## The Backstory
It all started about a month ago, when my professor at TTU approached me, asking what the heck an API was. Here we are, a month later, and I've trained a pretty solid context model into a local Claude3 instance and used that to enter a hackathon with another dev, Jonny Johnson of Dialogues AI, and NFT Joe of UNDRGRND. Rionna Morgan and Robbie Pollock of PageDAO Core Team rounded out our team. Deploy on Degen Week was a blast and a half, and it was a lot of fun building a dev project with Jonny.

Jonny's indexing dApp turned out to be an extremely powerful tool, which you can see on github here: https://github.com/PageDAO/raffler_web_app (hint: if you're looking to do an airdrop, this is not a bad place to start! it lets you compile lists of EVM chain addresses and export CSVs of them easily!). I had some pie-in-the-sky dreams at the beginning of the week but gradually cut more and more scope. The final day felt like limbo, though! We had to scrap the on-Frame minting button we had been hoping to squeeze in.

We let things really get down to the wire and almost didn't get our submission in in time, but two remarkable things happened during the pressure interval: 1. I spontaneously built an IPFS-based mint site on a static HTML document (which I haven't seen before, at least in the context of a mint button!), just to be sure the contract could be minted so we could blast it and try to get some users and 2. in the rush, I made a few mistakes!

Never fear, though, dear reader. The NFTs are for free and the strange accident of my ERC-20 Raffle Ticket mint won't cost anyone any money! When we do smart contract development work, it pays to be slow and methodical - anything new needs to be tested a lot.

Where is all of this going, you ask? You were hoping for more unhinged degeneracy? Well, let's get right to that part, then.


## The Unhinged Night Of Utter Degeneracy

In late 2019, a friend of mine shared a post to a slack channel that said the phrase "Ethereum use cases" and had a link to Cent--I was onboarded immediately and completely and totally hooked.

A year later, the founder of Cent bought Bring Back Satire on Ethereum Mainnet and was promptly rugged by Cargo, when they went under. Almost immediately thereafter, Jack Dorsey's first tweet was sold by Valuables, a Cent project. Six months after that, PageDAO was founded. Six months later, Readme Books was born.

The bear market set in, after that, and a depressingly slow 18-month build session took the PageDAO team through ups and downs. We met with consultants, we pioneered new technologies people just couldn't quite be interested enough in to make a market, we experimented, we made partnerships. And then, at the beginning of this year, we got $PAGE listed on Osmosis and had our first interesting DeFi experience as a DAO.

But, dear reader, what led me to Deploy on Degen week was a sense that tremendous opportunity was brewing in the EVM-based ecosystem again, and as we hacked away all week, we learned a good deal about the current state of affairs.

None of it prepared me for what happened yesterday, on World Book Day, no less! Yesterday Cent released, in my opinion, BY FAR their most impressive technology effort to date.

The setup appears to be a suite of complementary applications, including https://yoyo.meme/ and https://up.army/ - Cent always did have a way with a short and clever URL!

Yoyo.meme is a fascinating memecoin factory fronted by a coin called $YOYO that is tied to the up.army application, in which users buy websites via bonding curve on the Base blockchain. When users buy into the websites' sitecoins, a small fee goes into the liquidity curve of $YOYO, creating a value capture mechanism, on a bonding curve.

Every memecoin issued at yoyo.meme is on a bonding curve against $ETH, which makes a lot of sense because $ETH is a great asset to have exposure to at scale in many ways. My utter degeneracy involved creating a variety of memecoins and LPing them against one another. I also baked a book into one. And I dumped about fifty websites into up.army - just to see what would happen! The bull market is a-brewing, Web3 fam, and we're gonna see some really amazing technical lifts this cycle.

The most unexpected part of that is how small the effort to have these outsize impacts is getting. Let's take a tour through some of the things I threw together so you can get a feel for what up.army and yoyo.meme do, as well as why I feel like yoyo.meme and Readme Books are a match made in heaven.


## A Guided Tour

Exhibit A: my newly-overstuffed metamask wallet

Minting memecoins and sitecoins all night long was a fairly wild ride. The most fun part was creating the liquidity pools on Uniswap V2 for them, though. I like liquidity pools.

Here are the 2 notable LPs I put up:

First, and deepest, Wippy vs BringBackSatire. 2 classic PageDAO memes. Got another? It costs $.15 to LP your coin against these, and I think if we mesh them together like that, we could start to see interesting network effects.

$WIPPY vs $BRINGBACKSATIRE: 1:1

$PAGEDAO.ORG vs $WIPPY: $WIPPY is less expensive as an experimental tension

Now, the contract addresses for these tokens are very important because these pools are tiny and you can't really do much in the way of swapping between them if you don't have the addresses to import. Here they are.

$BringBackSatire: 0xB08c87c47f25d3AA531FC1c12d7C92Fcc02C0861 (BASE)

$WIPPY: 0xdE1D9A62A7425582Df4Db9b8b7AbC37eBa45DFeF

$PageDAO.Org: 0x01C4993B2bc77F2c5f94079B4D4c319C4AbbE33d


## BringBackSatire: A Book on Memecoin Rails?!

If you follow my twitter, there's a great chance you've seen me loudly exclaiming about elements of this stuff all night, but just in case this didn't sink in:

https://www.yoyo.meme/token/0xB08c87c47f25d3AA531FC1c12d7C92Fcc02C0861

That's right! It's a Bring Back Satire URI that's tied to a memecoin on a bonding curve. Everyone can read the book for free, I picked up some of the tokens once it was live, and I believe I get a little bit of $ETH every time anyone transacts $BringBackSatire!

that's right! PageDAO.org is currently topping the list at up.army!

I'm gonna have to stop writing now so I can go to sleep, but I hope you've enjoyed this article as much as I'm enjoying the feverish pace with which new products of amazing calibre are being released in Web3 all of a sudden!

It has been a great week or so since the last piece was released, and I must confess - I was not expecting the reception it received. I have been getting emails, comments, questions, concerns, critique, praise, and most of all, thoughtful discourse. It is truly a sight to behold!

There's just simply nothing like venturing into the unknown and finding oneself surrounded by friends who want to help.

That's why I went ahead and kept going. I listened as closely as I could to what everyone was saying and then wrote a follow-up piece to try to address everything that I could, as accurately as possible.

Without further adieu, I give you Notes on Virtual Conscious Processes.

https://app.t2.world

Notes on Virtual Conscious Processes

Introduction As a result of the circulation of a recent piece of my writing, "Determined, or Not?", in which I reviewed the work of Dr. Robert Sapolsky in his recent

Enjoy!

-Dylan

For this project, as popular as this vein of philosophical thinking is, the time seems right to introduce the DePhil Dialectic Hour podcast I'm working with Vagobond Magazine to produce. We'll be recording via Twitter Spaces on Friday, November 3, at 3pm EST - so drop by if you're free! You can even get heard on the show if you have thoughts to share about the subject. I'd recommend reading the essay first, but we should cover things in a way that will be accessible even if you don't. Also, I want to shout out CD Damitio for supplying the drive and motivation to make this happen now, instead of talking about it another few months. Good friends are an indispensable part of a happy life and I'm really happy to have so many wonderful people around me these days.

Here's the Twitter link, so set your reminder if you want to join us!

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1lDxLPWVNARxm

I argue that Determined is not the right way to think about minds, bodies, and actions. Instead, we should emphasize the cognitive approach and come up with a way of thinking about what we are and what we can do that isn't couched in age-old ideas such as subject/object dualism. It's far better if we update our basic framework to include discoveries from the past fifty years of science, and accept that dualism is defeated for good.

Read the review here, thanks to T2.world!

https://app.t2.world/article/clog8ea1z626131xmc7kewu4uk

I'll be putting out three more pieces during November, so keep an eye peeled for the email updates I'll send out as each one goes to press.

Cheers,

Dylan

Dear Readers,

I am excited to announce that Review #4 is now live and available for your reading pleasure. This time, we delve into the intricate world of mathematics, philosophy, logic, and physics with Jim Holt's essay collection, "When Einstein Walked With Gödel".

You can dive into our engaging review and join us in exploring this fascinating work by following this link: [Link](https://app.t2.world/article/clnrw690c3240001xmcm0amdl5x)

As always, we appreciate your continued support and we look forward to hearing your thoughts and discussions around the review.

Happy Reading!

Best Regards,

T. Dylan Daniel

Introduction

As we approach our goal of understanding the background of our primary investigation target, distributed cognition, few books are as useful as The Patterning Instinct, by Jeremy Lent. Lent tells the story of the development and continual usage of what he refers to as the patterning instinct at the heart of human cognitive activity. In our grander philosophical framework, we refer back to the Aristotelian doctrine that we study the good not to learn what it is but to become better, and this anchor for our investigation of human cognitive activity provides us with all the context we need to understand that our thinking about thinking can enable us to think in a better way.

The patterning instinct is an attribute of the thinking of humankind that emerges from studying cognitive history. The tendency of thinking to revolve around patterns is ultimately due to its source: the need for people to cooperate to survive. Cooperating with other people and cooperating with nature are similar experiences insofar as they involve taking in information to use in the assembly of a model to then influence by thinking about what to do and doing it. The Patterning Instinct has titular importance for the work because it replaces the Language Instinct first hypothesized by Noam Chomsky as the basis of language and culture.

In my reading of The Patterning Instinct, we find a ready divergence in means. Dr. Lent studies primarily what might be thought of as the collective level of cognitive activity. In discussing the variances we find between the thinking that evolved from rice cultivation and wheat cultivation, for example, Dr. Lent focuses heavily upon the trends that emerged from untold generations of what must have been highly divergent individuals for a substantial part. Lent’s use of the term worldview to refer to a cultural phenomenon of understanding informs us of his chosen scope of investigation.   

Now, human action is neither one-dimensional nor simplistic, and thus Dr. Lent has deigned to invent a new methodology, to be known as cognitive history. Cognitive history empowers the narrative we tell about ourselves to begin to include self-reflective concept mappings; i.e., we are both the product of and one of the primary drivers behind our environment. This view is a stark contrast to other prevailing ideas which insist upon more simplistic causal frameworks, sacrificing depth of explanatory detail in return for wider accessibility.  

The interactive framework of cognitive history enables us to develop a deep and thorough understanding of the way that cognitive processes exert their influence upon human behavior at scale. It also unearths mountains of evidence that cultures are superorganisms made of many human bodies acting on their own under various social frameworks, setting the stage for an in-depth discussion of distributed cognition to take place in Worldview Ethics. 

Pillars of the Patterning Instinct

1. Life is complex

Organisms don’t just find their fit in the environment, they actively construct it, even down to the genomic level. Humans use unique cognitive powers to create new ways to manipulate their environment. In all frankness, this is why I chose this book. Lent’s reasoning gives us a foundation from which to view distributed cognition as an end of human action. It is precisely by embracing the complexity of the interaction between physical and cognitive systems that we begin to empower ourselves to understand their properties.

2. Experience shapes perception

Even as complex living organisms navigate their environment by shaping it around themselves, the structure and character of the environment exerts an influence on perceiving life forms. Chomsky’s language instinct must be discarded because it cannot account for the way non-linguistic cognition enables patterns and communications that do not involve language yet mirror mental representative & symbolic capabilities.

3. Culture models the world

Culture is the set of ideas, behaviors, and expectations that are repeated by the individuals who make up a given society. The customs, habits, rituals, and language of a culture combine to give people who are part of the society that practices it a preordained baseline for interacting with one another, thus making interactions more efficient. If we all had to ask all of the foundational questions of one another before we could begin to cooperate, modern society would only be capable of very slow changes. Because culture models the world, we are able to study culture to derive a basic idea of who we are and how we fit in with everyone else.

4. Culture doesn’t always do what’s best

Much of The Patterning Instinct falls a bit outside the scope of this review because it consists of comparative analysis between particularly East and West. The primary drivers of the separation in terms of content, that is, ideas about environs shaped in different ways by different cultures, end up situating the West in a toxic “conquest of nature” mindset and the East in a less-toxic “harmony preservation” mindset. While this is fascinating reading, Lent himself understands that Western culture can be better at holistic environmental thinking just as Eastern ideas can occasionally lead to conquest and frequently sacrifice the harmony of the natural world for the betterment of human beings. 

In the end, the cultural level of human life is perhaps the most complex part of living. We study it, and our study of it makes it better. Or we deny its importance, and we become worse because our culture suffers. 

Linguistic Determinism

For those who didn’t get to spend a few years in graduate school investigating the hypothesis that the particularities of the language we speak is a major driver of the way in which we interact with the world, I can perhaps give a high level breakdown that encompasses Lent’s view as well as a few other major thinkers in the field. I enjoyed this thread of The Patterning Instinct because it is one of the few I have found which actually does a good job of explaining the situation without too much compromise.

Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote a book called Language, Thought, And Reality, in which the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is explained. In one example, the Hopi language is said to be more effective for communication of certain concepts from quantum mechanics than modern English (a language used for much of physics research!) precisely because it does not contain subject/object divisions. Where an English speaker would say “the light flashed” or some such, a Hopi speaker could merely say “flash!” and be done with it - resulting in a holistic picture of the event without the unneeded subject/object division. 

Throughout the century or so since Whorf’s writings captivated the world, thinkers have been struggling to make sense of the relationship between the structures of language in which we think and make our abstract comparisons and then save the computed results into new vocabulary. To what extent is it only possible to think some thoughts in the right language?

It is here that Lent’s decision to focus on culture at various levels of interaction reveals itself to be the work of a true master of the set of concepts at stake. The final verdict in the ancient Sapir-Whorf debate is neither the strong Whorfian view’s truth, nor that of the weak Whorfian view. Strong Whorfianism predicts that thinkers can only think thoughts enacted by their languages and weak Whorfianism entails that thinking is influenced by language in a less-constraining way but nonetheless has some impact. Lent’s formulation seems to reject both formulations of Whorfianism to look beyond the language as a determinant factor to the culture which uses the language instead, and there we find the most palatable version of linguistic determinism: cultural interdependency.

Cultural-Linguistic Coevolution

Lent’s conclusion is that there is “...a dynamic interdependency between language and culture,” (TPE, 203), as he wraps up the discussion of linguistic determinism. In some sense, language itself is not quite baked into our minds deeply enough to be a transparent determinant force in our behavior directly, but all of the studies showing changes to individual minds that correlate with different languages across similar thought domains argue that something beyond a basic user/used object relationship is at work when people use language to communicate. This something is the relationship between the language speaker and the culture the individual is a part of. Language enables rapid transmission of information within a given cultural sphere of understanding, but the understanding itself is an enactment of physical change in the brain of the understander. 

I don’t wish to toot my own horn too much here, but I was an overachiever in grad school. In my psycholinguistics course, I impressed my classmates with a presentation that spanned three disciplines to arrive at the conclusion that there are aspects of culture that are determined by language, but also that language itself is the outcome of a complex set of interactions between individuals, their environment, and their culture. The paper I ended up writing makes the argument that a neologism is needed to make sense of this interplay, which I termed ‘lexiculture.’

In a nutshell, if you get deep into the literature here, you too may arrive at the conclusion that culture is the interaction between different people and their environment (which has natural, artificial, and virtual components) and language evolves to meet the needs of this or that particular culture by serving as something like RAM in a computer system. RAM stores information that needs to be accessed the most often and by the greatest number of different applications in a computer system. 

Hence, we see culture as the broadest interface between environment and individual mind that can frequently be needed, and language is perhaps the most abstract means of storing different bits and pieces of information needed by individuals interacting with their culture. Lent puts it well when he says “... culture and language reinforce each other, leading to a deep persistence of underlying structures of thought from one generation to the next,” (TPE, 204). In the end, it is not the case that strong linguistic determinism limits the ability of the adaptable human mind to think the thoughts it needs to think to enable its body to flourish in its environment, but rather that the culture in deep interplay with that language is responsible for setting expectations for all the minds that interact with it and, when accepted by individuals, these expectations can exert an outsize influence on behavior because they directly, physically relate to real neurological structures. 

In the end, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right to an extent and wrong to an extent. If we study the issue long enough, we realize that culture does exert certain pressures upon individuals and that it does so in ways mediated by language frequently. We also see that individuals can enter the cultural spotlight and exert an influence in return. The key takeaway here is that culture is a metacognitive complex emerging from the physical interactions between neurons in brains and the internal and external states of the world these neurons map.

Negentropy & Gestalt Psychology

In Chapter 19, “‘Something Far More Deeply Interfused’: The Systems Worldview,” Lent takes us through Gestalt psychology and explains the high concept of negative entropy (negentropy) penned by Schrodinger. In addition to these two gems, we get a variety of other examples of emergent properties and systems in which unpredictability ensues despite well-known variable components. Are we nothing more than the activity of neurons, or are we patterns that emerge from the activities of these smaller component parts when understood at scale?

Gestalt psychology postulates that the mind emerges from the activity of neurons as something different from the sum of its parts. Add up the 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and you still won’t create conscious thought. The best example is a corpse - a dead brain is in every way the same as a living one, but it doesn’t produce thought. It also doesn’t flow blood, or engage in metabolic processes at the cellular level. It can’t send signals to the rest of the dead body to cause actions to take place because the emergent pattern that once animated it has been stopped. 

Schrodinger’s concept of negentropy dovetails particularly nicely with the Gestalt mindset by positing a goal for the Gestalt whole: reversing entropy. From my own research into the way brains work, I am quite familiar with the notion of reward prediction error (RPE) and the way that this concept helps to explain the subjective experiences of pleasure and pain. It seems that Schrodinger’s thinking mimics the dopaminergic tract in the brain which handles motivation to a degree that is remarkable for its explanatory power. 

Pleasure involves getting what we want; we make a prediction about the world, calculate some action to increase it, and it works. How could we not enjoy this rare reprieve from the callous, uncaring hardship of day to day life? Pain, by inverse, involves changes to the models we have. In one sense, pain refers to a cascade of chemical reactions that start when we are injured and send signals to our nerves informing our brains of one particular piece of information: it hurts here. Psychological pain, on the other hand, involves not getting what we want and learning something new - it is the experience of needing to rewire the neurons that govern our predictive framework in an arbitrary way. 

Given this shockingly clear overlap between the experiences of pleasure and pain that Aristotle once referred to as the “two sovereign masters of mankind,” we must not fail to consider the possibility that each of these thinkers - Gestalt psychologists, Schrodinger, and Aristotle - is touching a part of the same elephant, so to speak. 

In my view, there is a profound revelation to be discovered by the clever reader here: an argument that, using systems theory, a mechanistic reductive account of consciousness can be created to explain the unexplainable aspects of the emergence of self from body. Life is an attempt by a collection of metabolically-active matter locked in an emergent pattern of behavior to reduce entropy around itself so that it can self-perpetuate. Knowing this, we should be able to make rapid progress against a variety of ethical objectives moving forward.

References

1. Daniel, T. Dylan. (2015). “The Lexicultural Propagation of Concepts.” Philosophy of Language, by Brian Thomas. Chapter 2.

2. Lent, Jeremy. (2017). The Patterning Instinct. Prometheus Books, New York. 

The most recent release by Green Day has hit Spotify! You can now listen to three previously unreleased tracks that didn’t make the cut for the upcoming 30th anniversary edition of Dookie. This release follows a drop that happened last month of a 4-track demo version of the album. Let’s dive in and rehash some memories.

https://spotify.com

Dookie (30th Anniversary Outtakes)

Listen to Dookie (30th Anniversary Outtakes) on Spotify. Green Day · Ep · 2023 · 3 songs.

Prequel: 4-Track Demos

It’s always a wild ride to see behind the curtain when you’re looking at something you’ve been extremely familiar with for decades. The tracks aren’t in the same order and they aren’t really even the same songs! In some cases the lyrics are completely different from the ones you’re probably familiar with.

It seems like a thing that might be uncomfortable or difficult to understand but give it a listen and you’ll see what I see — Billie Joe Armstrong’s songwriting process. I’ll go into a little more detail about the special connection I have to this album (at least to the 1995 Reprise release of it!) later, but the upshot is that I really enjoyed the 4-track demo release. 

Burnout is fairly similar to the version you’re familiar with, so you might be put off-guard when you hear the rest of the tracks. I don’t want to spoil it because I know lots and lots of people really love this album and I think you’ll enjoy the demo more if it’s new and unexpected when you first hear it. 

Still, it’s a review — I have to talk about the highlights a little bit. So, here’s the compromise. Stop reading now, and go listen to the album, and then come back and finish reading the article if you want the full effect.

“Basket Case” is a completely different song — and it is every bit as good as the 1995 release! There’s also a little extra flavor, probably because we’re a bit deeper inside of the band’s creative process.

“She” is a little easier to understand in terms of vocals unless they’re just lightly rewritten, in which case I still don’t know all the words to the 1995 version of the song.

“Sassafras Roots” was probably my favorite song on the original album for most of my teenage years. The undertones of loneliness and desire were just the exact right frequency to tune out some of the bad feelings I had back then. And the melody.. Something about the song just intoxicates me even these days.

My favorite song for the early days was a shoo-in: “When I Come Around.” I actually learned to play the bass guitar when I was a kid for the simple reason that none of the bass players I tried to jam with had any idea what Mike Dirnt was doing and I wanted to be able to teach them. Hearing the version on this demo is like getting an even closer look into what was probably my first real favorite song.

“When It’s Time” is a track I’ve never heard before but it fits right in with all of the favorites on this spectacular time capsule.

Okay, so that’s the 4-track demo. Let’s get to the main course: the outtakes.

The Outtakes

I’m hammering this article out at 9:30PM at a Starbucks the very first night I ever heard this album, less than 2 hours later, because of the connection I felt to the first track on this limited release. And yes, there will be spoilers, so go listen before you read on if you want to get the full effect.

Just like the 4-track demo release, the Outtakes are songs that haven’t made it onto Dookie in any form yet. They’re both extremely familiar and somehow also unexpected. 

“Christie Road” was a song on Kerplunk, an earlier Green Day album than Dookie that I listened to even after Dookie had become a little too popular for my taste. In this form, it’s clear the band had evolved a bit between the Kerplunk studio session and the Dookie one. It may have been recorded as a test or just because the band thought they could do a bit better with the delivery, but it’s not too different from the version you’re familiar with from Kerplunk.

Still, hearing this song for the first time in maybe ten years or so, I had a new thought when I was listening to it: this song is about a place. I don’t like the new Green Day very much because it is so difficult to connect with as a person. The band grew into successful famous people, and if there’s one thing the Replacements knew, it’s that success and money make you boring. You lose your edge because you’re not having to fight to survive every minute of every day.

Back in the 90s, there weren’t cellphones with portable maps of the whole world that people could carry around in their pockets and everybody had to meet up with each other out there somewhere. The insight that this song is about a real place and real people who really used the term “Christie Road” to designate a spot they could escape from some of the bullshit was really striking to me. More on that insight in the reflection to follow.

“409 in Your Coffeemaker” is completely new to me, and I really like it. I don’t really understand the song yet but 409 is a cleaning agent and not something I’d usually want in my coffee. Younger me would have really enjoyed the chorus of the song too, I definitely used to spend some time thinking about previous mistakes.

“Walking the Dog” opens up with a bong rip and has an air of just-for-fun to it. The guitar lines are classic blues and the recording sounds like it may have been live. It isn’t quite as poignant or introspective as the others but it carries a strong sense of the culture that gave rise to the band that would grow into an international sensation within a year or two from when it was recorded.

Thirty Years’ Perspective

Thirty years. Thirty. Years. I still can’t believe it has almost been that long since I fell in love with this music. I have to wonder how many other kids, isolated in whatever ways, also connected with this album. I have very rarely ever connected with anything so deeply as with Dookie. I stared at the album art for hours, cataloging doodles while I listened to the CD on repeat. I guess what must have happened is that I created a bunch of pathways in my brain that have somehow survived all the living that happened between then and now. These songs are like a time machine that I can use to whisk myself back to, if not perfect, at least happy and good times before the onset of the insanity of adolescence.

Things have changed so much since Dookie came out. There are articles in top newspapers about how people don’t even remember how they spent their time before smartphones, which didn’t even really take off until Dookie was fifteen years old. 

I didn’t feel compelled to leave the sauna early and rush to a coffee shop where I like just to write to tell you what I think about some music, though. I think hearing Dookie was one of the most important, if not the single most important event in my childhood. I had loved music since I was old enough to hum along with the radio, but here was an album that seemed to understand how I felt. It’s even more remarkable to think that this intense emotional connection happened over a distance of thousands of miles, songs written by people who had never met anyone I had ever met and who probably had never even been to any of the same places as anyone I knew. That’s the power of music, and once I felt it the first time I never stopped looking for more.

I’ll explain.

I remember listening to Dookie for the first time. I’d heard some of the songs in my dad’s truck driving around town and he’d explained to me that “music like this is very important to lots of kids everywhere,” which I suppose he’d learned by reading the Rolling Stone. My dad was a punk in his youth — doing his part to spread the gospel of St. Joe Strummer to his friends and coworkers since the late ’70s. I’m proud of him, but despite having a stellar dad, I wasn’t supposed to listen to Dookie — and so one day, of course, while he was at work I swiped it.

I put the CD into a little boombox that was in my room and pressed play. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. It took a few songs for the effect to start to really kick in. I finished the album at low volume somehow, but dad didn’t say anything about the CD being gone and I was hooked. Every day after summer camp I remember putting that CD in and turning the volume all the way up.

I went to a church summer camp, and I started talking to the other kids about Green Day — they didn’t like it, and they didn’t want me to talk about it. So there I was, for the first time experiencing a connection with an art movement despite my relative isolation and sequestration in dry, small Lubbock Texas. I was ten years old.

What had happened was simple: a meme (the album) had propagated from the recording studio into my bedroom in a turn of events that would have probably been impossible mere decades before, and would certainly have been impossible before recorded music was a thing. The circumstance was equally unique due to the emotional salience all of this had for me. Here I was, a sheltered kid from nowhere slated to lead the most boring life ever and already fairly unhappy about it. I’d put this record on and it made me feel like I could accomplish anything. I’d bounce around my bedroom by myself as if I’d eaten a pound of espresso beans or something, and nobody I knew had even the slightest inclination to see what I was so excited about.

As time went on, punk rock became an integral part of my culture. I played the only gig with a live band of my life in 9th grade, covering Green Day’s “Brain Stew” with no vocals because our singer chickened out. It was scary to us, but we mostly weren’t in too much trouble — that and my friends were basically poseurs I’d talked into this. They both went on to be high school athletes and popular guys who did as they were told. That was okay, the next year I started high school (yes, Lubbock did 3 years of high school starting in 10th grade back then) and made friends with all of the other punks I could find in Lubbock — there were maybe half a dozen of us, and I only really remember spending a lot of time with two of them.

I didn’t start to identify as a punk rocker until high school had been in session for a year or two, but I’d always been a total nerd so I found that I had the unique ability to be an ace in the classroom while also getting into the culture I was interested in. We had a few bands who would play shows and I just remember going and seeing music I vibed with and vibing with the other people who vibed with it and just being friends with everyone by the end of the night.

Culture, Music, and Money

Throughout my journey as a connoisseur of obscure music from a variety of genres, I’ve always at least put a little effort into listening to earlier material from bands I find via the normal channels. More often than not, especially with punk rock, you’ll find the grittiest, most down to earth stuff by looking at the early albums. Even bands like Rancid get a little more comfortable and it’s like their identity goes from an open question to being a solved problem. There’s something really special about the risks taken by bands on their way up, but before they separate themselves from their communities or get separated from their communities by money and comfort and getting older, the experiments that happen with all of the heart and commitment behind them are just really something.

And now we’re to the good part of this reflection about my first favorite album. I’ve explained how I discovered my love for music via Green Day and my dad, and I’ve waxed poetic about the strangeness of finding oneself in a position where you have culture but it’s far away. What I want to explain now is a hot take on a trend I’ve been studying very closely in my professional life the past few years. One way to sum it up might be to say that things are getting progressively weirder as technology gets more effective and easier to use.

The essay you’re reading may be about to get a bit weirder, too. I’ll take things slow and break each idea out into its own section. I’ll try to be sure to get enough explanation in with each segment, too.

Community

I alluded to it earlier, in the review section, and again just now in Culture, Music, and Money — but here we can finally just come right out and say it. With no equivocation, pop music is a creative act by a songwriter who is not alone or isolated but instead part of a robust community of people who like the sort of thing the creator makes. 

There are some really interesting things that happen when we start to think about an album like Dookie that conquers the world — it’s the debut album of a band that started off as a group of people who were talented, driven, and lucky enough to make it big. Before Dookie, Green Day was already a fairly big deal. But they were part of a music scene that was, itself, a big deal. And so their friends and families and culture were still really closely attached to the creative process and performance activity of the group.

What happens when a band blows up the way Green Day did is that changes.

I don’t want to rehash the old Boxcar trope here, but instead I have a money connection in mind. What else happens when a band blows up? 

Well, who gets paid? Cui bono?

The band gets paid. And the record company’s investors get paid. The fans don’t get a dime, they get the shaft instead.

It makes a lot of sense to me to think about how alienating this is to the band, which has created itself from, within, and for that community. Even the songs are modeled to the community’s feedback. But all of those relationships die off. The people the band members spend their time with before they hit it big may try to stick around and in some cases maybe even do so successfully, but the neighborhood changes, the way the songs are written changes, and the things that people write about change too!

Just going from working a day job and really having to be super pissed off about that to channel enough energy into the “side project,” music, to now having a massive audience to please and a bunch of producers and managers around is itself a massive change in what the band members are feeling, thinking, doing for fun, and who they’re spending time with. And these things are basically what life is made of, and life is where songs come from. So it’s completely natural for a band’s sound to change and we don’t even have to attach a negative connotation to it because for lots of people this is exactly what they want.

All of this is just to drive home the point — the community of listeners is intimately involved in the creation of a piece of music. If they hate a song, they can talk shit to the band — and the band may drop that piece from their lists. Or rewrite it. 

It’s also fairly obvious what people think about a piece of music when you’re on the stage playing it. They can dance, mosh, jump up and down, or ignore you — and part of being a great performer is an uncanny ability some people develop to interact with this feedback loop by changing the way they’re performing.

As someone who tried for years to start a band anyone except myself would care about, has performed open mic nights at widely varying levels of skill, and hasn’t written a song or picked up a guitar in months — nothing will kill a song faster than never finding that first person who likes it.

Trust me, there are four or five dozen ghost songs floating around in my mind somewhere and I have no intention of trying to revive any of them. Nobody liked them enough to keep them alive — and don’t forget my taste and culture aren’t just the norm for where I live, so it isn’t like there were a lot of chances to try and find people who’d enjoy them in the first place.

In addition to my relative isolation killing my musician drive, I’m also very fortunate — I started writing, and put the writing online, and found a community of people who care about the things that come out of my mind that way. So don’t worry — I’m not really all that sad about the music thing not being where life took me, I got lots of great times in just playing the stereo and going to shows where other people took the stage!

My point in all of this is, just to recap before we get to the wildest part, is that 1. The community takes an essential role in the creation of any sort of widely circulated art and 2. The community changes over time, in the case of success looking a lot like exponential growth and in the case of failure looking more like a blip when the number of interested parties goes from 1 to 0.

Thought Experiment Setup

Picture Billie Joe Armstrong in the moment when he realizes he’s going to get a ton of money for his new record deal. Picture his face in the high end studio where Dookie was recorded. He’s comparing it to the previous records the band put out. But while we’re at it, pretend one thing is different. Instead of CDs, the record executives plan to sell digital collectibles that exist on the internet and give the entire world an instant opportunity to purchase the album. 

Further, this is what happened with the two previous Green Day albums as well, just at a lower and less-marketed scale. 

Are you following me? The weird part is what comes next, so I hope you are. We have one question to get started: what is different about this world?

A number of things come to mind. Bill Gates must’ve figured out how to build a value transfer layer into the Internet, for one thing!

But, far more relevant to our line of thought, the owners of the previous albums can be rewarded with a free copy of this new album. Album-holders may be able to get free tickets to the tour concerts. People, instead of scalping concert tickets, might prefer to follow a lot of bands early and buy their records in hopes that future albums will blow up and they can resell to a hungry market of new fans. The album might be free to listen to, even. Holding the album could grant access to hidden content, b-sides, and even future releases before they drop.

Still, none of these game-changing differences even comes close to the impact that digital collectibles could have had on the culture within which Green Day found itself.

This next bit is a little sticky, so I’ll try to make it accessible — the single biggest difference between the 1995 Green Day band that actually happened and the version in our hypothetical here isn’t the band itself at all. It’s the band’s community.

Remember earlier when we talked about the process by which a band’s community is changed when success creeps in? How the hunger goes away?

Well, another thing that happens is that they start targeting a new audience with their songs — they have wider reach, this is natural. It is the process by which the rich and famous are able to grow out of their starting point and become world class performers capable of entertaining thousands of people live and millions with their records.

But it is also the process that distributes wealth to the band and not to the band’s community.

Let that sink in for a second.

The community got nothing in 1995 when Billie Joe Armstrong got rich. Because Billie is an awesome guy who loved his community, he kept giving back and they did get lots of value out of it over time, but mostly it wasn’t monetary value. It wasn’t the type of value you can pay your mortgage with.

In a Rancid song, Tim Armstrong writes: “All my friends moved on, a simple domestic life, they’re all gone. Only a few of us remain, only a few of us wanna keep it the same,” (Trenches, 1993). Part of the reason most people leave music, just like me, is because they aren’t the people who end up being the best performers/writers and therefore can’t make money from the culture and have to find other ways to get by. So they move on. What if they didn’t need to?

Royalty-enabled digital collectibles give artists an opportunity to continue to earn from even a limited collection of actual assets, so picture this: you’re at a show at Gilman Street in the early 1990s, and you pay a few dollars to buy one of ten thousand copies of the band’s album. The band is fine with the idea that one day this collection might sell out and stop generating primary revenue, because they’ll continue to get royalties. The fans have an added incentive to support them, because they won’t lose the album (it’s online) and because they can potentially sell it to someone else for more money in the future if the band does well.

There’s actually a song by Jonathan Mann (aka SongADayMann) that does a great job of explaining this concept: https://songaday.world/auction/5369. Shout out to Jonathan! You do a great job of connecting with Web3 culture and it’s awesome to see you grow.

Alright, that’s the setup. Let’s move on to the experiment.

The Experiment

This won’t take long if we have a good grasp of the setup. The idea is simply this: what goes differently about Green Day’s career if they have an expanding pool of fans from earlier albums incentivized to promote them and follow along?

For one thing, the cultural alienation might not be as bad in this alternative universe. It might have been a little easier coming up, but even if it wasn’t, the early collectors of the band’s work would have a positional advantage in the market and might have been able to leverage this into any number of creative endeavors, stayed more closely involved with the band, and even continued to provide feedback on the songwriting, yielding better music over the years since Green Day’s peak.

This could happen to any band in the future, and while I’m not completely sure what to expect from deeper incentives aligning the community and the creator more effectively, I do think there is an excellent chance that it will be good for everyone involved.

The Reason People In Power Don’t Like Royalties

Alright, we’ve reached the conclusion of this essay. Let’s be sure to keep two things solidly in front-of-mind for this section:

The songs are the product of community engagement.

Early songs are about locations that locals know, issues the local community care about, and over the course of many live performances, they are shaped to the pleasure of that community.

These two points prove one thing: the community is doing part of the creative work. As the community members who have the most pull shift from surly audience members to record and marketing executives who want to maximize profit and aren’t afraid to influence the creative process to do so — in fact whose very involvement influences the creative process — we see the songwriting change and rightly so.

Now, instead of the money being handled exclusively by the record companies and agencies, if it was handled by transparent smart contracts that were publicly available, not only would costs go down because fewer managers were needed, but well-designed incentives could completely change the experience of being a fan.

Instead of delivering pizzas, a fan could be a curator or a speculator. Digital collectibles also make it possible for the fans to be on the other side of the world, so the internet increases the number of dimensions for self-promotion and fan discovery at the same time as it empowers local fans to essentially join their friends on stage.

People in power are generally boring people who don’t have much local culture in them. Instead, they analyze numbers and hobnob with fellow number people, analyzing data from culture to determine where next to attempt to extract a profit from said culture. In a tight, well-established digital collectible market, the ways to make money don’t necessarily include buying record company stocks because the digital collectible albums would provide an additional and, for your local scenester, a far more accessible route to a more precise sliver of the market.

Amazingly enough, I already have a few digital collectible albums in my collection. I got a Kings of Leon one back in 2021. It may seem wildly speculative, but the alternative universe presented here is probably less than a year away. Tools are coming to make Web3 technologies so easy to use that you won’t even need to know what they are — they’ll just be apps on your phone.

What’ll be different will be everything else. The way you interact with your favorite artist, the benefits you can gain by being active in a particular art or music community, and the opportunities you’ll have to create for yourself are all going to change a lot in a hurry.

The people in power don’t like this because they will suddenly have to do legwork instead of sitting on a monopoly. Or maybe they’ll adapt to the new conditions and start following scenesters with good taste, creating an incentive for such people to curate to their own tastes and interact with creative works in good faith. We’re seeing big pushes by the SEC to slow down the development of these technologies because, in the most extreme vision here, money becomes utterly subservient to culture and simply having a lot of dollars won’t be enough anymore. The value of the dollar could change, too, but what if your digital collectible collection was your ticket? Creators might seek curators with certain tastes, and the party could even be fairly private — Mark Cuban might not be able to buy his way in without a lot of research and legwork.

Make no mistake, the future is as yet unwritten, but it’s getting closer everyday and some of the changes that appear to be right around the corner are nothing short of astounding. We’re in for a hell of a wild ride. I have to end with a shout out to Green Day and all of the fantastic bands that I’ve loved listening to for so long. Life is better with ya’ll.

Find the NFT here, and remember - if you pick this up, it gives you the power to add to the essay, then flip it.

https://rarible.com

What Are Enactive Agents?

Discover, sell and buy NFTs on Rarible! Whether it's Ethereum NFTs, Solana NFTs or Tezos NFTs, get them on Web3's first aggregated NFT marketplace

Essay 5 Debuts at Quest of Evolution

The essay is about a concept I found in the literature earlier this year, which appears to have not been widely studied as recently as 2017-2018, or at least not widely written about in the spheres I was most familiar with. The idea is enactivism, which is essentially a vision of cognitive agency as a part of the world. While it seems obvious that people are part of the world that surrounds us, the surprising thing is that our best thought about how consciousness related us to our world before enactivism was embodiment. Our science was looking beyond the brain toward the body, but we weren't thinking in a deeply structured way about the way the body ties directly into its environment!

Temperature, air, hydration, health - the relationship between a body and its immediate surroundings is incredibly complex. The human brain is complex because it has to make sense of this unbelievably large data stream to maintain the life of the body. Where we sometimes say that the brain is the most complex thing in the world, and where I've said before that the relations between brains (ethics) is much more complex than anything that goes on in one single brain, it also makes sense to think about the complexity of the feedback loops that the brain processes and the one-way analogue computation that emerges from our observations of the results of our prior action.

Essay 5 will explore this subject in as much detail as I could fit into 3,000 words - and I've taken a slightly more conversational tone with the piece, even shoehorning in a few suggestions about areas that could be further explored by future contributors to the piece. Without futher ado, I give you the link to the essay:

https://www.thequestofevolution.com

What Are Enactive Agents?

Author's Note‍ Hey everyone, a brief note from your author before we get started. I've been paying attention to the responses the essays have gotten from around the community, and I am elated with the level of interest we're seeing in the project here!

A Very Lucky Find: Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains (by Josh Stark)

Essay 6 is coming in one month, and its subject is distributed cognition. I am also excited to share that, today, I found a completely unexpected piece from Josh Stark on Farcaster that details some very relevant ideas. Stark discusses two concepts in particular that are worth a glance if you're interested in the ideas at the heart of my work in Worldview Ethics and Formal Dialectics, hardness and casting. In a way, Formal Dialectics could be said to be about an inherent softness within our language.

Stark details hardness as a concept that relates closely to what I've called "determinism" in the past. We play billiards because we like to see our actions have an effect upon the world. The predictability of a given set of balls on a particular table is interesting because our minds build predictive models of the future basically all the time, and we feel pleasure when our predictions come true. Natural laws are very hard because they don't change, but one problem with natural law is that we don't get any input into how things operate there. Language and casting enable us to have more control, but the trade-off is that nothing in language is ever as hard as the things we find in nature.

Hardness can be natural hardness, which is essentially the tendency of natural objects to behave in predictable ways just as in our pool table example above; while softness is essentially what we don't know enough about to make reliable predictions. Softness in my work is the inability of things made from language to approach the level of reliably deterministic behavior we can see in the physical world. We can observe this softness in Chaos Theory and in the work of Kurt Gödel. Formal Dialectics was my first peer-reviewed philosophy book, and perhaps the main goal of conceiving of the world of literature as a sandbox in which the conflict between varying sets of opposites develops patterns and generates knowledge was in fact to explore ways of hardening thinking by observing the general limitations of language.

Casting is a fascinating concept because it details precisely the act of using complex thought to predict something that hasn't happened yet. Hardness gives us the ability to learn how to shoot pool, in which every shot is a sort of cast - the skill of the player is one part physical, one part mental. The mental component is the ability to cast, while the physical dexterity required to achieve one's goals determines the softness or hardness of even the most creative shots by the best players.

That was why I was so elated to see Stark's work earlier today, adding a beautiful and simple plain language account of relevant phenomena to the body of thought on these subjects, which now stretches from Ancient Greece to the Ethereum blockchain.

Find Stark's piece here:

https://stark.mirror.xyz/n2UpRqwdf7yjuiPKVICPpGoUNeDhlWxGqjulrlpyYi0

PageDAO Progress

At PageDAO this week, we held a meeting in which we finalized department structure and prepared to move forward with our various plans of development. Led by @indefatigable, myself, Cryptoversal, and Rionna Morgan worked through a long call and set up payment rails to distribute $PAGE tokens to people who participate in the public build process. We decided at the last minute to skip town hall until there is something to report, which at this rate should not be long. Product-oriented calls with Robbie will be starting up again soon, if you have governance or partnership thoughts, you can get at me in the discord. Rionna will be spearheading efforts to build the next generation of PageDAO Community projects, and Cryptoversal is strategizing to get more people publishing on-chain in the Publishing department.

See Robbie's update here (PageDAO Membership NFT required): https://discordapp.com/channels/834676513738850304/887866403900784641/1141759890034000043

Book Review #3: The Patterning Instinct, by Jeremy Lent

Jeremy Lent is a distinguished history professor with many decades of research experience under his belt. I don't know much about him that didn't come from reading this book, but sometimes you can just tell when you read a sweeping survey of the cumulative history of the thinking of mankind at scale that a thinker has been at it for a good long time.

I'm currently listening to this work on repeat at my day job and putting no small amount of effort into what will likely turn out to be a 5,000 word review if I am not careful! Still, the difficulty in attempting to treat with this piece in a concise way is a major compliment to its author. The structure and craftsmanship are undeniable, and the myriad connections Lent makes between culture, language, and the human brain during the course of history make this introduction to cognitive history a piece that everyone should read (or listen to!).

I first discovered The Patterning Instinct by pure chance in 2018 or 2019, ordered a copy, and was hooked. I think Amazon's algorithm saw me reading David Deutsch and Scott Aaronson and Antonio Damasio and Melanie Mitchell and noticed others who liked those works were also buying this book, but it's hard to remember for sure. The important part is that this work gives us a chance to understand new, relevant facets of culture in a highly complex new way: cognitivism.

Cognitivism is a subject I wrote a lot about 5-6 years ago, but I can't remember ever publishing much about the concept. The idea is essentially that minds don't have to be a black box - that we can understand cognition. I scoffed at IBM's old 'cognitive computing' marketing campaign because I knew the definition and their digital computers were... simply not nearly good enough to be thought of as anything like cognition capable. In any case, the full review is on its way. You'll get an update sometime next week when it goes out.

Thanks again for following the email chain here and don't forget: Essay #5 is either 200 $MATIC right now or destined to end up in the wallet of the highest bidder on Rarible in a month if nobody takes it at the roughly $100 current face value! Here's that link again:

https://rarible.com/token/polygon/0x3ae5dd0b3a7cab9e89ad1180fb5a6c4a26b7afef:5

See you next week.

-D

The Runaway Species is a great entry point into the ecosystem from which Worldview Ethics is arising. David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt present a wide and deep array of examples, each of which brings the reader a bit closer to the goal of understanding the sorts of things human minds and brains are. The pairing of a neuroscientist and a musician is a non-traditional one, but sometimes such combinations are the best way to generate new perspectives. New perspectives, Eagleman and Brandt argue, are a major component of what we do.

I was first introduced to The Runaway Species shortly after graduating from Texas State University with my Master’s degree. It may have been given to me in a goodie bag I received when I went back in 2018 to present Formal Dialectics to the Philosophy Dialogue Series but I do not remember for sure. The reason I had received the gift was because the philosophy department was to begin teaching it in undergraduate courses as a way of rapidly getting freshmen up to date with the sorts of things thinking makes possible these days. I took it home and though a few months went by before I read it, when I did I was immediately drawn to the delightful tension between the sheer volume of ideas the authors share and the singular subject matter of human consciousness’s manifold outputs.

The Runaway Species (2017) is a celebration of what it is to be a human being, indeed of what it has been over the preceding period from which we have history. We frequently do not see the future as it will play out over time, but that doesn’t stop us from guessing. Our minds are wonderfully creative and the insights they produce at scale, over the body of the human species as a whole, are without limit or prespecified form. We can do the most amazing things, when we put our minds to it! Worldview Ethics is about taking the time and energy to really see what’s going on in the world and, to whatever extent possible, understanding why things are the way they are.

From the anatomy of the body to one of the most abstract descriptions of rationality ever written, this book review series will guide the reader through a series of ten books. Review #1 was Outlive (2023) by Dr. Peter Attia & Bill Gifford, and it focused on health and mood as pertain to the good life. The Runaway Species is a way for us to take that basic understanding of biology up a notch — what kinds of goals do we have? What makes us happy? As Eagleman and Brandt observe in our behavior at scale, one strategy that has worked over and over again is to iteratively connect with our world. The Runaway Species is far from the most difficult book on the list (probably either Metaphysics or the Critique of Pure Reason could take that title), but it is a great entry level starter book for a layperson to read to get a feel for what it is we’re looking at.

Creativity Is How We Engage Our World

Just as Dr. Attia acknowledges the importance of the hands to the body’s interaction with the world, Eagleman and Brandt bring our attention to the imagination. Creativity is a process that benefits us greatly, indeed a process that it is almost impossible to keep us away from. The reason for this is given early in the text: our neurons are not like a bee’s neurons, which are more or less fixed and married to particular functions. Instead, we have an eleven or twelve figure number of them and they not only move around over time, but continuously shift to reflect the shortest path for a signal.

Our brains pull in information from our environment, develop goals for that environment, and then motivate our bodies to achieve said goals. This causes gratification, but also fatigue, and so something new needs to be found for the next run. The drive to novelty is described early on as a fundamental component of human consciousness, a survival instinct at heart which has helped us to learn to thrive in a difficult and unforgiving natural environment.

As a basic description of what we are as people, a physiological understanding of the body is a good place to start. Understanding some about hormones and hematology and the lightning-fast chemical reactions taking place inside our cells is important. But what do all those cells do? And why? 

If we want to answer questions about where consciousness comes from, it seems likely that there will be many layers in our explanation. Physiology is a start, and the reason it is a start is that many physiological attributes of our bodies such as the heart rate or level of cortisol in the blood have direct relationships with how we feel. The level of explanation occupied by The Runaway Species is a layer above that of Outlive, reaching up from the individual body to the social network and its outputs, but nonetheless the continuous motion and oscillation of our culture is presented to us as evidence of the way the biological elements work together at scale.

I find it particularly pleasant that Eagleman and Brandt manage such a creative approach to a book about creativity, and an astute reader will already have guessed that respect for the individual person’s ability to create is a consequence of the view of self that will be presented in Worldview Ethics. The most contentious component of WVE is the idea that scientific thinking and moral philosophy can work together, yet in The Runaway Species we already have a quite successful example of the sort of thinking WVE intends to spotlight.

What is creativity, if not a healthy body’s way of relating to its environment?

Eagleman and Brandt provide many beautiful pictures to break up the text of the work and nail down their myriad examples. A few high points to look out for include the discussion of innovation in Chapter 1, the discussion of language in Chapter 2, and Chapter 6 in general from Part 1. Parts 2 and 3 respectively aim to provide the reader with information about how to take up and use the creative mentality and how to apply our ideas about creativity to business, school and more.

The Scope Of Creative Thought

Creative thinking is best seen in language. Linguistic anthropology argues that all languages are well-adapted to their own place in the world, at the cutting edge separating what came before and what will come after. Some parts of language fall away over time, and some get added each and every day. How? It’s quite natural, Eagleman and Brandt argue, because “We take the raw materials of experience and then bend, break and blend them to create new outcomes,” (Eagleman, 2017. Page 51). Taking the raw materials of experience in is simple enough to understand, but the bending, breaking, and blending that our minds put our experience through is perhaps a bit more challenging to understand as a newcomer to this school of thought.

What the authors mean is that we remember things that have happened before. Some of this uses memory in our brains, some of it can be written down or stored in art or photographs. The reason language changes so much is because we shape it to our desired outcome each time we use it. New words being created is one path this can take, but new grammars, new stories, and new verbal experiences are all equally valid and important. When any of these occur, Eagleman and Brandt would argue, people have bent, broken, or blended bits of experienced life and memory to produce something new. This process happens all the time with language and is perhaps one of the most fundamental parts of being human.

Pushing their point further, Eagleman and Brandt dive into language a bit in Chapter 3: “Language meets the needs for conversation and consciousness not just because it is referential, but also because it is mutable — and that’s what makes it such a powerful vehicle for transmitting new ideas. Thanks to the creative possibilities of language, what we can say keeps pace with what we need to say,” (Eagleman, 2017. Page 72). There’s something absolutely spellbinding to me about the way our language changes in response to changing conditions in the world. The interaction between human minds and the environments we engage with is on display in studies such as lexicography in a way it can scarcely ever be seen anywhere else.

Creative thinking, for Eagleman and Brandt, is a higher level of scope than mere language or mere art or mere culture. It’s a collective process we all participate in that yes, has outcomes in language, arts, and culture; but creativity is something more for the authors. These outputs are simply byproducts of human creativity. Creativity itself is a raw instinct in human minds, a survival instinct we never could have lived without. When we are creatively engaged with our environment, any number of different outcomes are possible. This unpredictable activity is how human minds reshape the world.

How We Can Be More Creative

Eagleman and Brandt move from explaining what creativity is and why to sharing strategies about how to boost it and studying history to provide us with myriad examples of creative forces at work at various levels of organization, from individual minds to entire cultures. There is a constant turnover in the world of ideas, and though some ideas never really go anywhere, it’s very important to have the freedom they need to develop in new directions so that the few that do take off can get their chance. Napoleon III may have created an overly restrictive art show, but eventually popular pressure forced him to open the Salon de Rèfusès and let all of the 400+ rejected pieces be shown anyway. It’s almost like there’s a blow-off valve that has to be opened if things become too resistant to novel cultural expression.

There emerges, in the text, an insight into a circular social creative process: individual creators need society, and society needs individual creators — especially the ones who think differently and do new things. The lone genius is a myth because “creativity does not emerge out of thin air: we depend on culture to provide a storehouse of raw materials,” (Eagleman, 2017. Page 134), but likewise the starving artist is capable of pushing society forward with great power and should thus not be overlooked.

The creative process itself, at any level we choose to examine, is a whirlwind of change. Ideas are created and many are discarded but some have a profound impact upon the world. Many are much simpler, like trying a new restaurant, but creativity shines through a kaleidoscope of options and is not a simple or linear process.

If you’re trying to do something creative and want to improve, strategies listed in the book include a variety of different approaches. Creating many options is a thing most of us mentally do to one extent or another, but many of the great innovators from Hemingway to George Washington Carver and Mother Nature have found their success in what the authors call a proliferation of options. Many investments of time, energy, money, and effort yield the few amazing novel ideas, products, and creatures that thrive.

Open frameworks that are subject to iteration are also worth considering, when one is in the process of deciding what to do. Once the decision has been reached, risk enters the equation because innovators have to choose only one ending for the novel, one project to build, and there is always a cost to creation. Our ability to tolerate risk long enough for an idea to catch on can often determine the success or failure of an idea.

The process Eagleman and Brandt lay out for us, simply, is to open up the environment, create many different options, explore different possibilities for each of the options, then finally choose one and be willing to accept risk to bring it to life. Our creative process should operate something like this: we decide to write a novel, think openly about what it could be about, explore many possible story arcs, then choose the best way to tell the story and sell it as hard as we can.

How Creativity Makes Things Better

The reason The Runaway Species is one of the books being reviewed for my Worldview Ethics project is simple: it uses art, business, and school, along with history and many many examples to give the reader who does not completely understand the need for openness and creative thinking the opportunity to connect with these concepts in a deep way.

It seems very important to establish something like a historical track record, which Eagleman & Brandt do exceptionally well, for the open creative process. Many people look to a subject such as ethics with the intention of discovering the “one true” way to live. Insofar as it is possible to give an account of the “one true” anything, it seems more and more to be the case that the thing in question must be described as a tool that can be used or not.

This insight into how to give an account of the “one true” process has been thoroughly examined by philosophers throughout the twentieth century and is currently being examined as pertains to artificial intelligence and open source software, blockchain technology, and other platforms upon which eager developers and entrepreneurs intend to build the future. It was wonderful to see the clear and compelling arguments Eagleman and Brandt mustered up for our collective support of open systems. For my part, Worldview Ethics is a project in the discipline of moral philosophy that aims to give something along the same lines, a philosophical exploration of an open ethical system.

Worldview Ethics, if you're curious:

https://www.thequestofevolution.com

Worldview Ethics

infinite auction: 1ST MAY 2023 Chain: POLYGON Architects Description Enter the first knowledge base hypergraph, to be constructed around Worldview Ethics, a primary source philosophy text by T. Dylan Daniel, author of Formal Dialectics. This Crypto-Novel will represent an experiment in scientific discourse, with an auction mechanic governing the community's ability to add to the essay, creating an entirely new work.

No matter who you are or what your background is like, if you choose to read The Runaway Species you will find a wealth of great stories, a beautiful presentation, and some of the most important insights of our time into what it means to be human. From the way our minds are geared toward the creation and destruction of systems of logic at a biological level to the way our culture seeks continual renewal via creative iteration and reinterpretation, human creativity is foundational to what we are.

https://www.amazon.com

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World [Eagleman, David, Brandt, Anthony] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World

While we were hiding at home from a deadly virus and grieving for our damaged country and way of life, something wonderful happened. It took just 115 years from the publication of Einstein’s 1905 proof that atoms existed for us to get to the discovery of a computer-based technique from which the equations of Einstein emerged. We’ll be talking through some physics here, but the majority of the content can and indeed should be found in Wolfram’s original paper, here. I’m going to confess this up front: I believe Wolfram is onto something unique and significant here, with his Wolfram Physics Project.

As a philosopher, I enjoy a tremendous amount of leeway and am able to bounce from neuroscience to philosophy and anthropology of language and then on to quantum chemistry and biophysics without most people really even batting an eye. I just kind of get to be weird. I’ve written everything from books and articles to patents and whitepapers, and I’ve done everything from peer-reviewed research to reviewing my peers’ work to yes, I’m being serious, buying a pig farm and overseeing an attempt to develop a drug. Life is wild, sometimes.

But, and I mean this sincerely, few things inspire as much astonishment in me as the Wolfram paper I read the other night. Friends argue that Wolfram hasn’t done anything that revolutionary, and I absolutely cede them that point — and so does he. The truly exciting component of the machine Dr. Wolfram has built isn’t that it has already solved the universe. No, that will undoubtedly take much more time. Instead, what excites me, at least, is that this scientist who has spent decades building computer programs capable of doing all the advanced mathematics needed to partake in theoretical physics has finally made all of his work available open source to the public.

When I was younger, I used to tune and race cars. What does that have to do with theoretical physics, you ask? Hang on, you’ll see.

We used to take apart the air intake systems and modify the exhaust systems. Some of us took it steps and steps further — OBDII ports enabled us to buy computer programs that allowed us to “hack in” to the CPU and reprogram things such as volumetric efficiency tables.

My last build on my 2000 Trans Am involved a host of rather astonishing characteristics, including the removal of the Mass Airflow Sensor, which enabled me to run the car in Speed Density Mode. Now, Mass Airflow Sensors are still a core component of gasoline engines, but Direct Injection and adjustable exhaust systems are direct descendants of the tuner universe brought into production vehicles during the current golden age of gasoline engines.

So the big, significant development I see happening here is the same sort of thing — a lot of people will be able to play with Dr. Wolfram’s tools. Some will do things that end up not working out, like my choice to play with Speed Density Mode. But others… other innovations that the community comes up with will be significant. The creative power of a large group of open minds which have little or no formal training is substantial.

Beyond this, which I admit is not a fundamental discovery in the realm of physics in and of itself, there seem to be a handful of very promising concepts coming out of Dr. Wolfram’s work which I’ll try to explain in the next couple of sections.

Innovation 1: Explaining Temporal Variance In A Way That Makes Sense

Matter and energy could both be emergent properties of space. When I first read through this paper, I became enraptured with the impression I was getting here. I read around these subjects quite a bit during my science days, when I was trying to figure out how colloids worked and why.

It turned out, there was still a substantial amount of unsolved territory there, and that was a problem for me because I wasn’t a physicist. I just wanted to find the answers and apply them to something else — I was neither qualified nor particularly willing or able to go out and figure these things out myself, despite having access to kickass technology like a ZetaSizer Nano. So I left the company and started knocking out my prerequisites for medical school. But I haven’t lost my affection for the brilliancies of Richard Feynman or David Deutsch or Scott Aaronson or Carlo Rovelli, who may be the best communicator in physics today.

Imagine my surprise, as a layperson, when for the first time I discovered the strange concepts of Loop Quantum Gravity in Rovelli’s books. I’ve tried and tried to wrap my head around the ideas that everything could be comprised of strings, or that there are 11 or more dimensions in reality. None of this effort yielded much success.

Still, Rovelli’s discussion of local time brought me back to a concept I’d first encountered when I was working on my first major book, Formal Dialectics, and reading a lot about a mathematician and logician who was friends with Einstein named Kurt Gödel. Time didn’t have to be universal, Rovelli said, echoing Gödel and Einstein.

Wolfram’s work seems to agree — and what’s more, it builds the concept into something a bit more sensible somehow. If I told you that, on Alpha Centauri’s surface, time moved x amount faster or slower, you probably wouldn’t care that much. But if I was to explain that time moved differently for you, depending upon the speed you were traveling at, and could show you a picture that explained the frame-of-reference issue this caused… it might connect more effectively.

This is, for me at least, one of the most interesting conclusions we’ve reached about our physical universe. And to be sure, the most exciting thing about it is that we now understand it well enough to communicate about it simply. For Wolfram, there are many paths time can take and many different histories which can be given to explain events. And thus, shockingly simply, the old question about the dual slit experiment — is light a particle, or a wave? — is resolved before our very eyes.

Or at least it could be. Think about it. If we assume that light is a wave, an oscillating property of space, then it makes perfect sense that speeds faster than light are impossible. It also makes perfect sense to conclude that, from the standpoint of a person sitting on the surface of the earth, forty years could go by as a person traveling significantly near the speed of light somewhere else experiences only a year or two.

What Wolfram’s models make possible is to hypothesize that both chains of events with their different temporal fluctuation rates could still be part of the same general system of universal time — “…in effect, to an observer embedded in the system, there is still just a single thread of time.” And hence the resolution to the particle/wave duality question, which is really a question about which description we prefer, we are near something like a resolution.

Innovation 2: Causal Invariance

Wolfram has developed a system which uses causal graphing to map out the interactions of rules as they are applied more and more. And he’s noticed that, for some rules, things can get incredibly complex before yielding the same result as it yields in each other iteration. What this means, essentially, is that there are some rules which can be applied in different orders to achieve the same result. Imagine if you saw a math problem on a test back in school and it didn’t matter what order the steps were done in. No more PEMDAS!

Seriously, though, the time problem relates deeply to the causal invariance issue in that time is free, under causal invariance, to speed up or slow down as necessary. Time travel is still probably impossible, because what we really mean when we say time travel is travel against the grain of causality — think about it, if you want to move back in time you’re wishing to cause an event to occur which will undo some portion of the universe’s events, not simply transport yourself somewhere to meet your grandfather when he was your age and see what he was like. No, the only way to manipulate the causal arrow of time is to speed it up or slow it down — it will always move the same direction, we think.

To me, the most significant advancement represented by Wolfram’s writings has to do with the ease with which we can discuss these things now. Causal invariance as a demonstrable property of emergent systems is one thing; showing a graph which, with a simple change in perspective, explains the events in terms anyone can understand, is substantial. The field stays the same, but the path you walk is slightly different.

The original view

Another path

Observer View

Due to causal invariance, the end result is the same — whether your time changed, or whether you took a zillion different paths to reach the goal you were walking toward all along without knowing it, as the photon in the dual slit experiment does.

The Goal: More Minds, Faster Progress, More Effective Communication

I actually volunteered to help present the Dual Slit Experiment as a simulation during South By Southwest back in 2018 with the Institute for Quantum Computing and the University of Waterloo. The simulation let you fire one photon or multiple photons through one slit or multiple slits, registering simulated hits against a simulated detector in the back. When people asked how it worked, I explained that the two slits caused the light waves passing through the two slits to interfere with one another. This interference was what produced the various bands of light and darkness that showed up on the screen, as the photon seemed to take every available path to the detector it was being shone at.

Most people just sort of nodded and walked away at that point, enchanted but rather mystified. The collapse of the system into the apparent particle form upon the addition of a detector to determine which slit a given photon traveled through, weirdly, seems to be explained by the causal invariance principle Wolfram has contributed here. When one makes the system more complex, one reduces the number of viable paths for the photon to take, and thus the photon takes a more predictable route. To detect the photon, we have to interact with it one way or another, and this interaction is a source of complexity which is then added to the system.

If this isn’t as simple to you as it seems to me, don’t worry. I’m sure I could have done a better job explaining it if I understood it better myself. I’m just trying to give a gloss on a few impressions of what’s significant here so that people can learn about this exciting new project and perhaps make a decision to go ahead and get involved with it.

There’ll be plenty of time to catch up, and, if Wolfram’s project is successful, a ton of great analogies will help us become more familiar with these concepts in the future. The goal of this short paper isn’t to make everyone an expert physicist, but to explain why the machinery that just appeared may be able to put a larger number of human beings into direct contact with the core problems of physics than ever before.

The curvature of space, the properties of black holes, and the ability of humanity to begin to become able to understand the strange universe within which we find ourselves all hinge upon our ability to communicate about it and to simulate our ideas to play around with it, so to speak.

This piece was originally published in 2020, on Medium.com.

https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Outlive-Science-Art-Longevity/dp/B0B64WL9PK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=9UCC5YRZ7B37&keywords=outlive&qid=1688859652&sprefix=outlive%2Caps%2C151&sr=8-1

Why Outlive Outperforms

Outlive is a rare book. It combines a depth of perspective into physiology with well-formed critical analysis in readable prose. The science Dr. Attia and Bill Gifford present is clear, easy to understand, and applicable to the reader’s situation almost no matter what that situation happens to be. The introductory book about longevity has long been something I thought of as a holy grail because it seems almost impossible to write such works without making errors that lead the reader astray. Dr. Attia has provided just such a book, blending beautifully presented, easy-to-grasp science with deep novel insights that most people should be able to apply in whole or in part to their lives.

In a post-covid world where body issues are so often more than skin deep, Outlive is a wealth of relevant insight designed to empower the reader to make reasonable life adjustments in the interest of personal longevity. Dr. Attia has performed the critical portions of his research with adequate care, bringing back reasonable questions and, rather than dogmatically presenting one particular way to proceed, taking the time to explain the rationale for acting. This approach empowers the reader to plot their own path forward by applying the principles in context and observing the outcome.

Outlive is a book that provides the right background for us to get a sense of what our bodies are doing as we navigate our increasingly complex modern world. Released in 2023, Outlive is a great read and it gives you actionable information about how your body works, empowering you to have more control over your health and build a better life. This review will share my deep connection to the work and all the reasons I think everyone should read it, as well as a bit of discussion about the message of the book including the pillars of longevity and my favorite high-level takeaways. Finally, we’ll close with a brief note on Dr. Attia’s approach to preventing each of what he calls the Four Horseman diseases of ageing.

An Approachable Introduction To Longevity Science

I first began to follow Peter Attia’s podcast, The Drive, in 2018 or 2019. My career had taken a sudden turn in 2017, after years of graduate study ended without a meaningful career opportunity in my field. I wrote the bulk of my first peer-reviewed book during the first part of 2017, started my first startup, and then almost immediately when Dad’s diagnosis came in I got a remarkable opportunity to pivot into biotech. I’ve been following Dr. Attia since early in that journey. In my opinion, the hardest thing about medicine today has little to do with what is known and much, much more with how widely and/or effectively that knowledge is shared. Dr. Attia is one of the best out there in terms of his ability to stick to accepted science, of which he has a more than adequate grasp, and as a bonus he also has that rare gift: the ability to make things easy to understand.

This book meant a lot to me because it does something I tried to do better than I could have. I got pulled into medicine and biophysics after receiving my M.A. in applied philosophy and ethics almost a decade ago. The summer of 2017 terrified me: my dad was diagnosed with cancer and had a kidney surgically removed. 

I knew that cancer could be hereditary, so the fear of losing a loved one and the fear that my own behavior was potentially leading me down the path to early death and disability blended together in my mind, creating a powerful reality check that forever changed the trajectory of my life. Worse, there was nothing to be done for it. I had two options if I wanted to help: cure cancer or make a lot of money to pay for the best treatments. Mortality proved itself real and I found myself pulled out of more theoretical pursuits such as the explanation of consciousness, only to be thrust headlong into a new research project about the possibility of extending the human lifespan.

There I was, a philosopher, chasing answers to a question we could label an application of conscious thought to extend the health of the body.

When I met my former employer, a man in his 60’s who recovered from end stage renal disease after studying physiology and taking corrective action that was much in-line with the conclusions one can draw from Outlive, I was skeptical. The idea that one concept could hold the key to all of human health was too much for me, but then life happened. A year passed. Funds were raised. The plan shifted, instead of a book we decided to go into the lab. Suddenly, I was hired as Director of Research in 2018, the startup’s first employee. It was official: I had studied philosophy all my adult life only to grow up to become a scientist. 

I had been a researcher before, and I knew the drill. I read thousands of scientific papers, constructed highly detailed maps of physical processes such as the way the albumin protein moves through the body, and even skipped a chance at a free South by Southwest badge to instead build a bunch of cabinets and install them in the location that was to become our lab. I was hooked with no questions asked! Soon, my entire life was oriented to the North Star: developing a longevity-oriented understanding of the human body to push past what Dr. Attia calls Medicine2.0 and into more rewarding territory. 

Prevention, diet, exercise — for our team, there was one pathway that led to chronic disease and our goal was to understand it in as much detail as possible so that our therapeutic agent could corner the market by improving the lives of everyone who bought it. We studied the interior surface of blood vessels, learned about the complexity of the blood — which it is still impossible to study in vivo, by the way! — and worked on a way to improve its ability to transport oxygen and nutrients to each of a human body’s 37 trillion cells.

During this time, I studied nutrition intensely, as well as a variety of other aspects of health and sciences. These explorations ranged from microbiology to colloidal chemistry and everything in between. My mission was to prove out — true or false — a theoretical model of the body that predicted the progression of chronic disease and could yield new, more powerful therapies based on physics. I left the startup in late 2019 when it became clear that our trajectory was unlikely to lead to success and that pivoting was not going to work, but I barely slowed down in terms of reading and I never stopped following Dr. Attia’s podcast. After all, I was convinced that this science could help me and everyone I care about live a better, healthier life.

There were issues along the way. Primarily, I lack the qualifications of a doctor of medicine (MD) degree — in fact, I’m a mere master of philosophy, not a doctor of anything! This means there are some areas where my background could be a bit stronger, but in general I find that the depth of my knowledge in relevant fields turns out to be sufficient most of the time. When I find a gap, I make haste to fill it in. In general I am well-informed about the things I need to know. Just as Dr. Attia’s expertise in engineering and math come in handy in his medical practice, my habit of reading musty old tomes prepared me to rabidly absorb a lot of new words and think advanced abstract thoughts about the way they relate to one another.

Despite the success we achieved in understanding something important and coming up with ways to test it, at my old company we weren’t able to reach the milestone we were looking for during the time we had available to us. 

Nonetheless, an inkling remained lodged in my mind: the idea that understanding a few key principles of the metabolism could lead scientists to create effective treatment and prevention methods for dealing with chronic diseases that Dr. Attia refers to as the Four Horsemen. 

Everything was visible in the blood vessels, but how to manipulate it? 

How could we improve it when we saw that it was in a bad way? 

My former employer’s answer was unable to deliver results, but Dr. Attia manages to provide a powerful plan of action as well as a few hypothetical ways treatment could be improved. By reading Outlive, you’ll be able to achieve a higher level of understanding of not only the state of medical science today but also what you are able to do about it. For me, this has felt like a relief. Since my first listen to the audiobook, I have spent sixteen weeks running progressively faster 5km jogs in the evenings here in dry Lubbock, Texas. I feel that I have better control of my body now that I understand how to manage my blood glucose level, which I learned from Dr. Attia by reading this book. The research here is strong and even better, there is useful information on every page.

What stands out most to me about Outlive, and the reason I’ve listened to the audiobook a dozen times by now, is the way it takes an idea very similar to the complicated old project from my former startup and compresses it. Rather than a universal health biomarker, it seeks to explain the science we already have to the people who need to understand it. People then are tasked with taking charge of their own health and many who choose to take this approach seriously do quite well. 

What is the approach? 

Well, it all boils down to the five pillars of longevity.

The Five Pillars Of Longevity

These five items are the key points Dr. Attia makes in Outlive. Most of the discussion of stability, for example, ties into the Fitness pillar here. Knowledge is the key animating force here, as understanding the things going on under the hood enables us to make better choices to keep from sending the system out of alignment. Let’s take a quick peek at each one, but don’t forget to read the whole book to understand completely.

1. Happiness/freedom from malaise

Emotional health is tied to hormones that regulate mood. Cortisol, a stress-related hormone, is elevated in people who experience stress. Exercise can help to modulate excess levels of cortisol, and in this simple feedback loop we can see that, like a grounding rod in a lightning storm, stress can be relieved by physical activity. 

The payoff here is perhaps best: we feel happy when things work together to enable us to achieve the main benefit of good health, improved mood. Noticing the impact that the fitness routine and diet have on how we feel is perhaps the single most powerful motivation to keep putting in the effort to make the good choices.

2. Fitness/Freedom from injury

Just as exercise is important to support mood regulation, fitness is important to support exercise. Stability and adequate muscle can help the body manage hormone levels to improve a person’s ability to tolerate stressful life circumstances or painful emotions, but only if activity is possible. 

If injury compromises our ability to exercise, we lose the metabolic benefits of that missed exercise — we burn fewer calories, our hormone balances change, and far-reaching consequences can be seen throughout the body as our condition deteriorates in response to our inactivity.

3. Knowledge/ability to consciously manage health

Dr. Attia’s book does us a great service by accurately stating the facts and providing a high-level view of what the science has been bearing out in terms of conclusions from all of this research that has been going on. By understanding the way our body works, we can exercise to prevent injury or even to restore function to our body after a period of recovery from, say, a shoulder injury. Responding effectively to pains and aches that signal to us that our body has problems is as important as optimizing routines and workouts to minimize the risk of creating new problems by pushing too hard and getting hurt.

Keep in mind that knowledge of our metabolism may also empower us to compensate for an injury by eating more protein and fewer carbohydrates, sleep more, and even find new modes of exercise to work around our injuries and minimize the damage.

4. Nutritional biochemistry as a contextual practice

Nutrition is, Dr. Attia points out semi-regularly in the text, mostly about getting the right amount of the various macronutrients you need: fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. The most important part of nutrition today is knowing what to avoid, contrary to much of our species’ history. We leave the text with an understanding of how important it is to deviate from the SAD (standard American diet) and how to structure our own custom macronutrient intake throughout the day to meet our goals. 

Once we have been disabused of any favor we had for caloric restriction by Dr. Attia’s literature review in Chapter 5, the idea to consume our carbohydrates early in the day and before exercise appears. Proteins and fats can be consumed instead of carbohydrates later in the day, when the glycemic response is elevated. These principles enable us to flatten our glucose response and presumably benefit from improved mitochondrial and metabolic health. 

I bought a finger stick kit for $20 and have been testing my glucose levels periodically, fine-tuning my diet to complement my new workout routine. Knowing what caused my glucose to spike before enables me to manage it more effectively moving forward, and I’m considering asking my doctor for a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to get a better idea of what’s going on. 

5. Sleep as non-negotiable

I didn’t say it, but I’ll repeat it. Sleep is not negotiable. It is a required component of health in terms of metabolism, mood, stability, and the ability to exercise. Sleep has an impact on our insulin response to food and also upon our ability to perform in mental and athletic tasks, underscoring the utter centrality of getting enough sleep to our metabolic health. Dr. Attia explains the differences between various drugs, some of which simulate unconsciousness without providing the benefits of real sleep.

Medicine3.0

In a way, Dr. Attia also excels my old team and former project in terms of integration. Outlive critiques Medicine2.0 on occasion, and rightfully so, but what it does not do is invent a lot of new terminology (aside from perhaps the Centenarian Decathlon). If you took your health courses seriously in college, you should be able to understand most of the high points here.

The simplicity with which it’s brought back to the reader is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, if you do it well, you reach a larger audience and benefit more people by writing. On the other, it’s much easier to get things wrong when attempting to communicate at max simplicity. Outlive does an exceptionally good job on both fronts. So much so that it is impacting the way I am approaching projects that aren’t necessarily direct tie-ins. Even as I write this book review, I’m thinking a lot about Worldview Ethics and how moral philosophy can benefit from application of physiological science.

Put simply: Health is a pillar of the good life. Insulin resistance and the sugar metabolism more broadly are pillars of the modern scientific understanding of diseases that happen alongside ageing. In some sense, a lot of my best research work over the years has happened because I pay attention to my environment and make adaptations accordingly.

Following Dr. Attia through his journey in Outlive has brought me both a stronger sense that I have the ability to make good choices and live a healthier life as a result, as well as a sort of closure in my prior ageing research journey. The closure comes from the simplicity, the sheer obviousness of the sugar metabolism as an explanatory tool in the light of what is known about the diseases of ageing. The sense that I have more control over what happens to my body comes from Dr. Attia and Bill Gifford’s meticulous work on a problem I tend to gloss over as I focus more on the theoretical side of things, i.e., the problem of what to do about this.

Whether you’re seventy or seven years old, reading this book can change your trajectory and help you find your way forward into a better future.

Top 6 Takeaways: What Outlive Changes

These takeaways are the parts that resonated most with me. They are the things I point out when I share the book with friends and family, in hopes of inspiring better life for those I care about. The general function of the work of Dr. Attia is to distill actionable yet correct concepts from the body of scientific literature for application in daily life, and the work is a stunning success.

While there is no silver bullet to take ageing completely out of the scope of things we need to worry about as time goes on, the progress Outlive offers is entirely real. We learn nothing that is not well-backed in the scientific literature and each discussion builds toward the book’s primary goal: better, healthier ageing for anyone who can apply the principles found in the book to real life.

1. 30 minutes of Zone 2, 5x/week. Every week.

Zone 2 cardio enables the muscles to pull glucose molecules out of the circulatory system. The muscles break down the glucose and instantly put it to work powering physical activity. Exercise outperforms FDA-approved small molecule therapeutic approaches rather often in clinical trials cited by Dr. Attia in the text, highlighting the power this mode of activity has for transforming the body. Pulling excess glucose out of circulation and giving the vasculature a chance to clear out the cobwebs at the same time is a win-win, but exercise also releases endogenous drug-like chemicals that lead to a sense of happiness and well-being.

2. There is no “true” diet — eat by principle.

What are you noticing in your body? Do you run out of energy at a certain time of day? You can use a cheap insulin monitor to get a feel for what’s happening to your blood sugar and then re-formulate your diet, giving yourself the opportunity to generate measurable data to then observe as you experiment with different combinations. You can tweak your diet to include extra sugar to power some pre-marathon subcutaneous fat storage or limit excessive carbohydrate metabolism by cutting out sugary drinks.

Once you understand the principles, you may find yourself sticking mostly to morning time carbohydrate consumption and eating more fats & proteins later in the day. The goal is to develop an understanding of what’s happening in the body and provide yourself enough data to begin to make informed choices about what to eat, giving you even more control over the way you feel.

3. Insulin resistance is a major risk factor for chronic diseases of ageing.

Is it a coincidence that the lifestyle risk factors for diabetes also contribute to risk for the other Horseman diseases? The same biomarkers that help combat the severe insulin resistance we call type 2 diabetes will also have a positive impact in our efforts to prevent atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s Disease, and cancer. In the end, it appears that there is a biomarker of ageing, just as my lab used to search for. It’s just that insulin and glucose provide more information than we realized back then. Dr. Attia’s work in Outlive is as remarkable for its accuracy in chronicling the history of sugar as it is in providing suggestions for how to manage this remarkable chemical we all have such unfettered access to today.

4. Preventing injury is more important than setting records.

If you get hurt — no matter who you are — you’re likely to come back at a lower level of fitness than what you’d achieved prior to your injury. It is more important to avoid injury during a workout than it is to set a new personal best every time we enter the gym. Taking a long-term mindset approach is crucial to maintaining a high level of personal fitness precisely because priorities such as the avoidance of injury can be clearly seen in terms of their real importance. Keeping up with your buddy or neighbor is not as important as staying fit over the long term.

Dr. Attia’s innovation here, the Centenarian Decathlon, sets the appropriate life-long scope of perspective. As a Centenarian Decathlete, the goal is the best possible health for the longest possible time.

5. Sleep is as important as nutrition or exercise — you cannot be healthy without it.

No fitness plan is complete without careful attention paid to sleep. The normal pointers are all available: make sure it’s dark, tell yourself it is okay to sleep, get enough uninterrupted sleep if possible, and last but certainly not least — take it easy on the food if your sleep is disturbed, especially if your exercise is also disturbed. Certain medications for sleep don’t yield all the benefits we need to get from our rest, so be careful when choosing sleep aids.

Sleep ties into health in a complicated way. Getting less sleep than you need can slow down your metabolism at the cellular level by making your cells less receptive to insulin. Eating sugar in a sleep deprived state can therefore induce a big spike in blood sugar levels, causing the body to store fat and providing opportunity for more serious issues to arise. It’s best to steer toward proteins and fats if missing sleep is unavoidable.

6. The best fitness plan comes from within.

We each need to take up responsibility for our own fitness. Outlive helps us start with a foundation built upon an understanding of the core principles of health.

a. Exercise should fit you. You need to find something you can enjoy, and that works well with your lifestyle.

b. Sleep hygiene is important to all aspects of health. We should give ourselves permission to sleep and sleep as best we can.

c. Food is medicine and medicine is food. Eat a diet that you enjoy that arranges macronutrient delivery to suit your needs.

Preventing The Four Horsemen Of Ageing

Preventing ASCVD (Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease)

Of the four Horseman diseases, ASCVD is the easiest to prevent, according to Dr. Attia. To prevent ASCVD, our strategy is simple: do not smoke and do effectively manage your metabolic health along the glucose/insulin axis. What this means is that glucose spikes are to be avoided if possible, by using all tools at our disposal: exercise, sleep, and nutrition can all play a role here.

When Dr. Attia says that the easiest of the Horseman diseases to prevent is ASCVD, he doesn’t mean that ASCVD is simple or easy to prevent in its own right. Rather, the point is that, for individuals willing to take charge of the metabolic processes in their own bodies, ASCVD risk is easier to mitigate than cancer risk or dementia risk. In some cases this involves doctors and drugs, but for most of us simply paying careful attention to our metabolic health will pay major dividends.

By not smoking, getting plenty of exercise, maintaining muscle mass, and building a high VO2 Max, we’re building up the number and power of our mitochondria. These engine-like organelles power our metabolism throughout our body by processing sugars and fats to generate ATP. It’s fairly safe to say at this point that a healthy cellular powerhouse is required for the state of organism-wide health we’re all striving to build and maintain.

The Best Odds Of Preventing Cancer

Cancer cells exhibit a unique metabolic arrangement, which Dr. Attia’s extensive reading of the literature suggests could be related to the need of the cell to procure a massive amount of new building materials to fuel its reproduction. Whether cancer is a metabolic or genetic phenomenon, using exercise to maximize mitochondrial health mitigates the risk by minimizing mutations on the one hand and by improving metabolism on the other.

As Dr. Attia points out, the relevant pathway is fairly simple: inflammation caused by normal physiological processes such as the inflammatory cytokines given off by dying fat cells in obese bodies induce cells to become cancerous. Smoking and other sources of inflammatory processes that are known to be carcinogenic could be causal agents toward the increase of cancer risk by this mechanism. Once cells have become cancerous, PI3K is activated by insulin and IGF-1, enabling the voracious appetite for glucose demonstrated by cancer cells. In this light, a problem I used to be very interested in — the metabolic theory of cancer — seems somewhat irrelevant. The treatment is the same whether the cancer process is driven by metabolism or by mutation.

Insulin production is increased by the pancreas when high-sugar diets are eaten and sustained insulin overproduction is the body’s first response to insulin resistance, which would explain the uptick in cancer risk for obese or metabolically unhealthy individuals. The cancer cells don’t develop insulin resistance. Instead, they fuel their perverse growth by capitalizing on the insulin resistance developed by other cells. More insulin in circulation means the tumor cells have more ability to pull in glucose from the bloodstream to replicate and power themselves.

This aspect of cancer has also been used as a treatment vector in the lab: Attenuating the PI3K pathway by lowering insulin seems to slow cancer growth! Despite the lack of conclusive evidence that all cancers will succumb to metabolic attacks like lowering insulin levels systemically, Dr. Attia points out that preventing cancer by avoiding the spectrum of insulin resistance is a logical place to start when we’re young. For example, smoking is known to increase insulin resistance, just as drinking large amounts of fructose does. If I were to conjecture, I'd wonder whether perhaps when people combine the two they unwittingly multiply their risk. To me, the call seems easy: it is better to simply flatten one’s glucose curve and feel better while minimizing unnecessary risk.

Stopping Alzheimer’s Disease Before It Starts

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is less well-researched than ASCVD or cancer, but the parallels between this and the other Horseman diseases are nonetheless quite apparent throughout the research. The risk factors for AD are, perhaps unsurprisingly, plausibly metabolic in nature. Our prevention regime for AD needs to involve not smoking, getting adequate nutrition, and being active in a training routine that consists of exercise we enjoy that trains Zone 2 and fosters our stability.

Seeing a trend?

There is one goal for us, here, across all four of the Horseman diseases.

Alzheimer’s Disease is occasionally referred to as “type 3 diabetes” because the buildup of amyloid and tau proteins has a deleterious metabolic effect that is observed in all clinical cases researchers study, essentially choking out the affected neurons and shutting them off so that they no longer efficiently communicate with others. This is where the holes in conscious behavior originate. Not only does regular exercise reduce our body’s dependence upon insulin, including the brain, but it also has the ability to generate lactate. Lactate is a fuel that our neurons can use via the ANLS (astrocyte-neuron lactate shuttle) pathway to power metabolic function in a pinch, just like keytone bodies.

In the end, preventing Alzheimer’s Disease is very likely most achievable by managing metabolic health effectively over the course of our lifetime, just like cancer and ASCVD.

Preventing Diabetes with Zone 2 Cardio & Smart Carbohydrate Timing

Preventing Type 2 Diabetes is not just possible, it’s a direct result of the diet and exercise regime advocated for in Outlive. With diabetes, the most striking relationship between glucose metabolism and insulin resistance is visible. Eating sugar without understanding what it does to the body is in some sense the direct cause of the diabetes epidemic, which may ultimately turn out to be a driving force behind the other Horseman diseases as well.

Mitigating the spikes in insulin that result from our behavior when we eat too many carbohydrates in the wrong situation is a complex task, but awareness of the principle is often enough to encourage better sugar management in continuous glucose monitor users. Most people can get by without the need for glucose monitoring by applying the principles derived from glucose monitor studies and nutritional biochemistry.

In essence, the goal is to flatten the insulin response so that the pancreas does not need to overproduce insulin just to lower the blood sugar after a meal. This simple tactic can prevent negative biological processes such as storing fat in visceral tissue where it does not belong, dips in blood sugar causing postprandial fatigue, and even unsightly blemishes such as skin tags (which trace their origin to hyperglycemic conditions!). You won’t find a reference to skin tags in Outlive, but I made a living studying the deep connections between the various diseases of ageing for years and I fully back Dr. Attia’s read of the state of affairs he addresses in his medical practice and his writing because the root issues are so thoroughly considered.

For my part, Outlive is the book that I think everyone alive should read carefully. By maintaining the insulin/sugar metabolism, we set ourselves up to live longer, fuller, more fulfilling, and most of all, happier lives. Representing a new level of applicable science, Outlive is an exceptional book because it concisely teaches us how to get there without overwhelming us.

Many thanks go out to the wonderful team at The Quest of Evolution for first supporting a project and then going above and beyond to support an author (me!) on a live + recorded Twitter Spaces earlier today.

The Spaces can be found here:

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbrzvXMBKX?s=20

Our goal with the first-ever Worldview Ethics live public discussion was to cover a lot of ground and get up to speed with regard to the project overall. Alex did a great job of getting good takes and Bob stepped up to the plate and provided a few intriguing avenues for discussion.

Primarily, listeners will find a quick and dirty high level overview of the subject - what the author is doing by writing this way, where the project could fit into the overarching philosophical canon today, and how readers can get involved and participate in building the best lens through which to view the book's subject - all presented in a series of six topical essays delving into moral philosophy and the science of consciousness.

This project is made possible by the technology created by the team at The Quest Of Evolution, and I know you're probably ready to get a look at the essay so here is the official link:

https://www.thequestofevolution.com/worldview-ethics-nft/how-conscious-thinking-ai-differ-godel-completeness

As usual, thanks must go out to Andrew Nox for another insightful and provocative sound track, and to Midjourney & the QoE team for a wonderful cover image.

The newest member of the collection on Rarible is now live, and the Essay 3 NFT has been listed at the low price of 200 $MATIC to purchase immediately, or the highest bid may take it in 7 days. I am excited to see the project develop, and I want to remind the reader that one may contribute to the work as seen above by adding up to 3,000 words in response, support, or expansion, in any form that is desirable. This is a community project, built on the Polygon blockchain.

Find How Conscious Thinking & AI Differ: Gödel-Completeness on Rarible here: https://rarible.com/collection/polygon/0x3ae5dd0b3a7cab9e89ad1180fb5a6c4a26b7afef/items


A few more thoughts:

During the Spaces, Bob brought up the excellent point that Gödel-completeness already refers to something. I'm a big believer in stipulative definitions, which basically entails using words on an agreed-upon basis, which in this case is more similar to "alive" in character than to the hard logic focus of the original Gödel Completeness Theorem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_theorem ).

With respect to the Wikipedia page's above description of Gödel's Completeness Theorem, we're doing operations to determine the consistency of theorems of a language, in the language. A malformed statement can scarcely be held to have truth value. If we're doing logic in a Gödel-complete way, we're practicing deduction with care, and the conclusion must follow from the premises - but again, I just like to use the Gödel language as a signpost to describe the limits of language, so from the starting point the concepts morph and bend a bit as I lever things around with them.

The insight from today's Spaces with respect to the title of the essay here, which is perhaps an issue with my naming convention, is that the term Gödel-complete is, in my work, used to describe non-linguistic systems such as the embodied mind and/or enactive complexes such as people or animals.

The effort here, on my part, is to push us toward language we use to discuss the mind's relationship to the external world and/or people we find there, whereas the original Completeness Theorem in fact is still about logic and systems of language par excellence. As long as we keep that thought straight, it should work fine, but I could certainly see how this might be a bit difficult to keep track of. Maybe we need to come up with a new word that won't be quite as confusing, and perhaps someone will submit a contribution on-chain to suggest the an idea the community will like. It is wonderful to see a use-case for the experimental publishing tool Quest of Evolution have provided us!

If you're interested in getting a deeper dive on the Gödelian lines of reasoning and my fascination with pushing them directions their inventor did not, you can find Formal Dialectics in NFT form here, courtesy of Indefatigable and my friends at PageDAO. (this is v2 beta PageDAO technology!!!): https://www.bonfire.xyz/epicdylan/FormalDialectics

We may have the next essay ready for the presses in about a month's time, so be ready for Worldview Ethics Part 4. Essays 1 and 2 have sold and we have seen one contribution thus far, so keep an eye out for the next addition to the project! It could come any time. It is lovely to see the project catching as much interest as it is, so keep your eyes peeled - we're halfway there, and only just getting started.


As always, thank you for following, supporting, and contributing to my work!


T. Dylan Daniel

Hey everyone, I wanted to write a quick update because I'm going to be away from my computer for a bit. Finally, it will be time to decompress, just as soon as I've finished typing this message!

We have quite a bit of ground to cover. The main things that seem to have the most traction right now are the Worldview Ethics project and the Web3 Book Metadata Standard Group. If you're not following closely, Worldview Ethics is my life's work philosophy project and the WBSG is a rather extraordinary group of 30 or so people from all walks of life and technology backgrounds who want a standard public good platform for books.

WBSG

In WBSG, we've been taking things easier for a few weeks, ever since NFTNYC. But that doesn't mean the gears have ground to a halt. The first few frenzied weeks of the group brought together more CTOs than I've ever seen on a single phone call, which I took to be a very good sign. Since then, we've identified a number of problems and possible value propositions to develop toward and I'm thrilled to say I managed to hack together a (very) basic implementation of something like a scaffold that could be used to build the Standard we've decided to build.

The high point here is that we're still very early days, but now we have a new tool to use to display books and to import books from around the internet into a database. More on that when I'm back from vacation and up to speed.

Worldview Ethics

Worldview Ethics has also had a new essay release today! Read it here: https://www.thequestofevolution.com/worldview-ethics-nft/toward-a-metabolic-theory-of-consciousness-the-cognitive-science-revolution

The UI is a treat and everyone is excited to see what happens once a few of these essays have been pinging around getting contributed to by different people. I'm working on finding folks from the cognitive science field who would be interested, so feel free to share the link and/or forward this newsletter to folks who may be interested!

What makes Worldview Ethics so special is the moment that we find ourselves in the middle of today. We have AI coming up quick, we have blockchains enabling trustless interactions, and we have just about everything we need to have in place to start seeing some next-generation technologies begin to emerge and disrupt at scale.

It's an exciting time, and people are enthusiastically contributing to the conversation around Worldview Ethics. We had a good time on the Web3 Writer's Hour over on Twitter Spaces earlier today, (KHD did a great job reading a poem in the rain, too!) feel free to have a listen if you like:

epicdylan.eth

@thomasdylandan2

Come out and hear about the Web3 writing space and all the new tech.

New essay is live and I will be sharing a bit about it!

thequestofevolution.com/worldview-ethi…

3

12:01 PM • May 9, 2023

Final Thoughts

Here's a handy link to the Worldview Ethics collection, available on OpenSea: https://opensea.io/collection/world-view-ethics

Shout-outs are due to OddWritings for supporting the Worldview Ethics project by going the distance to win the first auction and become the first contributor! Go to his NFT on OpenSea https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x3ae5dd0b3a7cab9e89ad1180fb5a6c4a26b7afef/1 and you'll be able to click the link in the description to follow along as his contribution goes live and he starts the next auction for the NFT!

It's an incredible journey here in Web3 and there are so many exciting things afoot that we couldn't cover them all in one email even if it seemed like a good idea to try.

I'm feeling a lot of gratitude, and I appreciate everyone who keeps up with my work by reading these little updates. It'll be a while before the next update, but things feel good - I'm excited to see what's on the other side of this bear market buidl session.

Cheers,

Dylan

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

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

Worldview Ethics

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

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

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

https://www.thequestofevolution.com

Moral Philosophy & The AI Panic

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

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

https://www.thequestofevolution.com

Worldview Ethics

infinite auction: 1ST MAY 2023 Chain: POLYGON Architects Description Enter the first knowledge base hypergraph, to be constructed around Worldview Ethics, a primary source philosophy text by T. Dylan Daniel, author of Formal Dialectics. This Crypto-Novel will represent an experiment in scientific discourse, with an auction mechanic governing the community's ability to add to the essay, creating an entirely new work.

Note the soundtrack! I am indebted to the QoE team for their ingenuity and creativity in bringing these musical accompaniments to the project. I am looking forward with great anticipation to continuing to work with Andrew and all the rest as we move forward with the project here.

Details

The plan is simple: list the asset at 500 $MATIC, with a duration of seven days and NO RESERVE. This means that ANY BID could potentially win, or someone, if they like, may swoop in and pick it up for the full asking price.

The inspiration for this mechanism was twofold: eBay used to offer a Buy-It-Now price feature that paired nicely with offers made by users, and the Rarible marketplace enables offers to be made on items listed for sale.

If you're a fan of what you're seeing with these essays and you'd like to contribute (shoutout to OddWritings for being the first!) then you can find the new NFT at Rarible:

https://rarible.com

Toward A Metabolic Theory Of Consciousness The Cognitive Science Revolution

Discover, sell and buy NFTs on Rarible! Whether it's Ethereum NFTs, Solana NFTs or Tezos NFTs, get them on Web3's first aggregated NFT marketplace

The project continues as soon as this auction is finalized with Essay #3, so be sure to stay tuned! Something tells me things are heating up in Web3 again, at last.


Cheers,

D

Hey everyone. Quick note today: things are great at PageDAO, work is fine, and my VO2 max has finally recovered to pre-covid levels! That's right, your author here has been getting into shape. That's not what this newsletter is about, though.

Worldview Ethics Updates

I'm writing you today to let you know what's about to happen and update about a few things that have happened recently. First, I have to maintain some secrecy about what we're working on together but I do want to send a shoutout to Rionna Morgan, Collector of Essay 3: How Conscious Thinking & AI Differ.

Scope out her sweet new NFT here: https://rarible.com/token/polygon/0x3ae5dd0b3a7cab9e89ad1180fb5a6c4a26b7afef:3

While we're on the subject, OddWritings has recently lowered his asking price for Essay 1: Moral Philosophy & The AI Panic Letter. Available here: https://rarible.com/token/polygon/0x3ae5dd0b3a7cab9e89ad1180fb5a6c4a26b7afef:1

Worldview Ethics Book Review Series Launches Tomorrow!

That's right! I'm launching a Book Review series to help get the word out about the background for Worldview Ethics. We'll be looking at a long list of books and I'll write a book review for each to bring back some of the high points while also making the full text easy to find so that people who are eagerly anticipating my new work of philosophy have something productive to do to get ready for it.

Aristotle was a truly great philosopher, so great that he earned the nickname The Philosopher, with a capital-P, centuries after his death because his work was so important to the field they couldn't imagine it without him. He got there largely by reading all of the books other people had written, taking his time to get a sense of where other minds had been and why before he sat down to give his lectures at the Lyceum.

So we'll be looking into 10 books (or maybe more!) in order from least to most complex. I'll try to get each new review out in approximately 2 weeks, but I'm aiming for really high quality here so don't hate me if they're delayed a bit.

Anyone want to see the list of books?!

Here they are, with links to audiobooks where possible:

1. Outlive, by Peter Attia & Bill Gifford
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Outlive-Science-Art-Longevity/dp/B0B64WL9PK/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=outlive&qid=1688919120&sr=8-1
   

2. The Runaway Species by Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/The-Runaway-Species-audiobook/dp/B076CQBCC3/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3L0LRESOTBO49&keywords=the+runaway+species&qid=1688919143&s=audible&sprefix=the+runaway+specie%2Caudible%2C108&sr=1-1
   

3. The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/The-Patterning-Instinct-audiobook/dp/B075G21DKR/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+patterning+instinct+by+jeremy+lent&qid=1688919200&s=audible&sprefix=the+patterning+insti%2Caudible%2C109&sr=1-1
   

4. When Einstein Walked with Gödel by Jim Holt
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/When-Einstein-Walked-with-Gdel-audiobook/dp/B07CZMGMFZ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=when+einstein+walked+with+g%C3%B6del&qid=1688919257&s=audible&sprefix=when+eins%2Caudible%2C105&sr=1-1
   

5. Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Complexity-A-Guided-Tour/dp/B09SND3L5D/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=complexity+a+guided+tour+by+melanie+mitchell&qid=1688919315&s=audible&sprefix=Complexity%3A+a+guid%2Caudible%2C109&sr=1-1
   

6. Deep Thinking by Garry Kasparov
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Thinking-audiobook/dp/B06XWLY5XS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10U9T9UVLBLSN&keywords=Deep+Thinking+by+Garry+Kasparov&qid=1688919384&s=audible&sprefix=deep+thinking+by+garry+kasparov%2Caudible%2C99&sr=1-1
   

7. The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/The-Strange-Order-of-Things-audiobook/dp/B079C5JMGX/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+strange+order+of+things&qid=1688919460&s=audible&sprefix=the+strange+ord%2Caudible%2C108&sr=1-1
   

8. Cybernetics Second Edition: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/Cybernetics-Second-Control-Communication-Machine/dp/1773236652/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MQQGD7T2YTPB&keywords=cybernetics+wiener&qid=1688919481&s=audible&sprefix=cybernetics+wiener%2Caudible%2C106&sr=1-1-catcorr
   

9. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
   

   

   
   https://www.amazon.com/The-Critique-of-Pure-Reason-audiobook/dp/B073XVDBNX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3J6DG106ZIQ9V&keywords=critique+of+pure+reason&qid=1688919548&s=audible&sprefix=critique+of+pure+reason%2Caudible%2C104&sr=1-1
   

10. Metaphysics by Aristotle

    

    
    https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Aristotle-audiobook/dp/B06XHVHLDH/ref=sr_1_1?crid=12BT14ERMEJCF&keywords=aristotle+metaphysics&qid=1688919574&s=audible&sprefix=aristotle+metaphysics%2Caudible%2C107&sr=1-1.

These books aren't all lightweight, but they're all well worth the work they take to understand. Plus, I'll be working on putting together some short video content as well just to make things even easier and better for us as we work up to and through this reformulation of modern ethical theory I've been working toward for so long.

For today, cheers! Tomorrow the first review drops. Outlive was a life-changing text for me and I think everyone can get as much out of it as I did.



-Dylan

PageDAO

Recently we've wrapped up a sprint with a consultant in which we determined a way forward, out of the morass in which we have languished the past year or so. I don't have details yet about what will happen next, but I wanted the world to know it feels good again. Shoutouts are due to CD Vagobond, Indefatigable, Rionna Morgan, Greg Fishbone, and all the other honeybadgers who just kept building no matter how low the markets fell or what kind of part-time job they had to pick up.

Building technology is not easy, but it does seem to be possible! With all of the insights learned and all of the feedback received over the past two years, we are now moving forward with an overhaul that will set PageDAO apart.

We've also been working with partners on a variety of writings, including both MoonlingsNFT and The Quest of Evolution, as well as Slingshot DAO and others. This quick update will announce two pieces I've put together with Quest of Evolution and share the hype about the Moonlings who have infiltrated the hearts of the PageDAO community.

The American Arcade

The Watering Hole was conceived of as a lighter Quest of Evolution product, featuring shorter and more topical conversations. I was given one of the first Watering Hole NFTs and asked to contribute to it, which I did.

Find my 150-word piece about "The American Arcade" here: https://contribute.thequestofevolution.com/the-watering-hole/the-american-arcade

In the piece, I tried to capture the vibe of American politics today. People remember well the absurdity of the Trump presidency and don't want to go back there, but we also remember the pattern that led to the Third Reich (economic downturn etc), and want to avoid it. So there's this sense in which the very people who speak the loudest about politics are the least confident in the direction things are headed, which is a bit unusual because it defies single narrative lots of us were used to before it shattered about ten or twenty years ago.

Now, having passed through the post-truth age, we're approaching a multi-truth time. China and Russia and other nations that wish for an alternative to American hegemony are pushing one set of narratives, and the US & its allies are pushing another set. Things feel uncertain with the war in Ukraine, and the joke seems a little stale.

If you'd like to brave the risks and join the conversation, do so by making a bid or by purchasing the NFT here: https://qx.app/asset/0xB9720FB7ffFDa28D153fF0020B81637dE2258721/1

Once you have the NFT in your wallet, you can add up to 150 words to "The American Arcade." The goal is to keep it light, but in today's political climate it also seems important to be very respectful.

AI: A Cybernetic Appendage

Essay 4 from the Worldview Ethics series is also now available! You can read it here: https://contribute.thequestofevolution.com/worldview-ethics/ai-a-cybernetic-appendage

This essay was a bit of fun to write. In it, I attempted to give a bit more clarity to my process in choosing the name Gödel-completeness to describe self-justifying systems. It's a little funny to me that simply saying "alive" doesn't quite cut it. We're looking to use our language to make linguistic comparisons between things which language is very good at representing and things which are much harder to do justice to, linguistically.

I made an effort to characterize Google and OpenAI products as appendages for our minds, like extra, plug-in arms or legs, in an attempt to further ground the core critique of the AI Doomer movement that has characterized this project since Essay 1. The Worldview Ethics book will likely not be as concerned with AI or LLMs in particular as the essays have been, but progress has been a bit slow between the day job and all the growth happening at PageDAO.

By the way, if you're a publisher or an agent and you're seeing this and wondering who I'm going to publish with, I do have an answer to that but it is still possible that you could be of assistance. So please, feel free to reach out to me via Twitter or email and we can figure out whether a partnership can be of mutual benefit or not.

Book Review Series

We also now have a Book Review Series we're using to get a look inside the background upon which Worldview Ethics is being constructed. Every two or three weeks, I'll be releasing an additional review. If you'd like to follow along, write reviews in dialogue with my reviews, read the books in order as we go, or otherwise participate, feel free to get in touch! I'm on Twitter and Warpcast these days and I love to discuss this project on social media so feel free to @ me.

https://paragraph.xyz/@epicdylan.eth/introducing-the-worldview-ethics-book-review-series

Spaces

Last but certainly not least, we have a Spaces coming up shortly in which Rionna Morgan will ask me some questions and the audience will be invited to participate. Get @ us here:

The Quest of Evolution

@TheQuestOfEvo

Today at 8:30 PM CET we're meeting @thomasdylandan2 and @RionnaMorgan to talk about AI: A Cybernetic Appendage.

Join us!

buff.ly/3pRiuZt

#writers #writerscommunity #web3

0

3:07 AM • Jul 19, 2023

I think that's a wrap for the moment, but wow things are sure moving fast these days. In a couple of weeks we should have a new Book Review and in a month a new Quest of Evolution essay.

Moonlings NFT

It wouldn't be a complete newsletter if I didn't shout out the Moonlings NFT community, which has taken PageDAO by storm. Find your favorite PageDAO writers creating lore alongside the rest of the Moonlings NFT community on Twitter and in Discord! Moonlings is also hosting a Moonlympics series of competitions and have joined Avenue, so the future is wide open.

BTDwayne.Eth|NFT_Dee

@NFT_Dee

Just posted a new “Lore Heroes” story to @downavenue_ , this time for my @MoonlingsNFT , Dallas.

It mixes some history on the Moonlings’ tragic past, with some hope that sparks an epic quest for Dallas

Jump on Avenue and give it an upvote

How to in next tweet

13

9:06 AM • Jul 13, 2023

Cheers,

Dylan

Hey everyone! Dylan here. I'm writing this short post to share a new concept I've decided to pick up. At PageDAO, everyone has a project, but for me it's mostly been just DAO stuff. It hasn't worked out that well, so I'm going to be taking a page out of the community's book and focusing more on myself, but I'll always be part of the PageDAO community of builders in Web3.

It turns out that it isn't super easy to drive engagement to an underfunded DAO in the bear market, but maybe it will be a bit easier to take a step back and share a bit more of what's going on behind the scenes with a broader community. I'm a writer, first, and I've been in Web3 and writing about Web3 since about 2019. I briefly mined bitcoin in 2011, but gave it up and obviously didn't hit it big or stick with it back then. So I've been very committed to staying tenacious through the bear market we've been in, despite the massive difficulty there is in trying to get any sort of results these days.

What matters to me is that writers have the tools they need to succeed. We've absolutely moved some mountains at PageDAO, but we've been perpetually frustrated on the fundraising side. People want things to be simple, PageDAO understands that this market is a tough nut to crack and will not misrepresent the difficulty of the problem. Also, we're not the only ones building in this space anymore.

If I'm not the right leader (I think I am, but where is my proof?) to actually raise the money it takes to build the sorts of things my team can see these days, perhaps the best thing I can do is support other projects in the space and focus on my writing to show off all the cool new things that are now possible as a result of these dev teams who care about writers. Creative work is extremely unfair in many ways, and as one of the rare sort of people who comes with a strong creative side, it feels as if I've always had to fight a bit more just to get by than I would ideally have needed to. My passion is philosophy; that's where the cutting edge of human understanding lies and that's what I'm most interested in when it comes to problems to go work on.

I founded PageDAO in 2021 with Indefatigable and CD Vagobond and PhilofAustin and a whole bunch of other top notch humans. We raised a little money and built the DAO, but the world was not quite ready for it. The tools we built are still useful and the community has still been a lot of fun to be a part of, but being a DAO these past few years hasn't been easy.

Coming Changes: More Philosophy!

For me, what's changing is primarily that I'm going to be shifting focus away from building PageDAO tech (the pay is abysmal!) back to working on a very old project of mine. It's a philosophy book that comes from an idea that jumped out back in grad school somewhere between cognitive neuroscience and an extracurricular reading group that dealt with problems in ethics led by a professor I looked up to. The concept is Worldview Ethics, which is basically a minor formal revision to the way we think about ethical issues and individual people. I came up with it about a decade ago as a response to some of the issues I was seeing in the classroom. Ethics was too abstract, not tied in closely enough to the cognitive science or anthropological fields of study that seemed in my view to be very closely related to it. The main difference between Worldview Ethics and Normative Ethics is that Worldview Ethics attempts to maintain a much closer relationship to science.

Even back when I was working on my master's in applied philosophy and ethics ten years ago, there was this concept floating around that somehow we needed to find a way to make all of this more practical for people. We held reading groups and wrote essays about the issues we saw. Then, I went into teaching.

There was a component of the class that involved getting the students to do the reading, and it was easy to tell when they were interested in the subject because they paid more attention and were insistent about contributing to discussion. For this part, I found that choosing what to read made a big difference - but how we discussed the reading was also important. Going through the news and making comparisons to old obscure texts wasn't the right approach, but finding real-world examples of what the thinkers were discussing in the Gorgias seemed to drive Plato home by making him accessible to them, in one memorable case. Overall, the main thing that stood out to me was the importance of the way we approached the issues. It was possible to do it dryly and lose all engagement, or to get right to the core of the matter - which people liked.

When I wrote Formal Dialectics, my goal was to produce a readable primary source text for my immediate community. For its ambition, it is at the very least a fairly short read! The bibliography is extensive, but the text is generally successful in explaining its concepts concisely. I pulled it from Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2022 after they refused to indulge my desire to experiment with it on-chain.

Available as an NFTBook via PageDAO technology and my philosophy collection, Serious Philosophy, you can find Formal Dialectics on OpenSea here: https://opensea.io/assets/optimism/0xe7f967ed990c4db5262b592a3e5b70e29dd585c3/2.

Or, you can mint your own from my Bonfire page here: https://www.bonfire.xyz/epicdylan/home. I'm happy to say I'm also working on building out a collection of classic philosophy texts users can collect. The plan is to find them in the public domain and then, with nice introductions, add them to the roster so that people have some sense of where the really key background is for my philosophy.

Worldview Ethics

Teaser: Panic essay art by Quest of Evolution team. Upcoming Worldview Ethics project.

Worldview Ethics is one piece of the puzzle here, as are my other books. It is possible that one result of this experimental period could be a process by which to integrate on-chain and off-chain publishing arrangements that others will be able to use, but mostly the goal is to show off the technology PageDAO has created and that others around the space have created by doing what I do best and writing accessible, thought-provoking content for people to read.

For one thing, I'm going to be working with the Quest of Evolution team to put out a series of essays that the community can then add to, enabling a conversation to come together around Worldview Ethics starting very soon. Should the world care to participate, there are a number of games that can be played both right away and down the line. If you purchase the NFT, you get to write the next section of the essay. If you do so, you receive some $QEV tokens and a seat in the royalty pool (so you receive part of the proceeds from the trading of the NFT). The Quest of Evolution team is great and I am very excited to see this experiment in the wild! Later, as more Sparks are created and more people get involved, the relationships between these ongoing conversations can be developed as well.

The current plan for Worldview Ethics is to release a total of twelve essays relating to the work via the Quest of Evolution platform. Users will be able to contribute, perhaps even in a rigorous way that could yield true value. After the first six are live, the next release will be the book, Worldview Ethics. We're working on finding a traditional publisher to work with on the print side and for ebooks, but it may be tricky because we certainly intend at least one NFTBook launch (Serious Philosophy) and maybe a second. So many things are possible here, and as a result one of the main goals I'll have will be to listen to the community as this process unfolds.

After the book is live and people can read it, the second set of six essays will begin to drop. These will refer directly to the book more, and will attempt to address the open questions that remain in the completed work. That way, in a few years, maybe some professor somewhere will be able to assign grad students to read the book and some subset of the responses to one of the essays to give them a sense of one aspect or another of the problem of consciousness. Our goal, as technologists building an app that consists of something like a book that's really a live application that runs on the internet and contains a social media component alongside everything we expect from print book media, is to find out what works and what doesn't as we go to refine the approach moving forward.

Knowledge Base Hypergraphing

If a conversation starts with Worldview Ethics, who's to say that other projects couldn't follow suit? Ultimately, the goal is to build out a concept I call the knowledge base hypergraph as we go. A hypergraph is a graph in which two points can be connected by multiple sides. If the project here works, it may make it far easier for individual people without advanced training to get access to the scientific process. There is a LONG ways yet to go, but I am absolutely thrilled to be here in Web3 experimenting with these open systems. There are many things I've wanted but not gotten over the course of the bear market, but something tells me this concept was worth sticking around for. We won't be doing a discord for this project, but anyone interested in connecting can come find me in the PageDAO Discord. We should see a live site shortly, and a week after that the first Worldview Ethics + Quest of Evolution NFT will be available on the market for purchase. It has been a wild ride in so many ways, but here we stand on the cusp of something really new.

Thank you for reading this update!

If you're interested in following along on this intellectual safari, please give me a follow on Warpcast or subscribe to this newsletter on Paragraph.xyz. Going forward, this will be the best way to stay up with the alpha on all your favorite T. Dylan Daniel philosophy projects.