VR Chains and DAC Brains: Upload your mind as a VR AI DAC

Blockchain thinkers or DAC Brains are the notion of having DAO/DAC entities running with smart contracts on blockchains for the purpose of conducting thinking operations. The genesis of blockchain thinkers could be organic or inorganic: human mindfile lifelogs and uploads, and any variety of brain emulations and AI ML/DL algorithms (artificial intelligence machine-learning deep-learning algorithms). One idea is to instantiate your mindfile on the blockchain as a lifelogging tracker and standalone ideation tool: your own mind as an AI DAC. Some key enablers are coming together to make personal AI DACs possible. Idea chains (lifelogging your ideas onto a blockchain) could auto-record your ideas through 1) QS (quantified self)-attached gamma wave spike tracking (recording when you are having an idea), together with 2) cortical image recognition and thought identification (what the idea is about), logged into in a 3) personalized blockchain-based VR consensus reality (coordinating ideas into your own ongoing reality view).

Immersive Virtual Reality is Digitized Experience
Immersive VR (virtual reality), like with the Oculus Rift, is not just video games, virtual worlds, or 3-D CAVE environments, it is digitized experience. Qualitatively different, immersive virtual reality is a means of making physical world experiences real in an alternative medium. VR metaverses then, are parallel realities, as distinct from multiple digital worlds. If you and I go into WoW (World of Warcraft) or SL (Second Life) separately, we see the same world. Even if different levels of views are enabled or locked (like Karl Schroeder’s tech locks in Lady of Mazes [1]), they are just different lenses on the same world. However, if you and I construct our own digital worlds, we see and create different worlds, possibly on the same basic platform, but the realities can be fundamentally different, with different participants, events, and historical records.

Reality Unity in the Physical World
Consider the physical world - there is one platform, and we each have varying reality maps or views of the physical reality platform in our heads. There is one consensus reality and historical event record, and conflicts arise out of different views of the consensus reality trying to hew to one (e.g.; “What happened? X punched Y first. No, Y shoved X first.” – we seek a unique consensus reality of events (Probability Moon further explores the notion of societal shared reality)). Centralized virtual worlds have been the same; there is one reality platform, and centralized event engines record the consensus in one shared events ledger, the game history, even in OpenGL self-hosted models. Now, however, with decentralized models powered by blockchains and dapps, DAOs, and DACs, reality multiplicity is possible. There can be simultaneously existing parallel realities. The multiverse exists, and one place it can be created is in cyberspace.

Blockchains enable Simultaneous Multiple Realities
Just as blockchains are the critical enabling technology for digital cryptocurrencies, so too are they a key facilitator of VR multiverses. Blockchains could serve as the backbone infrastructure for multiple parallel realities (VR multiverses) by coordinating the chain of event histories in these multiple realities. The transaction history is not just for transactions, but more broadly comprises the historical event record. Blockchains consensus-generate the historical record, and allow any number of separate and parallel historical records to be created simultaneously. Blockchains are the mechanism for creating and coordinating simultaneous multiple realities. The altcoin space is already an example of simultaneous separate realities.

The Selectability of all Reality Features Blockchains consensus-generate the historical record, and further, make it clear that all parameters of reality can be malleable and selectable: time, participation, reputation, memory, history (historicity), economic models (hierarchical or peer-based), and political operations (governance and decision-making). These are all selectable parameters of a reality environment. One recent revolution in economic liberation sensibility is that blockchains allow individuals and communities to self-determine economic systems. Now seen in the VR multiverse context, blockchains are revealed to be much more: they could enable all parameters of a reality environment to be selected.

Blocktime Time Malleability
One example of reality feature selectability is blocktime. The timeclock in blockchains is blocktime, the time it takes for blocks of transactions to confirm. The easiest way to specify future time moments (t+n) is via the internal time system of the blockchain, blocktime. For example, the term of a certain decentralized dapp loan might be 7000 block confirmations. Blocktime is the clocktime of blockchains. Certainly blocktime converts to physical world time, but differentials could arise and give way to arbitrage opportunities or other divergence-as-a-feature possibilities. The key point is that all reality parameters, including time and space, could become malleable in blockchains and especially in blockchain-coordinated VR metaverses. Further, if blockchains become the mechanism for keeping time and event histories, de facto they become memory, where memory is a critical functionality that feeds back directly into lifelogging and Brain-as-a-DAC idea chains.

A World of Multiple Realities
All of reality can be made malleable, personalized, self-determined, personally-constructed, emergent, and a thing of multiplicity not monolithicity. There can be an end to the tyranny of a sole reality. “End reality tyranny, create your own VR multiverse!” Deleuze's multiple inner views can bloom as described in Proust and Signs. In the new sensibility of VR multiverse reality multiplicity, an imaginable query to alien intelligence could be a Kardashev scale parameter: “To what extent do you have multiple realities in your world?”

Right to Self-Determine One’s Own Realities
The earlier positions in human liberation have been the right to self-determination in certain contexts, in different parts of life and the experience of reality. These include the right to self-determination in governance, legal systems, IP protection/sharing regimes, software business models, neural data privacy rights, cognitive enhancement, and most recently, the emerging sensibility of the right to self-determine one’s own economic systems. These are all important steps in the liberty of the individual, but they are all in some sense intermediary positions on the way to the now-visible bigger position which is the right to self-determine one’s own overall reality, and really, realities (plural). A new sensibility could be seeing the right of each individual, entity (human and machine/technology entities), or group to self-define its own personal consensus reality (realities). The central component of the self-determination of organisms could be the operation of its own consensus reality(ies).

Blockchains as a Historicity Mechanism and Collaboration Space 
Blockchains are a means for consensus-generating the historical record (a historicity mechanism) to facilitate reality multiplicity, and they are the means of enabling value flow. In network economic theory, this is beyond the transactional sense of the value flow of currency from me to you, where unleashing the creation and transmission of many kinds of non-monetary value flows is the bigger picture of what is at stake and possible in creating multiple realities. Non-monetary currencies (like universal human needs for connection, contribution, mattering, and understanding) can be registered and tracked as blockchain-based smart assets. One reason for VR realities, what we are really wanting in creating new realities (via VR multiverses) is creating spaces that are free of the limiting constraints of physical realities. These constraints pertain to both the physical world and human limitations, including matter, gravity, time, illness, disability, impairment, sleep, recovery, distraction, cognitive bias, etc.) such that more freedom, exploration, collaboration, expression, creativity, fun, serendipity, progress, and contribution can be enabled. We want to cognitively enhance proximately for a better memory, sure, but ultimately to be 'bigger' in the sense of being more able to grow and participate beyond our initial position of self. We want more of the creative yes-and collaboration space of new energy and idea generation. The ‘economy’ of the future might be measured based on non-monetary value flows like ideation, which could be orchestrated by public and private reality blockchains.

Convergent Integration of Multiple Simultaneous Realities
Now possibly having a situation of multiple simultaneous realities, what is there to do with them? There are several implications for the future of privacy, sharing, and collaboration. For example, there is a question about when and how to cohere and merge VR DAC brain realities. Therefore, within realities, there might be sub-threads or other means of parsing and segmenting sub-realities.

Colored coin threads in your brain DAC could be the way to permission subreddit mind ledgers to cloudmind collaborations

Mindchains could be a means for how to safely mindshare or collaborate in a cloudmind, for example by permissioning your subreddit ledger for ideation related to certain areas as opposed to your full mindfile or meat-brain….“here, let me share everything with you I’ve thought about crowdsourced genomic studies,” or "here, join the mindslack channel for this community."

Blockchain apps could auto-merge shared realities in the way that topical queries are ambiently processed in the background now. There could be situations analogous to Hayek’s competitive currencies where reality views compete. There could be reality ecologies where repetitive threads across individual realities converge into shared group realities (the unobtrusively representative politics of the future). Right now this happens manually with the blunt tools of the physical world; we search for other individuals, groups, and institutions with our own shared values and reality view, and blockchain DACs might facilitate the automatic canvassing and convergence of all of this.

We might know that VR metaverses and the human-machine collaboration are really working when VR NPC DACs self-create in our realities per sensing our human needs (actualization, contribution, growth and learning, exploration, creation). Blockchain-based VR AI DACs could auto-sense and create whatever 'Tuscany houses' are needed to grow an entity (like a human or machine mind) in its progression. For example, in an ideas 'economy,' the most important inputs are anything which facilitates the development of ideas, and attending to this could be one purpose of a an NPC VR AI DAC in your personal VR metaverse, operating via smart contracts on your mindchain. Ideas are the demurrage-redistributable basic income of a blockchain thinker Brain DAC. Blockchain thinker Brain DACs then become another Ubiquitous Grid Resource, an important one, for idea generation, in the overall picture of the future Network Economies of Abundance.

Acknowledgement: This post was inspired by ideas from Maciej Olpinski regarding consensus in virtual reality worlds.

[1] POV HUDs are a mechanism to accommodate multiple levels of technology adoption within a society; e.g.; through my HUD, I see unimproved nature and birds tweeting; through your HUD, you see propositional nanotech 3-D printed finery self-mutating in utility fogs.

Personalized Economic Systems: Self-Determination and Economic Theory

In addition to blockchain technology, another clear node of current innovation is in self-determined economic systems. Increasingly, as individuals, we are consciously examining the economic systems into which we were born by default, and questioning their validity, utility, and reach; and proposing alternatives. In some sense capitalism is the new feudalism and there is a finally starting to be the conception and realization of a viable postcapitalist position. The new sensibility could be that economic systems are determined at the level of the individual as opposed to the level of the nation-state, and further that different economies might be appropriate at different levels of scale in an overall world of economic multiplicity. Further, economics means discovery and exchange more generally and conceptually as opposed to exclusively transactionally. As individuals we have become our own selection node for the news, information, and entertainment we consume. The same could happen with economic systems and governance systems: downscaling the locus to the level of the individual as another context for personalization and right to self-determination.

Personalized Economic Systems: Platforms and Features
There could be a new world of ‘let a million economies bloom’ (in an esprit of self-blossoming not socialism). As every individual might have their own social media platform with a channels like a blog, Twitter feed, YouTube channel, and Instagram stream, so too as individuals we might have our own personalized economic platform, with our own personal currency and economic system. A common set of feature functionality could coalesce in these programmable economic systems. The core feature set could include token issuance, exchange, and conversion mechanisms; transaction validation, confirmation, and tracking; identity and reputation management systems; bounty, reward, and appreciation systems; consensus protocol; node on-boarding/off-boarding; and basic income systems mechanism including with redistribution (demurrage) parameters.

How these features are implemented in different individual and group economies could be via a combination of pre-specification and emergence (including via community prediction market voting) through the ongoing operation of the economy. Some emerging platforms for personalized economic systems for individuals and communities include datt.co (a decentralized reddit for any user-content created community), Ethereum CIRCLES (personal economic coinplatforms for creating user-specified self-determined economies), HyLo (social network based on intentionality of asset-mapping, intent-casting, and crowd-resourcing), and those integrating direct democracy with economic empowerment like D-CENT, LiquidFeedback, and Citizen Code.

Qualitative Economics: Registering Values as Smart Assets
Blockchains are not essential but are the obvious and contemporary information technology to include to facilitate personal economic systems and enable new kinds of functionality. For example, qualitative parameters such as group values and group needs could be registered as blockchain-based smart assets to which community coin is booked, spent, or voted to indicate the level to which the group values and needs are being met. This could be an integrated and minimally-obtrusive feedback mechanism for awareness of how community values are evolving, and the extent to which they are being embodied. There could be multiple community tokens: quantitative coin for the usual basic exchange, and qualitative coin for tracking ideas, inspiration, and other values, benefits, or needs of the community registered as smart assets. Overall this is what is meant by ‘the new economic theory’ as being a means of acknowledging and attributing value in a relevant context like an individual, group, or community.

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.