a vision for steemit: homunculus for the web

rewarding those who present relevant information is a great idea.

an  awareness of media manipulation, manufactured consent and the private  ownership of public opinion creates a market for honest information.

as  a mechanism for rewarding those who produce relevant information,  steemit is building self-supporting, intelligent neural pathways for  communicating public opinion.

opinion is valued  for its ability to resonate with others. what echoes is a shared  internal narrative, a mythology. both fact & fiction, our mythology  is the model in our mind for how the world works.

immutable public memory is an important step toward the goal of achieving intelligent collective thought.

Bucky had it right when he said:

"Intelligence is the discrimination between relevant and irrelevant feedback."
 - R. B. Fuller

his  definition implies intelligence as a system of input, process, output  and feedback. as nodes on a network, from birth to death, we process  information into "outformation." our processes of discrimination often  operate without relevant feedback, conditioned by consensus trance, with  little objective observation of internal processes.

through  language and experience, neural pathways connect and stiffen the edges  of the story. the boundaries are set and the narrative begins to  produced fixed responses. cultural maturity emerges as it becomes hard-wired into our limbic system. a contrary opinion becomes an insult, a  punch in the gut to our intuition.

confirming our  beliefs through others makes us feel good. we discard or ignore  information that doesn't fit the mind's model - regardless of it's  relevance. cognitive dissonance is our mind's defense mechanism that  repairs the short circuit or blown fuse caused by information that might  damage the wiring or challenge the deeply held belief.

I  think this is the hazard that a young steemit will endure before it  grows more objective neural pathways: as an immutable record of  irrelevant opinion.

but I expect this to be only temporary.

my  goal with steemit is to help create tools for creating objective data  to support rational analysis that builds honest conclusions into  relevant opinions. My contribution is the scientific instrumentation and  conventions that can present the Internet of Place - the relevant  purpose for the IoT.

the brain is not the mind

I'd  like to carry the metaphor of "web as collective mind" a little further  and add that coherent thought requires a sensory connection to the  body.

the web today is a massive brain with no shared  homunculus, no public somatosensory cortex and a lot of irrelevant opinion, disconnected from the body. the web's objective connection to the physical world is scattered, incoherent and attenuated - but it's  improving.

my work is an attempt at improving this connection by building instrumentation shared over the web. my focus is building tools  for submitting objective data to a blockchain, an immutable public  record - very much like steemit.

introduceyourself

I  work for a small company that makes battery-operated wireless sensors that report to the web. this is my tenth year with  Aginova. for an IoT company, a decade is a long time in the business.

my  35 year career in applied cybernetics began as a helmsman on a Coast  Guard cutter, then as an electronics technician on nautical  communication/navigation equipment. I spent decades working in research  laboratories and industrial plants as a process control &  instrumentation engineer.

about 20 years ago, I was  trained and certified to practice hypnotherapy and biofeedback with an  emphasis on sEMG and neurofeedback. my only client is me.

applied cybernetics is the only term that fits most of my interests & vocations.