LunarPunk_Labs - a decentralized intelligence agency, for R&D to ground the unstoppable.

We recently heard a story about a businessman who decided to sell one of his father’s petrol pumps to buy forest land. He claimed that carbon sequestration was a “lazyboy” way to make money with little effort. He bought 100 hectares of deciduous forest land in Northern Russia and planted fast-growing birch trees, which are not indigenous to the area. To make way for the new trees, he cut down rich biodiversity, leading to the destruction of the local ecosystem. The situation was worsened by the use of fertilizers and other short-term solutions, which caused soil erosion, over-extraction of the water table, and displacement of local species.

Traditional Impact Metrics that use simple quantities like carbon credits incentivize such behavior that can have devastating long term consequences. This is not what regeneration should look like. 

This is where LunarPunk_Labs comes in.

LP_L is a decentralised intelligence agency. Best envisioned as a praxis learning microDAO, and best collaborated with as a guild who’s core dynamics are situated around R&D of what we call “Adaptive Capital”.

Our fundamental proposition is that the living systems are ‘complex adaptive systems’ that grow and change; our conception of a ‘healthy ecosystem’ is dependent on our own anthropocentric world views and priors… speculative values which are based on facts and wisdom.

Any global design means facing some really difficult questions like: which values or heuristics? embedded in which context? and for whom? Clearly there is NO single answer, but we can develop an interoperable infrastructural substrate capable of holding such plurality, which is precisely what we are working on. This changes the impact specification game from a top-down mandate to bottom-up and fit-to-ground metrics selected by social mutation. All powered by composable grounded blankets of local wisdom. This will be the difference that web3 empowers over traditional impact which is stuck in top-down capture games that will cause significant pain when the towers have to come down. 

Put more explicitly, we are building multi-modal knowledge graphs that can progressively approximate the adaptive landscape through human and machine inference. This is analogous to what AI developers call the “mixture of experts” methodology, just in a more tightly refined and explicit embedding space that is human-auditable with “double-click to zoom” hierarchies of abstraction.

On a high-level of abstraction, LP_L is deeply concerned and building competency within the field of action between :-

• The Ideal of Cosmology: beyond the hydrogen and computational universes, towards living towards something more conscious and meaningful.
• The Ground of Ecology : beyond alarmist narratives and material reductionism towards living ecologies centered around the phytogenic, germinal and animal worlds.
• The Instrument of Technology: beyond blockchain incentives towards distributed hash tables, edge computing, sentient agents and AGI.
• The Directive of Philosophy: beyond the rock of knowledge (epistemics) looking towards the bread of wisdom through techne and phronesis.

We are platform and network agnostic and provide our services and systems design under permissive licenses. Your funding allows us to keep our R&D open source and to benefit the ecosystem, as real impact shouldn't be constrained by our current models of profitability and survival. Our ability to speak truth to power and build for good is provided for by the safety net of your donations. We are not playing network effect games and want to use our intelligence to accelerate the coming of a better world by empowering the wise and rooted with the tools, methodologies and patterns we build and collect. Our exit will be in consultancy/advocacy for inducting implicit grounded values into machine readable knowledge graphs. 

Below are our updates :- 

Dreaming

• Translation Engine for Impact Frameworks and multi-perspective Reputation

• Narrative Sensemaking Oracles

Doing

• Comic Production Engine for storytelling vehicles of ineffable truths

• Regenerative methodology codifications

• Travels and explorations: tothecosmos.org

Designing

• Foundational knowledge graph schema

• dMRV Sensemaking Oracle

Developing

• Data sets of Regenerative Value Models/Markov Blankets

• LLM Auditable Graph Memory & fine tuning

• Process Pipelines for consistent characters Image generation Models
  Intersecting

• weco.io and The WWW (auraura, noo/nao, ad4m, CSensemakers)

• h3uni.org (wisdom wheel, qual systems, cosmic ecology)

• AtlantisDAO (oracles, narratives)

• Liminal Village (ecology)

• Commons Hub

• Olbia

• Fests ( ReFi & GreenPill India, Metaphorum, bonfire.link, The Turn, MetaFest, Boom) 

How we have used the funds until now

All travels have been personally financed. Funds received from previous gitcoin rounds have gone towards a laptop for Rishi, with the remainder pooled into a DAO multisig and ear marked for infrastructural / operational costs. Lean basics.

Learnings 

Since starting the project our prime directive has been informed by philosophy and our search for wisdom in a turbulent world. In other words we’ve undertaken a significant amount of research into fundamental understanding; a path fraught with peril due to the metaphysical implications. Who’s metaphysics? And why theirs? 

Thankfully we don’t need to be so specific and can reason about the genus instead; what is metaphysics? The answer to this question is usually pretty uncontentious; it’s the reconciliation of ontology and epistemology. So what can we learn about these fields? Plenty for sure but let’s keep things high level for now build our fundamental proposition from some general statements:

• Ontology is about the specific nature of being 
• Epistemology is about the general nature of knowing

Interestingly, many long standing wisdom traditions are densely codified and you need not look too far to find this out whether christian, buddhist or hindu. Yes, they use their own domain specific terminology (ontology) but the form of their transmissions are nearly always geometric (epistemology). 

From these two areas we can continue with deductive reasoning through the garden of forking paths. The dyad of ontology and epistemology is triplicated into the classic Trivium of logic, grammar and rhetoric. Most LLMs are trained on such a corpus. 

Expanding further we get the classic Quadrivium of maths, music, geometry, astronomy. In the west the trivium and quadrivium have traditionally been considered the seven liberal arts to inner and outer perfection. We could further bifurcate these terms into higher resolution systems, but what of tantric Yoga? Or other wisdom traditions? Yes, they seem to build their own metaphysics through similar ‘stacked geometries’ and ‘knowledge graphs’.

Since the last round we’ve concentrated on filling out this high level picture and increasing their resolution at more fundamental levels. We can repeat our method on any given term to articulate what amounts to a qualitative and quantitative infinity of measures and values. 

At this point you may ponder how this is related to the environment? Good question. Let me ask what do you really know about ecology and how do you know it? Or permaculture? How do you frame and validate a methodology to know its actually effective? 

Permaculture for example has three fundamental principles; earth care, people care, fair share - but what do we validate these values against? An answer of monitoring, verification and reporting might suffice for some, but precisely what kinds? Sky, ground, human, reputational sensing? And just to throw a wrench in the works, should we really go with the permaculture principles or ESGs? The answer is of course contextual is a matter of subjective ontology.

Can we sort this mess out with technical infrastructure? Well, we can codify both global and local knowledge in graphs, but you will always need a human in the loop for wise stewardship… which is why we are attempting to model what ‘wise stewardship’ actually means in a descriptive manner and building out a resource library.

This quest has taken us around the world in search of the miraculous; please see tothecosmos.org to further monitor and verify this and other reports.