The world is becoming obsessed with ‘digital’ as many want to spend more time in the digital realm — some call the MetaVerse. Personally I can’t see why, as sentient beings the MetaVerse seems boring uneventful and dull. When one can swim in the sea, feel the cold, taste the salt hear the seagulls, feel the waves, or walk in a forrest, feel the breeze, smell the damp and resonate with your surroundings.
Big brands have convinced themselves they need a MetaVerse a glorified place for customers to shop, try things, use things virtually apparently, experiencing what exactly? You cannot examine the products quality, the material or features that indicate quality. The entire ‘experience’ is an optical scan from images that hit the retina leaving the cortex to render the brain, to deliver the experience, the physical reaction. Unlocking fun, excitement, emotions and certain arousals, but you still cannot FEEL what is going on.
SEEING is no longer believing! Today you have to be able to FEEL what is going on, every jump, jolt, force, punch, kick, bullet, rain, wind through our skins, our muscles and skeleton dealing into our deepest humanity. After all consciousness is the ability to experience being alive, using most or all of our senses. Otherwise it is a rendered simulation right?
The question that springs to mind — can we live, co-exist and experience both realms by flipping back and forth between the physical and digital. Or is it more complex or is it just that simple? You be the judge.
So why write this article? I’ve been at the forefront of technology for decades and my day job comprises of listening to pitches and trying the various ‘frontier technologies’ that have the potential to advance humanity, push civilisation to the next phase or indeed kill us all. But then I tried a full immersion membrane.
Opposing Forces
There are several opposing forces that limit what it’s like to be human or not. In the sense of biological entity as opposed to non-biological we’ll go into more later. The morally right and correct, the ethically concerned, the government rules and continued manipulation by the few who prey on our instincts, our pursuit of fun, entertainment and efforts to live a good life.
What many call being alive, being sentient and thus conscious, we leave the argument — do we really have or is there such a thing as free will for another day?
Our lives are also about collecting experiences that we store as memories and which makes us human. Again our brain re-renders experiences, how we felt, emotional state, a cocktail of things that is written into memory, science has discovered isn’t very accurate and over time our memories can often be entirely different and unreliable.
XYZ
The new generation XYZ are all about experiences, growing up in a tech world and they expect to be entertained, to be online, to have everything at their finger-tips and want to live on both sides. They want a phy-gi-tal existence, as many want to play with gender, flexible lifestyle, support causes and want to push new boundaries. And lets not forget this generation will be 65% of the workforce by 2030.
Choices are varied. We immerse fully in a digital experience or receive Augmented or Mixed Reality (AR, XR) through primary senses to aid our path, our journey through the day to day of physical realm. Additional information, gamification, concierge and guidance — the risk of making future generations completely reliant on HELP to get through the day becomes a fixed reality.
Studies are already revealing increased level of depression of those who spend a lot of time in the MetaVerse, primarily shopping, social networks and gaming, and early studies link young children who live in the blue screen too much develop new forms of ‘digital dementia’ as their creativity is diminished and right brain activity is dialled down.
The conspiracies and theories continue following the Tritone move from 432hz to 440hz that has shown to shut down right brain activity responsible for freedom of original thought, creativity, decision making capabilities. Is the MetaVerse another example of mass population manipulation and control?
The Science bit.
Humanities greatest invention was the telescope, that enabled us to find our place in the stars, helped us create the concept of time, understand the sessions and posed the big question — where do we come from? It was not until we turned this inside to create the micron scale did things get interesting, the world of randomness of subatomic particles opened the quantum debate but also showed us the way to discovering how life itself really works. Now passing the Standard Model exposing new particles, we are presented with String Theory and my favourite Assembly Theory, a clue to the Constructor.
Synthetic biology has been outperforming by 500% Moore’s Law and this has been going on for decades. Whilst we don’t yet fully understand how life itself works and what makes us tick at the cellular level, we are getting much closer. New discoveries forces us to let go of the Newtonian concepts that hinders our thinking, new breakthroughs are happening all the time as computation efficiency increases. But overall advancement is rather disappointing as humanities greatest advancement — is the transistor really is our greatest achievement, and until we surpass this we will, as a race, be unlikely to reach our dreams, or the stars.
We know that death isn’t inevitable, a disease like any other as we become more obsessed with bio-hacking, with longevity and why not. But living longer isn’t about extending time on earth, it’s about living a healthy life in old age, still able to move around and experience things. Enjoy not endure.
There has been an explosion of discoveries that prove it is possible to slow down ageing, in some cases reverse it, through better lifestyle choices and finding out, measuring and analysing our personal bio-data. The explosion in wearable tech much is clinical grade allows us to record and examine of core biomarkers — as evidence of how well our bodies are doing. Our body chucks off huge amounts of data and only now are we starting to analyse it -properly.
I’m not talking about recording steps, heart rate and blood sugar content. No, I’m taking about knowing the state of my immune system, on a daily basis is important right? How about knowing through a simple test the severity of the virus I have caught (Covid) from mild infection to you’re OK or severe or possibly causing death. Knowing if I will develop the biggest killers Type I & II diabetes, cardio vascular disease or whether my body has been traumatised, and the extent of poisoning from our environment and food chain, including heavy metals. I can then take effective remedial actions to extend my runway and believe me when you hit 60, you start to think about longevity, how mych runway you have left.
This is advanced #BioTech and #MedTech and it is very real and I am pleased to say advancing quickly. We can track and trace, analyse and do somethign about how we FEEL.
Extending life 20 years of more is already within reach. The tech that measures everything is here — both worn externally and as implants. Capturing data and receiving signals from the body. But this signalling can go both ways — as we start to think about correction, prevention and cure.
We can dial into our bodies with new instructions? As we are already trans-human in so may ways.
MetaVerse
The MetaVerse cannot be engineered as a single realm connecting the world as a new form of Internet. Rendering billions of experience cannot be done, and should computation advance to enable this, it would destroy our climate 100x faster than anything else including data centres.
Look the reality of anything online is actually quite boring. Gaming apart as I remain a big first person shooter fan, but now I know what it is like to be shot, blown up, stabbed and it hurts! Whether consuming content, watching a video or playing a game where after a while we become numb to it. The reality is our eyes optically input signals, our cortex leaves the brain to interpret to delivery the bodies (nervous system) response. The scary movie where something jumps out gives us a sudden rush, normally adrenaline as our flight response takes over. We get sad, aroused or excited by the things we see, yet we use just two senses, audible and visual. The other senses are not engaged. But what if we could?
Imagine you could feel the MetaVerse, experience the many realms and the mny things it has to offer?
I created the Internet of Feelings model alongside Web3 to explain where we are with, and take advantage of the brilliant Web3, that is a transformational layer into our analogue past, dialing into Web1 and Web2 and embracing the tools of a modern era to capture and analyse data quick enough to influence human behaviours (Predictive), responding to and adjusting ones products and services on the fly (Sensory Processing).
A predictive world that puts the people, the consumer, the user in control of their personal experience, their sovereign identity, their data and rewarding them for it. A model the big corporations just hate as they cannot do as they wish as they do today, relying on us all to simply Accept Cookies. Gives them the freedom to exploit us, sell our data and manipulate our good will.
How to combine a Web3 sensory physical world with the digital realm, to get Phy-gi-tal.
Many believe our sensory abilities are not developed to their full capabilities, while others believe we’re dumbed down from birth through dissonant frequencies, fluoride in our water, and a broad range of social manipulations, and of course the education system that hasn’t changed for almost 200 years. In combination, essentially keeping humanity dumb, controlled, as throughout history the people do often rise up to opression and force change at massive cost to lives, replacing one form of dictator with another — authoritarianism is soon followed by totalitarianism. And don’t be fooled by technology advancement which without sovereignty over our data, be under no illusion it is another form of extreme surveillance, oppression and control.
All governments will try to force us to reveal what is ours. Ransoming us with laws, threats, fines and further dilution to our freedoms and privacy — through the use of technology which is more subtle, more hidden. But if we secure our own bio-data, our thoughts, desires and lifestyle data they become blind, and this includes AI, the ultimate nemesis and existential threat. But it is inevitable our bio-footprint will be demanded by government for access and lifestyle as we have seen with PCR debacle for permissions to travel.
Trans-humanism, Cyborgs and a bit of tech…
It is inevitable biological humans will converge with machines? Well, yes — if you have a pace-maker, prosthetic or transplant you’re alive because of this. Bio-feedback from our bodies will manifest as a set of decision to make to improve what is going on, our physical and mental wellbeing. There are new membranes that act as Bio-Ware (data passing both ways) acts as a new digital nervous system is available, so we can FEEL everything, offering new ways to dial into our bodies — to cure, correct and for therapies, and to help people with damaged bodies move and enjoy more life.
Full Immersion Call of Duty
The fun part of my job is trying the tech, taking the tests and in this case wearing a new generation of bio-ware membranes. To play Call of Duty and feel the bullets, explosions, punches and cuts (a big kid thing I admit) and to train differently, loading my muscles and not my joints, to feel a movie as I watch each scene, to feel sorts collision of music as though I was there, while sitting on my sofa.
Neural muscular stimulation (NMES) has been around for 100 years — the ability to dial directly into each individual muscle with new signals, bypassing, supplementing, adding a layer of signals from brain to body.
Collective Experiences — Hive Mind
The collective intelligence opportunity, the Hive Mind has been spoken about for decades is already here. Already delivered by Google, Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Apple and others who harvest our data to harvest us (humanity) to purposes of manipulation for profit, for their benefit and not ours or advancing humanity.
As government seeks more ways to enforce mass surveillance and data capture, they will use and create further pandemics to force our hand. But not if we know more about our bodies than they do, not if they cannot see our actual data, not if we don’t let them. At birth we have one thing that nobody can take away — our unique identity, not formal government naming schemas, but from our DNA, our humanity, our unique biology.
We live in a world where we can test the effects of foods, chemicals and lifestyle on our bodies within hours/minutes. We can see the effectiveness of drugs and treatments for ourselves as see the extent of big Pharma lies and manipulations. We can call out the food manufacturers that have been poisoning us for generations.
Which foods make our immune system dip, cause and effect on our bodies. The evidence. But then we can measure how your body responds to products, films, TV and other experience, data you cannot fake, your physical reaction/response.
Internet of Feelings — Feeling is Believing
With Web3 combining with the Internet of Feelings we can take back control of our lives, our bodies and our future. We can live more life, experience more of everything and we can decide what we want to be, how we want to live and whether we want to live a Phy-gi-tal life.
The data coming from us (our bodies) is ours and the things we do, how we live and enjoy ourselves is OURS! And without it, large corporations and governments will find it harder to manipulate us.
They have become used to deciding whether or not we live a good, healthy and long life. It hasn’t been our decision for millennia and with the social, economic unrest around the globe with draconian moves by governments and those in power to control us further, we can use new Web3 and I-o-F business models to take back control.
This is our time to have nore control over our lives, our quality of life, our wellness and health…
“Ignorance is strengthened”
Author. Nick Ayton is a technologist, futurist, speaker and writer. He’s spent 45 years in tech and works at the frontier of computing, materials and biotech.