The past year has been a blur. Between my personal life, my budding career as a neuroscientist, and my permanent fixation on PageDAO, it’s kind of amazing to think that I’ve had the chance to write a book at all. And yet, as I plan the book tour around Texas for this summer/fall season, I can’t help but smile as the thought pops into the back of my mind like the bad habit it’s getting to be: it was inevitable.
It all started about ten years ago. I went back to school because I was bored of running retail stores and my life changed almost overnight. I was broke because students don’t make much, but I’d stumbled onto a wealth of powerful, fascinating ideas that pulled me around like a puppet on a string as my mind explored them.
First in philosophy of mind, a rockstar intellectual professor shared works from Douglas Hofstadter and Antonio Damasio that opened my interest in the subject and then, in cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary pick in which I breezed along without a care except for how all of this related back to the philosophy with which my familiarity was so much more excellent, I had the experience of the cutting edge of science.
I graduated and couldn’t find teaching work or Ph.D admittance at top schools, and then the hook of entrepreneurship and software appeared, pulling me in a similar fashion into an entirely new direction. I started by learning some basic programming skills (the javascript I still love so well) and ended up, you guessed it, doing biomedical research into colloidal chemistry, hematology, and the biology of aging.
It has been a fairly wild ride, in all honesty.
When I discovered Web3 in 2019 via the Cent social media platform (https://dylan.cent.co), I was on the same sort of journey once more. I wrote (mostly bad) articles as I learned what blockchain technology was all about, and ultimately the refinements in terms of both technique and subject that I went through along that path were what had me writing the beginnings of INEVITABLE, the Worldview Ethics project, via Quest of Evolution, in 2023.
I’d boomed with the DeFi Summer and busted with the $LUNA collapse along with a generation of bewildered newly-minted cypherpunks from around the world and I knew one thing for sure: this technology would change EVERYTHING about the publishing industry.INEVITABLE had its start back in grad school, when I began wondering about how my degree (a Master of Arts in Applied Philosophy and Ethics) in ethical thinking could relate to the physiology of the brain, the neuroanatomy I was being exposed to at the time. I read everything I could find on the subject, still do (and it powers my research in the lab, too!) and ultimately came across an old German idea, weltanschauung, the worldview of a human being. Worldview is a word you find in social psychology and anthropology as well, but from my history as a student of ethical thinking I knew that the foundation of modern liberalism was basically Kant’s view of the individual as the wellspring from which agency of individual and collective alike arose. And Kant’s view of individuality is little more than a development and repackaging of Aristotle’s ancient idea that action defines the actor.
This philosophical connection was first featured in my 2018 book, Formal Dialectics, a peer-reviewed primary source work that took me about five years to put together. The idea that a new sort of network was arising took me by shock in 2020 because of what that sort of network could do for agency, and what could begin to happen with it. Fast forward to 2024’s presidential election and over 1/4 of Americans own crypto and used it to elect Donald Trump back to the office of the presidency because he said he would make the government buy Bitcoin.
It’s not a stretch to say that the takes here are bearing real fruit in real time and they feature real explanatory power to boot. INEVITABLE started as an idea and by the time I knew I was writing it, it has already more or less been written. One chapter came from an essay I submitted to Nature Neuroscience, whose editor found the concept valid but a bit too risky. Several others draw heavily upon the Worldview Ethics content to shape the conception and relevancy of AI. More are built out of essays published later to my page at T2.world: https://app.t2.world/u/0xc6cd1a73fe649febbd2b400717c8cf5c5b5bfd8f
It was wonderful news to hear that the book now features an Ingram-Spark ISBN number, which means you can now purchase it on Barnes & Noble’s website as a paperback. I’m excitedly writing this because I’m also pursuing some plans to do a book tour this summer around Texas to share the work with the world. I truly believe INEVITABLE offers something of a glimpse into the future of consciousness in a world of increasingly networked technologies.
