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. 

Big brands have convinced themselves they need a MetaVerse a glorified place for customers to shop, try on things, use things virtually apparently, experiencing what exactly? You can 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, scares and certain arousal, but you still cannot FEEL what is going on. 

SEEING is no longer believing! Today you have to be able to FEEL what s 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.    

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. 

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 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. 

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 live with both sides. They want a phy-gi-cal  existence, as many want to play with gender, flexible lifestyle, support causes and want to push new boundaries.  

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 micro 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 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 is our greatest achievement, and until we surpass this we will as a race be unlikely to reach our dreams. 

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. 

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 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.

I’m not talking about recording steps, heart rates and blood sugar content. No, I’m taking about knowing the state of my immune system, knowing through a test the severity of the virus I have caught (Covid) from light to 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. This tech is real and advancing quickly.   

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?

MetaVerse

Look the reality of anything online is quite boring. 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 interprets to delivery the bodies 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 audio. The other senses are not engaged. But what if we could?

Imagine you could feel the MetaVerse, experience the many realms and things it has to offer? 

I created this model to explain where we are with Web3 that is a transformation layer into our analogue past, dealing 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. The freedom to exploit us, our data our good will.

So how to combine a Web3 sensory physical world with the digital realm, to get literally Phy-gi-cal. 

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. Essentially keeping us dumb, as throughout history the people do rise up and force change at massive cost to lives, replacing one form of dictator with another - authoritarianism is soon followed by totalitarianism.   

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. 

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 it, to feel sorts collision of music as though I was there, while sitting on my sofa. 

The collective intelligence opportunity, the Hive Mind has been spoken about for decades is already here. 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 humanities.  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 from the 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. 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. 

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-cal life.  

The data is ours coming from us (bodies) 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. 

“Ignorance os strengthened”

Author. Nick Ayton is a technologist and Founding Partner at Solarix Ventures a Deep tech Investor and Multi Family Office. He’s spent 45 years in tech and works at the frontier of computing, materials and biotech. 

By Nick Ayton

Keywords: Blockchain, HealthTech, Metaverse