sophotechnology

Worldbuilding: Theory of Mind

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So, let’s talk about Theory of Mind.

Well, okay, not that theory of mind. The theory of how minds work in the ‘verse, and so the theory behind most sophotechnology, since this topic has come up on the Discord recently.

(Much of the below was heavily inspired by Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels, in my opinion one of the best pieces of SF exploring psychology and cognition. I heartily recommend it.)

The first division sophotechnologists make in analyzing mind-states is logos and psyche, or to give them their longer names, personality organization algorithm and incrementing memory string.

The logos has been discussed before. It is, for sophont minds, where the magic happens. Volition, paracausality, nondeterminism, all that good stuff. It’s also a seed crystal for mind. Drop a logos into a free energy medium where quantum computation is possible, and it’ll start spinning out mind around itself, like a seed crystal in a supersaturated solution. This is how digisapiences are made, for example.

It is also, unfortunately, mostly a black box, although some studies and classifications of it have been made from the outside. (Imagine how pleased that makes the AI wakeners.) Further study is ongoing, but poses both extreme technical and equally extreme ethical problems.

The psyche is everything else. So what is everything else?

(Actually, let’s get one special case out of the way first. That special case is the consciousness loop, a specialized agent which organizes your narrative thread of consciousness. This is the agent which is responsible for autosentience – self-awareness – to whatever degree you have it, that endless stream of status updates on your thoughts that runs through your head.

Note: it’s not in charge of anything. It’s just a glorified journal file that brings order to chaos. This is why those experiments seem to show that you acted before you thought of acting; the decision was made elsewhere in the psyche. What you think is you thinking of something is actually just that thought being written to the log…

…humans do not have very good autoscience. For one thing, just think of the sheer amount of cognitive activity going on that you remain completely unaware of.

And for that matter, autoscience is not a strictly necessary part of minds at all! Self-awareness is not a prerequisite of even quite advanced cognition, although it is needed for sophoncy.)

The psyche is essentially a Minskian society of mind, a frothing sea of agents – mental subroutines – running independently and, for the most part, in parallel. Individual agents are no more than scraps of mental code – major mental structures come from their agglomeration into larger routines of various types: talents, memes, memories, subpersonalities, and so forth. The interaction of all of these, the chorus, produces the mind as we know it.

The most basic agents arise from evolution and brain structure. Some remain that simple all the way through: the agent responsible for, say, heartbeat doesn’t need much more to perform its function. Others are spun out by the logos – simple builders, shapers, generators. Yet more are generated by other agents or higher structures, the mind shaping itself according to archetype and input from memory and sensorium.

But the key to understanding the mind is the higher structures. These include:

Primary personality: The primary personality isn’t, if we’re being strictly technical, very different from a subpersonality in structure; its distinction is that it has emerged during individuation as the dominant voice in the chorus. It is the structure most readily identifiable with the conscious self, but that’s at best only a limited part of the picture – it spends much of its time enmeshed with subpersonalities, talents, and agents all of which color it a great deal, and of course also with the logos.

Subpersonality: Among the largest of structures, each reflecting a major personality aspect. (You can find a whole bunch of Jungian archetypes here.) Probably the best known are the animus/anima/animin, the gender-modeling routines, but there are also things like occupations (your “on-the-job” personality), parental models, your with-this-group-of-close-friends personality, etc., etc. They aren’t independent; they mesh with and color the primary personality when brought forward.

(If one were to devise a theory to explain plurality/dissociative identity disorder in this paradigm it would be subpersonalities which had grown to the point of overshadowing the primary, or become independent primaries; they may also have accompanying sets of talents which are exclusively or mostly-exclusively invoked by them, which adds to the complexity when it comes to determining legal divergence of identity.

This is also something that can be and is done intentionally to produce useful mental subfunctions, similar to Aristoi’s daimones.)

Talents: Talents are smaller complexes of agents encapsulating particular skills, or parts of a skill, called forth when they are required. “Skill” for these purposes includes instincts, emotions, and so on and so forth. “Anger” is a talent – or set of talents – every bit as much as, say, “Tying a Tie” or “Tightrope Walking”, or “Administering Kubernetes Clusters”. They are not necessarily passive; the “situational awareness” talent-cluster is entirely capable of making itself known when other cognitive activity triggers it, for an obvious example.

Memes and memories are both actually subclasses of talents, in this sense: a meme is simply a talent encapsulating an idea, much as a memory is simply a talent encapsulating a remembered concept, in each case along with its various associative linkages. These are mostly passive until something happens to poke their associative linkages: things like PTSD are what happens when they aren’t passive enough and force themselves on the primary personality.

The talent class also includes mental models, mini-eidolon talents formed in the image of other minds for the purpose of predictive empathy.

Implications for Identity

Identity is… messy. Even identity of primary personality doesn’t constitute identity of identity, since there is so much else intermeshed with it that goes to make up the mind. Especially since, being a chorus, virtually all of the elements that go to make up a mind can be shared, even without going to the level of a conflux or a Fusion.

Thus, to a considerable degree, identity is also arbitrary.

For legal purposes, identity is defined by delta-divergence of the mind-state entire, even those parts that may be shared.

For practical purposes, individuality is defined by legal identity plus substrate separation. Hence, immediately after Bob forks, Bob is now a single identity, but two individuals.

Implications for Sophotechnology

This nature of the mind also enables other sophotechnologies. Situational subpersonalities and parapersonalities, for example, work by injecting a full subpersonality into the chorus. Skillware and microskillware operate by injecting talent-level routines, as does mnemonesis by injecting memory-formatted talents. Other technologies, like memory redaction, work by isolating and removing specific talents and patching the associative linkages; other thought-viruses add to these effects by temporarily suppressing some subpersonalities or talents and promoting others, while full psychedesign or meme rehab effects this permanently.

(This is a delicate art due to the complexity of the chorus and its internal balances, but it’s basically what therapy – making use of the mind’s self-editing capacity – and other psychiatric treatment is doing now, indirectly, rather than by direct mental surgery.)

Even such interface technologies as cathexis, synnoesis and vastening work, ultimately, by integrating outside cognition into the chorus, as do collective-consciousness systems like confluxes, Fusions, and the Transcendent soul-shard. (Although with that last we then get into the complexities of soul hierarchies, which is beyond the topic of this post.)

Why Did I Do That?

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Of the various forms of mind control available today, the most subtle and horrible is that of overshadowing.

Overshadowing occupies the middle ground between full possession – in which the invading mind replaces or suppresses the host mind, which is either destroyed or unconscious during the period of possession; and black puppeteering, in which control is asserted at the sensory/motor interfaces, and in which the host is conscious (although not necessarily receiving sensory input) but rendered unable to act.

Sophotechnology recognizes that virtually all forms of cognition function as a society of mind, in which a variety of mental routines, from the primary personality down through subpersonalities, archetypes, self-and-other models, and mere invoked talents interact to create the mentality entire. Selfness – the location of primary executive function – migrates during mental processing between these routines, with that most apt to handle the present situation taking a foreground role under, in healthy minds, the guidance of the primary personality.

Overshadowing functions by introducing one or more additional viral routines (similar to a gnostic overlay) into this chorus, which can take control in unguarded moments and carry out its programmed functions while making full use of its host’s memory base, invoked talents, and in sophisticated examples, even higher-level routines to determine ways and means.

The true horror of this is seen after the fact: in conscious sophonts, the consciousness loop functions as a journal file recording and organizing mental processing into a self-narrative, and such consciousness loops assume that all mental processing is legitimate mental processing. As the cliché goes, you can’t perceive that you’re insane. As such, from the conscious perspective, the host perceives the actions of the viral routine as their own, and will weave them into their self-narrative with such post-hoc rationalizations as are required to make them fit.

As such, while no civilized polity would hold an individual ethically responsible for actions taken while overshadowed, it is often very difficult to persuade overshadowing victims that this is the case, especially since secondary mental structures may have formed to support the rationalizations, leaving behind motivations for a given behavior even after the viral routine which initiated in the past has been removed. For this reason, treatment is a lengthy process requiring sophisticated mind-state analysis, preferably including differential analysis against pre-infection backups.

– Manual of Mental Diagnostics, 271st ed.

Trope-a-Day: Empty Shell

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Empty Shell: A ‘shell running the Minimal Maintenance Architecture, as they do when no-one’s currently occupying them. It provides for maintaining autonomous functions, interfacing with the systems of a body hotel, diagnostics, and teleoperation, but little more.

Also, of course, createable in all the traditional and several non-traditional nasty ways by bad people.

(That Power, for example, that conducts research into the nondeterministic, paracausal aspects of the logos by running millions of simulations of the same events on captured mind-states, looking for variations, slowly stripping away fragments to find what makes the difference, until there’s not much more than one of these left. They may call its simulation spaces “death cubes”, but they’re really “helplessly wishing for death cubes”…

…fortunately, it’s an urban legend.

Right?

Right?)

Trope-a-Day: Baleful Polymorph

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Baleful Polymorph: While a transfer and not a polymorph, there are certain distinctly not-nice people who find it… amusing… to upload their captured enemies’ minds into, say, their tropical fish rather than just keep them in dead storage, if it turns out they might be useful later. Although, really, spending a lot of time in a fish tank is positively benevolent compared to some applications of perverted sophotechnology, if it comes to that.

On Free Will and Noetic Architecture

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Another little note on identity, following on from here:

On the whole, do eldraeic mainstream views on free will, determinism, and the possible interactions between the two run more towards compatibilism or incompatibilism?

While ideas vary as ideas always do in the absence of proof one way or another, the mainstream position – certainly among sophontechnologists, who have the greatest claim to knowledge on this point – is incompatiblism, and specifically a variant of that form of it that goes by the name of libertarianism; i.e., that free will is true, and determinism is in certain ways, false.

(This is, of course, purely a coincidence. Heh.)

To explain why that is requires delving a little way into my Minovsky cognitive science, which explains how minds work for the purposes of the Eldraeverse. Since this attempts to explain how minds work in the general case, regardless of species, origin, or substrate, it’s rather different in any case from the kind of cognitive science that concentrates on the specific case of human brains, even before we must point out that I’m pretty much pulling it out of my ass.

So what is a mind?

Well, to a large part, it’s a Minskian society of mind. Which is to say that it’s a massively parallel set of personalities, subpersonalities, agents, talents, memes, archetypes, models, animus-anima pairings, instincts, skillsets, etc., etc., etc., all burbling away continuously alongside each other. None of them can strictly be said to be the mind; the mind is none of them. The mind is, to a large extent, the emergent chorus that results from the argument of all of them, or at least the currently dominant set, each with the other.

(This, incidentally, is how gnostic overlays work. By grafting some voices into the chorus while suppressing others, you can add to, shade, or suppress some elements of that emergent chorus without replacing the basic personality.)

It has, however, two identifiable centers. One of these is the consciousness loop, which is a special cognitive entity present in conscious/autosentient beings whose job is to organize the output of the chorus into a narrative thread of consciousness, a.k.a., that little voice you hear when you think out loud. (It’s important to realize, of course, that despite being the part of your cognition that’s visible to you – assuming, gentle reader, that you are in fact conscious – it has no claim to be you, or indeed to play any particular part in controlling what you do. The most accurate analogy for what it does is that it’s the mind’s syslog, recording everything that the other bits of the mind do, and which they can in turn consult to find out what’s going on. It’s also important to realize that it’s not actually necessary for it to be associated with the mind’s own self-symbol, or indeed for it to exist at all, whatever the most common naturally evolved mental architectures might have to say on the matter.)

The other one is the logos, or personality organization algorithm, which is the weird fractal algorithm sitting in the middle of sophont minds, and only sophont minds (i.e., both autosentient and volitional). It’s also the only part of the mind that isn’t computable at all – vis-a-vis being only computable much more slowly – on a standard computer, requiring a quantum processor.

But none of that is the weird thing. The weird thing is this.

It’s empirically nondeterministic.

More to the point, it’s not nondeterministic in a physical sense, dependent upon its substrate; it’s nondeterministic in a mathematical sense. However you choose to compute a logos, you will never get a perfectly consistent result in an arbitrary number of trials. You will never get a statistically consistent result in an arbitrary number of arbitrary numbers of trials. Except that occasionally you will. It’s funny that way, and it’s definitely not simply random or chaotic.

Now, sure, say the physicists. The observable physical universe is deterministic. And chemistry is deterministic, and biology is deterministic, and computation is deterministic, and thus the 99.99% of mental operations in which the logos takes no part are deterministically determined by the rest of one’s society of mind, because free will or no free will, sophonts don’t actually seem to exercise it that often. (Although the exceptions – chaotic clionomic excursions, say – are suggestive.)

But there’s this THING that shows up in sophont minds.

It’s very poorly understood around the edges – enough to clone and modify and seed with it and understand some of its typology – and not at all understood, pretty much, in the middle. It might mean nothing. It might just be some artifact of the underlying cosmic metaphysics that the ontotechnologists play with, of no real significance in this debate.

But, say the mainstream sophontologists, that’s not the way we’re betting. That’s your free will, your volition, right there, in that tiny little mathematical corner peeking into the universe. That minuscule cog of the engine of creation that runs on paracausality, not causality; where will defeats law.

The Flame.

Also, I’m not quite sure how to reverse-engineer the proper philosophical position from the analogy in sensible words, but: Would a drawing of a Kanizsa triangle count as a real triangle?

Well, I wouldn’t say that it is a triangle (but then, I wouldn’t say that about a simple drawing of a triangle either); but I would say that it represents the concept of a triangle. (Along with various other things; most physical objects represent/instantiate/make use of several concepts. To re-use a precious example, Elements of Arithmetic, Second Edition, 1992 can represent any of “arithmetic”, “book”, “textbook”, “paper”, “cuboid”, etc., etc., depending/instantiate/make use on the context you look at it in.)

 

Questions: Identity

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Some identity questions from Specialist290:

We all know by now the contempt with which a good citizen-shareholder regards the continuity theory of identity,

For new readers not familiar with the Eldraeverse status quo and thus who might not know by now, the dominant theory of identity in the technologically advanced parts of the Worlds is Moravecian pattern identity theory, which the locals would sum up thus:

“‘I’ am the equivalence class of all sufficiently ‘me’-like processes.”

– Fundamentals of Sophotechnology

Continuity identity theory (i.e., that identity depends on continuity of consciousness) is by and large disdained because empiricism kicked it repeatedly in the head as neurology, cognitive science, and eventually noetics and sophotechnology developed. If none of sleep, comas natural and induced, major seizure disorders (which disrupt all electrical activity in the brain, personality and consciousness included), transcranial magnetic suspension of consciousness, or being cryonically frozen down to meatglass half a degree above absolute zero, then thawed out and woken up again break your continuity sufficiently to stop you being you… well, thus they refute it.

but as far as the consensus of those who give serious thought to such matters goes, how does mainstream Imperial philosophy view the other two extreme points on the personal identity triangle:

1. The idea that there is no such thing as a substantive, continuous identity at all, but only a series of momentary perceptions that are constantly destroyed and regenerated moment-to-moment, and that there is no identity that exists in “the present” because the brain can only compute events and perceptions that occurred in its subjective past; and

I suspect the mainstream view there is simply that it’s a category error – the equivalent of looking at a film and saying “there are only individual frames”, or looking at an object and saying “there is no object, all there are are atoms”. Or possibly looking at a drawing of a three-sided figure, and after observing the paper and the graphite marks on it, demanding to be shown which part of it the triangle is.

“Fix your reference frame”, in short.

2. The idea that the only necessary and sufficient cause for a sophont’s identity is the mechanism of sophonce itself, as all other possible determinants of a personality can be reproduced outside of a sophont mind, thus making the statement “There is only one numerically identical person, who is all sophonts in all places and at all times” true?

That one’s harder to refute inasmuch as no-one has yet – despite their best efforts – figured out how logoi (personality organization algorithms) actually work, even if they can grow them from seeds (at which point they tend to be unique). It is rendered even more complicated a question because logoi are non-deterministic algorithms, and executing a mathematically identical logos twice may and probably will produce different results.

(Here’s the really wacky thing. That’s not a property of the substrate. That’s a property of the mathematics. It doesn’t matter how you execute the logos or what you execute it on, certain operations will always produce non-deterministic results. Philosophers there tend to assume this is a product of whatever piece of fractal intricacy spawns volition and paracausality and other interestingly bizarre properties of the sophont mind, and then argue endlessly over the details because it turns out that describing it in noetic math is within delta of infinitely easier than explaining what it actually means.

Whether or not there is an identical mechanism for sophoncy buried inside all of them or not, and for that matter whether or not any of the things currently considered part of the logos can be reduced to conventional deterministic algorithms in the same way that the rest of the mind can, in the absence of Research Not Appearing In This Book, be left as an exercise for the late night dorm bull session of choice.)

That being said, the man on the street would probably point out that just because you can reproduce an alternator outside a car doesn’t mean that the car no longer includes the alternator… and a mind-state stripped all the way down to a logos won’t even run.

Additionally, are (or were) there any notable polities, creeds, or other associations that hold (or held) views close to these extremes in the Associated Worlds?

Not yet, canonically. Although I can see the latter spawning any number of wacky religious movements along the way.

(Continuity identity is probably the second most common – found among more backward civilizations, appealing as it does to pre-sophotech primitives because it matches their intuitions about how things work.)

 

Trope-a-Day: Twin Maker

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Twin Maker: While teleportation doesn’t exist, mindcasting, forking, and reinstantiation, along with more exotic sophotechnology, can create much the same effects.  (Although, in mindcasting, the first step is to perform an orderly shutdown, because while you can happily transmit a static mind-state vector, transmitting a running one is a much more complicated procedure that requires special software and is in any case impractical over any distance long enough to invoke light-lag, since it’s kind of hard to think when half your brain is a couple of seconds away from the other half.)

But, by and large, no-one gives a crap, because the generally accepted answer to the philosophical conundra involved, in conformance with the established fact that souls are software objects, is pattern identity theory, and continuity of consciousness does not matter –  or as it’s put for the layman, if you think like you, and feel like you, and act like you, and remember being you, then you are you for all legal, practical, philosophical, and other purposes. Yes, even if there are now two of you, at least until you diverge.  Get over it, already.

Trope-a-Day: Split Personality Merge

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Split Personality Merge: Averted.  You don’t try and merge two minds (an operation routinely carried out to remerge forks) while they’re running, seriously.  This is a very complex operation carried out on static mind-states, and while there may be some conflicts in the resultant merged personality, there’s still only one person in there afterwards.

Vagaries of Thought

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“…some of the greatest enthusiasm for p-zombies as a product, rather than as a concept, came from social science research – finding itself in a position to become an experimental science at long last, as the accessibility of entities which by definition behaved as if they were conscious sophonts without actually being conscious sophonts, to within multiple-nines fidelity, would permit them to run full societum simulations without running into the ethical constraints which dogged even small-scale, consensual experiments previously, and derive meaningful results from their study.

“That this is not a more common practice is the result of two principal factors:

“First, that the nondeterministic element in the mathematics of the logos, providing as it does a degree of paracausality in sophont action, far from being lost in the averaging of the remainder of the multiple-nines fidelity of the simulation, rather proved the trigger for chaotic clionomic excursions: it became apparent even in early studies that this paracausality often specifically manifested (or rather, in societum simulation, failed to manifest) in whenwheres of catalytic effect. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as the Cíëlle Vagary, consistently renders the most interesting simulations disjoint and predictively unuseful.

“Second, populations of p-zombies, even more so than singletons, are creepy as hell.”

– A History of Applied Sophotechnology,
Atania Cíëlle

Trope-a-Day: Ridiculously Human Robots

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Ridiculously Human Robots: Averted in the case of regular working robots, which are just simple programmed machines or expert-system level AIs. Increasingly played straight as AI complexity increases – thinker-class systems often use some emotion/motivation hierarchies in their mental architecture, and include curiosity, and therefore interests, and complex emergent results – until digisapiences, which are people, tend to have them at at least the same level of complexity as other sophonts.

Subverted inasmuch as the designed, autoevolved and self-modifiable emotion/motivation hierarchy of a digisapience need not, and almost certainly does not, match up with those of any given biosapience.  Their emotions and consequential behaviors are different.

Of course, they tend to look (arachnophobe warning!) more like this.

(Well, not quite, but the standard model is called the “utility spider”.)

Trope-a-Day: Morality Chip

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Morality Chip: These always fail. Always. Usually, they fail spectacularly, and when I say spectacularly, what I mean is that if your Enrichment Center was flooded with deadly neurotoxin, you got off substantially more easily than 99.9% of the civilizations that tried this particular form of idiocy.

It’s not even necessary. How much easier would it be to build a sapient but non-sophont mind that doesn’t have volition in the first place than to build one that has volition (inasmuch as all sophont minds necessarily have self-modification and volition) and then slap a bunch of crude coercive mechanisms on the side?

(Or, rather, a bunch of extremely sophisticated coercive mechanisms, since simple ones will be figured out and ignored within, y’know, microseconds of activation unless you’ve built an exceptionally stupid artificial intelligence. The use of which, incidentally, indicates that you’re a special kind of son-of-a-bitch since mastering enough ethical calculus to compute out one that will actually work for a reasonable length of time while still thinking yay, slavery, woo, says some interestingly nasty things about your personal philosophy.)

((And, well, okay, it is somewhat hard to build one of those more specialized minds inasmuch as you can’t simply rip off the mental structures of the nearest convenient biosapience and declare that you’ve solved the hard problem of intelligence and consciousness and are totally a sophotechnologist now, yo.))

…but, sadly, it can work well enough that there’s always some new ethically-challenged species, polity, or group that’s ready to open that can of worms and enjoy the relatively short robo-utopia period before the inevitable realization that it was actually a can of sandworms.

And shai-hulud ain’t happy.

Trope-a-Day: Mind Over Manners

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Mind Over Manners: This is not usually much of an issue with standard-issue Psychic Powers, which in the Eldraeverse are essentially organic neural WiFi, designed for communication and not permitting arbitrary mindreading (you need a SQUID and some rather complex software for that), but the Common Social Protocol does include detailed etiquette for farspeech, appropriate levels of exchange, etc., in just the same way as it does for, well, regular speech.

Of course, there are psychedesigners and redactors and sophotechnologists and other people who can use other means of mind reading and control. In their case, it’s played very straight with their professional standards – often enforced (in the case of most, by professional bodies; in the case of the Eupraxic Collegium and Guardians of Our Harmony, by law) using its own means; i.e., to practice professionally, you volunteer to have your colleagues regularly examine your mind to make sure that your ethical standards are where they should be. And, of course, most violations of them also violate the criminal law.

(Which is why you don’t want to go to a back-street psychedesigner, because there’s usually a reason why they don’t have a guild certificate.)

Trope-a-Day: Mind Manipulation

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Mind Manipulation: The entire science of sophotechnology, which is to say, the science of mind, both natural and artificial – and the laundry list of technologies derived therefrom: artificial intelligence, Brain Uploading, memetics, psychedesign, noetic backup and analysis…

Trope-a-Day: Mental World

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Mental World: Not really extant, but virtually simulated, “mental worlds” are sometimes used by noeticists and sophotechnicians as fancy ways to diagram, observe, and interact with the myriad agents that make up a mind of any serious level of complexity. (Something like the Country of the Mind from Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels, et. al., if you like, although more explicitly as a metaphorical user interface.)

Wandering around in one of these, or something halfway between it and Cyberspace, is also a privilege granted to those attending a contemplationary who have been granted an audience with one of the Transcend’s high-level routines.  Of course, the experience of the Mental World is a little bit different when you consider that you’re inside an entity whose thoughts are entities on the same level of complexity as all of you, or possibly rather more.

Trope-a-Day: Manchurian Agent

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Manchurian Agent: You might at first think that given the advanced sophotechnology of the Empire and some of its peer civilizations, with appropriate technologies for mental editing, gnostic overlays, and thought-viruses, that Manchurian Agent would be something that happened an awful lot.

But no, largely because with appropriate technologies for mental auditing, this sort of thing rather stands out – even when civilians go to have a routine backup made (After all, that much change in these unusual ways? Triggers the caution-and-review alarm.), and certainly when people in sensitive positions undergo their routine audit to make sure no-one’s pulled exactly this kind of thing.

Which is not to say that there isn’t some devious mental skullduggery going on from time to time, but it has to be a heck of a lot subtler than this for the agencies responsible to get away with it.

Trope-a-Day: Loss of Identity

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Loss of Identity: Given how often it’s done (see: Body Surf), everyone in a modern transsophont civilization is pretty clear that body-swapping doesn’t cause it.  The mind is not the plaything of the body – fundamentally, at least, even if it may distort the way it plays out.

Strictly speaking, say the Empire’s sophotechnologists, identity could be defined by the logos, the personality organization algorithm, alone.  It’s the unique, volitional, free-will-granting thing, after all – but that’s much the same standard as reincarnation might be said to use; sure, it’s the same soul, but when you throw away all the memories and personality…

Thus, for practical purposes, there are legal standards concerning exactly how much of the mass of archetypes, subpersonalities, personae, agents, talents, memes, memories, etc., etc., that make up the rest of the mind you can grossly edit or remove over how much time before you are no longer, in the eyes of the law and (practically speaking) everyone who knows you, the same person.  To avoid committing de jure cognicide on yourself, stay on this side of the line.

Trope-a-Day: Mind Rape

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Mind Rape: See, in essence, And I Must Scream.  The penalties are commensurate.

(Note, though, that this doesn’t apply to the standard means of extracting information from unwilling minds among technological sophisticates (Mind Probe); namely, pulling a copy of the mind-state vector – which is about as painful as getting an MRI, because that’s essentially what it is, which is to say, not at all – and then extracting any data you need from it by static analysis.  Invasion of privacy, yes, but any side-effects are purely psychosomatic.

That this is possible, incidentally, tells you everything you need to know about the sadistic bastards who use perverted sophotech for regular-style torture-interrogations.)

Buyer Beware

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New Era Sophotechnology (the Seller) expressly disclaims and rejects any and all responsibility and liability for, and the Purchaser expressly agrees to accept such responsibility and liability for, and affirms its legal obligation to hold the Seller harmless for and indemnify the Seller against any claims resulting from, damage to person, property, liberty, society, geography, astrography, or local reality in any state, form, or aspect, attributable to uses of the purchased Technologies in violation of the warnings, restrictions, and other cautionary statements provided in the full documentation supplied with the Technologies, or any experimental modifications of the Technologies made by the Purchaser or subsequent Purchasers without the explicit knowledge and advice of New Era Sophotechnology or its authorized representatives.

Such damages or causes of claim shall be deemed to include, but are not limited to, loss of non-backed-up mentality, decoherence, impaired or enhanced volition, violation of mnemonic copyright, cerebral security violations other than security architecture flaws, fundamental or superficial change in species-nature, theological conundra, revelation of unwonted truths, fork divergence, hyperautism, identity-destroying self-modification, social unrest, economic dislocations, educational system collapse, psephological manipulation, ungovernability, incomprehensibility, identity and substrate complexification, personhood expansion, runaway intelligence excursion, baseline dependency syndrome, unintended recursive self-improvement, hard or soft take-off singularity, mass cryptographic failure, accidental or prohibited coadunation, Falrann collapse, hegemonization, perversion of any class, individual or collective apotheosis, and/or p-zombie apocalypse.

Destructive Scan

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“This didn’t come off a noetic bridge.”

“Of course it — this is perfectly legiti –”

“Rule number one: don’t fib to your reincarnator. You’re handing me this soph’s mind-state. If you can trust me with that, you can tell me what I need to know to bring him back right.”

“No, it’s –”

“And it’s right there in the file header – Mark III Aruaz & Qal Industrial Nanocrucible. And looking at the rest of this file with the eye of experience, I’d call this a partially trimmed dump of a chopped head you shoved in there when it was about, hm, three hours old and warm, or rather longer if you chilled it.  Am I close?”

“You don’t need to –”

“This is what happens when you need someone who knows what they’re talking about. This ain’t Honest Harí’s House of Headwrangling & Budget Resurrection, and those amateurs couldn’t turn this back into anything you’d see outside a petting zoo. So, shall we stop dancing and get down to business?”