks involved in figuring out what to do and doing it well.

Blockchain technology is taking off. Soon, it will be easier than ever to raise money for new ventures. It will also be more important for investors, executives, and consumers to understand the core of this technology than ever before. Social networks will involve more and more of the fundamentals of blockchain: un-deletable posts, easy sharing of value both in terms of knowledge and in terms of currency, and support for increasingly obscure interests.

That’s why it’s going to be so important to be able to decide what to learn and learn it — opportunity will increasingly be governed by knowledge. For those who are willing to accept this challenge, the future holds a great deal of promise despite the threats of COVID-19 and climate change and the Doomsday Clock. We just have to take it one step at a time until we get where we want to be.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xdA0060876E7342771e12eccf2B8d966D25007be0/0

Before we begin, perhaps a bit of background on me is important. I’m a philosopher of language and morality, originally. But when I went to grad school, I took a class in cognitive neuroscience that opened a few doors for me. I worked in labs, read science books, etc. And oh, could I bore you with the details. My most recent “real jobs” have included research and teaching college and starting startups up, but there’s a thread of a goal here for me: I’m passionate about solving hard problems and understanding the world around me. Oddly, I’m doing both right now, as I write this short essay.

In the past, my main squeeze in philosophy has always been Aristotle — his work is simple and elegant, but incredibly powerful. In the Aristotelian view of human behavior, we train ourselves to do certain things so that we develop the right character. Once we’ve accomplished our goals, we can engage in this activity of happiness and simply just enjoy life.

As part of the Existentialist Book Club, I recently began to get involved with the philosophy of Albert Camus, who says something entirely different about happiness. Namely, that it is inevitable. Is it time to start picking sides, or is there some way to reconcile Camus’ view with that put forward by Aristotle 2500 years ago?

Philosophical Suicide

Soren Kierkegaard, a Christian existentialist philosopher from 19th century Denmark, wrote often of colorful objects such as masks, and intriguing if scary philosophical concepts such as the leap of faith. For Camus, the leap of faith is clearly the antecedent of the concept of philosophical suicide.

In Kierkegaard, who wrote after Kant and understood the Kantian critique of reason; i.e., it is possible to argue both sides of a given issue to fruition (these are the antinomies, see the Critique of Pure Reason) in a valid and sound way, but not resolve the question at stake. Questions such as the existence of god seem to demand a sort of pre-eminent importance in our eyes as thinkers and as readers, but nonetheless never reach a satisfactory resolution. What are we to do?

Kierkegaard’s suggestion is to choose a side and jump. As a Christian, the side he believes most will naturally pick is the side of belief. And this viewpoint, though meta-rational, is not fundamentally irrational.. After all, life must be lived! We must make a choice at some point, and if reason does not provide us with the groundwork for said choice, we must do so via other means.

This is the meaning of Camus’ difficult phrasing during the few references to philosophical suicide, a point he explicitly states that he is not interested in: “I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. But this does not imply a judgment. It is a convenient way of indicating the movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation.” Later, when we find out that Camus is not interested in philosophical suicide, we must decide why it should be so, and the general gist of what I see in the text is that philosophical suicide’s negation is a way out of the challenge for Camus. He is disinterested because he does not believe that escape is a reasonable goal, here.

What is Existentialism for Camus?

What does Camus mean, when he uses the term “existential philosophy?” The term has its roots in the word “existence,” and the general gist of it in its philosophical usage is that humans don’t merely think — they exist in terms of emotions, actions, practices. So why should Philosophy be focused narrowly around thinking, when that mode of being is not the sum total of human existence? We’re leaving a lot on the table, so to speak, if we take that fork in the road.

The virtues of existentialism are inescapable for Camus, but he chooses nonetheless to attempt to improve upon them by taking the question of man’s existence one step further and asking about its value.

There is none, he discovers! What is to be done about this vacuum? We must face it with courage, work it into our philosophy. Only then can man’s treatment of his own existence via philosophy reach the height of its potential.

The Purpose of Philosophy in Camus’ Writings

By discarding any notion that meaning can be implanted into the human web of meaning by god or anything else, Camus takes a radical turn toward the complete appreciation of the human condition. In fact, he goes so far as to celebrate Don Juan as a hero and to incorporate defenses of such notable characters as Kirilov and Stavrogin from Dostoevsky’s novels into his questions regarding suicide and human existence.

The purpose of philosophy is to allow these sorts of people to apprehend their own existence in a way that is no longer rooted in their own being. They reach above themselves, which allows Kirilov in particular to “become god” — a heroic act, though none of us is likely to follow! By embracing the absurdity of existence, then, it becomes possible to flippantly and happily deal with even the most difficult problems in life and to, when necessary, assume responsibility for ending it as well as for living it.

Happiness, for Camus, is another very interesting question. Soon, I will write about it and treat with it in more detail, but for now it is enough to suggest that happiness is inevitable. We must, to quote the most popular fragment of the work, imagine Sisyphus happy — not because he has ended up in heaven, but because it is human nature to find meaning and even happiness itself in the minutiae of the day to day existence we each live. If even the toil of Sisyphus can lead to happiness, Camus has reasoned, then what good is the philosophical suicide of Kierkegaard?

Camus doesn’t seem to have any moral qualms about suicide, beyond his comprehension of its meaninglessness. Ultimately, all of these characters are human beings who live and die by their own hand, as it were. In this, they’re all essentially heroes, for Camus. What this does to morality as such is perhaps a question for another essay, but for now it is sufficient to say that the question of philosophical suicide has been laid to rest. We are responsible for our own destiny, as it were, and there is no need to take a leap of faith.

Many popular reading lists for the COVID-19 pandemic include a text by Albert Camus, a French existentialist philosopher who was a journalist and a writer and a member of the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation. Camus was born in Algeria, and his father died soon after his birth. For a fascinating glimpse into Camus’ life, have a look at Albert Camus: A Biography, by Herbert R. Lottman. Though he sought to avoid being called an existentialist as a means to avoid association with Jean-Paul Sartre, a one-time friend turned enemy, Camus’ work centers upon existentialist themes such as the need of each individual to take responsibility for one’s existence.

Camus’ unique twist on this theme involves couching it within the absurd — which is to say, for Camus, it is due to the fundamental absurdity of life that we must all take responsibility for creating meaning ourselves. After all, there is no yard-stick by which to measure meaning; human beings experience life and ascribe meaning to it themselves. The most absurd part of the entire affair is that we never find out if we did it right or not. Virtue seems to be one way of dealing with this problem in The Plague, but for Camus, virtue is not in and of itself meaningful beyond what it means to the one who bears it — again, due to the fundamental absurdity of life.

In The Plague (1947), this necessity on the part of the individual to confront the absurd stands out in two stark reliefs, masterfully woven into a fictional narrative of a disease which many interpret as an allegorical discussion of the politics of World War II. The first sense of the plague in the text is just that — the disastrous outbreak of pestilence which destroys the economy (read: everyday standard of living) of the village of Oran, Algeria. However, the second sense in which the term is employed in the book is different, more striking, and more permanent.

In fact, it is possible to read the narrative in such a way as to ascribe the outbreak of plague in the first sense to the prevalence of the plague in the second sense; that is, the decadence of the culture has led the village of Oran to a certain currency-fixated complacency with respect to the fragility of the relation between humanity and nature — this complacency results in a lack of vigilance and the resulting inability to mount adequate defenses against the outbreak which ultimately, tragically, claims the lives of far too many of the citizens of the village.

2020 will forever be known as the year of COVID-19; the pandemic which swept the globe and infected far too many human beings. Politically, it will be remembered as the year in which authoritarian regimes around the world made public their own inadequacy. And for many of us, it will be remembered as the year in which our elected officials were too slow to act to prevent the loss of a loved one.

However, as Camus might remind us, all is not lost. We have become complacent, and the effects of that complacency have been quite painful. However, we can still unite in the face of this tragedy, and many of us will stand up and be better than we were before, setting aside our financial concerns to purchase and donate personnel protective equipment to hospitals, care for each other, and stay home for fear of transmitting the disease to or from those we love. Those of us who do will have acknowledged reality in a deep way, deeper than most of humanity will ever understand, and will have responded to it, thus setting the course for a brighter future.

The Hero

Tarrou is perhaps the most striking, the most beautiful, the most admirable character in the work. Despite his lack of professional commitment to the medical field, he sees what needs to be done and does it; in fact, the risks add up and he dies of plague as he works to accomplish his task. Tarrou is unable to turn the tide of the plague, and he is unable to save the lives of the people affected by it — but still he stands, stalwart, unyielding, convicted of the rightness of his actions and willing to die for them. His long soliloquy toward the end of the piece is perhaps the most brilliant moment in an extraordinary, popular work.

The purpose of this speech is to describe what a close reader might term the “real” plague — the instinct to kill another human being or commit actions to bring about such ends. Some don’t know they have it, this monster lurking within. Others have learned to live with it — and for Camus, it would seem, the only true path to goodness is to become a third type of person, the type of person Tarrou is, who becomes self-aware and works to change himself. Tarrou knows he is stricken and seeks to alter himself to “get out of it.”

The philosophical history of this idea that we need to purify ourselves goes all the way back to ancient Greece, in which the Gorgias provides Plato an opportunity to recount a Socratic argument in which the great founding father of Western philosophy argues that the purpose of punishment is to make the punished better; hence, if one acts unjustly, it is in one’s interest to turn oneself over to the authorities for punishment to become better.

Disabused as we are, in the modern age, of the notion that the authorities have any better idea what justice is than we as individuals do, Camus’ character seeks to work against himself to stamp out this tendency to kill others who threaten him. In so doing, he cultivates his humanity and his compassion for his fellow man — which leads him to create the sanitary squads to mitigate, to whatever extent is possible, the spread of the disease.

Tarrou’s final days are “spent keeping that endless watch upon [himself] lest in a careless moment [he] should breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection upon him.” The good man, for Tarrou, is “the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.” The profound significance of the presence of this character in a Camus book about the absurd nature of pain and the human condition at large ultimately seems to be a critique of the way in which good people are used up by the rest of the mass of humanity.

Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, Tarrou’s sacrifice is in some sense necessitated by the political call to avoid “false” alarm at the outset of the disease, when it is obvious enough to Rieux and other experts what the cause of the disease is and yet things are not quite pressing enough to call politicians to action before things spiral out of control.

The Victim

The city itself begins the novel in something of a trance — the mundane has overtaken it; the desire to make money has overpowered the desire to utilize said money for some good beyond itself, and as a result there is a problem which dates all the way back to ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, who knew that money is not good in and of itself because it is essentially worthless. No, money is only good insofar as someone else is willing to trade something good for it — and once the sight of this knowledge is lost, avarice is the only possible outcome.

Perhaps the most absurd observation I can contribute from my study of the book is the sense in which the plague, for the city, is in fact the cure. Besides killing too many and causing too much grief, the plague actually breaks down the immoral conditions in which the inhabitants of the town lived before it struck, bringing back solidarity, meaning, and communal reality into focus within their lives.

The plague is also able to finally hold politicians to account, in the sense that this is an issue which it is not advisable to “waffle” on. The reluctance with which precautionary measures are taken up is at once necessitated by the general ignorance of the citizenry who elect the politicians and also woefully indicative of the inadequacy of the machinery of the state to act upon the basis of unfamiliar evidence to bring into effect the measures which might prevent the outbreak.

For the poor inhabitants of Oran, it is thus both necessary that the plague strike and seat itself among them before anything is done about it, and terrible that circumstances do not lead to more readiness upon the part of the government to act upon the early warning signs recognized by the experts.

Still, we must not forget that the culture of the town itself is what drives the developments in this direction — the citizens are unaware that a plague is possible, and are preoccupied with money, which we must remember is not a good in and of itself. For this reason, we can conclude that there is some lack of vigilance, some lack of awareness, some failing, in other words, on the part of just this hapless populace, which ultimately leads to the destruction and grief experienced by everyone involved.

As Camus states in the third paragraph of the text:

Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. In our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, “doing business.” Naturally they don’t eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, seabathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible.

Hardly innocent, then, the citizens of Oran have become quite complacent. And if you’re reading this, and it sounds familiar, perhaps you are a member of the audience for whom Camus wrote this book.

The Informed Observer

Benjamin Rieux, the doctor who is tasked with responding to the plague on behalf of the citizens and government of Oran, is a familiar character to anyone who watches the news today. A stalwart man, he is capable of accepting a great deal of punishment and quite used to administrators who fail to heed his concerns. Stalwart though he is, Rieux is not a virtuous person for Camus. The only hero of The Plague is Tarrou, who does what must be done though he is unqualified and not responsible for the catastrophe he becomes a victim of. No, Rieux is something else entirely: the resident expert who refuses to pitch a fit, Rieux is part of the city and as such, no martyr.

Though capable of reflection, of self-awareness, of deep thought and friendship, Rieux is more a symptom of the disease than he is cure for it. As we’re informed in the beginning of the story, the bulk of the population of Oran is primarily concerned with making money, and with little else besides. Though many commentators seem inclined to exempt Rieux from this description, we have substantial reason to do precisely the opposite, including his final in-person exchange with his wife, in which she mentions the expense of the train ride she is to take.

The compassion of Camus comes through at the end of the text, though it is present all along in his choice to select Rieux as narrator. Rieux’s inability to act, his guilt, as it were, no more diminishes his humanity than it would if he were an ordinary villager with no medical knowledge and therefore not guilty due to the foresight he failed to act strongly enough upon.

In fact, Rieux approaches wisdom as the work concludes — evidence of growth, of a true character arc! Becoming something of a hero himself, though his character pales beside the humbly brilliant martyr we see in Tarrou, Rieux has become aware at the close of the work that “such joy is always imperiled.” And it is in this simple statement that Camus shares with us the true beauty of the absurd existence of human beings.

As self-aware creatures, we continuously make predictions about the future to guide our actions in the present. And yet, it is only through tragedy that we learn where the danger really lies. The powerlessness of Rieux is thus shown through his inability to act at the administrative level early in the story, and it comes full circle as he showcases his awareness at the end of the story. And what could be more absurd than the fundamental nature of man as shown insofar as he becomes aware of the danger of a crisis only by living through it, as though it were predestined to happen again? In this sense, The Plague allegory suggests, it is the inertia of culture, of the prevalence of what Hume referred to as the Principle of the Universality of Nature (the assumption that the future will resemble the past), at the social level, which makes life truly absurd.

Hope For The Future

Though it is impossible to truly hope; that is, to disavow the absurdity of the human condition as mediated by the cultural inertia discussed above, there is nonetheless a sort of bastard hope which arises as we confront the fundamental facts of life on our own terms: love grows cold, when left alone. When we are completely dominated by a love of a person or of something else, it drives our cognition into unfamiliar territory.

Forced to depart from this unfamiliar terrain by the plague, the character Rambert has first had the epiphany that there is more to the world — more to life, perhaps — than his obsession, than his beloved. And in the face of this epiphany, what is he to do, when he is reunited with her?

As Rieux ably narrates: “The plague had forced on him a detachment which, try as he might, he couldn’t think away, and which like a formless fear haunted his mind. Almost he thought the plague had ended too abruptly, he hadn’t had time to pull himself together.” The unreadiness of Rambert to confront his love after the plague has ended is a symptom of his realization that the obsession for her which once motivated him is now tempered by an understanding of the absurdity of the world — a world which would not hesitate to see the two of them ripped apart any more than it exercised its caprice in bringing them together.

In essence, The Plague is written to teach us to treasure the moments of happiness and joy we share because the superorganism of humanity is yet in its infancy — it is, absurdly, ridiculously, painfully inadequate to cope with stressors and stimuli it has seen before. How could it not be? The passing of time dulls its attention to detail. Despite the power of our civilization, the We, the collective, the mass of humankind, remains quite dull and slow to respond to threats.

Darkly, this collective humankind survives by virtue of its ability to throw bodies at a problem. This, insofar as we individual humans die when our collective fails to recognize and respond to a threat, is the essence of the absurdity of existence for Camus in The Plague just as it is for us, almost a century later, experiencing and reacting to COVID-19.

Thus, as predicted by the narrator of The Plague, the plague is not over and will likely never be over — we can only hope and love and act rationally and be as good as we can be. It is no more right to say that we deserve our fate as Father Paneloux would have it than it is correct to assume that one day the collective, assembled mass of humankind will be able to respond to all threats without loss of life. And for those of us who live, unawares, in the middle of this conflict between our species as such and nature, the difference between life and death will continue to be dictated by means beyond our understanding — that is — it will remain ultimately absurd.

This essay was originally published in Philosophy Now Magazine in June 2020. This is the unedited version. Find the edited version here.

Introduction

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are entities that aspire to coordinate human beings using blockchain technology. Blockchain technologies are publicly viewable ledgers that run independently from any particular user or administrator of the system, and as such they represent a new sort of database that accomplishes a good deal of improvement with respect to the general state of the flow of information between human minds as mediated by the internet today, or what is becoming known as Web2.0. Web2.0 is the suite of technologies including Google and Facebook that developed centralized servers users could generally access for free, if they gave up information about how they used the platforms to the service providers.

This essay will explain the benefits of Web3 technologies including DAOs as they pertain to the general state of human societies. If DAOs make the flow of information more efficient across human networks, it is likely that certain foibles lingering in recent years from Web2.0 technologies will be able to be resolved with code. What this means is that it is becoming possible to coordinate minds and resolve disputes using artificial intelligence at a never-before-seen scale. Blockchains and DAOs make it possible, ensuring that human minds are involved in the decision making process so that we don’t end up in some weird AI dystopia. Superintelligence is here, but it lives on a network not a chip. And it may give you your next job.

That’s right — in the age of artificial intelligence, we don’t have to worry about most of what Nick Bostrom was worried about in his 2004 book Superintelligence because social networks of human minds are actually part of the computer that runs the superintelligence program. We’re good in terms of the risk of arbitrarily choosing to produce so many paper clips that human beings become obsolete or whatever, but we’ve struggled a lot with coordinating in ways that don’t lead to increased hate or general friction between different groups because we let advertisers get in between us and our economy is set up so that they make more money the further from one another they can drive us. Our emotional reaction to one another is being monetized, and it makes the parties monetizing it more money if we get angrier at each other and find less common ground, not more. Let’s back up just a little and think about how this toxic trend got started.

Web2.0 platforms kicked off a technological revolution that soured as it became increasingly ad-funded. Half a decade or so after Facebook was founded it was forced to capitulate to the whims of advertisers as venture capital tapered off, and it was not alone in this. Google and the media companies found themselves dependent upon ad revenue across the technology space as IPOs forced the firms to earn a return on the monies invested in them. See more of my thoughts about advertising and social media in this essay.

For the purposes of the piece you’re reading now, suffice it to say that we have good reason to believe that advertising has caused unpredictable effects in the collective information stream of human consciousness as the general level of reliance upon social media funded by ad revenue has increased over time. Anecdotally, I met my ex fiancee on Facebook in 2006 when the network’s primary purpose was connecting college students to one another. Then in 2010 the Arab Spring kicked off and Facebook was used to coordinate a revolution. Then in 2016, Facebook coordinated with an advertiser called Cambridge Analytica to cause a highly unlikely outcome in the presidential election that year. In 2017, Libra, a Facebook technology to be built upon Cosmos and compete as a global reserve currency was rejected. And in 2022, having rebranded, Meta is laying off over 10,000 employees after dumping absurd amounts of money into metaverse development.

As Web3 replaces Web2, centralized platforms stand to get the short end of the stick. Users faced with a choice between a purely exploitative platform such as Facebook, in which they are expected to contribute content that can be monetized by the platform in return for mere access to that platform, on the one hand, and Web3 technologies that can actually allow the end user to monetize their own activity on the other. Facebook has a truly gigantic userbase, but if the platform does not find a new value capture mechanic that rewards the users it is perhaps likely to encounter significant hardship in the days to come.

Web3 is on the rise as new platforms built upon decentralized networks lower the cost of innovation by bringing more users together and providing them with a direct path to financial remuneration for their online activities. Web3 has provided a base money layer for the internet in conjunction with a powerful anti-lie machine that, when used properly, makes an entirely new level of cooperation between people possible: trustlessness.

This essay will first establish the well-known fragility of the Rule of Law and contrast this framework for the governance of human interaction with a new concept, Rule of Code, made possible by blockchain technology. Given the capacity for high-throughput trustless interactions, people can create a new type of organization known as the Decentralized Autonomous Organization or DAO for short. DAOs are networks of people who use the internet to coordinate their actions around the world in pursuit of their common good. DAOs will exist alongside laws to make life better for people.

The DAO is different from the corporation because it does not necessarily have a profit motive and is not owned by shareholders who hire employees that have a fiduciary responsibility to increase the value of the shares of the company. A DAO is a community based around an interest that the members all have in common. In general, DAOs use blockchain technology to coordinate financial and non-financial interactions between members. DAOs can be more difficult to capitalize than traditional corporations because they tend to be more mission-oriented and less driven to seek profit, but DAOs can coordinate large numbers of people from widely divergent geographic locations around specific goals discovered by radical alignment with the DAO’s mission. This property of the DAO enables technological development at a rapid pace and creates financial opportunities that do not involve securities but rather hinge upon the issuance and trading of digital commodities including NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as well as cryptocurrencies and information.

It is the blockchain coordination that makes DAOs special. The Facebook technology that enabled the Arab Spring and then the 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton did not enable users to directly send money to one another and also provided little to no objectively agreeable framework available to all users. As a result, camps were formed. They created the red camp and the blue camp, and the big con Cambridge Analytica was able to pull was to consolidate the red camp in the control of Donald Trump, and then there was this whole scandal involving geolocal targeting of undecided voters with overwhelming success in persuading them to join the red camp after that. Cambridge Analytica accomplished their geolocal targeting goals by creating a wide variety of ads and showing those ads to specific people in specific places at specific times by paying Facebook to put their content out. It didn’t help that this was around the time that the methods Facebook used to get people to pay attention to ads began to involve a lot of really manipulative stuff that they achieved by essentially playing their users off one another to make them all sadder. It had been ongoing for some time, but in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica an inflection point was reached; perhaps the Meta struggling today is having a hard time because it hasn’t found another really effective business model now that it has tried ostensibly to move on from its unsavory past.

At the end of the day, you have a social network that uses an algorithm nobody outside of the company that runs it is allowed to know much about to… sell ads. And so over time what happened was that the people buying the ads got more and more power over what the algorithm did, until eventually everyone went off to la la land and something big went wrong because it was impossible for anyone else to provide any oversight or to meaningfully engage with Facebook about what they were doing with that formula.

DAOs are essentially the answer to this problem — the DAO owns the IP that the network uses to function, i.e., the algorithm if we’re hypothetically thinking of a DAO that runs something like a Facebook type of application. What that means is that we are no longer in the dark about what the application is doing to us if we have it running in plain view on a public blockchain managed by its users, a fluid group of people that changes over time as they swap NFTs and/or trade cryptocurrency with each other. Because the DAO owns the IP and not a centralized corporation, the whole community of users has to be consulted and vote for changes to it. This makes it very easy to run an open source software community, and with the addition of the base money layer we think of as cryptocurrencies it becomes possible to create a new type of incentive for people to come and participate in the projects DAOs can run.

But that isn’t the end of the story. DAOs can scale, and so you can end up with a situation where there are a variety of different teams building different software solutions to solve the same problem at the same time, collaborating as they go — contrast this to the Web2 technology company environment in which everyone is highly secretive about IP and the firms raise hundreds of millions of dollars primarily to build and defend IP moats.

In the end, the DAO provides a higher level of throughput for information to reach its members than a corporation does. We know this for a number of reasons, but the most important thing to know that has changed between DAOs and corporations is that in DAOs the structure is largely horizontal and voting can involve thousands of people — see Juno Proposal 16, or Cosmos Proposal 82 for extremely high-turnout examples. In addition to the large number of voices that can be supported by DAO governance on public blockchains, stake-in requirements to enable on-chain proposals to come to a vote can pose a financial penalty if ⅓ of voters choose the No With Veto option, as on Cosmos Proposal 82, in which the depositors lost their funds. This rule is not necessary for all DAOs or for all votes, and yet it signifies the variety of coordination tools available to DAO organizers. In conjunction with blockchain technologies that are always online and available to be consulted and/or queried for information, DAOs allow members to get more information about what the other members think than the traditional political discursive technologies did.

The Rule of Law is Fragile

The Rule of Law, in conjunction with democratic governance of the people by the people for the people, has been considered the leading framework for human social coordination for centuries. We base many interactions from national governance to corporate governance upon this system of rules and corresponding penalties.

Nonetheless, the Rule of Law is a fragile system dependent on authority that involves a great deal of trust, most of which is undeserved. Especially in the current epoch, in which incentives seem more perverse than ever before, the trust placed by governed people into their elected leaders seems to have melted away. Regulators are frequently “lobbied” by industry leaders who oppose the values of the general public, but hold significant economic power, making it difficult for legitimate coordination to be arranged. All too frequently, elected officials find themselves at odds with the interest of the body of people who elected them as they attempt to coordinate their policy goals with the support of an eclectic group of well-heeled businesspeople they would prefer not to be at odds with.

While it is easy to have sympathy for legislators in a seemingly hopeless situation, caught between the rock of the way things are and the hard place they told their constituents they were going to get to, it is important to be clear — the fact of the matter is that representative democracy is a pale shadow of the will of the people.

And this state of affairs is rather typical in ordinary legal proceedings today. Think of the speed limit — enforced by a police officer under the peculiar circumstances that an individual who speeds all the time has now been caught doing so, the rule about how fast we should drive is more of a guideline for most of us most of the time. And say we drive somewhere, speeding, and don’t get caught. In some sense, what we did was just as permissible under the eye of the law as it would have been for us to drive the speed limit.

Now, our speeding doubtless created risk for our fellow drivers and ourselves, and so the act is not in any means except with respect to the application of the law identical to not speeding — but the argument being made here is that the rule of law is frequently unenforceable and therefore at least sometimes a very poor representation of the will of the people who decided that there should be a law in the first place.

Beginning with the Iraq War under the administration of George W. Bush, American politics has increasingly suffered from an inability to legislate meaningfully and within appropriate timeframe regarding American military conflict and American Citizens’ privacy. With the USA Patriot Act and its subsequent renewals, the banks fed information about their clients directly to the US Government in the hopes of catching a small number of bad actors who have mostly ceased to be a threat if they ever really were much of one in the first place. Then, under the Obama Administration, the quasi-legality of drone strikes arose and was largely not dealt with, and finally under Donald Trump corruption became so rampant that the President was actually given leeway to distribute federal relief funds with almost no congressional oversight and records show that he largely paid his friends.

Without delving into the Biden Administration too much because we are only halfway through it, it is safe to say that the American state is having a difficult time deciding what to do with the former president, who kept classified documents, violated the emoluments clause, normalized the phrase “fake news” and in general overwhelmed any legal establishment that could have possibly threatened him enough to get him to behave.

The reason that the state is having a hard time is that it is being pulled in multiple directions by a wide variety of partners who all fight for uncertain goals by arguing to a small group of elected officials that they are the most important thing in the world right now. Some of the people say that Trump is a criminal who needs to go to jail, others say that about Biden (albeit with far less evidence!). And at the end of the day, the centralized state has to choose one pole or the other, and it is very bad at doing that. One party can only make one decision at a time, and the monolithic nature of the US Government has prevented it from doing a good job of keeping abreast of technological developments in a number of sectors.

The centralized authority represented by the Rule of Law is being eroded by coordination technologies including artificial intelligence and psychological manipulation because the parties that create and enforce laws do so inefficiently. This enables other parties to outmaneuver them, thus undermining the general idea that people should obey the law by failing to accomplish adequate enforcement.

My first ever published academic essay was about the failure of the Rule of Law system that was put in place to regulate oil production and minimize its externalities. This system, created with the consent of the petroleum industry, had failed to adequately quantify the material difference between emissions in an internal combustion engine vehicle and an electric vehicle. The situation is as it is because the economy is set up to incentivize the petroleum people to try to hide some of the consequences of their actions. The petroleum industry’s understanding of the regulations it is subject to has outpaced that of the regulators attempting to regulate their industry, and the result is that the Rule of Law ends up far behind the current state of affairs at any given time. If only it were easier to manage all of these measurements and drag all of this accountability out into public view!

The Rule of Law is an important part of human culture and will undoubtedly remain thus for the foreseeable future. However, with the addition of blockchain technology to increase the throughput of human social networks and create a reliable on-chain record of the past that network participants can agree upon, it becomes possible to do some things much more efficiently than the old system that was based primarily on the Rule of Law and its hidden axiom: “if you get away without being prosecuted, what you did was legal.” This is the assumption that underpins most of the negative externalities inherent in modern capitalism, and when there is an immutable record of all transactions on-chain it is likely that bad actors will have a much more difficult time eluding prosecution for their misdeeds indefinitely.

Rule of Code: Trustless Interactions in a Post-Law World

The Rule of Code is well-adapted to post-law conditions. It involves inviolable coordination principles agreed upon by a community and baked-in to applications built upon the community’s blockchain, enabling an astonishing array of possibilities for collaborative development. When contrasted with the Rule of Law method of coordinating activity among people, Rule of Code methods are surprisingly simple. Largely enabled by smart contracts, Rule of Code systems simply are set up to do some things and not others.

A smart contract-based application, such as a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX) or NFT marketplace, can be managed by a community of people and used permissionlessly by anyone. Ultimately, this means that these technologies can be made available as public utilities for people to use as long as they are maintained.

Post-law interactions are interactions that have a built-in guarantee of a specific result; i.e., they are deterministic. A smart contract can hold funds and enable users to behave in a particular way to earn them, or to swap for them, or to do some other action — but in each case, as long as the contract remains functional, the action the user takes leads to a completely predictable outcome with respect to the smart contract.

As long as the contract is doing something legal, we can refer to the way it transparently administrates its own function as a post-legal framework for interactions. Users who interact with the contract may only do so in ways that the contract supports, which is to say that it is not possible for them to break the rule of the application and hence we can imagine more complex smart contracts that can administrate increasingly advanced functions without a direct need to evaluate legality under the case of normal operation.

A DEX application will enable users to swap some tokens for other tokens according to rules that have been baked into the application at the smart contract level. These applications are publicly viewable open source software that runs on public networks, which circumvents the lack of transparency that has most recently led to the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Voyager and Celsius were similar organizations, accepting user funds and then using those funds to pay operating expenses, leaving them insolvent when a large proportion of users sought to exit the platform all at once. On a DEX, each user keeps custody of their own funds — eliminating the risk of malfeasance by actors who operate without transparency.

In this way, smart contracts replace trusted intermediaries who manage certain affairs for us, enabling users to save money by working around these intermediaries. Less risk and greater transparency are assets public blockchain communities leverage to provide services to their users, making some actions available and not others. This is the simplest way of expressing the Rule of Code; which contrasts with the Rule of Law insofar as laws require enforcement and code simply permits some actions and not others.

Comparatively speaking, Rule of Code has a few components, just as Rule of Law involves a legislative body, an enforcement arm, and a population that accepts the actions of the legislative body as legitimate. The components of a Rule of Code system are a public blockchain that serves as a frame of reference that is freely accessible, a community of developers who maintain the software for the blockchain and build other applications atop it, and a base money layer that enables users to send payments to one another over the network.

What a Rule of Code blockchain fundamentally does is make actions available on a network for anyone who meets the conditions, usually a small cryptocurrency payment. Hence, Ethereum charges a small fee to purchase an NFT, and it doesn’t matter to Ethereum who the buyer or seller of the assets happens to be. Recently, OFAC has sanctioned a smart contract application called Tornado Cash in the United States, resulting in Ethereum nodes participating in a blacklist of addresses and ETH assets on the basis of their participation in the Tornado Cash application.

Ethereum is a censorship resistant public blockchain, but even so it faces pressure to comply with regulations because it is run by people, some of whom are obligated to behave legally in their homes. It is here we begin to see the interplay between Rule of Code systems like Ethereum and Rule of Law systems including the US Federal Government, in this case OFAC.

To date, there is great leeriness directed at Rule of Code systems by Rule of Law regulators, but in general the coordination tools made available by public blockchain technology are quite benign. The public nature of most of the activities that take place results in reasonably good behavior by most network participants most of the time. However, it is easy to find examples of imperfect code that has enabled bridge wallet hacks totalling in the billions of dollars, and in some cases the broken code has generated caseload for regulators who are then tasked with bringing criminals to justice under the law.

It is likely that Rule of Code will continue to front run the Rule of Law system by simply not enabling users to steal from one another or commit other crimes on-chain, but in hacks and other cases where code fails, legal repercussions will continue to be employed to penalize the worst actors.

As time progresses, Web3 will become more sophisticated with respect to both attacks and defenses, and as Rule of Code systems become more widely used and popular we can expect them to more thoroughly flesh out their relationship to the legal structures of the different nations in which the code is maintained and accessed and interacted with.

These post-law tools enable cooperation between users from any nation to cooperate without fear of legal issues — i.e., international royalties are typically all but unenforceable for most small-time creators, and yet a smart contract that trustlessly distributes royalties can seamlessly integrate atop this rickety international legal framework to provide reliable royalty payments to users across borders, all achieved independently of the cumbersome and diverse legal systems we are accustomed to.

Rule of Code systems should therefore be thought of as a collaborative framework to enhance human connectedness despite local differences between various legal jurisdictions. Cooperatively built Rule of Code AI systems will provide improved access to advanced computation to end users around the world.

Destination: Scalable, Reliable, Verifiable DAO Architecture & Public Good AI

DAOs exist to coordinate human beings on a global scale in pursuit of common goods. The primary common good to be achieved is an acceleration of the flow of information & associated increased capacity for claim verification, to all parties in all locations. The simple operation of basic decentralized applications such as DEXs and even NFTs have highlighted the way to a publicly accessible organization strategy capable of replacing most of the centralized architecture that we use today.

Over the long run, it is important to think about all of the different applications that Ethereum and Cosmos and their associated chains will automate. Already, we see email that stores files in IPFS and runs off an ENS domain being provided by Skiff and other third-party services who have learned to take advantage of the on-chain data that Ethereum users share already and build in extra functionality around a product that can make them some money.

The way in which open source software development facilitates economic growth is central to the Web3 vision of a creative commons available for everyone. As long as that basic software that connects everything together stays online, the applications people build on top of the blockchain can be anything they need to be. Profitable, resilient, functional — the developers in the Web3 space have a lot of creativity and will no doubt continue to come up with new offerings as the space grows over time.

In a Rule of Law environment, AI presents many concerns. Will it be evil? Will it be highly functional, but motivated by an arbitrary goal to take destructive actions against its creators? These and other practical questions are largely ruled out by the advent of the Rule of Code. And while the rules that govern smart contracts are not nearly so abstract as Asimov’s ideas about what they would be, they do allow human beings to build extraordinarily reliable applications that require less trust between users because they “just work.”

Cosmos SDK appchains in particular stand to make a powerful contribution to the smart contract-based foundation that DAOs build upon. In another essay I have expounded in some depth about the power of the verifiably on-chain DAO. Ethical theory is likely to be significantly influenced by Rule of Code applications and, as governance and participation grow, the interplay between legal rule frameworks and code-based ethics is sure to prove fascinating.

As the development of Web3 continues to provide more power and scale to builders and communities based on blockchains, the concept of a public good that is permissionlessly accessible by anyone is going to become increasingly important. The general concept of artificial intelligence is simply a smart application that knows what its user wants and gives it — this could be a search filter or a chatbot with equal ease.

Building AI in siloed corporations is a great way to end up with lots of competition between teams to build the best technology, and as AI and blockchain technologies have developed over the past decade and a half or thereabouts, the amount of resources going into AI “training” has increased dramatically. The corporate AI-for-profit model will be meeting increasing competition from public good AIs that are built upon public blockchains and enable anyone who wants to use them to do so.

Access to AI will hence be democratized insofar as anyone who meets the network’s requirements will be able to access cutting edge AI models, such as the one I used to generate the cover image for this essay. However, for the communities building these technologies it will be important to maintain the public good positioning and to keep fees low enough for new users to access these networks to limit the incentive to “fork” the software and replicate it on a new blockchain that now can compete with the old one.

In this way, pursuit of a public good by a community of builders can for perhaps the first time in human history achieve the robustness and resilience the modern technology company with less pressure to profit at any cost and more focus upon what people actually want and need. The accelerating pace of development and the frequent flame outs of projects that were not good enough can be quite disorienting, but Web3 is already changing the world. The power of DAOs to organize coordination of individuals around the public good they choose is the cornerstone of effective cybernetic coordination. As the Rule of Law is gradually supplemented and made more effective by Rule of Code structures, we can expect to see increasingly complex applications managed by DAOs using public blockchains to distribute the work as well as its rewards.

Essay originally published at Readme Books, as part of the Cosmos Better Future competition, where it took home a First Prize. https://humanitythree.com/2022/11/16/cosmos-better-future-prize/

Leaving behind any postulation which entails the origin of human consciousness, with the main goal we set for ourselves consisting of precisely the reconnaissance of the character of human consciousness, not distinguished from other forms of consciousness for any particular reason aside from the fact that we lack personal access to the innermost workings of such forms of consciousness, we enable ourselves to understand precisely what sort of thing we are in possession of with regard to our self- awareness.

The Freudian view was a nice attempt at explicating consciousness in terms of drives, just as the Nietzschean concept was. However, the Nietzschean account is more accurate. Nietzsche was able to produce a useful and functional account which required little or no modification to impact the life of a reader. Freud’s attempt to simplify the subject of which he wrote was ultimately quite misguided for the simple yet ample reason that it became nigh- impossible to put it into practice.

Nietzsche’s lower-definition, more chaotic attempt to situate the human mind within a particular position with regard to reason, self- awareness, and social acumen was born of a very particular interpersonal situation itself. The recent advent of the typewriter, the novel possibility of cheap rapid travel over long distances, and even widely circulated print communications are all examples of technological advances which made Nietzsche’s life as a philosopher different from any who had come before him, yet Nietzsche’s mind was far different from those of his contemporaries, as well.

This possibility was enabled by a particular moment in time in which the old guard had withered and fallen away in the face of new technologies and yet the new faces of the disciplines of academia were still open to the possibility, indeed the fact, of a brilliant mind joining their ranks. Nietzsche’s exemplary political and academic performance in his rapid rise to fame made it possible for his mind to at once conquer the political realm in the service of his academic agenda and simultaneously doom himself to a life in which he could never speak freely.

Somewhat tragically, Nietzsche spoke his mind in the face of powers far greater than himself, attempting a failed conquest of the conservative element of academia which ultimately cost him everything.

By understanding the situation in which the most novel philosopher of the nineteenth century spoke his mind, it becomes clear to us that the revolutionary thoughts written by this formidable philosopher were in fact uttered from a standpoint of compulsion. Nietzsche was deeply dissatisfied with the lack of vision; both personal and in terms of the cognitive limitations he noticed in his fellows!

This dissatisfaction became central to Nietzsche throughout his life, driving him to attempt to enlighten those who would be his peers as well as to attempt to explain the convoluted relations he continually witnessed between himself and these others.

In this explanation, which can roughly be summed up in terms of the Kantian distinction between minority and moral agency; i.e., a moral agent is someone free to act due to the fortunate circumstance engendered by their embrace of the ability to reason, as distinct from a situation in which one free person surrenders agency to another to make decisions about life for them, Nietzsche gains a great deal of freedom from the constraints of the academy (i.e., the need to continually explain one’s work at a low level to fellow academics, the need to appeal to publishers with wide circulation, the need to second-guess and slow down to pore over one’s texts to ensure their correctness, etc…) which Freud never had.

It is true that Freud’s ideas still enjoy a good deal more celebrity than Nietzsche’s, but the fact that Nietzsche’s ideas have more power is vindicated every day that the society he struggled to found survives. Contemporary society, in every sense, is the heir to Nietzsche’s foresight — a bold claim which is substantiated by the untamed human will as evidenced by the general chaos which, at every turn, creeps into the orderly machinations of the best intentions of our political mind. And with this vindication of the Nietzschean worldview, it becomes possible to discuss consciousness in a way that is at once quite timely and also excessive, alien, foreign, and terrifying.

The Nietzschean View of Consciousness

The Nietzschean view of consciousness entails a single division between what we think of as the self and the rest of us; there is to be no distinction between body and mind or soul or world. Just as Antonio Damasio’s 1994 exposition of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis has shown the world of cognitive neuroscience, Nietzsche’s understanding of the I as a divided, conflicted, tormented and will-enabled organism exposes a pair of levels upon which an organism can be conscious: the awareness of drives and/or emotions (one body), and the stage upon which these drives and/or emotions play out their synergies and conflicts (many bodies).

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) is one area in which the modern social understanding of consciousness is most fundamentally inadequate. Instead of a complex web of different inputs being configured to produce unpredictable, strange, and novel outputs, what we today think of as AI exhibits next to nothing we would acknowledge as consciousness. Simple outputs in general, even in cases such as Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero chess algorithm’s products or the recent advances in natural language processing, have not yet begun to add up to anything larger. The deep compartmentalization of core components of a complete AI from one another has almost deliberately played out on the stage of the global marketplace and yet no AI-involved thought leaders seem to recognize it.

In essence, the Nietzschean critique has once again become necessary. In Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio argued for a — now accepted — hypothesis regarding the structure of the relationship between emotion and reason which plays out in the metabolic power of the limbic system adjacent to the calculative acuity of the prefrontal cortex. This hypothesis, known as the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, consists of the simple claim that reason itself falls out of the activity of emotions. That is, reason is a product of emotions.

There is nothing particularly revolutionary about this claim, and there was nothing revolutionary about it in the mid-1990s either. The sleep-wake cycle, the heart rate, the various metabolic urges to get physical activity or to eat or to hug someone, have all received a great deal of publicity for their explanatory power. It is not revolutionary to conclude that low-brain functions, such as the experience of a given emotion or a particular feeling, when added together, somehow become more than the sum of their parts.

What was stunning, rather, about Damasio’s argument in the mid-1990’s, was the general lack of enthusiasm with which it was received. Philosophers of mind still argue about the existence of free will and the fundamental nature of consciousness without ever bothering to enlighten themselves about the advances taking place in the psychological sciences — the roots of all these problems are metabolic, Damasio has shown, developing the Nietzschean thesis that they were many.

In sharp contrast with this trend, which is nonetheless quite normal in institutions and even more so with respect to institutions which pride themselves upon their philosophical acumen, Nietzsche actually anticipated the gist of Damasio’s argument by a full century when he articulated his thoughts about the will, despite his lack of the terminology which would develop to describe these things or examples such as Phineas Gage to prove his conjecture with.

For Nietzsche, to be conscious could be said to roughly equate to what he meant when he used the term will. Willing something, that is, being aware of it, caring about it, emoting about it, and fighting oneself to bring it into being, is nothing else than becoming conscious of it in precisely a way quite consistent with modern day reductive explications about the mechanistic workings of the limbic system in the brain. To go just one degree further, it can now be said definitively that the mechanism behind even the most abstruse philosophy, even the most coldly rational thinking possible, is always a process which reduces to metabolism. The cruelty of this critique of rational thought is second only to precisely the usefulness of such a critique, insofar as it can even be called a critique at all.

AI as a Mirror

To truly conceive of a model of conscious minds as a metabolic vehicle at the most fundamental level, it is necessary that we contrast this sort of conception with its opposite: AI. Today, the term AI is something of a misnomer. AI is currently a term which applies to almost any sort of automated computer application which either performs a complex task or helps a human being accomplish something. This rather broad umbrella includes everything from spellchecking to facial recognition to data visualization — but the concept of intelligence in these applications almost universally develops directly from inputs given from outside (as in Alpha Zero, the powerful chess engine) or worse, designed by someone outside. That is, the very creativity we consider so central to human intelligence is written out of AI by the time we finish describing precisely what it is we mean when we utter the phrase itself!

To walk this critique of AI back to the intended domain, an explication of human consciousness, it is merely necessary to discuss the manifold outputs emotions are capable of producing. Words said in anger, poor dietary choices made in situations of hunger, addiction and love — all involve both a metabolic component and a corresponding change to the worldview of the individual we think of as having the feelings which lead to their various rational outputs. In each case, the cognitive system gives shape to (or, in some cases, reshapes or competes with) the high- level outputs derived from intensive competitions between distinct drives, motivations, and impulses within a given individual!

AI, then, serves as an effective mirror for our understanding of human consciousness due to its remarkable ability to show us precisely what we do not understand as entity or as consciousness. Deep Mind, for example, does not represent — at least not in terms of consciousness — as complete a revolution beyond Deep Blue as the popular press might have us believe at first. This is merely to say that the machine learning mechanism has changed in a revolutionary way which did not cause it suddenly to gain consciousness in a new way, and merely instead improved the same sort of thing we think of when we think of a simple machine, say a card-shuffler. It would be more accurate to say that a better chess-playing machine has been created than to say a better mind or person or even entity.

A rudimentary account of consciousness is implied by any sort of discussion involving AI, after all, artificial intelligence at the very least seems to be some sort of intelligence — if there were no intelligence to it, would we not rather refer to it as Artificial Agency, or some other sort of more accurate name? Instead of this, we could also posit that perhaps some goal exists that simply hasn’t been met yet. After all, world-champion chess has only been played by computers for the past twenty years at this point. The most likely outcome is that a human being will never be able to beat a strong computer in chess consistently again.

Pushing the limits of the definition of intelligence will only get us a bit closer to understanding consciousness, however. It is important to understand that intelligence is only a part of consciousness, just as being good at chess is only a single part of a very complex system we refer to as intelligence. Creativity was mentioned earlier as a means by which to differentiate between success in completing a task and intelligence, but it seems that creativity is central enough to what we mean by intelligence as to be capable of proving, by counterexample, that a given example of intelligence is not, in fact, intelligence. This is to say that creativity is a necessary condition for intelligence. We understand this to be true because intelligence only becomes visible to us when a decision is made — we cannot see a single example, anywhere in the world, of intelligence which is divorced from action.

Essentially, a truly intelligent chess computer would need to be able to act in the world beyond mere move-making and planning activities. It would be able to win games by means beyond merely making the best moves on the board — instead, a truly intelligent chess computer would be capable of bluffing, perhaps something like pulling the fire alarm to disorient its opponent. It would be able to compete at the psychological and physical level rather than merely at the intellectual one. It would also probably be an amazing teacher.

Truly intelligent machines are disorienting to contemplate, but if we really want to know what it would be like to have a conversation with one, all we need to do is to have a conversation with another human being.

Freud and Nietzsche Help Us Understand Consciousness

Consciousness could be said to be that which a given human mind possesses which a given machine lacks. But this is not specific enough. To improve our concept of conscious thinking, we must develop it more. We must say that machines — even elegant examples of machinery, even the finest machines in the world, are universally developed with a purpose in mind which can never be deviated from. In reality, it has thus been the case until now that a machine never truly accomplished anything its creator(s) did not intend it to do. However, a few glaring counterexamples stand out. Behemoths such as Facebook and Google essentially consist of machinery — and yet the creator of no such machine could ever have foreseen the contemporary state of the machine they set out to build initially.

The rampant growth experienced by both technology companies and by the machines which power these companies is driven by intelligence, but it is human intelligence which makes it all possible. Having thoroughly established this, it is now time to describe the difference between a conscious entity and a machine with a purpose. This will be helpful both for those of us who lead other humans and for those of us who wish to develop machines which reach or near human-level effectiveness at jobs, rather than mere tasks.

To quickly and effectively describe human consciousness, then, we must merely point to the boundlessness of the outcomes which emerge from metabolism! It is a fact about the body that everything which transpires does so by means of a process mediated at the roots by the cellular drive to produce and utilize energy, but it is also true that the simplistic nature of this sort of fact is almost entirely trivial. The fact is, consciousness is at heart mediated entirely by the need of the organism to provide for itself, though it is not our place here to discuss those needs beyond the initial layer of complexity, i.e., the cell’s need to continually nourish and divide itself and the intensive cooperation by which the organism as a whole survives despite the repeated deaths of critical cells on a massive level.

There are 37 trillion individual cells in the average human body and the sum total of the communication between these is what we ultimately think of as consciousness. Consciousness, then, is an unbelievably complex emergent phenomenon which arises from a large number of internal inputs which communicate their success in survival, metabolism, and reproduction to each other through a hostile external environment and awe-inspiringly complex internal chemical signaling mechanisms.

Nietzsche enumerated a number of internal components of consciousness as well as the influence of the external world whilst Freud sought to build a more exquisite structure from these and use them to account for the complex interactions between self and world in terms even of previous interactions between self and world. Both men contributed immensely to a modern understanding of conscious thought which is, recently, capable of not only understanding itself in a deeply meaningful way but which also seems to be on the cusp of reproducing itself by an act of will.

Conscious thought, then, is the complex outcome of a veritable whirlpool of physical, chemical, and mnemonic interactions throughout the human body over time. It is true that time is a difficult concept in itself, but for the purposes of understanding consciousness we can accept the definition that a quantum of time is the smallest amount of interaction between part of a body and part of the world such that the body becomes distinct from what it was before. And it is only by understanding just how small a change is necessary to make this determination that we begin to understand the incredible profundity of the action of using language to make conscious an understanding of what consciousness is.

This essay was originally published as part of a book about happiness called Bring Back Satire.

In Robert Pirsig’s famous work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a metaphysical concept is born. Pirsig explores his relationship with his son as he explores the US on a motorcycle and as he explores the very concept of sanity. The goal he seeks is what he refers to as Quality. The work itself is structured as a novel, but this thin veil barely conceals some of the deepest postmodern philosophical insights into the dialectical nature of reason that had ever been published in 1974. The main thrust of Pirsig’s argument is a flourish that is seldom encountered in academic philosophy and perhaps this is why he remains something of an outsider to present day.

Put simply, Pirsig believed that the most important part of subject/object relations consisted of an attentional guidance which precedes, in every case, the material which is discussed: care. People do better work, feel better about their lives, and generally succeed more often when they care about the problems they address. This simple point is addressed by neuroscientists, psychologists, and a wide variety of technical personnel — but it has yet to receive its due as a core component of analytical philosophy. Things change based upon the disposition of the subject who apprehends them.

Despite a wide following outside of academia, few scholars have taken time to critically examine Pirsig’s most popular work. For this reason, I write with the goal of unpacking the deepest nuances of the philosophical position the prose and story of the work construct. This essay will attempt to argue that Pirsig’s rightful place as one of the greatest philosophers of postmodernism is not only well-deserved, but that the emerging philosophical movement itself will do well to heed the lessons he has taught.

Deliberately, Pirsig’s instructive study of the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic unfolds in the space between his realization that there is a need for a direct exploration of Quality and the conclusion he ultimately reaches: that we cannot help but care about it. Why must we care about Quality? Because, for Pirsig, Quality is the only thing that can actually become real to us.

That is, our perceptions of Quality precede and determine our perceptions of everything else. The neurosciences of attentional guidance and emotional attachment, as well as the body of literature surrounding the subconscious, tend to support this sort of underpinning element to human consciousness, but Pirsig seems to have happened upon it without too much external influence.

Though widely read, the style of ZMM’s authorship makes it extremely difficult to retroactively compile bibliographic evidence of Pirsig’s literary footprint. This is likely one major hurdle for contemporary scholars such as Dr. Anthony McWatt of Liverpool who have been working for some time to see Pirsig included alongside his more academic contemporaries, but perhaps it serves to isolate Pirsig’s own work in an effort to seclude the reader, forcing would-be Pirsig scholars to think more deeply for themselves. In this essay, I will attempt to sum up a little over ten years’ worth of Pirsig scholarship on my own part under the remote tutelage of several secondary authors as well as Dr. McWatt himself.

Though the subject-matter is quite difficult, and it is occasionally necessary to argue with the concepts put directly forth within the work or even take inference from the plot of the story regarding the philosophical prize modern scholars would prefer to see stated as plainly as possible, I believe it is possible to understand ZMM in a way which both benefits the reader and does justice to the work as it stands amongst the constellation of postmodern philosophical works.

Dialectic, Mythos, and Logos

Pirsig’s attitude toward the centerpiece of philosophy, dialectic, shifts throughout the work. The narrator alternately approves of it, then rejects it, and finally seems to regard it as a necessary piece of a larger puzzle by the end of the work. Dialectic, for Pirsig, is a problematic concept because it attempts to prioritize rationality and sacrifice relatability; it may clarify our thoughts for us but it cannot do so without pushing them away in a sense — dialectic analyzes, and this makes it difficult for us to care about what is analyzed by distancing it from our conscious minds. Rhetoric is the opposite of dialectic in this sense, and it is the subject that Phaedrus,[1] the narrator’s alter-ego, taught as he embarked upon his exploration of philosophy. Pirsig’s natural preference for rhetoric over dialectic is a central feature of the emerging concept of Quality, but this one-dimensional understanding is not enough.

We need to be certain that we grasp the fact that the very presence of rhetoric is closely tied to subjectivity, to individuality, and to care. For Pirsig, dialectic may be said to explore what it is that exists, but rhetoric explores, in every case, why THIS particular thing matters. So, while dialectic strips us of the care we have for its subjects, rhetoric enhances that emotional value. These concepts of rhetoric and dialectic need to be addressed in a deeper way than Pirsig explicitly instructs the reader to do in the text of ZMM, but with a bit of external insight it is nonetheless possible to understand the Metaphysics of Quality as a metaphysical undertaking.[2]

The result of this reading of Pirsig is a deeper understanding of the core concept which can be seen as the ultimate end served by all postmodern philosophers, namely that truth itself is dialectical and never immutable or absolute. Postmodern philosophy in general is attacked as an attempt to undermine the value that we as a species seem to know things to have, as well as an attempt to disprove foregone conclusions such as the existence of God, or the absolute nature of morality. However, as a postmodern philosopher myself, I might like to remind the reader that such goals are not a priority for postmodern thought.

Rather, postmodernism is simply the realization that our thinking must be translated into verbal action to become communicable — we can only mean what we can say. Though the observation seems trite at first, the philosophical ramifications of the necessity of condensation into speech are markedly more significant than any of the particular philosophical questions the philosophers of prior ages have argued at length. Hence, the core of prior philosophical insight is felt to be under attack by adherents of the various schools due simply to the fact that the assumptions which undergird it have come into question.

For Pirsig, along with the postmodern movement in general, the traditional metaphysical practice attempts to conceive of the one universal, absolute Truth. This truth is thought of in postmodernism as the truth which must only ever be stated once. Pirsig frequently argues that traditional metaphysics is problematic because it seeks definitions which produce absolute Knowledge — knowledge of the world in itself, knowledge of the ultimate logos without a hint of the mythos.[3] This is a somewhat plainer way of speaking than the riddles of Deleuze & Guattari, or the strange machinations of the mind of Derrida, but the general point is the same: we must reconceptualize our worldview in light of the realization that our speech cannot be absolute.

Pirsig’s mythos is the unfolding of the larger story of which we are all playing a different part, which on the wide stage of postmodern philosophy results in a variance from individual to individual in the perception of a hypothetical absolute reality somewhere beyond us, or perhaps made up of us. Pirsig, like many postmodern philosophers, would argue that regardless of a given philosopher’s choice to pay attention to it or not, the mythos is a fundamental part of our reality.

Further, Pirsig thought it would be fair to say that, if one wants to push beyond the mythos and find oneself in some sort of absolute, one has become stuck in logos. Being stuck in logos is not a good thing — it is to be imprisoned in a false reality where everything must be rationally expressed to be understood at all, a severe limitation that has confounded thinkers including Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore — but Pirsig traces the history of this flawed, mythical, ideal principle all the way back to Plato. The key to understanding the value of the Metaphysics of Quality is that metaphysics itself is of the mythos just as physics is. A traditional conception of metaphysics might consist of an attempt to connect logos with the patterns which comprise the morals of the stories we tell each other in the process of communication.

Pirsig took a deep look at this concept, determined that we communicate mostly through analogy, and concluded that it was unlikely that we would ever draw out a universal principle from this mostly-contextual information, even if we had the ‘sum total’ of all that had ever taken place. This is textbook postmodernism at its surface, but in Pirsig the concept is both deeper and clearer than its analogues, found in thinkers from Deleuze & Guattari to Foucault and Derrida, from Alasdair MacIntyre to Bernard Williams. Pirsig’s key insight is unique because it contains the only postmodern critical theory which can be said to posit something beyond itself, by which we mean, of course, Quality.

Finding an absolute law which could be considered absolute Truth or Knowledge here would be the surest way to know that our thoughts have been trapped by the logos. When we get stuck in this problem, we only need to realize that we have started using dialectic to try to tell ourselves how we should always live, and the only likely outcome is that we will instead bankrupt our lives of why we should live. In practice, this error comes with a definite result: we will forget to live in a way that lends Quality to our lives. Following Socrates, the Metaphysics of Quality urges us to employ dialectic instead of rhetoric when a problem is encountered, but turns back to rhetoric and silence when we deal with relationships — when we need to care.

The Metaphysics of Quality is in every sense a continuation of the work Plato wrote Socrates doing in Athens. Its purpose is to produce in the reader an understanding of the way that dialectical reasoning can lead to a full understanding of one’s situation when there is a problem to solve. For example, in his attempt to explain certain aspects of the world in terms of logos, Phaedrus encounters contradictions and conceptual difficulties faced by the philosophers of the past, which he then deals with by focusing his energy into a dialectical attempt to reconcile the mythos with the logos. In so doing, Phaedrus is forced to destroy the web of analogies that constitute his understanding of his place in the world by analyzing it.

Analogies are produced by rhetoric. They are stacked upon one another and thus constitute the mythos.[4] Phaedrus arguably attempts to move beyond his own mythos to find a replacement for what he believes to be a broken logos. The logos is the domain of rationality, the opposite of the web of analogies that constitutes a person’s identity and the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are. Attempting to reconcile rational knowledge with the analogical and creative aspects of human life is what drives Phaedrus mad in the story because the only satisfaction we ever find in asking why is rooted in our own identities, our own situations. Phaedrus loses his personal situation and the resulting madness nearly costs him everything.

This madness, however, is the point of origin of the Metaphysics of Quality. Once the concept becomes more fleshed out, and after Phaedrus is eliminated, the unnamed narrator rehashes the old thoughts and arrives at new conclusions. Instead of futilely attempting to mix oil and water, going mad when the task is proven impossible, and throwing up his hands in defeat, Pirsig’s unique mind managed to reframe the problem. The Metaphysics of Quality, then, is a framing mechanism which contains the assumption that personal meaning and care are outside of the domain of logos, and thus beyond the reach of the dialectic. Instead of applying dialectic to the world at large, then, we should allow care to be the frame within which logos is found. By creating this metaphysical construct, Pirsig has contributed not a scientific theory, but something bigger. He’s developed a set of tools for dealing with the difficult thoughts.

Rhetoric as the Key to Pirsig’s Thinking

Perhaps the key to Pirsig’s work is rhetoric. His claim can be understood in terms of knowledge, but not the kind of knowledge that will lead a person to absolute Truth. Absolute Truth is a construct of the logos and hence, rather than understanding itself as a knowledge of what has been said, a knowledge of the strongest and most effective analogies, Absolute Truth attempts to frame the question of whether a claim is true or false as logos transcending the mythos. By contrast, the function of the Metaphysics of Quality, perhaps ideally the function of any metaphysics, is to provide a person with a working ability to engage with the world and to communicate with other people — the function of metaphysics is thus practical, and not the recovery of the absolute. This is the single clearest statement one can make about postmodern metaphysical thinking.

The myths, the analogies, even the scientific truths that make up the mythos — these are merely a means to the end of communication between ourselves and the world outside of ourselves. This is why Pirsig never uses logos to define the what-it-was-to-be-that-thing of reality; his encounter with Zen has taught him that there is a bit more to reality than can be explicitly stated. As a result, Pirsig refuses to see science as anything more than a means of engaging the world dialectically: per his favorite example, logos is useful as a means of keeping the motorcycle running. This view has the impact of dispelling any mysticism in the operation of machines — whether they be metaphysical, cultural, or mechanical — and it utterly eliminates any possibility of Absolute Truth as a valid theorem.

The significance of the term rhetoric for Pirsig becomes apparent with the realization that Phaedrus’ status as a rhetorician is to blame for his resistance to dialectic. His rhetoric is merely a skill by which he can effectively organize the mythos and make people care about it: it will never prevent a dialectician from wreaking havoc on his worldview. Phaedrus describes the development of dialectic, as he sees it having happened in ancient Greece:

Dialectic generally means “of the nature of the dialogue,” which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at. It’s the mode of discourse of Socrates in the Dialogues of Plato. Plato believed the dialectic was the sole method by which truth was arrived at. The only one. That’s why it’s a fulcrum word. Aristotle attacked this belief, saying that the dialectic was only suitable for some purposes — to enquire into men’s beliefs, to arrive at truths about eternal forms of things, known as Ideas, which were fixed and unchanging and constituted reality for Plato. Aristotle said there is also the method of science, or ‘physical’ method, which observes physical facts and arrives at truths about substances, which undergo change.[5]

Pirsig goes on in a speculative, unsupported, and hypercritical fashion to elaborate a story of Plato’s confrontation of the Sophists’ Good in ancient Greece in terms of dialectic and rhetoric as methods of finding value. The victory of Plato’s Truth is significant in the sense that it is the origin of the modern drive to place dialectic hierarchically above rhetoric.[6] The replacement of the ancient Greek arête[7] with Truth by Plato is the first discovery Phaedrus makes as he moves toward the moment of enlightenment which destabilizes him. His second realization is that Aristotle created a second binary division between dialectic and science. At this point in the text, Pirsig is setting the stage for the implosion of Phaedrus’ identity and the three days and three nights he spends in his bedless bedroom, staring at the wall, unable to function. Phaedrus has mounted an attack upon Aristotelian logos without realizing it. The result is an internal dialectic that he cannot stop because he cares too much about the result. He obsessively analyzes himself until his mind shuts down.

In addition, at this time, we must remember that Phaedrus has opted to eradicate the mythos within which he formerly understood himself. By attacking these binaries — which he sees as the primary process at work in the formation of the structures he is at odds with — he is effectively attacking himself and everything else he believes in. Thus, the dialectical inquiry he engages in is itself responsible for the mental breakdown he suffers.

Phaedrus’ mistake, in my view, was that he placed Quality before everything, but he failed to understand that access to the contents of the mythos is enhanced by dialectic — essentially, the means to destroy the former divisions and create something better are already part of the mythos. I.e., Quality is primary because it is primary for the mythos. The ability of Aristotle to differentiate between science and dialectic is a refinement in the process of seeking truth, not a destruction of it. In fact, following Pirsig’s analogy,[8] it could be said that binary distinctions are the only way for growth to take place. Rhetoric is good for constructing analogies to describe relationships between these binaries, but we must never forget that dialectic must be used to unpack them.

Dialectic comes from the Greek to converse with; but it is separated from dialogue and more closely related to the word dialect, which, if I may speculate, positions it to combine the analytic character of philosophy (dia, through the) with that which pertains to the dialect (logos, language, thought, idea) of the language a given person speaks, writes, etc. This is why the classical philosophical starting points are, in fact, questions.

The beginning of a dialectical discussion can often be found in a question such as “What is the meaning of life?” Any subsequent unpacking of that question is what I mean by dialectic. It can be done by a single person, or by two or more, and Plato’s dialogues are an excellent place to look for examples. Aristotle, instead of describing these questions as dialectical, however, called them ‘bastard questions’ and suggested that they resulted from category errors.

Pirsig’s solution to the problem of these tremendous, insoluble questions is different: he suggests we ask a question in return that begs clarification, such as “Whose life?” or some such focus point whereupon a particular is reintroduced to the conversation to clarify the issue at hand.[9] The resulting relationship — a call for balance between dialectic and rhetoric — is the key to understanding the true philosophical significance of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The rhetorical construction of the moral of the novel itself, for example, is effective if and only if the reader is willing to perform an interrogation of Pirsig’s rhetorical construct by using dialectic. To more critically unpack this notion, it will be helpful to draw upon Pirsig’s own sources.[10]

Care: The Root of Proper Dialectic?

For Pirsig, we must not forget that dialectic is a means to the end of solving problems that must come from a position of care. Dialectical reasoning, as applied to the motorcycle, leads Pirsig to a complete understanding of its parts and their functions. Care about the motorcycle is what leads him to engage it dialectically. Perhaps he would not pay such careful attention to the working of the machine if he was not interested in recognizing problems with it that might leave him stranded.

The second, main motorcycle trip portrayed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is differentiated from the first attempt the narrator and Chris made by the fact that Pirsig’s involvement with the machine is sufficient to keep the machine running well in the second trip.[11] The first trip to Canada involves the characters in the story running out of gas and giving up. The second trip, when the story unfolds, is different — Pirsig has, by studying the mechanisms that govern the workings of the machine, earned the right to take part in a mechanical discourse with the cycle during the second trip.

This deep emotional involvement with the wellbeing of the motorcycle itself is what makes the second trip possible. Pirsig’s newfound, care-driven relation to the motorcycle makes the trip more fun, makes it possible, and enables the growth of his relationship to his son, Chris, which plays out through a development of the character’s general disposition: at the beginning of the work, he is disengaged and reluctant to indulge his son’s frivolous desire to express himself. Toward the end of the book, Pirsig changes; he becomes more open to fun and more accepting of the developments which have led him to the end of the journey — to Chris’s benefit, as well as his own.

The personal growth narrative of the work is intended to convey an understanding of the world as more fully accessible through engagement in terms of care. Words themselves refer to things to which they bear no relation; try petting the word “dog” on this page (or screen) for an example.[12] In this way, talk or thought is always removed by at least one degree of abstraction from its subject. Hence, doing dialectic upon language as Socrates does is an analogy. It represents the way in which Socrates interacts with the world.[13]

As Pirsig sees it toward the end of the book, Aristotle takes the mode of engagement with reason demonstrated by Socrates and applies it to everything imaginable; not to exclude future generations from doing so as Phaedrus accuses him of, but rather because it can be effectively done now that Socrates has shown the way to do it. Pirsig’s dislike of Aristotle comes from the fact that Aristotle was the philosopher who demonstrated the need for an application of dialectical reasoning to the world around him rather than merely to rhetorical constructs.

Pirsig ironically takes this technique one step further and makes the dialectic work upon a physical system, just as Aristotle did. The motorcycle is a tool Pirsig sees as a way of making a claim about the applicability of this method of reasoning to the world itself and not simply to dialogue. This is not because he understands the motorcycle in the only way in which a motorcycle can be understood, but rather because he has developed the dialectical means for understanding his particular relationship with his particular motorcycle — a phenomenon which occurs because he cares about the motorcycle. His technical writer’s approach would likely be dramatically less effective in discussing the workings of a car[14] because the engagement his mind has in its relationship to the motorcycle is responsible for the emergence of his ability to care about it. Take away the care and you may as well take away the motorcycle.

Phaedrus, on the other hand, is disgusted by Aristotle and his dialectical method because the teachers, the system, whose stated purpose is to help everyone learn to think, is instead teaching them how to act like they are capable of thinking, filling their heads with facts that have no relation to an understanding of the subject matter — about which, it is impossible to care. I might suggest Paulo Freire’s experience in Brazil as evidence that Phaedrus is right about everything except his unfair notion that no one else understands. The discovery at the end of the book which allows Pirsig to reunite himself with Phaedrus consists of a revelation: the understanding is finally reached that dialectic is not always malicious, that the teachers and people who do not reach this height of cognitive virtue are not deficient in dedication, but rather in terms of their relation to their world.

Characters in the book repeatedly enact this deficient engagement with technology, with each other, and with themselves — learning to forgive himself for his mistakes enables Pirsig to forgive his son, his friends, and his society, for the difficulties each faces in building proper Quality relations with their respective environments. The motorcycle mechanic who damages the machine[15] is guilty of a lack of care — it isn’t just that he doesn’t know what he is doing, it is rather that his work lacks Quality for the simple reason that he cannot own it. He is not properly existing in relation to it because his application of dialectic does not correspond to an equal application of rhetoric: he cares about his paycheck, not about the bike’s engine.

Later, when the “talkative fellow” repairs his chain guard, Pirsig’s narrator does see Quality in the work that is done — but the man responsible thinks absolutely nothing of it.[16] The difference between these two mechanics is precisely that they have different levels of mastery over what they care about. The older, better mechanic is able to care more deeply about this new motorcycle than the younger one. It might be said that Quality is its own reward: rather than being Pirsig’s lackey as he does the job, the older mechanic acts like Pirsig’s boss, making him clean the grease out of the chain guard and take it apart himself. Hence, if there is one fundamental, definitive characteristic of Quality as it emerges in the text, it is the agency of the subject in choosing the object.

This agency is the fundamental ground for the emergence of Quality in a life, and it is enabled by an understanding of mythos which then calls for an application of logos. Without this mechanism of restraint by which the dialectic can be contextualized, there is still Quality in the world, and it is still fundamental, but there is an additional need to achieve a state of unity with the object toward which care is to be directed. The way to do this is to accept the framework of the mythos as the context within which the work is to be done — and the older mechanic here clearly accomplishes this to a greater degree than the younger mechanic.

Care in the Metaphysics of Quality

The final piece of the puzzle in Pirsig’s notion of Quality revolves around the realization that Pirsig deals with his motorcycle out of need rather than choice. In Pirsig’s own words: “…Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects…” [17] So, the younger mechanic who did a bad job on Pirsig’s motorcycle was not trying to wreck his work; he was blind to the fact that he did not do the job well because he did not care about it enough.

Care about Pirsig’s motorcycle is the result of a Quality event — as are the details which reveal themselves afterward. This care Pirsig developed for his motorcycle when it broke down was the ground for Pirsig’s discovery of the motorcycle and the process through which he came to realize that he was the only one who could take excellent care of it. Indeed, phenomenology supports the claim that objects in the world can be more there or less there for different people. Psychology supports a variety of attentional guidance claims and can even suggest neurobiological mechanisms by which memories and experiences are made more vivid based upon one’s frame of mind or attitude toward a given object. Pirsig simply seizes this operant mechanism and asserts its dominance over all of the others in human experience.

Having established the place of rhetoric and dialectic, and even carved out a niche for the symptom of a Quality event in terms of care, it is now time for the emergence of Quality to be treated. Quality exists prior to anything else, attracting its counterpart care. To be a Quality person can be said to be the aim of the struggle for arête, as Pirsig claims, but it can also be said to be the goal of many different Eastern approaches: Taoism, Confucianism, Zen Buddhism; even Hinduism rather transparently reveals itself to be an attempt to order society in a way that promotes Quality. In fact, the much-analyzed Western culture can be said to be an attempt to produce Quality. Pirsig’s stinging indictment of the Western approach is couched in the assertion that, in the West, the priorities are all wrong — he never argues that the goal itself is fundamentally different.

The dualistic outlook that one approach is better than another in one way, inferior to that other in another way, and should or should not be adopted instead of the other, is reducible to a rhetorically constructed analysis. I might be tempted to speculate that the defining moment of Quality is what actually happens here, when Pirsig’s Phaedrus collapses: “And the Quality, the arête he has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.”[18] This is to say Phaedrus’ mental breakdown is triggered by the realization that Aristotle’s method is a pursuit of Quality — which Phaedrus himself conceives of as the fundamental ground for the emergence of subject and object.

The man who emerges from electroshock therapy, with all of his deficiencies, is in the end only able to begin to live a good life when he reunites with Phaedrus and teaches himself how to care about an imperfect world that cannot be solved or put aside. The journey is an allegory for the need to unite living with thinking, rhetoric with dialectic, and reason with the pursuit of a high-Quality life. Thus, Robert Pirsig can find a place among the greatest postmodern philosophers, despite his plain speech and few bad habits, because he understood and communicated the goal of postmodern living more completely and more correctly than any other, without handing down a stone tablet carved with absolutes. Perhaps the Socratic adage that the unexamined life is not worth living, ultimately, expresses a valuable observation: we care about that which we examine.

References

1. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014.

2. –. Metaphysics. Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin Classic Books, 2004.

3. Nikulin, Dmitri. Dialectic and Dialogue. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

4. Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.

5. –. Lila. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

6. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945.

Notes

[1] Phaedrus is a name Pirsig uses to refer to himself as he was prior to his mental breakdown and eventual admission to a mental hospital where he underwent electroshock therapy before being released.

[2] Metaphysics as a subject is generally conceptualized in terms of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which was a relational term applied after his time. The story goes that it was the book found after the physics book, and the Greek for after is meta.

[3] “The term logos, the root word of ‘logic,’ refers to the sum total of our rational understanding of the world. Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos,” (ZMM, p. 315). Pirsig’s usage of logos differs somewhat from a literal translation of the Greek, which uses the term alternately as language, thought, or idea.

[4] ZMM, 316–318.

[5] ZMM, 330

[6] (ZZM, pps. 342–345).

[7] “Excellence,” (ZMM, 340).

[8] (ZMM, p. 315).

[9] Dmitri Nikulin, in his book, Dialectic & Dialogue, puts it thus: “Dialectic is an art or method of reasoning that initially occurs in dialogue and has to clarify the essence of a notion — that is, ‘what’ a thing is” (D&D pp. 5).

[10] See: Plato’s Apology, Symposium, Phaedrus and Euthyphro.

[11] ZMM, 19–20.

[12] From discussion of de Sassure’s “arbitrariness of the sign,” (Pinker, S. p. 83, 1994).

[13] An excellent example of this occurs toward the end of Phaedrus, in the discussion about writing.

[14] “Through that car window everything you see is just more TV,” ZMM, 4.

[15] ZMM, 22–23.

[16] ZMM, 321.

[17] ZMM, 215.

[18] ZMM, 359.

In the Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir demonstrates the breadth of her understanding of the world with a short treatise full of deep and meaningful concepts. In this work in particular, I was stunned to find such new concepts in the field of moral philosophy. Beauvoir’s approach involves looking at the basic qualities a person may have in contemporary parlance with almost no technical jargon. The most resonant of these qualities, for me, was seriousness. This article will walk through why it’s a problem to be too serious and end up with a few ways to spend more time in a healthier mindset.

It strikes me that, though ethics is quite literally the study of how to become a better person, we in the field do not spend much time thinking about day-to-day subjects such as laughter or moods. And in two degrees in philosophy, one of which was specifically designed to explain ethics to me, nobody really did much with Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking — which is a shame, because it is both more coherent and more relevant than the work of many leading ethicists.

Why is seriousness a problem?

Imagine a world in which everyone wanted to be good. These people choose for themselves what they want to become, but everyone is receptive to how their language treats the various traits and qualities they possess because it’s unavoidable. So language is intentionally or unintentionally manufactured to glorify certain traits, occupations, or behaviors.

This pattern of seeing good and naming it ends up creating a situation in which everyone wants to do the same handful of things which are highly regarded. However, it is not ideal for so many people to end up being swayed by this system of speaking and thinking to pursue things which are not natural to them. So even though everyone in this hypothetical world wants to be good, not everyone can, because a lot of people are forced to do things which are not so glamorous.

To de Beauvoir, this innate tendency of language to almost accidentally moralize in the abstract is perhaps the core problematic for modern society. Everyone is encouraged to take life seriously, to strive to be what he or she is not. Take a moment to think about what it generally means to you to be serious about something.

If it’s a relationship that comes to mind first, we tend to think of close romances and/or marriages. If what is considered serious is a job, or a task, we think of something important to us, something like being a doctor or a nuclear power generator technician — mistakes in these fields are extremely costly.

Seriousness at its heart is about trying to get something right; it is about principle. If a person is considered serious, or if an attitude is, then the quality we’re envisioning for that person (whether temporarily or characteristically) involves a certain brittle and narrow focus and a drive to execute the task correctly, along with a fairly high level of emotional attachment.

Seriousness at heart is about trying to get something right; it is about principle.

But seriousness is also inappropriate much of the time. What de Beauvoir has for us is something like a balance of qualities, a charcuterie board of virtues to strive for. And in the end, none of us gets where we want to be precisely, but moral philosophy has always acknowledged this difficulty, all the way back to Aristotle who famously said that we study the good not to learn what it is, but to become better.

We study the good not to learn what it is, but to become better.

The serious man for de Beauvoir is the man responsible for the Holocaust. He is the man who beats his children, the man who conducts business, and the man who goes to war. The fragile nature of seriousness is borne out by the circumstances under which it is observed — the spirits which break and splinter under stress are themselves serious!

How can we prevent ourselves from becoming too serious? The present moment in history, dubbed the “age of outrage,” has been developed by a variety of actors including 24-hour news media establishments and Russian internet trolls. People do not tend to smile as they walk down the street — good news and bad news all amount to the same general thing: more seriousness.

Worry is an emotion which comes along with the serious attitude. Many of us know it to be a problematic state of affairs, and yet we persist in it. We invest our emotions, our time, and our energy into this pathetic and self-absorbed activity. We even spend our money on stultifying pills to help lessen anxiety, and yet the seriousness remains. Yes, of course there are matters of life and death afoot. It would not do to fail to be careful in public during the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, life can end at any moment. It seems, upon consideration, that a serious death might be the worst death of all.

The alternative to seriousness

How can we thwart this ultramodern vice? It has been shown that women do not like to date serious men, and it is obvious that children prefer to spend their time with adults who know how to make and take a joke. If laughter is the best medicine, it is because laughter is the treatment for an overly serious attitude. A good laugh can shatter even the most depressing rumination, leading to a rebirth of sorts.

But seriousness is also political. The world itself is in the grip of a staggering array of serious problems at the highest levels; COVID-19 may not ever really go away — but climate change and geopolitics promise a slow return to peace even if it does. As our friends and family members pass away from these globetrotting maladies and the world continues to get darker as epidemics of opioid use and right-wing politics increase, what levity is left to us?

The realities of these problems must not be allowed to detract from our recognition of humanity in one another and in ourselves. Each of us, as Camus reminds us (here is a piece about happiness for Camus), carries the spark of inevitable happiness. Regardless of how the problems confronting the human race play out, we must understand that we will always find happiness. And with that, we must remember that we’re happy, goofy beings who fall down all the time. We may march toward an apocalypse, but we will do so grinning and making jokes.

Regardless of how the problems confronting the human race play out, we must understand that we will always find happiness.

To me, it almost seems as though I’ve had a brush with a very scary disease of the mind, in which the very feel of life changes and the natural impulse is to attempt to retake control of the situation. But having control of one’s life is a difficult thing and it is rather plain to see that, for me at least, this effort to control has actually backfired and taken away the enjoyment that could have been.

I’ve recently picked tennis back up, and despite all the problems in life, I make an effort to enjoy it as much as possible. I don’t play competitively, I just hit around with a few friends of mine who have varying levels of expertise, on down to my nieces who are just learning the game. It’s beautiful, now that my competitive ego has moved aside. I almost couldn’t enjoy the game anymore as a youth because I always felt I could have done better. I used to play tournaments and try to compete, but it was self destructive, and mainly because I took it too seriously.

One of my first philosophy teachers said that happiness is simple: you just find something that makes you happy and do it occasionally. That seems to me, still, to be a bit of an oversimplification, as I study the philosophical concept of happiness some fifteen-odd years later. For now, my efforts are directed at the minimization of the serious mindset as it appears in my day-to-day life.

My strategy for doing this will involve attempting to find the joke in situations where I feel overly-committed and/or vulnerable, instead of bearing down with reason and attempting to take the problem seriously until it goes away (via my own effort or otherwise!).

By the way, I’m not sure about you, but my results with the serious approach were mixed in the first place. Half the time I would end up worried about something that wasn’t really a problem at all. The other half, just doing what came naturally to me would tend to unearth resolutions to problems I’d never have thought of in my serious mindset. That’s right, a professional philosopher in charge of a magazine called Serious Philosophy (as a joke) refuses to take things too seriously, whenever he can remember why he shouldn’t.

Here’s the quick version of the strategy to circumvent seriousness:

1. Really? Ask yourself, when you become upset: what’s bothering me about this?

2. So what? When you find the answer, unpack it a bit by asking: so what?

3. And the joke is?! Put the effort in to figure out what the hang-up is and laugh about it.

4. Remember the context. Everything that happens to you is part of your life. Use your memories to make funny connections.

The strategy isn’t something to observe religiously, but I’ve been doing it for a few weeks now and I find that it does seem to be helping me enjoy living a bit more than I was before. Things seem to be fun again, after several weeks of doomsday and drudgery.

Materially, nothing has changed. My world is still as full of problems as anyone’s — indeed, as everyone’s — but I find that I don’t tend to kick myself as much anymore. I’m able to relax more completely. In most things, it’s best to avoid competitive activity. That doesn’t mean don’t work hard, and it certainly doesn’t mean nothing matters or that you shouldn’t care about your life.

That being said, we all need to let go every once in awhile. You can’t control everything that happens in your life. It’s much more fun to just goof around with it, and sometimes the best things happen without much effort at all.

Originally published via Medium.com.

I’m new to the NFT space. In fact, less than a year ago, I appeared on a podcast and spoke in public about how I didn’t understand the concept. Fortunately, a lot has changed since then. Services such as Cargo and OpenSea have made it easier than ever to mint and view NFTs with a set of web-based services that allow users to put almost any sort of digital content into the blockchain. But let’s back up just a second and work up to that. I just figured out what an NFT was myself, after working up to it for almost a full year.

How It Got Started

The story starts last December, when, a day or two after Christmas, a friend of mine sent me a link to a website called Cent. I joined up and saw it as a golden opportunity to pursue a new audience online. I’d experimented with a site called Ello that was billed “the creator’s network,” but I hadn’t received much in the way of reward or anything there and was fairly slow to build my account in terms of followers. I discontinued my use of that platform a bit after getting onto Cent and beginning to receive tips in Ethereum for my work.

Ethereum is a network, and ETH is a cryptocurrency that is used to pay fees on the Ethereum network. Ethereum is special because it is backed by the most robust development community in the blockchain marketplace; that is, more applications accomplish more diverse ends on the Ethereum network than on any other blockchain. Games, information exchanges, trading, and even authentication services such as Metamask which make use of ETH wallet addresses to manage accounts securely; all of these and more are already deployed at various stages of development via Ethereum today.

Naturally, I was getting paid in this stuff, so I had to figure out what it was. That took a few months, but was rather boring, so I saved up one paycheck and bought a crypto token called Tezos with it for a lark. It doubled over the course of the next two weeks or thereabouts. I was hooked on cryptocurrency! I took up trading and did fairly well over the course of the immediate past. While this was going on, I was experimenting creatively with the most engaged audience at the deepest level that I’ve found anywhere on the internet today. The new beta came out and I believe the site has declined since that point in terms of this activity, but I waxed philosophical and watched the tips roll in faster than my eBook sales on Amazon counted upward, not that I made all that much via Cent.

I published a book to Cent, in fact, called A Murder In The Silicon Hills which you can read from beginning to end onsite using links at the bottom of each chapter. People tipped the work each week it seemed, sometimes quite generously. If I’d kept all of that ETH I probably would have at least a few hundred dollars today. I noticed that artists were doing artwork that was selling on websites for substantial sums, but didn’t really understand which parts of an NFT were stored in ETH, which were in sidechains, and whether it would all work long-term or not. I knew I didn’t want to see the inconsistent storage I’d previously experienced with IPFS, and I understood that blockchain’s immutability was what made it different from IPFS, but I was uncertain of the price.

So I waited. I looked at the concept of happiness from a philosophical angle, then put together a short and light philosophy book about happiness called Bring Back Satire. I put this new book up on Amazon and sold a handful of copies, but never drew much attention for it until I minted an NFT version of it and put a copy onto OpenSea.io, where it sold for about $125 in ETH.

It turns out, even these days gas can be as low as $20 or so to mint a single NFT using Cargo. To do a run of identical NFTs with royalty agreements that can retroactively pay you over time as the artifact changes hands, it’s looking like significantly more (.8ETH, all in, give or take). Enough more that I won’t pay that much to go forward with this project if it’s possible to wait out the high prices, though using Valuables as a fundraising platform for this work of art is a new possibility I’m looking into. So, for now, I’m waiting for the price of gas to drop on the Ethereum network so that I can execute my transactions for a reasonable sum of money.

With that said, the prices are generally reasonable enough that, if there really is enough of a market to support a $20 or $25 average first sale price for 25 of these books, I will be able to get them out into the world where people can trade them at will as collectibles. I believe there is substantial reason to believe that this improves the upside for the writer dramatically in comparison to services like Amazon Kindle which do handle some marketing and some money for authors, but charge far higher fees. I’m about to try to divorce the monetization of the book from the text by tokeninzing it, after which I plan to make a few formats of the work completely free to the world to read.

What’s Next

From here, it looks to me as if NFTs are poised to take over. These unique and immutable assets have an opportunity to change everything about digital commerce and digital rights management in the near term! Once the owner holds the token, the files locked inside can be downloaded and viewed at any time with no transaction fee to pay. The owner incentive structure is fascinating, though: it is more financially beneficial to the owner of such an NFT to download the file and sell the token (if the goal is to retrieve the information within) without sharing the PDF file or other content!

That’s right! The collector’s mindset here could be an asset to creators everywhere who are interested in cutting out the middle man and assuming more responsibility for the distribution of their content. The sword cuts both ways, however, and widely-read works are more likely to generate interest as collectibles, so content creators will be able to approach the market from different angles as they see fit.

Weird collaborations between writers such as myself, studio artists who make audio files, and of course our friends who do visual art, may become far more commonplace as the digital art universe takes on a new degree of complexity in response to the ease of integration offered by the new medium. For one example, have a look at this lovely poem/picture combo by Cent user @Puffin. A small thing, which has long been the fashion in magazines and in books, images featured alongside works of prose can have a certain priming effect upon the reader, perhaps striking a sort of familiar chord when it goes according to plan.

The same sort of thing should be feasible with music… here’s an early attempt at something like that by yours truly if you’re curious.The point of all of this is that what is happening is small-time creators are finding a major advantage in their ability to create unique, memorable and therefore collectible content on the blockchain. As Cent have recently shown with their lovely tweet bidding application Valuables, it is entirely possible to turn virtually anything that exists on the internet into a commodity with technology many creators can have direct access to today.The question on everyone’s mind is this: what will you make?

As the famous Clash frontman Joe Strummer once said, the future is unwritten. The genius Strummer had was that he could go around to all of the places where different people gathered to say what they had to say and make the music they wanted to make, and he could see the value in all of it.

Strummer’s career as a musician, from the Clash to the Mescaleros, was about taking the sounds he heard and putting them together in his own way, to create something new that spoke to people. The point, to him, was to “communicate something” to the audience, and as a creative and a writer I think what excites me the most about the evolving NFT space is the treasure trove of new possibilities that web3 communication has already begun to open up.

The barriers between an artist of any stripe and an audience are eroding rapidly in the face of Ethereum’s rapidly increasing library of automations for almost everything. Soon, middlemen will be out of the game entirely. It is possible that these new distribution methods for classic forms of information will dramatically reshape the economics of the independent creative lifestyle, making it far more accessible as well as more stable and thus more desirable.

The ability of a smart contract to create and enforce royalties will simplify DRM (digital rights management) and I can’t help but think that increasingly direct communication between creatives and ever-larger audiences enabled worldwide by technology could have the potential to create a modern-day Renaissance. However, after my conversation with the one and only Marjan Moghaddam this weekend, I am convinced that the present day’s NFT art movement represents merely a Roccoco and not yet a true Renaissance.

Originally published at Voice.

The cover image for this piece of writing was generated by StableDiffusion, and is an excellent example of the hyperrealist style requested. The piece seems to have a real face in it - almost so real it could be a photograph of a person, but the hues become wrong in some areas, creating impressions of features that no real face is likely to have. The result is that the piece has an unreal quality to it. We could imagine someone seeing it from a distance and thinking it resembled someone they knew, but upon closer inspection our imaginary friend would almost certainly be tipped off at some point that this wasn’t a real person, much less a photograph of an acquaintance. When StableDiffusion does it, it’s hard to guess what the machine might be trying to tell us; it isn’t trying to tell us anything, it is randomly combining elements until its trainer tells it has gotten its result.  Still, when people use the hyperreal style, as in the photo to follow, there is often a message or at least an idea behind the piece, even if it is vague and difficult to describe verbally.

Indeed, we find hyperrealism in literature as well as art and philosophy. Philosophy, when employed by thinkers such as Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, comes up with lots of concepts - the image that becomes the real, rather than the other way around. Elements of this style of cognition go at least back to thinkers such as Spinoza, but the duplicitousness of modern consumerism really ran things into high gear. In my work Formal Dialectics, I critiqued Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy from what might be considered a hyperreal angle.

The general line of reasoning there was centered around a lot of time I had spent studying Plato, reading the existing primary source texts, and almost never finding Forms or Ideas in any of them (much less the rigorous and well-formed positive account that Russell seems to swear Plato defined). Then I read HoWP, and I just couldn’t understand where Russell was drawing his conclusions from. So, I argued, perhaps the body of philosophical work around the Platonic Theory of Forms is one example of an image becoming the real. In plain English, someone made it up and convinced someone else it was true, and before you know it, it’s accepted canon being taught in classrooms everywhere. Philosophers are a discerning group, though, and if one thing can be said in Russell’s defense, it is perhaps that most philosophy lessons on the subject come with a bit of skepticism.

Granted, not everyone is so concerned about what a long-dead Ancient Greek philosopher thought the world was like. These traces of history are extremely tough to follow, too - we can’t exactly go back in time and simply ask Plato what the right answer is, so we’re limited to guessing mostly. In Thomas Hobbes’ famous work Leviathan, my favorite concept had little or nothing to do with political philosophy—that book was the first one in which I encountered the concept of ratiocination, of which addition is one sort. Essentially, Hobbes argues, our minds take simple concepts and combine them to form more complex ones. We can trace this process consciously by analyzing our thinking. One key worry of hyperrealism in philosophy is that there is no sensory base layer to ratiocinate our way back to, leaving it difficult if not impossible to ever discern the strength or weakness of a given line of reasoning based upon virtual grounds!

Literature does a good job of getting to a line of reasoning that philosophy doesn’t seem as well-equipped to handle, in this case, what it feels like to experience a situation in which one does not know what is real and what is virtual. The vague anxious tone that can be found in hyperrealist works like Don DeLillo’s classic White Noise, for example, comes from shifts in the culture. What enshrined White Noise as a classic, in my opinion at least, is the element of incomplete attachment to a greater whole that comes through as we read the book. The narrative is always shifting, always changing, being updated piece by piece over time and by an instrument that was never understood to be perfect for the purpose in the first place. Mostly these shifts in the context of the story come through the radio, or the TV, or the kids. Almost never are we really sure what is going on.

With a growing suite of technologies directed at the underlying problem - how to discern and analyze the veracity, origin, and value of things that happen as we interact with technology, and with each other via technology - of hyperrealism, it appears we may at last be able to begin to peer beyond this curious historic moment in which it first became necessary to question the massive flows of information that gradually became available to us. Public blockchains in particular seem likely to be useful sources of truth.

There is plenty of room for speculation, as the culture in general has not yet integrated anything like public blockchain or decentralized web services at scale, as to what may be coming next. For now, it appears that deepfakes and superintelligent AI systems with arbitrary goals are a new form of hyperreal problem posing, the very art of presenting such things changed by the emergence of technologies that make it possible to respond to the Baudrillard problem of a model of a real without reality. The response can be simple, even: if it happens on-chain and I can see it happen there, I may believe it to roughly the same extent I would believe something I saw with my own eyes. It is always possible to be fooled, and to have the rug pulled from beneath my feet, but something very remarkable is happening at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and blockchain technology.

Critics may respond to this line of reasoning by claiming that the telephone cut through the white noise of the postal service, just as the television provided a better means to transmit information from one mind to another than did the radio. It is impossible to argue that the pattern will not repeat, but the very fact of the public availability of on-chain information in atomic and simple (if early) form is something new. It is now possible to know with certainty that a given wallet called a given method on a given smart contract on a given blockchain - and as these utterly reliable seeds of information grow, perhaps hyperrealist anxieties will give way to something more hopeful: scalable coordination.

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0xdA0060876E7342771e12eccf2B8d966D25007be0/0

https://questchains.xyz/polygon/pagedao-second-generation-minter-beta-testing

The Second Generation PageDAO NFT Minter is now in testnet phase. Released 2/20/2023, this unique decentralized application enables the user to bring a manuscript and create a unique NFT asset with a variety of never-before-seen features.

This piece of technology was developed primarily by Robert Pollock and incorporates minting pages from Bonfire, marketplaces from ThirdWeb, and contracts from Mintplex. To top it all off, we’re using Questchains to onboard everyone to the new testnet here:

It has only been a few hours since the new testnet went live, but excitement around the first PageDAO NFT creator to enable users to spin up gated assets or marketplaces is already palpable.

To peek around without necessarily getting involved with the testnet, please have a look at the rest of this article.

Previewing the New dAPP

The new dAPP is a special piece of technology. This is the second official generation of the PageDAO Readme Books NFTBook Minter, and it features most of the user requests we’ve heard since we released the initial version 14 months ago. Here is a short list of things that are changing.

Multiple Collections: The new minter will be one piece of code, but it will exist in many places simultaneously. As a piece of FOSS (Free, Open Source Software), it will be possible for other users to take the code, modify it to suit the intended use case, and deploy assets that are compatible with existing PageDAO NFT products. These assets can exist on their own collections, and the WIP Publishing Team intends to create forks of the software for a variety of PageDAO projects and perhaps could be financially persuaded to do one or two extras if people really want us to. This is not the final stop on the journey, however — there is more technology waiting in the wings.

Scope out the new minter here: https://minterv3.onrender.com/ (membership NFT required!)

Bespoke Marketplaces: Bonfire.xyz has created open source software that rapidly spins up a marketplace for NFT assets controlled by the user. OpenSea will also index these assets, but due to recent royalty revocation, it is important to note that the custom marketplace enables the user to do whatever they choose with respect to royalties.

https://main--gleeful-sunburst-65c589.netlify.app/

Gated NFTs: The new assets have a built-in token gate that reveals only as much of the text as the author chooses at the time of the initial minting of the NFT. A set number of pages from the work will show up publicly as a Preview, and further pages of the work require the user to connect wallet and prove ownership of the asset to enable viewing.

https://ipfs.nftbookbazaar.com/ipfs/QmVPSP9xXZ3n3uzZ6x2K64vmUEc2zpHERS4D7Sef8yfPNq

EVM-Compatible: The present technology platform provides the ability to spin up compatible collections on any public blockchain that supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Initial targets include Polygon, Arbitrum, and Ethereum Mainnet. Waiting in the wings are Optimism, Evmos, and others.

https://www.bonfire.xyz/indefatigable

Incentivized Testnet: 50k $PAGE tokens are set aside by the DAO to be airdropped to holders of the Soulbound NFT testnet users can earn by participating in the testnet. All that is required is to complete the basic tasks the developers assign and provide some feedback along the way.

Join in the fun! Go to https://page.cent.co to find links and subscribe for updates from the PageDAO corner of the metaverse, welcoming Authors to Web3 since 2021. This article was originally published by Epicdylan (me!) at PageDAO Magazine. Find it here:

https://medium.com/pagedao-magazine/announcing-the-second-generation-of-the-pagedao-nft-minter-d0b10e3f39f9