Universal Oikos

I admit this reads a bit as a fiction but the ideas I am sketching below seem so clear to me that as I work out the intricate warps and woofs I quickly cobbled together, I don’t expect the basic conclusion to be shown erroneous. So read it at your own risk. The rewards however as the words reveal are already (t)here. Perhaps I am bat shit crazy but I just don’t think so. The advances that blockchains avalanche have already started to flake off. Others just play tether ball around the tree that might snow the next 100 years of evolutionary theory.

Joan Roughgarden has propounded an evolutionary theory of social selection to replace sexual selection and has advocated, advised, and added instances of her bottom up modeling procedure. This development in evolution studies, realizes objectively equal gender classifications formerly relegated and reduced to incidentally derived dimorphic status, latterly founding reproductions of natural selection through underdeterminations of offspring first rather than overdeterminations of parental investments and divestments. Her proposal met with profound disdain and dejection from those supposedly in the know. Blockchain technology appears to be evolving along the lines of a new algorithmically instantiated platform by AVALabs from increasingly familiar consensus protocols first sketched in 2018 by an invisible crew named Team Rocket. Roughgarden’s social selection as recognized and applied largely moved from and through animal species even-the-while plants remained in it’s rear view purview. A physical property that sports the model appears to be definitively recoverable from nature in the presumption of a potentially mutual cross gender pleasure via an unknown chemical mediator. Joan has suggested one such discoverable option but it turns out supplementally that by applying a version of the avalanche protocol towards achieving consensus within plant ecologies under social selection in analogy with human economies of blockchain at scale, new insights into empirically testable scenarios for evolutionary theory can be designed which obviates the need for a specific chemical in the sustainment of theoretical trajectories the model supports. There is a sustainable cross over through Nash’s idea of parallel machine control, his notion of a bargaining equilibrium, Roughgardian social selection, and programmatic avalanche metastability. I am only going to sketch — here and now — the communicabilities within.

Suzanne Simard tested and proved that plants can send carbon through their roots to other trees. The relation of plants ( and animals) in this network of relations provided by communication of chemicals through the mycelium has been called perhaps flippantly and humoursly the Wood Wide Web but as I shall show below the manifestable narrow waist of the metabstability as designed by AVA Labs in its production engine provides an architecture which when applied to Rougarden’s use of game theory can oscillate theoretical plant sexuality ( big vs small gamete) within and between plants in such way that implies that plants have genders, a prediction that can be empirically confirmed. There is more to blockchain evolution than meets the atomic-swapping eye. I suspect that there will be more and more applications of the snow family of protocols to science just as there are increasing instantiations in the blockchain (AVAlabs, BCH, Perlin) space.

The basic idea underlying social selection is that reproduction is not about the mating process temporally per say but rather is about cooperating to raise the most number of offspring. This cooperation may occur between parents without respect to sex but interestingly may also occur between species and subspecies. That is the contribution that blockchain technology provides to evolutionary theory. It is quite remarkable. Hermaphroditic trees may court each other by choosing not to revert to global competitive Nash selfish threat points but instead ‘opt-in’ to continue to choose cooperative joint bargaining and side payments strategically when a plant team fitness function is constructed by chemically agnostic (concentration gradient driven) transmission through a stable main mycelial network. Simard has shown that “mother trees” can direct carbon deferentially to their own offspring and thus as these parent individuals in some families may be either male or female both within and between the organisms themselves (multiple genders) it is possible for team work to arise ecologically ( in the space the distribution of trees on the ground landscapes) such that other species mother and father trees receive chemicals including carbon by differential inbreeding that draws other subspecific variants within the network being provisioned underground to their offspring by excluding non-familial relatives that have opted out of helping to raise offspring and decided to compete rather than cooperate and thus bifurcate in evolutionary time the genes fungi select when evolving the proximately extant networkable connections. If the parents use an avalanche like metastability format to distribute carbon through such a growing network ( sampling courted partners both within themselves and between individuals and adopting their carbon release kinematic) and the offspring have traits passed down by grown ancestors similar to begging in baby birds utilizing such, then trees using self-DNA ‘to pay’ (from the pay-off matrix operation in game theory ) ( which inhibits self growth and thus expands the places on the ground available for growth and reproduction) during the transmission, those so strategically cooperating can move up trophic levels the network builds out purely geographically. There is no group pleasure chemical involved in this model, instead only each individual’s DNA is incorporated which can be as narrow a margin as the heritable interpretation of that supramolecular chemical tolerates as a template biophysically. This will be explained in the sequel. That is the basic idea and thus while it make take some years before this idea is networked out, the basic idea is available for those who look beyond the negatively competitive aspects of oikos information and towards the cooperation we all need both as a species and as a humanity with others.

Unfortunately for our better-selves, there has been a value judgement marshaled against at least some of those sold on bitcoin among us. Commentators have challenged up-coming POS governed blockchains as being too complex and that when making a guess at where to place one’s $R&D, the promoted projection has been into POW tech not because it might be inherently a better platform to launch a distributed ledger in, but because the threshold to user adoption appears to them as literally a no-brainer. Some have made the bet that it is easier to develop POW functions etc. than POS ones, since one does not have to assume any cognitive interest in the user- validator beyond the required instructions ( 1 — plug in computer, 2 — go hash). While Kevin Sekniqi of AVALabs has said he has no universal composable theorem/argument of POS and POW, he has made the point on multiple times that POW networks can be embedded into POS systems. This means to me that any value judgement being applied against POS support equally applies to POW manifestations (when the entire universe of future design possibilities is included in reflection on those interests that regulate the decision of how to constitute the afforded applications). Now Microsoft has recently published a patent to use body activity as proof-of-work, saying that this will help reduce energy expenditures. Microsoft is trying to patent in on the decision bitcoiners made, that it has value— that they have been convinced of the bitcoin narrative and gone the last mile to adopt it as something they choose to do and be a part of. The POW operation proposed in the Microsoft patent potentially includes “ a brain wave or body heat emitted from the user when the user performs the task provided by an information or service provider, such as viewing advertisement or using certain internet services, can be used in the mining process.” while it is determining if work was done. We do not need these companies using our interest and decisions in agreeing to a narrative of what money, whether ideal or not is, to force and coerce our behavior based on a prior knowledge about our ideas, decisions and preferences we may have expanded on socially and communicated with others publicly. Microsoft may think this is not what they are doing but the application is clear in the example of the musicians who have already had their brain waves used to select notes. It is the artist when thinking of the note to be needed creatively that produces the wave the machine records, it is not the machine that creates the image the the user’s brain produces a wave thereof. We do not need new tech companies or new tech products deciding how we use and view social media, we need them to build tech that reflects how we like to use it, how we are pleased to use it independently of how some sovereign wishes it to be regardless of how free, how much money they have or are. If they had such a device then it seems that sooner than later some will start to create advertisements that manipulate not only our pleasures and pains but also our understandings. This would be much worse than bad. It is something I would resist. Humanity made clear the distinction between the physical actions of organic bodies and bodies made of physically active materials a few hundred years ago and yet the Microsoft patent in the name of creating something new slashes and hashes right through this distinction as if it was nothing but a virtual simulation of the large scale data synthesized from a prior analysis. Seems to me that this kind of POW centric thinking and planning on control over our user interaction with machines is just not the way to go into Web3.0. With Web 3 we will, among many other things accumulate smart assets and we will need a way to sort and use our own personal portfolio of them especially if one obtains them through non-fungible tokens.

The production, wilding, collection, and reuse of these valuable digitizations is going to be a increasingly demanded functionality on Web 3. With AVA these powerful processes individuated by different businesses will thus have a programmed utility under an action — reaction horizon of superfluid network changeabilities previously invisible to intelligent creators but ones we can understand. The details of such a lightweight scalable tech remains for me to provide to you but it is clear the motivation behind the Microsoft patent is not sound. I hope to show that one on the AVA network is. Here is quick guide to my idea: It is possible to produce a body activity proof-of-work such that there is absolutely no forced cognitive decision making that is required of the user. One does not have to force/coerce the user into making new and additional cognition than those already being done.

Sounds like I am saying you can eat your cake having haved it too. But in fact the example I am suggesting is one in which the user simply adapts to technology rather than adopts it and this can be done with a body activity POW aspect within and POS horizon.

In the case of using a hand gyro for digital asset search and retrieval ( it rotates in two independent degrees of freedom that provide manual overrides) the user simply is doing something that is independent of the hashing. Electricity is generating as a side effect of the searching activity. Muscle energy rather than visual/brain energy powers the device but by being on the periphery of the nervous system provides minimal interference with physiological function. From John Nash’s perspective of the worth of a machine, it makes no sense to build one that takes more time unless there is a need to multiply the kinds of tasks we want to compute and use the computer thus for. We do not need to a make a technology that forces one to compute and do tasks just because this is easier for the computer to instruct us to do — rather we should, I feel, build a machine that does the computations that we ‘ask’ it to do. That’s my ask for digital asset creation devices. We need devices that interact with us from the outside-in not the inside-out. The hand gryo when parallelizing the inputs and scaling to many users may be designed to speed up the rate at which machines take instructions. It looks at least initially to be able to make division as a decision requiring process since it can exist at the extremity of both locomotion and computation. This device is not a world computer — it will not compute anything but it might be made to sort digital assets. This is not something that Nash considered. New decentralized blockchain tech requires new ways to parallelize digital logic for it to correspond with our social and economic activities all the while attending to our personal actions similarly. Further it is helpful when evaluating what Nash said about bitcoin to understand how he thought about computers and mentality. He wrote a paper in 1954 called “Parallell Control” and he expressed the hope that computer part separations would result in self-programmable machines. While we are now able somewhat to create programs that program themselves there is no such thing as Von Neumann’s idea of computers making themselves that is in homology with biological evolution — there are no workable disciplines of applied metabiology here. There does appear to be such a thing as the evolution of social selection by avalanche protocol applications however. The idea of dividing currency into two coins that are bound dynamically to each other and separate formerly united capital in the system, as in POS, comes out of this general idea of Nash, however it does not lead to the extreme form that he had considered where he took the analogy quite literally and thought that the communication system of the computer and the mind’s parallels were organonically ( a term from the history of logic) and materially one and the same. This may have led to some of the symptoms he claims to have apperceived but it also gave him insight into the ideas of money before others followed on. Again, POW proponents may think that this is all just too complicated and that the gains are not worth the effort and that it is better and easier to demean past decisions but the point is that POW in POS makes Nash’ s ideal not into something directly tied to the entire global financial system nor into what Bitcoin is trying to do but rather into something that does all of that in a much more restricted way. We can directly map our human economics to animal and plant eco-evolutions and we can have a new future that is positive both for us and our interests as well as with those possessed by different species if we learn how to apply evolution rather than just discuss if it exists or not.

The POW proposal of Microsoft has an analogy in the social selection of the wood wide web that further draws out the intricacy we are entering in on as a society of the 21 century — in explaining how rusts — which are fungal parasites of trees genotypically evolved into their strange and weirdly acting genetic cell types. These parasites may have taken advantage of the behavior of the mycelial network to game the social selection system of already cooperating individuals and produce throughout its geographic spread, a new kind of production of chemically fit individuals, from the outside — as sovereigns — by attaching themselves to multiple species evo-ecologically. Thus while it is possible that the Microsoft proposal can be built, it will add the kind of complication that might be suggested rusts have already inserted into the ecosystem of life itself already here on earth. The value of new blockchain techs will not only come from those who have adopted it but from those who adapt DAGs( directed acyclic graphs) to many different activities that might be homologized in tree-wise topologies of time in space — otherwise known as phylogenies. So while this still reads as a fiction and I jumped to the end before I really began — I suggest you try it again, and again…while you gain away the pain the cooperation will appear — it is a joy to realize that the past is is just that — past. Or just ask me a question directly.