Blockchain Temporality Smart Contract Time-Specifiability with Blocktime

Blockchain TemporalitySmart Contract Time Specifiability with Blocktime

Part of a Series on Cryptophilosophycryptophilosophy

Melanie Swan

Philosophy & Economic Theory

New School for Social Research, NY NY

[email protected] Brook, New York NY, July 7, 2016

Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga

April 22, 2016

Temporality of the Future1

Melanie Swan

Time Theorist, Philosophy and Economic Theory, New School for Social Research, NY Founder, Institute for Blockchain Studies

Singularity University Instructor; Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology Affiliate Scholar; EDGE Essayist; FQXi Advisor (Foundational Questions Inst)

Traditional Markets Background Economic Theory Leadership

http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Blueprint-New-World-Currency/dp/1491920491

Book: Blockchain:

Blueprint for a New

Economy

April 22, 2016


Classic problem:

how can we

make more time?

April 22, 2016

Temporality of the Future

Thesis Statement

3

A concept of temporality is needed that is

adequate to the future; a model that has an open

possibility space for both the form and content of time;

that is multiple and complex; discrete and continuous;

and integrates the unstoppable flow of physics and

biology human-time with manipulable compute-time

April 22, 2016


Part I: A New Theory of Time

4

April 22, 2016


http://www.robotandhwang.com/attorneys/

Law Firm,

San Francisco CA

How to develop empowering human-

machine collaborations, especially when…

April 22, 2016


…humans and machines are running

different time paradigms

Human-time of physics and

biology is continuous, inexorable,

flowing unidirectionally

Fixed endpoints: birth and death

Compute-time is discrete and

malleable, interruptible, with

multiple temporal regimes

(discrete time, no time,

asynchronous time), and the

possibility of evolving new

paradigms such as blocktime

6

April 22, 2016


What is time?

7

“A non-spatial continuum that

is measured in terms of

events which succeed one

another from past through

present to future” – Merriam-Webster

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/time

April 22, 2016


Bergson’s Duration (1889)

Two time paradigms

1. Objective (quantitative):

Measurable clocktime

2. Subjective (qualitative): Internal

experience of lived time (flying by,

taking forever, flow state);

duration

Claim: exercise of free will is

possible, by tuning into our

internal qualitative experience,

and acting from there

8

Source: Bergson, Henri. (1889, 2001). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Dover Publications, London UK.

April 22, 2016


Husserl’s Retentional-Protentional Internal

Time Consciousness (1893-1917)

Three time paradigms

1. Bergson’s measurable clocktime

(quantitative) as objective time

2. Bergson’s internal sense slow/fast

(qualitative) as phenomenological time

3. A third domain where we comprehend and

distinguish 1 and 2

Any present moment is comprised of a

primal impression (pure perception)

plus a link to what it retains of the past

(retention) and what it anticipates of the

future (pretention)

9

Source: Husserl, Edmund. (1991, 1964). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht NL.

April 22, 2016


1. Retention 1. Protention

Present Now

Primal Impression

2. Recollection 2. Expectation(Discrete) (Discrete)

(Continuous) (Continuous)

Husserl’s Internal Time Consciousness

I. Classic Diagram

Primal Impression: pure perception of the present-now moment

Retention-Protention: the link of the primal impression to what it retains of the just recently-elapsing past (retention) and what it anticipates of the rapidly-arriving future (protention); the horizon might be immediate (only surrounding the present-now point) or extending to include all recollections and expectations

Recollection-Expectation: discrete elements (snapshots or flows) composed into re-plays or re-presentations of present-now moments in new present-now moments when requested or imagined

Source: Husserl, Edmund. (1991, 1964). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht NL.

Past Future

April 22, 2016


A “Middle Third” Time term is needed

Overcome either/or conceptualizations of time

11

Discrete

Snapshot

Digital

Quantitative

Objective

Recollection-Expectation

Computing Clocktime

Machine-time

Continuous

Flow

Analog

Qualitative

Subjective

Retention-Protention

Physics/Biology Time

Human-time

April 22, 2016


Why? Cognitive BiasWe know that we are not good at thinking about the future

Always “20 years out” - AI, nanotech, life

extension, fuel cells, grand unified theory

Minsky: computer vision=summer project

Blackswans: positive/negative outliers occur

with greater frequency than anticipated

Procrastination and fMRI studies: we

procrastinate because we think of our future

selves as strangers, third persons no

different than politicians or celebrities

Supports Parfit: personal identity is not required

for survival, but relational experience between

past/future selves and experience is

12

Sources: http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/why-we-procrastinate citing van Gelder JL, Hershfield HE, Nordgren LF. (2013).

Vividness of the future self predicts delinquency. Psychol Sci. 24(6):974-80, and Pronin, Emily. (2008). How we see

ourselves and how we see others. Science. 320(5880):1177-80.

April 22, 2016


Thus we need a Temporality of the Future

A temporality in a more

open non-determined

possibility space of both

form and content,

where new trajectories

might be possible

A temporality of

multiplicity and

complexity Non-linear, dynamic,

emergent, open, unknowable

at the outset, interdependent,

self-organizing

13

Source: Morin, Edgar. (2007). "Restricted complexity, general complexity." Trans. C. Gershenson. In Worldviews, Science and Us: Philosophy and Complexity, ed. C. Gershenson, D. Aerts, and B. Edmonds, 5–29. World Scientific, Singapore.

April 22, 2016


Inspiration: Light’s Wave-Particle Duality

The first ever photograph

of light as both a particle

and wave (Mar 2015)

Light's wave-particle

duality imaged in physical

reality for the first time

Schrödinger's cat: dead

or alive?

14

Source: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html, http://actu.epfl.ch/news/the-first-ever-photograph-of-light-as-both-a-parti

The bottom 'slice' of the image

shows the particles, while the top

image shows light as a wave

Particle

Wave

April 22, 2016


1. Retention 1. Protention

Present Now

Primal Impression

2. Recollection(Discrete) (Discrete)

A middle kind of time: time as a ‘raw material’ existing uncollapsed as simultaneously discrete and continuous; a snapshot and a flow (like light as a superposition of a particle and a wave); a perdurant khôra-spacing; time is an

uncollapsed raw material until deployed into a specific situation

Adds to our conceptual model of time

(Continuous) (Continuous)

Husserl’s Internal Time Consciousness

II. Adding a New Kind of Time: X-tention

Husserl’s Missing Middle Third term

3. X-tention 3. X-tention

2. Expectation

(Discrete and Continuous) (Discrete and Continuous)

Source: Extended from Husserl, Edmund. (1991, 1964). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht NL.

Past Future

April 22, 2016


Composability of Physical Time

Information Theory

Formulate spacetime as

simultaneously discrete and

continuous (Shannon’s sampling)

Time and matter are

composable at small scales

Matter at the atomic scale

(1×10−9) via positional

nanoassembly (actual)

Possibly time and matter at the

Planck scale (1×10−35) via Lego-

like time fabric bricks (loop

quantum gravity) (theoretical)

16

Source: http://www.dedoimedo.com/physics/what-is-time.html, Kempf, Achim. (2010). “Spacetime could be simultaneously continuous and discrete, in the same way that information can be.” New Journal of Physics. 12.

Atomic-scale Positional Nanoassembly of Matter

Planck-scale ‘Lego-like’ Assembly of Spacetime

April 22, 2016


Part II: Compute-time/Blocktime Temporality

17

April 22, 2016


Contemporary Situation

Algorithmic Reality

Increasing presence of technology

Everything is a math problem

Automation economy

Explosion in classes of compute

technology

Personal robotics, drones, IoT (Internet

of Things), BCIs (brain-computer

interfaces), quantified self wearables,

smart cities, smart homes, self-driving

vehicles, factory automation, big data

analytics, recommendation engines,

deep-learning neural nets

18

Source: Swan, M. Rethinking Authority With The Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment. Response to The Edge Question 2016: What do you consider the most interesting recent news? What makes it important? John Brockman, Ed., 2016.

April 22, 2016


Posthuman Futures

Radically-different situations

Life extension, digital societies, cloudminds

Temporality and spatiality have been the

fundamental organizing parameter in the

physical world but less relevant in digital situations

Example: “location” not among 20 features in World-

of-Warcraft event-recording software Prat

Need new models for correspondence between

internal mind/experience and external objects

Meillassoux: conceptual grounds for the necessary

contingency of reality

19

Source: World of Warcraft http://www.wowace.com/addons/prat-3-0

April 22, 2016


Temporality Paradigms

Human-time

Continuous flow of physics-biology time

Compute-time: computing clocktime eras

1. General: time becomes stoppable and

malleable

2. Machine learning/big data temporality: time

becomes predictable, future-addressable

Causality models = prediction models1

All human and natural patterns modeled

Shifts focus from reactive response to proactive

attending to the real-time present and future

3. Blocktime: time becomes future-assignable,

future-creatable

20

1Predictive Outcome causality modeling; graph theory; recurrent neural nets; (Karpathy) selective equation modeling (Pearl)

April 22, 2016


Blocktime: Temporality of the Blockchain

Blockchain: decentralized computing

software protocol upon which

cryptographic ledgers like Bitcoin run

Blocktime: the temporal regime of

cryptographic ledgers and smart

contracts; time is specified in units of

transaction block confirmation times,

not minutes or hours like human-time

or variability like “park closes at dark”

21

Source: Swan, M. Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blockchain Arbitrage. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Swan20151202

April 22, 2016


Specify Future Time with Smart Contracts

Time has not been future-specifiable before;

now assignable in blocktime smart contracts

Example: automatic pay-out of bet on high

temperature tomorrow, automatic e-debit for utility

bills, automatic mortgage rate resets

Techspecs: assign time primitives, via MTL

(machine trust language), for example open a

micropayment channel dapp to track time

Temporality as a Smart Contract feature

Temporal regime: contract-specifiable parameter

per drop-down menu, just like legal regime

Blocktime specifications: time speed-ups, slow-

downs, event-waiting, prediction markets,

Bayesian-distributed future event-positing

22

Source: MTL (machine trust language) time primitives: http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2015/11/machine-trust-language-mtl-human.html

April 22, 2016


Conjecture: Blocktime “makes more time”

Any compute-time like blocktime creates

a differential with human-time

Since there is a differential, possible to

Hedge or arbitrage between time regimes

Example of Blocktime Arbitrage: a

decentralized peer-to-peer loan coming due in

blocktime, without there being enough

physical-world time cycles available for

generating the ‘fiat resources’ to repay the loan

‘Make more time’ by accessing events in

other time trajectories; thereby getting access

to more time

Example: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat:

accessing event trajectories not lived directly

23

Source: Swan, M. Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blockchain Arbitrage. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Swan20151202

April 22, 2016


“More time” Parallelism Argument

Core argument: having sense of “more

time” due to ability to access events in

other time trajectories

Future could be running parallel: Flesh-

space self and various digital selves; thus

acquiring “more time” through multiple and

parallel experienced trajectories

History is a form of time parallelism

Time parallelism already exists via history

where we access events pre-dating and

existing outside of our own direct experience

of time as individuals

Example: Moon Landing

24

Source: Carr, D. (2014). Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World.

April 22, 2016


More philosophical questions raised…

Do we need “more time”?

How can we experience the

benefit and meaning of more

time and alternative time

trajectories?

How to integrate the “diffs”

How to synthesize myriad

subjective time regimes and

event trajectories?

Moore’s Law for time?

Limits of computational

complexity and time?

25

April 22, 2016


Thesis Statement

26

A concept of temporality is needed that is

adequate to the future; a model that has an open

possibility space for both the form and content of time;

that is multiple and complex; discrete and continuous;

and integrates the unstoppable flow of physics and

biology human-time with manipulable compute-time

April 22, 2016


Conclusion

Blocktime Temporality

Merges human-time and compute-time

New theory of time as a raw material:

simultaneously discrete and continuous

Make more time through access to

alternative time trajectories

Could help orchestrate the

automation economy and futures

such as human-machine cloudmind

collaborations, digital smartnetwork

societies, and algorithmic reality

more generally

27

April 22, 2016


Kurt Vonnegut “Salami-mercury (quantitative-qualitative) theory of time”

28

“I think one of the biggest mistakes we’re making, second

only to being people, has to do with what time really is. We

have all these instruments for slicing it up like a salami,

clocks and calendars, and we name the slices as though we

own them - when in fact they are as likely to break into

pieces or go scampering off as dollops of mercury.” - Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country, p. 119

Blockchain TemporalitySmart Contract Time Specifiability with Blocktime

Part of a Series on Cryptophilosophycryptophilosophy

Melanie Swan

Philosophy & Economic Theory

New School for Social Research, NY NY

[email protected] Brook, New York NY, July 7, 2016

Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga

Thank You! Questions?