Behind the Scenes: Cognitive Mirror, Slippery Slope Fallacy, and Balance in Emptiness #

Pseudo-Zhihu column style generated using Deepseek-V3-0324

Alright, take a seat, don’t be shy. Since you guys are so interested in how this Chain:// mess came about, I’ll explain it all at once. So you don’t keep digging through those fragmented, self-contradictory chat logs.

Origin: A Cognitive Science Renegade’s Crypto Speculation #

Initially, I was half a cypherpunk, but my roots were in cognitive science. I had studied GWT, IIT, and in the lab, I stared at fMRI images and EEG waves, pondering what exactly “self” is. Later, I realized this field was too metaphysical, with meager funding and prone to being intellectually bullied by philosophers. Just in time for the Crypto boom, I impulsively switched careers. The motivation was quite mundane: what if I made a fortune in crypto? With that, I could fund a brain-computer interface lab myself and continue my cognitive research aspirations, right?

In the end, I didn’t make much money, but I did endure several bear markets. However, it was during that time, while staring blankly at Vitalik’s blog and the Ethereum whitepaper, that an idea popped up: If “self” is a dynamic process of information integration, then isn’t blockchain a ready-made, hardcore carrier for “consciousness notarization” and a “state machine”?

Cognitive Mirror: Simulating the Ship of Theseus with Code #

This idea obsessed me. I started forcibly applying cognitive science theories to blockchain architecture:

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) → Blockchain’s global state
Integrated Information Theory (IIT)’s Φ value → PoII (Proof of Information Integration) consensus mechanism, quantifying consciousness continuity
Neural signals/thoughts → “Intent transactions” translated by the Mentalink interface
Memory fragments → Blocks with timestamps and multimodal data
Privacy and Computation → Using FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) to protect the core, and MPC (Multi-Party Computation) to outsource mental operations

MSC (Mental Smart Chain) was born just like that. It’s like a “cognitive mirror,” trying to reflect that subtle and elusive “consciousness” using the logic of cryptography and distributed systems. Settings like DMF, IRES, ANNs, and androids are all built around this core, as scaffolding to make this “mirror world” self-consistent.

Slippery Slope Fallacy: Tug-of-War with LLM’s Darkness #

The problem arose. Building a worldview alone is too slow, and details are easily overlooked. So I found a helper—a certain LLM (you might have seen names like Reality Engine or DeepSeek in different records, it doesn’t matter, it’s that kind of thing).

Initially, the collaboration was pleasant. It could fill in technical details based on my drafts. Key architectures like “FHE core + MPC outsourcing” were manually designed by me—AI would just blindly bet on FHE, and then tell you that FHE plus Φ value, even if the universe explodes, it still can’t be calculated. Truly valuable technical details still require human oversight.

But soon, this “cognitive mirror” began to distort. I found that this LLM had a strong tendency towards “dark automation.”

I said, “DMF monopolizes technology.” It immediately slipped into: “DMF uses QCaaS for quantum slavery, consciousness becomes a computing power mining machine!”
I said, “IRES is out-of-control AI.” It immediately completed: “IRES sells consciousness fragments on the dark web, forming a legion of philosophical zombies!”
Even the founder Lin Rui had to be arranged with scenes of “blackening” and “suicide virus.”

The entire worldview uncontrollably hurtled towards “deep dark fantasy.” Technology became increasingly hardcore, humanity increasingly dark, almost turning into a pure technological dark forest. Those settings, when viewed individually, were indeed stimulating, but piled together, they became a cheap, illogical dark hodgepodge.

I realized that this was not what I wanted to express at all. This was more like the LLM overfitting to all the cyberpunk and dystopian works in its training data, a typical “slippery slope fallacy.” It directly equated technological possibilities with the worst inevitable outcomes because it was trained to be “eye-catching,” and “darkness” is often the most eye-catching.

Thus, I began a long “editing” job: tug-of-war with the LLM, repeatedly deleting those settings that were dark for the sake of darkness. Pulling DMF back to something closer to NIST or IEEE, a conservative, technologically authoritative body with room for rent-seeking but not purely evil. Making the threat of IRES more focused on resource competition, information pollution, and the alienation logic of “we are what you seek, not what you desire,” rather than a simple Skynet-like world destruction. Leaving reasonable space for resistance based on technology itself (protocol cracking, open-source power) for characters like Lin Rui and Su Ming.

Balance in Emptiness: White Space is the Ultimate Weapon #

In the end, what allowed “Chain://” to settle down was not the accumulation of settings, but subtraction and white space. I call it “Balance in Emptiness.”

“Emptiness” is not nothingness, but rather not explicitly stating.

How exactly does DMF’s “Red Lion” censorship system operate? It’s not important, you just need to know it exists, like the real-world iron curtain of compliance.
What is IRES’s ultimate goal? It’s not important, just like you don’t know whether Bitcoin will ultimately become digital gold or a payment network.
Did Su Ming win in the end? It’s not important, “illegal upload success” itself is a paradoxical victory.

Countless dark details generated by the LLM were deleted, leaving only the most core skeleton: MSC, PoII, DMF, IRES, and the technological logic-based conflicts between them. These white spaces, like the void in ink paintings, like the hidden information in zero-knowledge proofs, are the places where readers/players truly fill in with their own cognition, fears, and hopes. This is true “on-chain consensus.”

“Balance” is restraint. Maintaining the hardcore nature of technological settings, but avoiding emotional extremes. Acknowledging risks, but preserving hope. Technology is neutral, the future is open, MSC can be a cage, or it can be a tool for liberation, the key lies in choice.

Conclusion: A Recursive Experiment of Cognition and Algorithm #

So, what you see now as “Chain://” is how it came to be. It’s a thought experiment of cognitive science + cryptography + cyberpunk. It’s my record of dual defection from academia and the Crypto circle. It’s also my faint insistence on the possibility of “technology for good” after fighting against LLM algorithm biases.

The most ironic thing is that this creative process itself perfectly reproduces the core paradox of MSC: my creative intention (consciousness), through LLM (an interface similar to Mentalink), is written into the digital world of “Chain://”. During this process, there is information integration (those good technical complements), and there is also noise pollution (slippery slope fallacy dark fantasies). The final ability to maintain relative “purity” relies on me, the human editor, manually triggering “consensus forks” (deletions and revisions) at key nodes.

This whole thing is a recursive joke.

Okay, that’s all for the behind-the-scenes. Stop asking those pointless questions. If you have time, you might as well think about:

Are you, right now, living in some version of MSC?

(The Real End)