Blockchains as an Equality Technology

The advent of blockchain technology has prompted the questioning of many concepts that have been taken for granted for years such as money, currency, markets, economics, politics, citizenship, governance, authority, and self-determination.

We have become accustomed to the hierarchical structures of the contemporary world. These structures and models were nice advances at the time of their derivation, hundreds of years ago, to facilitate the large-scale orchestration of different operations of society so that life could be conducted in a safe and productive manner.

While serving as a significant node in the overall progress of humanity, the imperfect value proposition of hierarchical models has been waning, and especially rapidly so in the current era of science and technology. Now contemporary information technology is facilitating not just a more efficient life through technology (off-loading both physical and mental drudgery), but also allowing the models for large-scale societal coordination to be rethought.

Large-scale decentralized (e.g.; non-hierarchical) orchestration models like blockchain technology are starting to be available, and this could configure a completely new era in human progress. This is because decentralized models are equality technologies: technologies that allow more possibility for individual liberties, freedoms, rights, actualization, expression, and self-determination than has been possible in hierarchical models. Further, equality technologies imply not just more liberties for individuals and an eradication of illiberty, but a better equalization or calibration of liberties amongst individuals and societies.

It is not that a complete revolution to decentralized models would be underfoot, it is that decentralized models are a striking new entrant in the possibility space of the models for large-scale coordination. The longer-term future could likely be a space where there are many different centralized, decentralized, and hybrid models, and other new forms of models, where the important dynamic becomes tuning the orchestration system to the requirements of the underlying situation.

The Philosophy of Complexity: Are Complex Systems Inherently Tyrannical?

The philosophy of complexity is developing as a field of philosophical inquiry to accompany, support, and question advances in the science of complex systems. This is warranted given that the issues surfaced by science findings signal a full slate of philosophical questions in the three main areas of ontology (existence), epistemology (knowledge), and axiology (valorization and ethics). The fast pace of technological innovation has been substantiating the need for various new philosophies explicitly examining these issues in technology, information, cognition, cognitive enhancement, big data, and complexity.

How much total Liberty is in the System?
A philosophy of complexity would operate both internally and externally to the practice of complexity science, at the level of the theory of the practice, and at the abstraction of the impact and meaning of the practice more broadly in society. One issue for investigation is a philosophical characterization of complex systems themselves, including parameterizing different features such as range-boundedness. For example, in French politics, there was the revolution and the subsequent process of republics starting, failing, and enduring. The question is measuring the total liberty available in the system, how has this changed over time, and what predictions can be made, or, more importantly, what improved changes might be catalyzed for the future?

Persistent Mathematical Behavior across Complex Systems
Fifteen or so criteria that are mathematically persistent across complex systems (fat tails, power laws, high coefficients, degrees of correlation, fractal behavior, etc.) have been identified. However, it seems that even while expanding and contracting over time, complex systems may be displaying cyclic and range-bound behavior. This could be inherently mean-regressing, and potentially tyrannizing or at least limiting to system participants, and this should be measured and evaluated. Is there a fixed amount of liberty available in the French political system? To what degree do complex systems as a format have limitations, and is this a block to progress? Both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of complex systems need to be measured, with an identification of where and how these limits can be and have been broken (beyond traditional symmetry-breaking).

Bergsonian Information, Illiberty, and Rethinking Thinking
The philosophical questions concern the ontology, epistemology, and axiology of complex systems. For example, does complexity have a qualitative side? There is a need to investigate the idea of ‘Bergsonian information,’ the extension of duration-as-time and duration-as-consciousness/self to the internal doubled experience of information, in the context of complexity. Likewise, liberty, illiberty (the absence of liberty), and potentiality in complex systems should be explored, especially in cognition, neuroscience, and connectome-mapping, areas which are just starting to be accessible to the complexity discipline. There can be an examination of how we can rethink thinking and intelligence (biological and artificial) per deep learning, symbolic systems methods, and the philosophy of complexity.

Futurist Ethics of Immanence

The ethics of the future could likely shift to one of immanence. In philosophy, immanence means situations where everything comes from within a system, world, or person, as opposed to transcendence, where there are externally-determined specifications. The traditional models of ethics have generally been transcendent in the sense that there are pre-specified ideals posed from some point outside of an individual’s own true sense of being. The best anyone can ever hope to achieve is regaining the baseline of the pre-specified ideal (Figure 1). Measuring whether someone has reached the ideal is also problematic tends to be imposed externally. (This is also an issue in artificial intelligence projects; judgments of intelligence are imposed externally).

 Figure 1: Rethinking Ethics from 1.0 Traditional to 2.0 Immanence.

There has been progression in ethics models, moving from act-based to agent-based to now situation-based. Act-based models are based on actions (the Kantian categorical imperative vs utilitarianism (the good of the many) or consequentialism (the end justifies the means). Agent-based models hold that the character of the agent should be predictive of behavior (dispositionist). Now social science experimentation has validated a situation-based model (the actor performs according to the situation (i.e., and could behave in different ways depending on the situation)). However all of these models are still transcendent; they are in the form of externally pre-specified ideals.

Moving to a true futurist ethics that supports freedom, empowerment, inspiration, and creative expression, it is necessary to espouse ethics models of immanence (Figure 1). In an ethics of immanence, the focus is the agent, where an important first step is tuning in to true desires (Deleuze) and one’s own sense of subjective experience (Bergson). Expanding the range of possible perceptions, interpretations, and courses of action is critical. This could be achieved by improved mechanisms for eliciting, optimizing, and managing values, desires, and biases.

As social models progress, a futurist ethics should move from what can be a limiting ethics 1.0 of judging behavior against pre-set principles to the ethics 2.0 of creating a life that is affirmatory and expansive.

Slideshare presentation: Machine Ethics: An Ethics of Perception in Nanocognition

Illiberty in Biohacking, Personal Data Rights, Neuro-diversity, and the Automation Economy

Illiberty is a new concept that describes the notion of a lack of liberty. In one way it is strange that a word for the opposite of liberty and freedom does not exist given how strongly these ideals feature in social, political, and cultural life. However, illiberty is quite subtle; it does not have the bluntness of the freedom-slavery opposition. Illiberty is the sense of a lack of liberty, particularly where there should be liberty. The justice-injustice pairing is similar to the liberty-illiberty relation.

As individuals, we continue to wake up to higher levels of consciousness in constituting ourselves as subjects, and now is the time to develop an awareness and response for new situations of illiberty.

Illiberty extends the familiar equity, social justice, privilege, and access struggles and covers a larger conceptual ground. Here are some new cases of illiberty, many of which we may be unaware: 

• Labor Rights: Mind liberation from working in the corporation, working for others
• Personal Data Rights: rights and responsibilities conferred upon personal data, especially big health science data streams: personal genome data, pacemaker data, biometric data, quantified self-tracking gadgetry data, neuro-data streams
• Citizen Scientist Rights: Non-institutional conduct of scientific research, biorights, biohacking, the biocitizen, community labs
• Neural Rights: Neurodiversity, ASD (autism spectrum disorder), introversion, mind emancipation 
• Economic Rights: Basic income guarantee (JET Vol 24, Issue 1), automation economy, post-scarcity economy
• Augmentation Rights: Rights and responsibilities of augmented persons

Illiberty Studies – Research Agenda 

1. Develop the illiberty concept drawing on: Derrida (democracy to come – inherent illiberty in the conceptualization of liberty), Rancière (emancipation), de Soto (responsibility-taking maturation), Dussel (liberty recast as liberation), Foucault (self-imposed disciplinary power) and Deleuze (micro-fascisms in one’s own thinking). 
2. Identify the conceptual shifts and argument structure in the historical development of equality philosophies (decolonialism, feminism, queer theory, transgender, marriage equality, neurodiversity, polyamory) 

Illiberty Working Group

Is responsibility-taking freeing or not?

In Greek philosophy, there is the notion of taking the responsibility for shaping and defining yourself as an individual. This concerned all aspects of life, both external (e.g.; social, political, economic), and internal, (e.g.; personal life, health). One philosophical view bemoans that this notion disappeared after the Greeks, with external forces shaping nearly every detail of the individual, first in the classical era by the church, and now in the modern era, by science and other experts, and culture.

Responsibility abdication is paradoxically freeing
However, cultural hypnosis is not sufficient to explain why people are not taking more responsibility now in an era where the information and tools afforded by technology are allowing greater responsibility-taking. The opposite occurs, instead of taking new responsibility, it is just better outsourced. Part of the reason is laziness, or more respectably and thermodynamically, entropy the tendency towards low-energy states.

Trusting outsourced solutions to care for responsibilities might seem to increase dependency, but it paradoxically leads to more freedom. It is actually freeing not to take responsibility. Abdicating responsibility has the higher benefits and lower costs of controlling rather than owning assets. However, one danger is that the outsourcing becomes too derivative, and through lack of oversight, later enslaves the originator, morally or otherwise.