Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 3: Chris Goes
This blog is a transcription of the third episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews Christopher Goes, lead for the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol development in the Cosmos ecosystems. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify; or read the transcription below.
Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I’m your host Gregory Landua. Alright, folks. In this episode, I’m proud to bring you Christopher Goes. Christopher is the lead for the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol development in the Cosmos ecosystem, and all-around smart guy. Christopher and I had a great conversation in which I plied him, trying to find out some of the dangers and potential pitfalls of creating a world of seamless integration and communication between blockchains. We go deep into some of the governance of social constructs stuff and periodically use a pretty fun metaphor around island evolutionary biology theory. I hope you enjoy this episode. It was a deep one.
I’m here with Chris Goes who’s calling in from Berlin and excited to have an awesome conversation. Thanks for joining Chris.
Chris: Thank you.
Gregory: Just a little context. We had an abbreviated, but I think a very interesting conversation while we were in Berlin together after the Hackathon ended and everybody was unwinding. I wanted to just dig in to some of the topics and themes that we were talking about. The aim of the podcast that I’m working on is to approach almost like the philosophical underpinnings of what’s happening, what’s emerging, how different people are approaching things. We were in the middle of that. I’m just excited to connect the last little piece of context, in sort of framing for our conversation is. I really appreciated your blog post. I forgot what it’s called.
Chris: Comparative Advantages of Distributed Ledgers.
Gregory: Yeah, that’s the one. Wanting to hold back also is a conversation topic. What are we evolving and what does that mean for business and society? What about that is super exciting to you? That’s the big framing. Do you mind sharing just a little bit about why the heck you’re devoting your life force and energy into the crypto states and blockchain? What brought you here?
Chris: Sure. In retrospect, I suspect I could construct a narrative to fit the path, but in truth a lot of that was coincidental. I think I encountered bitcoin at age 16, and my use case was pretty mundane. I wanted to rent a virtual private server for building a website. Back in the day, when you wanted a website, you had to rent a server. I couldn’t get a credit card because I wasn’t of legal age in the United States. I said, “Is there any other way I could purchase this thing online?” I don’t recall if I asked my parents. I was convinced that I had to do it of my own means, and I found bitcoin. At that point, I certainly didn’t understand the entire technological underpinnings. I just understood bitcoin as a digital, decentralized, peer-to-peer currency, which I can [00:04:12 unintelligible] and rent a virtual private server. That’s what I did. That got me more into the fundamentals of the technology. I was very curious as to how this thing could exist and work. I investigated, and honestly, after using bitcoin for a little while, I sort of gave up because I thought — or at least as I interpreted it — its goal of becoming peer-to-peer cash was, I thought, really unlikely to be realized because of scalability problems that weren’t being addressed. Because bitcoin really didn’t have privacy in practice both due to fundamental details of the protocol that’s [00:04:58 linkable], but also due to how people used it. Most people used to address this for every transaction, which I think Satoshi assumed would have [00:05:07 inaudible] but turned out to be [00:05:11 unintelligible].
[00:05:14–00:05:20 inaudible]
Chris: After I took a serious look at Ethereum and Zcash, and some of the generation two, I guess you could say, projects, and was much more convinced that they would be able to host really interesting platforms for new kinds of economic activity, new kinds of social coordination, new kinds of [00:05:43 inaudible], new kind of models, in ways that I thought were pretty unique that companies building platforms hadn’t been able to do successfully. Often maybe the governments hadn’t been able to do successfully around what they were trying to do. I’m interested in both the technical side, the technical background in computer science, but also very much so in the applied technology and society side, and how this ends up translating into the things that are played in the real world, used by people who certainly don’t, and oughtn’t need to understand every detail of how that worked, to provide genuine utility and improve people’s lives.
Gregory: Right now, you’re working on the inter-blockchain communication protocol with the Tendermint team and people from a broader ecosystem as well. Do you mind sharing a little bit about, maybe just superficially on a pattern level, what that work is? Then, what’s maybe more interesting is, what evolution is that going to catalyze on the Internet really or how people are transacting on the Internet?
Chris: Sure. The inter-blockchain communication protocol is designed as a data authentication or you could say message authentication and transport protocol operating between blockchains. Just like TCP and TLS are transport and authentication protocols between computers, so that computers on opposite sides of the world can send these messages to each other over the Internet infrastructure to understand and communicate, that ultimately translates to higher-level applications like email or instant messaging. I hope that IBC will enable blockchains to authenticate and send messages to each other as separate, sovereign, consensus algorithms like Zcash, Ethereum, Cosmos, Bitcoin, et cetera.
On top of all that, transport and authentication can build user protocols that allow many people to move their funds around different chains, allow them to create composite contracts, composite sense of logic, that constitute lower-level interactions on multiple chains and between chains, and allow different — maybe even allow and state the sovereignty apology of different blockchains to reflect sovereignty in the real world to allow communities to build their own chains, to allow different stakeholders that want to adhere to particular rules, to choose what rules they want to adhere to, to find the other adherence, create their own distributive ledger, and to build commons — but then still interact with other ledgers and other rule-sets insofar as their rule-sets intersect and can be mutually comprehensible. That intersection point is IBC because they need to agree upon some standards if they are transferring tokens, transferring access rights, or making contract calls across many chains, but they can disagree on other parts of those same chains.
Gregory: Right. There’s a couple of really interesting pieces there. One that I’d like to delve into is — why is it important to have sovereignty over a blockchain or a state machine? What’s the interaction, in your mind, between the human side of this, where there’s communities making agreements with one another, and the technological side where these agreements are being represented in a digital way? Why is it important for us to have sovereignty there instead of just a single, universal protocol?
[00:10:00]
Chris: That’s a great question. I think there are two almost separable categories of reason. One category of reason is local control. If many people are going to interact together using a blockchain, by virtue of choosing to use that chain, they have chosen a set of rules. Different people around the world, doing different things are going to want different sets of rules, to govern those economic transactions, those data exchange, et cetera.
Gregory: Can you give me an example of some of the types of rules that people might choose to hard-code and maintain through a consensus algorithm?
Chris: Certainly there are basic rules for implementing something like money governing ensuring fundability and ensuring that only someone who has ownership, by virtue of controlling the private key, knowing the private key, can spend the funds. Those rules are agreed upon by pretty much everybody, but there may be quite different rules about the ways in which those transactions are more detailed or in which those transactions are more [00:11:20 subtle]. For example, in many countries, there is something called the value-added tax, where at certain points in the supply chain, consumer firm which is purchasing something will pay a percentage tax on the transaction that gets, at least theoretically, rather to fund public goods. Different people with different preferences on the goods funding might want different value-added taxes, and they would want to test out maybe their economic philosophy in a sovereign network that imposed the rules they agreed upon. Maybe it could be a high tax, but then while allowing people to opt out of that in a different sovereign network, but maybe they wouldn’t receive the public goods in question. A very specific example of one thing you could do — I’m not saying it should be done, but one thing that you could do and it would be interesting to see it tried on a blockchain — is to levy a value-added tax and fund the community. You could try to fund further technological development along some particular axis.
Gregory: That’s kind of what Zcash did with the founder fund essentially, right? Founder fee?
Chris: It’s kind of like it, yeah. That was a tax on inflationary rewards, so in some sense, it traded off security of the chain because miners were being paid a bit less, although, in practice, I don’t know if it’s a linear relationship or not. You could also trade off. You would pay a bit of a fee to use the chain. Both are possible.
Gregory: Right. Yeah, interesting. The image that I get as you’re speaking — I have a background in which I spend a lot of my life exploring different forms of governance and styles of inhabitation community-wise, ecovillages, intentional communities, where people are actively experimenting in what are the social norms, ways of decision-making that make sense for fairly small groups of people (neighborhood-scale usually or maybe small-town scale) — and the image that I just got was of that same sort of experimentation taking place, but even between communities.
It may be place-based, but it’s may also not be. It might be more philosophical — for groups of people who have similar philosophies about economics (everything from very laissez-faire no taxations for the provision of public goods to groups of people who are, “No. We all want a tax, a self-tax or tied”) — and allow people to simultaneously experiment and make agreements with one another, with groups of people to create economies that can also interoperate. I guess I’m curious — why is interoperating and exchange between those groups important? Why isn’t it enough to just have tools so that anyone anywhere could experiment amongst themselves? What is it about the exchange between experimenting groups that have sovereignty that feels so important to this experiment and the evolution of the global economy really?
Chris: One way of phrasing it is that interoperation allows you to avoid the tyranny of network effects. Let’s say that there are several totally sovereign systems. These totally sovereign systems are, at least at first, built to completely consensually make people who want to adhere to different sets of rule-sets, and that’s fine. But then, some of them are going to be more effective at producing something of value to other people who have a different rule-set. Conversely, someone who’s subscribed to blockchains A and B. Someone on blockchain A is really great at producing — let’s talk about food — lettuce. Someone on a blockchain B is going to be really great at producing salad dressing. Obviously, it makes sense for them to exchange. But at the moment, if they have no way of appropriating, and maybe these blockchains are actually settling payments and the only currencies they have are sovereign, then they can’t exchange. Often in practice flow, what happens, if they don’t have an inner operation is that (in the best case) they will make some compromises on the rule-sets and together merge. But often, one of these groups will be smaller and will sort of be forced to choose between eating salad or remaining sovereign. If he chooses to eat salad, it will be because in many cases the network effects dominate. Not only do you participate in the modern economy, the depth of the supply chain leads to products on the shelf of the grocery store is immense, probably tens of millions. If you go through the firms, and all of the firms which supply the firms, et cetera. It’s deeply interconnected. That deep interconnection is powerful and efficient, and enables people to specialize in different skill sets, different tasks, and enables people to choose what they want to do, even while benefiting from the specialization of others. But it requires that everyone agrees on, at least some, rule-sets.
Interoperation is a way of allowing the rule-sets, which you choose to cooperate on, to still interact with rule-sets upon which they may differ. They may differ on the amount of VAT that you want to pay on your transactions, or one blockchain. Blockchain A has founders rewards going to the developers and blockchain B doesn’t, but if you can find some interoperation protocol, they will allow you to agree and authenticate it automatically between the blockchains, on the kind of transaction for buying, for exchanging lettuce for salad dressing, and maybe some modified tax rate for that transaction. Then, both parties benefit. Somewhat simplified example.
Gregory: Yeah, but I think it’s useful. One of the things that we’re starting to get into in Berlin is, I was sharing a little bit about — I have a background in ecology, evolutionary biology and I tend to think of things in terms of these living system metaphors. We have several hundred years of pretty robust, scientific examination of the natural world around us. How can that inform what we understand about the evolution of complex systems essentially, which I think you’re talking about in this interconnected global economy? It’s a complex system. I would propose that it likely follows the same laws of that the Amazon rainforest follows and the enormous complexity emergent, sort of trophic flows that forest expresses. I got to thinking about genetic flows and thinking about the relationship between genetic flows and digital flows of information, just like these flows of information. One of the most famous examples in evolutionary biology is the Galapagos Islands, very well studied.
[00:20:00]
Gregory: It’s the story of how Darwin realized that there were different finches that had evolved from a single ancestor on different islands to have different specialties. They have different beaks. They have different plumage and different sizes. One’s eating bugs and the other is eating seeds, et cetera. That evolution and speciation was made possible by the separation between the islands themselves and the mainland. What happened when humans — we should say Western civilization, Europeans — found the Galapagos, historically, what happened is it basically became a pirate post. They would eat the tortoises. They started dropping off livestock. They dropped off goats. Some rats ran ashore. This conduit for the exchange of genetic information essentially. New animals were introduced to the island. It had catastrophic effects on the existing genetic diversity because all of the animals had not evolved in a large continental situation with those evolutionary pressures. That’s been a common story throughout time, is that when the genetic conduit was opened it essentially homogenized the diversity of an island biogeography and genetic pools. I’m just curious is that analogy one that holds, if we translate it across to the digital world and the world of the human economy? If so, how does that relate to these twin projects of sovereignty, sovereign chains, and interoperability? A thought provocation — what does it bring to mind and inquiry around that analogy?
Chris: I think I’ll answer in two parts. The first part is a definite similarity. If you think about evolutionary processes going on, on the Galapagos Islands before they were joined to the mainland by a genetic conduit — you’ve mentioned that there were a lot of parallel evolutionary tracks because everything was spread local, there was intermixing, but all of these different species were bifurcating, rejoining, evolving, in response to different natural selection pressures, and just differing random input and from genetic recombination, evolving in parallel and to many different unique strands of fancy plumage or unique capabilities or bodily functions, et cetera — one thing that’s necessary for that kind of evolutionary process is the ability to run it all in parallel. Another thing that’s necessary is the ability to exchange periodically between different strands with some limitations on locality. If all of the creatures were competing in the exact same evolutionary market, or so to speak, competing for the same resources at the same time and there was no locality, you would end up with maybe a few species dominating. If all of the species were never able to genetically recombine with each other, you might not end up with so much variety. Would that be accurate?
Gregory: I think so. Evolutionarily speaking, genetic diversity, genome type to phenome type expression — and phenome type being an actual species and its behaviors and what it looks like — is directly related to the quantity of niches, which is directly related to the geographic, and climatological, and ecological diversity. On the slopes of the Andes, going down to the Amazon, that’s the highest genetic diversity anywhere because you have from a high altitude to a low altitude. You have all this edge like a coral reef. You have all this edge. There’s a million different places for different entities to specialize. Whereas you have a flat surface like a parking lot — just compare a parking lot to coral reefs and you can see the genetic diversity between the two. There may be dandelions springing out of the parking lot, versus millions of species on a coral reef, fish and bacteria, and anemones. On Galapagos, I think it’s well said that there are these rare and controlled moments of genetic exchange between parallelly evolving organisms in slightly different niches. There’s firewall or compartmentalization between them and allows them to specialize in a particular way that, if there was no ocean between those islands and they were all in the same place, a generalized strategy would win. There would be a single finch that would both eat insects and eat seeds. That’s not completely precise, but I think it’s good enough for the analogy.
Chris: Yeah. Insofar as in the analogy, the evolutionary typology we’re talking about here is the typology of — since for now, it’s going to be humans using these blockchains or humans telling computers to use these blockchains — the typology of human desire and rule-set preferences in philosophical positions on how their world ought to be run. My guess is that that typology does have a lot of niches, although we have to test it out. Right now, I think it’s largely dominated by large political coalitions. The question is (I don’t know if the analogy succeeds here or not but) — do large political coalitions which fail to represent the underlying diversity of niches, but instead sum up a bunch and put them together, do those result from constraints on physical space? Do they result from the difficulty in interoperability?
There’s some analogy here too. I don’t know about Galapagos Islands, but certainly to Nicaea states. If you’re a large Nicaea state, it’s easier to negotiate trade agreements. Being a block has its advantages, but you also don’t accurately represent the real diversity of political and philosophical positions of your constituency. In some ways, if smaller blocks which suffer less from the lack of network effect, then maybe the wider diversity would be able to coexist while still interoperating for a mutual benefit.
Gregory: The idea here is to have the benefit of network effect without the tyranny of network effect?
Chris: Yeah, that’s right. In some ways, even to allow the stakeholders in the system to choose some of the parameters of the evolutionary niche. If they choose both the parameters of the evolutionary niche and the parameters of the genetic exchange — the genetic exchange here is the exchange of ideas for blockchains, so I don’t know.
Gregory: You could just replace gene with meme perhaps.
Chris: Yeah. Certainly, I’m all for a memetic interoperability as well as interoperability at the point in a landscape.
[00:29:17 crosstalk]
Gregory: What’s interesting to me is that I think there’s a nuance, there’s subtlety here which is the term — when you’re using it (when the Cosmos ecosystem uses it maybe more broadly) — interoperability comes along with ideas about sovereignty. There’s the encapsulation or boundaries around interoperability. The interoperability is in order to — I think what I’m picking upon — in order to preserve agency actually. Whereas I also think the term interoperability gets used in the opposite way.
[00:30:00]
Gregory: How do we impose a standard, not in terms of a schema or a language that allows us to communicate, but a standard that is enforced around what is possible or the behaviors that are acceptable or whatever that might mean? Does that sound accurate that there’s something baked into when you used the word interoperability? In order to understand it in its wholeness, it’s mashed with agency and sovereignty.
Chris: I think that’s absolutely true. Maybe we should call it polycentric interoperability or sovereign interoperability. The idea is that we want the stakeholders of each of these individual rule-sets distributed ledgers to. Not only control the rule-set but control the ways in which the rule-set interacts with other rule-sets, the ways in which data and assets and value to the stakeholders of the system can be transferred or exchanged with other systems which might disagree on the rules. We want the stakeholders to be able to explore both the design space of sovereign rule-sets and the design space of agreed standards for interoperability.
Gregory: Yeah. There’s something about this which is just as much giving people the ability to create boundaries as it is to create open flows.
Chris: I want to go back to the Galapagos Islands case. While in a parallel life, I would have studied and in the last I did not study too much biology or the history of that area of the world, I wonder, when the genetic conduit the mainland is established and all of these local, diverse species are outcompeted by species from the mainland — is there a particular hypothesis as to what the cause of that was? Was there more evolutionary pressure on the mainland and it led to these species to be more competitive? Was that the niches on the island change by resource extraction?
Gregory: Yeah. You can open up, as you can imagine it, an entire can of worms there. The competing hypothesis, in general, I think the idea is when you have continent-scale gene interactions, random mutation, there’s so many more mutations, there’s different pressures as well. I also think there’s a genetic expressions that just through random chance never made it, so new and novel, the genes, the organisms, out in these skylit places have the ability to drift into niches and evolve in directions that they never would have been able to otherwise. For instance, you can have birds that nest on the ground because there’s no cats. That bird can then have this cascading complexity of interactions that create other niches and a whole little ecosystem evolves around, due to the random fact that there are no cats on the island. The bird can survive, whereas on the mainland there are cats. The cat will kill the bird because it’s just sitting there on its nest, hanging out.
Chris: I see. Well then, in the analogy, if the Cosmos network is the Galapagos Island and the United States mainland, or the Central American mainland is the Facebook’s Libra, then I think that the idea of IBC in this analogy is to give the Galapagos Islands the ability to choose the genetic combinations that they will accept through that genetic conduit. It won’t just be open to anything. It will be controlled. Through that control, they might seek to retain sovereignty.
Gregory: That’s like a quarantine system.
Chris: That’s right.
Gregory: When a boat comes, somebody hops on. Are there any cats on board? We don’t want any cats because we have this ground-nesting bird and we would rather not kill it. [laughter] Yeah, interesting. Very interesting. Then, the question becomes — is Facebook’s Libra (because that boat already is sailing). Not to be another person just asking “when IBC”, but “when IBC?” Is that race between conduits open because that’s just what’s going to happen and that ship is coming? Are we going to have the ability to stop that boat before it gets onshore and make sure there aren’t any cats?
Chris: [laughter] Yeah. I don’t know how the analogy is interesting, but some parts of it probably don’t fit. I mean, Facebook’s Libra is not quite the result of millions of years of continental evolution. It’s a result, a product of rather short-lived — at least on the geological timescale — but insofar as allowing control over boats, yeah, I guess. It’s not that a physical analog here is difficult. There’s IBC imposed this magical screen which allows boats to pass through only if they fulfill particular restrictions.
Gregory: That action of a person auditing the boat, that happens. It’s automated and it happens nearly instantaneously, right?
Chris: It’s automated and it’s based on a whitelist, not a blacklist. The IBC protocol would have [00:37:16 unintelligible], steep, precisely which genetic forms they are willing to accept and under what terms, and allow only those through, and allow only certain genetic forms to go back. That seems like a pretty effective defense against infection, but maybe the danger here is that all of the humans will decide to use Facebook’s Libra despite it compromising their privacy by known problems just because of the dominance of the network effect. Insofar if that’s true, I think interoperating — I don’t know if I want to draw specific conclusions on Facebook’s Libra — let’s just say conceivably and there will be other cases of this too I’m sure, like Central banks, Megacoincz, Stablecoin. Something which generally I would think would be a positive development. Larger networks, they launch, they provide the benefit of the immediate, quite wide, user base. I think different parts of the Cosmos network, different blockchain using IBC will make different decisions. Many might be well served by choosing to interoperate with larger networks. Giving consumers those larger networks, not only the option to access the smaller ones, but maybe a taste of what they’re missing, given they could opt instead of this better rule-set and keep all their assets. Interoperability produces the exit cost in some sense of Libra. You can move all your Libra coins over IBC off of Libra. What do you need Libra for? [laugter]
Gregory: Right. Interesting. It may be that the biophysical constraints that help form the conditions around gene flow and the evolution of biological systems, that analogy starts to be less useful in a fully expressed digital world. I’m not sure if it is or isn’t. You’ve said a couple of things there around making statements around what might be good or bad in the relationship. I would love if you could just unpack those.
[00:40:00]
Gregory: On a very personal level — how do you define or explore the idea of goodness and make judgments about whether or not what you’re focused on in building new technology is going to create more good than bad or is going to ameliorate bad? What’s your guiding ethical approach?
Chris: Sure. My first answer is that my guiding approach is one of deep epistemological uncertainty which occurs in morality. I think it’s really, really hard to know, not only in particular but even more so in general, what the right thing is.
Gregory: Start there. How would you describe your epistemology then? How do you make meaning? How is the meaning explored given that you’ve just said it’s hard and complex? What is the approach to interacting with that complexity and maybe surfacing from time to time with something that feels like solid ground?
Chris: I guess I would say I try to approach the question from a lot of different angles and see what sticks. Personally, I find thought experiments useful for implications which require data, which no one really has a manual Connes’ prescription to…
Gregory: Take intuitive strain?
Chris: …as if you would do if in fact, by your doing, you created a rule by which everyone would do the same thing in the same circumstances. I’m misstating it slightly, but it captures the essence. That’s a particularly useful tool that unrolls the veil of ignorance. You should decide as if you were — which I think has a deep parallel with Connes’ prescription that you should construct societies or at least tool rule-sets on a basis of being a randomly selected number, not on a basis of who in fact you actually are. I think those are really convincing examples by which to reason. I would also say I take a really a puricist view, not very de-anthological (at least not in the sense that I think there are specific rules about which actions are right or wrong) — I think it’s much more about that the best rule-set is the rule-set which leads to the best outcome for the set of stakeholders which it is governing. I would view of my epistemological processes as really a search for rule-sets, which are progressively better than the rule-set that we have at the moment.
Gregory: How do you make that determination? I think it’s baked in what you’ve just said earlier in terms of an empirical approach.
Chris: A lot of it right now is, in fact, more about allowing more rule-sets to evolve in parallel and allowing more experimentation to happen. In some sense, I think, experimentation, allowing evolutionary processes to take place even at the level of ethical norms, is the most powerful tool we have for searching a space that we really don’t understand. But I think that the ability of that search to progress is threatened by edge cases. In one system, in one rule-set, in the United States, for example, decides to use nuclear weapons to eliminate other rule-sets. Now, those other rule-sets cannot go evolving in other directions. I would be, I guess, almost more interested in trying to realize the architecture required for safe co-evolution of really different ethical-moral norms, different social systems, and different personal codes of ethics even, and make sure that can happen without anyone imposing such a fundamental, existential risk to the entire system that it could cause the whole evolutionary process to be stopped in its tracks. That would be tragic.
Gregory: Yeah, definitely.
Chris: I don’t have a particular prescription. I don’t have opinions on particular policy choices.
Gregory: There is a meta-ethic there I’m hearing, which is that which preserves and even increases the ability for a polycentric, multiplicity of approaches, is best and should be focused on first in order to create that. I’m sure you have your own personal ethics and taste and desires for the world that you’d like to live in, but the work at hand is to make sure that people beyond you can also be making choices.
Chris: Yeah, that’s right. I would note that my particular decision to focus on another level is contingent. It’s not necessary. If I didn’t think there weren’t such systemic risks, I would probably instead be focusing on a particular system and evolving it in interesting directions. I would think that that was the most valuable thing to do if it were the case. That probably was true a few millennia ago. A few millennia ago, risks on the world were not very correlated. What happened in some tribe somewhere in the world had been very unlikely to affect another tribe within their lifetimes, if ever. I would have focused on developing a civilization near science or something in a very local area. Right now, I think we all almost have the opposite problem, where there’s tons and tons and tons of local development going on and so much of it is through pathways really I don’t think anyone is in favor of, but no one quite knows how to stop. So much of it is causing systemic risks that we really need to focus on those.
I really do subscribe to the theory that, on the ethical level, it’s a pretty fundamental preset that not only should we not discriminate across space (that human life in Canada or the United States is just as valuable as human life in India or Africa or around the world), but that we shouldn’t discriminate across time that human lives in the future are just as valuable as human lives today. If you think of that position, and you include some notion of comparative advantage that you spend time doing things, in part, because other people are unlikely to do them. Not a lot of people necessarily consider future lives to have equal value or at least make decisions based on that consideration. I think, that leads you pretty quickly to focusing on ensuring that there will be many future lives and they will exist in some evolutionary space, but they’ll have a chance of trying different things and sweep the landscape of different moral and ethical norms, and really experiment with that. I want the possibility of that happening.
Gregory: Yeah, cool. So may it be. Let’s make it happen.
Chris: What about you? I’ll turn your question back if you don’t mind.
Gregory: Sure. I’m happy to think on that a little bit. The question is — how do I personally create (ethical is probably a decent word to use here) — ethical or epistemological approach to life, to deciding what I’m putting my life energy into? There are some similarities. It comes down to simple, what appear to me very concrete biophysical truths. We live on a planet hurdling through space. It has a boundary. It’s singular and it has a boundary around it. Humans are one part of that whole. You can look at the Earth and you can say, “Oh, there’s a discrete whole here.” We are but a part of that whole. I tend to, in the same way, that you drew this ethical equivalency between any human, anywhere on the Earth, I would also draw the same ethical equivalency between humans and any species on the Earth.
[00:50:00]
Gregory: What emerges out of that is my own sense that there are some other things that are more intuitions or even approaching spiritual understandings that are less maybe empirical which have to do with a sense that I have which maybe I can back into rationally that humans are unique. There also exists — even though there’s a value equivalency — this deep uniqueness of every organism. Humans, in particular, have this amazing uniqueness which I don’t think just compiles to this cognitive or linguistic or tool-making. I think it has more to do with the potential role of a singular species that can either be degenerative on a geological scale. We can create species extinction on a scale of an asteroid hitting the Earth or an Ice Age. I also think we have the equal, and opposite, potential to be stewards of evolution and novelty and the expression of the full potential of life at a planetary scale as a species. That has a lot to do with how we as a species connect our socio-cultural, and economic relationships directly to the welfare of the species upon which we actually depend as a member of the whole. For a lack of a better word, reciprocity, although it’s non-linear. That non-linear reciprocity is what, I think, we’re working on at Regen Network in particular. How do you create a new, I guess, accounting system that allows for economic exchanges to account for the non-linear reciprocity necessary for that whole endeavor of the human experience, economy, culture, life, for the emergent phenomena, to be ever-increasing health of our biosphere and ecosystems that make it up? That’s, to me, the ethical imperative in a very clear way of our generation essentially. I think a lot of what IBC and Cosmos, and this intersection between the cyber and the physical, manifest through cryptographic and decentralized networks. The ability to experiment, to have active rapid experimentation on attuning the human economy to its regenerative potential and doing that in a place sourced in an agency-centric way is what’s necessary. In order to achieve what I’m talking about — humans as a member of a super-organism (I actually think the paradox is that the pathway towards that is through human will and agency, and expression, not through impositions of the eco-fascist standard) — it actually has to come from the ground up, from communities (from individuals as well, but from communities in particular) exploring that fully and making their own determinations and then interoperating with one another. That’s my, in a nutshell, answer to that. Planetary regeneration — that’s the aim. That’s my North Star there.
Chris: That is all fascinating. I would say, I think, the stakes are — in the long-term — even higher. If we can successfully (and we must do this first) facilitate the regeneration of not only agency but successfully facilitate the regeneration of the ecosystem here on Earth, eventually we’ll have the possibility to spread that ecosystem to other planets, other solar systems, other galaxies, which do not have life. If they have life, we should be careful before we interfere. Presuming that many exist which do not have life, and we could bring that life to them. Interestingly, I think probably this is the period, if we take some assumptions for granted and say that the Earth is the only planet on which life has evolved, this is the period in galactic history where life will be at most systemic risk. Once we succeed, not as I think we will succeed, in generating the ecosystem here on Earth and spreading outwards, evolutionary tracks will start to be necessarily separated again by the hard limits on light speed, and even more constraining hard limits on transport speed, on physical and material. We must be very, very wrong about the laws of physics. All is possible, but the indicators so far seem to indicate once we get to living ecosystems on Earth, on Proxima Centauri, on others in the Milky Way, even other galaxies, that those will start to take diverging tracks. A new galactic ecosystem of really great, cultural, and biological diversity will be engendered.
Gregory: Yeah, definitely. In service to the centropic potential of life, go out in the universe and reverse entropy. [laughter]
Chris: At least for a while.
Gregory: Definitely. It reminded me of Ethan Buchman’s recent talks on gradience of dissipation and the eddy, these complex life eddies. I’m just pulling it out of my mind. I think it’s a good moment to work towards wrapping. Do you have, A. any parting thoughts, and B. any recommendations for either fiction or non-fiction books that people who were interested in this conversation might pick up in order to go a layer deeper into what’s inspiring you and your work?
Chris: That’s a great question. I would say that my position on some of these issues has been informed by a wide variety of sources. A lot of it has been informed by the movement which styles itself as effective altruism, which is focused on oftentimes pretty quantitative analysis of the best ways to do good, but they also go deep into the philosophical questions like — how ethics ought to prioritize across space and time? They come to a similar conclusion. I was inspired by some of those works. The future value of possible life really has such a high moral weight that we ought to spend a lot of time ensuring that in fact, that future possible life would be able to exist in actuality. The ecosystem here on Earth continues and engenders that in the future.
In terms of fiction, I’ve been reading more non-fiction recently. The most interesting piece of fiction I read in the past year was probably The Three-Body Problem and the two subsequent books in the trilogy, which was translated from Chinese. I highly recommend that.
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Chris: It deals with a somewhat interesting game-theoretical problem, which I won’t spoil and which I hope is not realized because it would put at risk some of this potential systemic risk lacking intergalactic evolutionary paradise, but I won’t say any more.
Gregory: [laughter] Awesome. I like the vision of the intergalactic evolutionary paradise.
Chris: I wasn’t sure what word to search for, because nature is red in tooth and claw. It’s not the human idea of utopia with no pain. I just mean cornucopia of evolutionary and cultural diversity.
Gregory: Yeah, I follow. Chris, it has been great. Thank you so much for taking some time to chat and maybe we’ll do it again before too long.
