Anoma x Biosemiotics: Intents Across Umwelten

[Exeunt]

As a relative neophyte in the world of intent-based architecture, what immediately stands out are the epistemological implications involved in exploding fiat as a universal denominator. In the world of fiat, legibility before the value graph is restricted to private, individual humans, and the process is self-reinforcing: those who value collective agencies, process entities or the nonhuman are systematically marginalized - and, of course, those agencies themselves are excluded entirely.

An intent layer on blockchains seems to ‘break the spell’, so that those with different ontological assumptions - or in the liminal cases entirely different umwelten - can nonetheless participate in counterparty discover on a value graph.

If my assumptions here are correct, then there’s a whole potential research space around applied biosemiotics and Anoma: If an intent based OS reduces the need for a universal denominator in a value graph by taking on the burden of semantic standardization, how deep and weird can the pluralistic denominators beneath it get?

Speculatively, intent might even come from exotic agents beyond those traditionally defined by biology - for example, sociotechnical assemblages, collective affects, or inorganic assemblages like storms or rivers that may have enough cybernetic complexity to be registered as possessing intention. It’s plausible that social coherence provided by this infrastructure could even make evident cognitive capacities previously invisible to us.

(And yes, I do have A Thousand Plateaus sitting on my desk right now).

Curious if there is any thinking in this direction, or maybe flaws in my assumptions around what Anoma can do

[cwgoes]

Fascinating point of departure! Big fan of Michael Levin’s work as well.

Although I’ve read a little Deleuze & Guattari, I’m not extremely familiar with these perspectives, so I’ll start here with a few clarifying questions and attempts of my own to clarify the boundary of what Anoma does and does not do.

Questions

@Exeunt

epistemological implications involved in exploding fiat as a universal denominator

What do you mean by “epistemological implications” – changes to what can be known, and how it is known, writ large, specifically changes to what kinds of knowledge are legible to economic systems (and how so), or something else altogether?

@Exeunt

Speculatively, intent might even come from exotic agents beyond those traditionally defined by biology - for example, sociotechnical assemblages, collective affects, or inorganic assemblages like storms or rivers that may have enough cybernetic complexity to be registered as possessing intention.

I think the key question here would be – registered by whom? Anoma – as a digital system – has no intrinsic ability to recognize humans, rivers, or assemblages of any sort – it deals purely with informational-functional notions of identity (e.g. whoever can produce a signature with a particular private key). Neither the identities of humans nor the identities of rivers as we would commonly understand them are particularly related to knowledge of private keys, so some mediation is required to translate between the historical-temporal and information-functional notions of identity.

In the former case, this is currently practically accomplished by physical devices which store private keys and people are expected to keep safe – a relatively brittle mechanism in my opinion, but no worse than any which we use to interact with distributed digital systems at the moment. My question here would be: who would register these agents as possessing intentions, and could both (a) the identities of the agents in question and (b) the intentions so registered somehow be translated into the information-functional conceptions of identity and intent which are legible to digital systems?

Boundaries

@Exeunt

If an intent based OS reduces the need for a universal denominator in a value graph by taking on the burden of semantic standardization

I think whether or not Anoma takes on the burden of semantic standardization depends on what you scope under “semantics”, namely:

• Anoma takes on the burden of database semantics standardization, in the sense of providing protocols (e.g. controllers) which different computers (and blockchains) can use to interoperate with each other and to provide the user (who or whatever they may be) with a standard interface, where the protocols themselves are value-neutral.
• Anoma does not take on the burden of representational semantics standardization, in the sense of somehow determining what it is that an “AppleToken” in the database relates to in the physical world (this is, of course, impossible for a digital system to do – representational semantics are in the eye of the beholder).

I think that one can make the argument that standardizing protocols which do not fix or preference a particular notion of value (such as a particular fiat currency) can indeed open up more space for alternative notions. However, the protocols alone merely help open up a space of possibilities, which will only be actualized if social actors (be they individual, collective, alien, or otherwise) take it upon themselves to use the protocols to instantiate alternative, concrete economic flows.

[Exeunt]

Yes, I do mean “changes to what kinds of knowledge are legible to economic systems”, or more importantly, what kinds of knowledge are available to us through the shared epistemological filter of our economic system.

I think both the questions of registering identity and registering intent from different entities point to the research space I’m trying to get at: specifically, biosemiotics (“economic biosemiotics”?
), with an emphasis on cyborg or prosthetic appendages that might help an animal, plant, swarm, or other type of sensemaking cybernetic system in broadcasting intents, not passively, but with the learned expectation that interacting with said prosthetic interface might help them reach a goal. In this case, registering an identity would be the end goal of a likely long, iterative process of real instantiation of the interface into the “behavioral program” of the entity.

My interest in this comes from a brief collective research project on “interspecies mutualism” with some regens in the space that tried to think about nonhuman participation in economics or governance that was direct rather than representational, expert based or rights based. The fact that this isn’t really being considered in academic animal rights discourse points to how difficult and sci-fi the problem space is..

My techno-optimist intuition here is that where there is plausible scaffolding for a cognitive system between organisms, they will often adapt to to those channels beyond expectation (see the ectopic eyes experiment linked above). Maybe this can be thought all the way from the collective intelligences known egregores or tulpas - there is a good deal written about the uncanny sense of their sentience and intentionality and the feeling that, given an opportunity, they will exploit it (see Slenderman documentary) - to simple organisms that seem to carry a more-than-just-reflexive cognizance of participation in an ensemble. Could niche-specific token economies act as this cognitive scaffolding, symbiotic signaling interfaces between organisms or entities with a common environment? Perhaps these organisms in themselves can’t directly scale to participation in a global economy, but one can imagine them scaling as a collective (by way of these niche economies) into an effective counterparty at the intent interface level, giving emergent collective bargaining power at the scale of human economy. The first part of this is far from trivial and maybe not even possible, but the ability of Anoma to do open ended counterparty discover and find liquidity paths between distant economic paradigms begs the question (again) of how alien those paradigms could be.

I’ve written a bit of a manifesto on this topic, with some mention of these questions & Anoma here: noopunk . It can be a bit hand wavy (as I have been above) so excited to escalate this to a more technical level if anyone is game !

[Exeunt]

@cwgoes I am in the process of constructing a research and funding application on behalf of Studio A for Earth Species Project, DemocracyNext, Interspecies Internet and the Templeton World Charity Foundation on the topic of ICAs and biosemiotics.

As I move forward, I just wanted to check in and ask (you or others on the team):

a) Would Heliax be available to some limited extent for researcher’s queries given the success of the proposal and the establishment of a small team of academics to focus on this issue?

b) Are there any key flaws in this preliminary research framework?

Any suggestions for research questions would be welcome as well!

Proposal: Intent-Centric Architectures and Interspecies Political Economy

Studio A is a design studio focused on radical innovations at the intersection of ecology, technology, and design. One of our key current areas of focus is the implications of intent-centric architectures for human and more-than-human ecology. We think this novel form of economic media is well-positioned to escalate the stakes and expand the possibilities for meaningful interspecies communication, especially as regards more-than-human experiments in governance and economy.

We are reaching out to DemocracyNext, Earth Species Project, Interspecies Internet, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Diverse Intelligence for guidance and support in exploring the implications of intent-centric architectures for an interspecies political economy.

Our end goal is to establish a dialogue and research trajectory involving organization affiliates, biosemiotic specialists and advisors from Anoma, the software world’s avant garde team in intent-centric architecture.

Context

Intent-centric architectures describe operating standards for engaging digital economy through primitives called intents. Intents are claims posed by a cryptographically identified agent for a change of state with another agent. Each “intent” generates a search for a counterparty, matched by a third party agent called a “solver” to optimize around each party’s constraints and preferences for a Pareto-optimal settlement.

Because the third party solver effectively abstracts away the economic processes leading to the settlement - processes which can be rivalrous but may in many cases be mutualistic, as in clearing or other forms of mutual credit - the ceiling for consensual participation in such an economy is substantially lowered. Moreover, because the state changes described by ICAs are fundamentally open-ended - including software permissions and digital economic tokens, but potentially encompassing any material configuration that can be credibly reflected in digital state - an agent need not have any relationship to the concept of money or other narrow epistemological models to be able to participate in economic coordination and benefit from the network effects of ICA marketplaces.

Research Orientation

With this economic framework in mind, where the ceiling for understanding across umwelts may plausibly be lowered, the necessary areas of focus for research and design clarify into two poles: biosemiotics - what are the existing capacities for representational thinking and consensual coordination in more-than-human agents and systems, and technogenesis - what are the possibilities for and potential feedback loops of materially augmented perception that could aid a project of interspecies political economic relation?

As a nonspecialist independent researcher I have established the following preliminary research questions, only to give a taste of the implications of this research and design project as I see it. With the appropriate field experts coordinating on an interdisciplinary basis, one would expect the scope and potential output of this project to become even more compelling.

Research Questions

• What are the key differences and fundamental similarities between human economy (broadly considered) and more-than-human economies? Where are there potential bridges?

• If intent-centric architectures “unbundle” economic institutions, deconstructing them into a fundamental relationship of counterparty discovery on a coordination matrix, what are the primary boundaries that might still animate a human/nonhuman divide?

• In nature, individuality is complex: full of nested hierarchies, overlapping dependencies, scales of significance. (Indeed, this is true of human society as well.) What do ethical economic relationships look like when entities are entangled across scales?

• What is the relationship between consciousness, semiotic capacity, and economic relationality? What are the ethical implications of economic interaction with non-conscious organisms?

• How do we move from merely sensing nonhuman signals to enabling meaningful, intentional participation, where organisms learn that their signaling has causal power and can use it to express need, consent, or refusal? Broadly, how can the field of biosemiotics be applied to this problem?

• Can apparati be constructed to act as prosthetic amplifications of the semiotic capacities of organisms, bridging them to basic competency in and cognizance of a human economic interface like ICAs? In short, what would it mean to position ICAs at the intersection of technogenesis, economics, and ecology?

• What are the implications of augmented economic capacities between nonhumans, or between natural intelligences and artificial intelligences?