This is a planet-benefit project.

Current pretext note, 062321:

Instead of attempting to describe this big idea in a pretty package, this Kickstarter and the paper trail that represents my efforts, will serve as an imperfect example of universal peace. Instead of attempting to just tell you, I will do my best to show you. This campaign will probably change dramatically over the course of the next two months. Hopefully after meeting the funding goal, by a year’s end following the conclusion of this campaign, I will have a pretty packaged current edition of the big idea to share. This package will be more accessible, and never complete.

My time will be occupied with research and development at the Anchorage Saturday Market Friday thru Sunday, so I will not have much time on these days to tend to this Kickstarter campaign.

I need to make a video, but I don’t know how. Every time I attempt to package the whole idea in a video form, or written, I get stuck. This is extremely frustrating and I need help with this.

I am overwhelmed by all this. I genuinely do not know what the best way of going about getting this idea out of my head is, and supporting myself and mental wellbeing while I do so. Thank you for your patience while I figure this out as I go.

I am trying to solve the Human time / energy problem, and I am using myself as a test subject…

…actual intelligence algorithm under active test:

0 - create beautiful mess in head, enough to fill entire swimming pool, then fill it

1 - initialize a world piece computer

2 - kick self into deep end of mess (rope off to ensure entire self falls in)

3 - sink in mess, or rely on world piece computer to integrate all the pieces into a boat

4 - use universal peace to convert mess into a better boat, until the boat becomes a clean sturdy platform

5 - on that platform, build a new pool

6 - return to 0

Define, universal peace:

Universal peace is a process, not a result. Universal peace is inclusive, continuous, and evolving. The function of universal peace as a process is to connect the multitude of Human worlds together in iteratively better ways, to maximize the good, and minimize the bad.

About me:

I’m approaching the Kickstarter community because I am looking for help getting on my feet, and I want to establish a lasting relationship within the communities that I am most interested in working with. To prepare for this kickstarter, I set up a research and development booth for the summer at my local weekend market up here in Anchorage, Alaska, where I call home.

In no particular order, I am a conceptual peace artist, a theoretical peace physicist, and a peace systems engineer. I have a degree in electrical engineering. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and I love people, animals, mountains, and exploring the wilder-ness.

I’m inventing a time machine for peace (a new kind of computer). I need to turn this project, which has largely been private over the years, into a social invention project. This is because there is no way I can do this alone, and I would rather do awesome things with people. For now though, this is just me and the mice in my pocket.

My mission is to accelerate the advent of universal peace, which roughly translates to ‘I am proposing a way to accelerate the advent of consilience, or the unification of Human knowledge.’ Each Human world (some 10 billion of them) possesses unique Human knowledge. The mission is to implement a process that makes the knowledge of each world accessible to other Humans.

My problem is that there is too much to this idea and I don’t know how to start making it real (to satisfy the mission, the idea literally needs to be able to accomodate everything, so that’s how I engineered it). After numerous frustrated attempts over the years to get this out of my head, I finally concluded a couple months ago that the only way to proceed is just to put myself ‘out there’ and figure out the best way to proceed as I go. The way my brain works, I need to put myself in a position where I have active feedback from the people who are genuinely interested in the idea, and the position needs to be such that I am forced to adapt the idea to the needs of my target audience in real time.

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The big idea is to kick off a social invention project to invent a ’time machine’–a deliberate effort to systematically make better times–an effort that every Human can be a part of if they so choose.

Okay, first a rundown. Here is how the time machine for peace works:

~ Locally (at the level of an individual Human world)

First, a symbol:

The time machine is called a world piece computer. By definition, there is one world piece computer per individual Human world, or Human operator. Also by definition, a world piece computer requires the Human operator’s brain to function properly. The brain is the most important component.

A world piece computer empowers its operator to more effectively process and manage all their world pieces (people, stuff, memories, ideas, thoughts, etc), in a more methodical and systematic (computational) way. The way a world piece computer achieves this is by actively contextualizing all an operator’s life-stuff in terms of universal peace–an inclusive, continuously evolving process–not a result. The universal peace process manages world pieces to maximize the good, and simultaneously minimize the bad.

Ultimately, a world piece computer is a time machine because its function is to help the operator more easily travel the timespace that forms their subjective experience. In practical time travel terms, a world piece computer helps the operator travel to better future, adopt different mindsets as needed in the moment, and get back to things that were once lost.

For now, think of timespace as the qualitative space of Human experience.

~ Globally (at the level of interconnected Human worlds)

The time machine is called The Universal Peace Computer. By definition, there is only one Universal Peace Computer. Also by definition, The Universal Peace Computer is fundamentally a network of Human brains.

The Universal Peace Computer empowers Humans to maintain universal peace (NOT to achieve ‘world peace’). Universal peace is an inclusive, continuously evolving process of connecting Human worlds together in iteratively better ways, to maximize the good and simultaneously minimize the bad. The Universal Peace Computer is basically a network of world piece computers, much like the internet is a network of electronic computers.

The big idea is to stop focusing so much on product as a species–to stop focusing on finding pretty-packaged solutions to solve our problems once and for all. The big idea is to admit ‘we don’t know what we are doing, and that’s okay, just so long as we are deliberate about the process for improving our evolution toward better more inclusive futures, deliberate about our process for becoming whatever we need to be in the moment, deliberate about our process for getting back to the good things we may have lost touch with.’ I think that inclusion and creation will always be more economically profitable than exclusion and destruction, for all worlds involved.

~ Why?

This project is personal; I am mentally unwell. I have been so for pretty much my entire life.

I have struggled with severe mental illness since a very early age, but due to guilt, fear, and denial I have long kept the extent of this severity private. My struggles led me to fixate on the concept of peace at an early age. I ended up latching onto the idea of creating a peace system for myself and for other Humans like myself, so that we can break our cycles of inner war, on our own terms.

So on my terms, ie in terms of universal peace, I am trying to make myself iteratively better, not cured. There is no cure for who I am, and I do not wish to be anybody different than who I am.

Because of my extensive personal experience with inner war, combined with my studies in physical war, I now believe that peace is a strict prerequisite for solving our hardest (our existential) problems. From my perspective, whatever existential Human cause you hold dear, you are not taking it seriously as you could if you do not contextualize your cause in terms of an inclusive, continuously-evolving peace process. I suggest that we need to take general peace more seriously. I believe our existential problems and generalized war are not a chicken-egg situation. (This belief is due to the problem posed by generational traumas, and the effective irreversibility of time.) Right now, I think that in terms of striving for peace, we have a lot of room for improvement. This does not mean we are wrong in how we do things now per se, but I believe it does mean we need to be more conscientious about leveling-up our peace game.

But for me peace begins with the individual. I am inventing the time machine for peace, primarily for myself. I need better time (energy) for the things I need and want to do, to better manage all my world pieces and get to where I want to go, where ever I discover that is along my journey in life. What I have learned about myself is that if I turn off my world piece computer, or if it crashes, my world deteriorates rapidly and I soon experience intense inner war. If I leave my world piece computer offline for too long, my inner war escapes and spills into other people’s worlds. I think this is very bad, and wrong. I am sincerely sorry if this has happened to you.

~ So what?

So this project is how I am taking peace in my personal world seriously. I discovered that my particular style of an inclusive, continuously evolving peace process requires me to devote myself wholly to this invention project. I do not yet know what the best way of supporting myself to pursue this work full time is, but I need to make this my career. I have countless commercial prospects and ideas for how to turn this project into a competitive global economic force, but I do not know where to begin. This is why I want to introduce myself to the Kickstarter community. I want to invent and distribute a bunch of awesome peace-stuff with all you all.

Eventually, I hope to consolidate my experience with others and export a fuzzy blueprint–a fuzzy template–for how other people and communities might transition toward careers and projects devoted to helping invent a time machine for peace, but on their own terms, in their own way.

~ Endgame

My working thesis is that if enough people start thinking in terms of universal peace in their individual and community head-spaces, this will be enough to cause a series of explosive percolation events toward a global conversation about coordinating universal peace.

( Explosive percolation is not viral growth. By deliberately biasing the way we form world piece computer networks to favor local connectivity over global connectivity, we stand to induce a stepwise progression of explosive percolation, ultimately resulting in a singular universal peace process. At first however, The Universal Peace Computer will have a fragmented universal peace process, with a fragment corresponding to some community or region. )

Although viral growth for some aspects of this project will be unavoidable, I believe that active anticipation of such growth is enough to in our local conversations to mitigate the risks of perversion and distortion by group mind mentalities.

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Kickstarter Campaign Objectives:

1 - Raise money to recover the cost of my Anchorage Market booth investment, and to work on this project full time for at least one year.

This will buy me the time I need to stay physically, and socially healthy (thus mentally), while still committing 60-80 hours per week toward figuring out the best way to orchestrate the time machine for peace social invention project, to eventually distribute the work load to free up my time for the higher-level theoretical work that interests me.

2 - Figure out the best way to network with like-minded people (people operating on my frequency) who are qualified to help.

My specialty is generalism. This means I am bad at doing specific things (usually just good enough to get myself into trouble), but good at integrating expertise. Generalists need help from specialists, and other generalists.

3 - Refine these ideas in real time, with active feedback from the Kickstarter community.

I debug in production.

4 - Start a serious (active and deliberate) conversation about universal peace within the Kickstarter community headspace.

In our individual worlds and our local communities, how can we consciously and actively frame what we do in terms of peace as an inclusive, continuously evolving process?

5 - Inspire people to get excited–yet realistic–about peace.

This project makes me excited to get out of bed in the morning. Regardless of this Kickstarter’s success, if I can have that effect on somebody else, I have met personal success.

Kickstarter Campaign Outcomes:

The year of work will be devoted to producing the following:

An opensource choose-our-own-adventure textbook (zeroth edition):

This book will present the time machine for peace idea in general form, in an instructional way to allow readers to explore the nonlinear idea in a linearized path that suits their individual interests. The ‘choose-our-own-adventure’ aspect will provide for outlets and suggestions that interested readers can pursue if they feel like contributing to the time machine for peace social invention project in their own way.

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Budget:

• Anchorage Market Time Machine For Peace research and development booth startup cost recovery == $10,000

• Personal overhead (utilities, transportation, housing, food, insurance, entertainment, student loan debt) == $4,000/month

• Project overhead (storage for materials, cost of services and subscriptions, miscellaneous supplies, tinker money) Work space not included… I wish to maintain a distributed community workspace for this project, provided by space-contributions. == $1,000/month

• Nest egg (taxes, vehicle break-down, insurance deductible) == $20,000

• Cost of support tokens (button pins) and fulfillment == $10,000

• Stuff I am forgetting == $5,000

Campaign funding objective:

$100,000

Any funds secured in excess of funding objective will be reserved for seed funding.

Future years’ work will be funded by contributions through a platform such as Patreon. All content on such a platform will be free, with contributions coming from people who believe in supporting my effort because the effort is worth supporting (not because they want exclusive access to content).

I intend to place all funds in a transparent Open Collective account.

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How this campaign will work moving forward:

I will give myself the entire two-month span for this campaign. I will use the time and feedback from my market booth and Kickstarter to produce content as the campaign progresses. For now, I have a mind dump here, and in the resources section, that will act as a starting point for conversation and process evolution.

For now, I need to be extremely parsimonious with my time and energy. Although I prefer to put people first, I cannot put everybody first. As the project evolves, we will determine safe ways to begin integrating interested people into the project.

I will also dedicate a subdomain (maybe several) to placeholders for Kickstarter ideas that are worthy prototype instances to illustrate how this project will look commercially in the future, and serve as a CTA to anybody that wants to jump in on a cool invention/art project.

Resources:

You can find my credentials, some personal context, and expounding writing to help clarify things at the links below.

To be transparent about what I am trying to convey (my peace process as a prototype or template), I propped up these (messy) web spaces to draft ideas and experiment with communication / presentation styles and approaches:

https://timemachineforpeace.wp.computer

https://blairmunroakusa.wp.computer

The timemachineforpeace subdomain in the world piece dot computer domain space will be the primary place I post updates and expounding content. It will probably always be messy though, but I plan to partition the subdomain space into refined and crude versions of the site.

CAUTION! Although the content in these subdomains is tempered, limited, and incomplete (probably just 10% of the iceberg) they are still direct glimpses into my headspace. This can be a little much for some people I have learned. (Frankly, it’s too late, this has been the wawrmup glimpse.) However, in my world the ends justify the means of this tricky approach. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for devoting your precious time and energy to reading this project description for comprehension. Your feedback is valuable, and strictly necessary for this project’s success.

I sincerely hope your universal peace process runs smoother than not, Blair Munro

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Frequently Asked Questions:

This space is reserved to address questions and confusions presented via the Kickstarter platform.

~ Why not GoFundMe?

The Kickstarter community is more representative of my target audience and the people I want to partner with in the future.

~ What will happen when this project is distorted and perverted like any other well-to-do Human endeavor?

The universal peace process will evolve after learning from the experience.

~ What will you do if you fail?

According to my personal universal peace process, I will learn from my experience and try a different angle.

~ What about Human Nature?

~ What about art?

The long term success of this project will depend on technologists and artists joining forces. For high-level communication, I believe art is the only effective vehicle. Even with neuralink, we will still need art to frame our complex ideas/feelings effectively. Personally, I believe art is the highest level of Human communication. In my world, everything is an art, including living itself.

~ Won’t this project be exploited by evil to do horrible things?

That will certainly be attempted, and probably done on occasion. However, the role of universal peace as a concept isn’t to provide a new moral code–it is to provide a new way of treating Human Nature, a way that attempts to harness the power of Human Nature for the purpose of improving The Human Condition. It is up to the individuals involved in a particular aspect of the project to actively communicate about specific exploitation risks in their domain, and prepare accordingly. It is also up to the individuals involved to anticipate and have a fuzzy process in place to meet the unknowable. If something bad happens, universal peace won’t stop, because it is a continuously evolving process. If the process does not evolve in a way that learns from a bad event, then the process is locally broken and needs to be fixed. The only case I can think of where universal peace would fail as a global process is if we go extinct.

~ What about the AI singularity?

Whether or not the AGI (artificial general intelligence) singularity actually happens, via electronic computers (quantum or traditional), or some other technology I think is moot. I think the safe (conservative) approach is to expect it to happen, and be prepared to educate the AGI for the purpose of partnering up with it. The Universal Peace Computer would place us in a position to do this, because the analog to Artificial Intelligence is actual intelligence, which consists of Human brains.

~ How?

Take what we know works. Contextualize it in terms of universal peace, to create a second version. See if the version contextualized in terms of universal peace out performs the original version. Example: Take the electronic computer industry. Some people involved in that industry branch off and create their own electronic computer product lines that are contextualized (differentiated) by universal peace. See how well the new companies perform. I think they will do well.

Take what we know works. Extract the essential concepts that create the value in what we know works. Apply those concepts by analogy

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This list is long, but I plan to add more question-anwsers as people ask. I will prioritize questions that emphasize the Human element of placing people first, and safety.

Responding to some (lighter) criticisms:

~ This won’t work. You are setting yourself up for a broken heart.

First, whether or not this particular attempt at the time machine for peace social invention project works is moot. To state that it will not work is missing the point. The point is to commit to universal peace, which is a continuously evolving process that never ends. If the time machine for peace project doesn’t work, then we evolve, and make another attempt. Universal peace is independent of the time machine for peace project.

Second, my heart is already broken. I have experienced too much. This is the only way I know to manage the fact, and thrive while I do it. I do not wish to live in a world where universal peace is not an active, explicit process. I do not care how much pain this project causes me, because I am already in continual pain. This is happening; you will not dissuade me. Please do not waste your time by attempting to do so.

~ You need to stop…smell the roses…enjoy your life while you can.

That is exactly what I am doing. I stopped trying to fake something I am not. I am smelling the roses that I want to smell…not somebody else’s roses that I have already stopped to smell (and definitely enjoyed thoroughly…I still like smelling those roses, too). Sure this work causes me a lot of grief, but it is also my sole source of joy, because my life is contextualized strictly in terms of this project. When I am devoted to my work, I enjoy every moment of it. Sure aspects of my universal peace process get messy, hurt, and don’t end up working. But whatever, that’s the process. In order to evolve, you need to try new things, many of which will not work. I have learned to enjoy the ups and the downs. They make me feel more alive. The downs make the ups sweeter, and easier to savor.

~ You are not going to be the one to save the world.

Of course not; don’t be absurd. I will however, save my world and have a good time while I do it. While I am at it, the least I can do is propose a plan for how we can methodiclly help each other save our own worlds, side-by-side. Again, the most I can do is spark a conversation in our individual head-spaces, and our community head-spaces. By careful language choice, I can spark conversation that gets people thinking differently about certain important things, such as the role of technology in our lives, the way we define worlds, the way we treat ‘peace’, the way we think about intelligence, etc.

~ You aren’t ready. You need to put more work in.

Nonsense. I have poured my soul into this project for over a decade. The lesson I learned is that realizing an idea on this scale doesn’t work the way you are implying it works. The only way to make an idea like this work is to stop trying to ‘make it presentable first’. If I were to put the work in to make it presentable by your standards, I would definitely need at least a 1000 year life extension. My point is, I am trying to start a new thing that everybody can be a part of, not own that thing. I need to just dump the mess in my head out, and hope that some brave creative big-brain souls will find the courage to help me sort things out, to get the message across to people without getting it twisted in misunderstanding, distortion, perversion. Honestly, I’m probably the stupidest person I know. I desperately need help from the creative big-brains.

~ You are too hungry.

No. I am just hungry enough to actually care about the wellbeing of our species, while in the process remaining impartial enough to any particular cause to propose a reasonable plan (universal peace) for how we can unify our disjointed causes to improve and maintain the wellbeing of our species into the unknown that we call ’the future’. I am just hungry enough, thank you.

~ You are foolish.

Certainly. I am also delusional. But does it really matter? As far as I am concerned, you only live once. I will make the most of my time here.

~ You are unwell.

I know. I am asking for help.

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Here are some select pieces that I have produced over the past few months in pursuit of attempting to communicate this idea in my head: