The Worm That Walks: There are a number of cybershells which are made up of microbot or even nanobot foglets, all of which would qualify, here. So, too, would some made up of somewhat larger modular components. (Also embatil, of course, who are a collegiate intelligence made up of multiple serpent-like components, which are independent when they’re young. Mature embatil, by contrast, grow together, so they look like multiply braided eels.)
Month: March 2016
More Questions: Security, Reputation Economy, Pattern Identity
Clearing the backlog a little again…
On “Securing Security“:
Specialist290: ‘I’m guessing, though, that in their own courts of law, the Imperials would view the refusal to voluntarily provide access to such a device as an aggravating circumstance in itself?’
Tony Harris: ‘If I’m reading Alastair’s posts right, Imperial society considers ones “stuff,” including one’s personal data, to be as much a part of one’s person as their own limbs.
The right to be to “secure in one’s own person and papers” (including data) is taken VASTLY more seriously in the Empire than anywhere on this planet.’
The latter, in a word.
Specifically, you retain that right unless they can actually indict you for something. A Curial court addressing a criminal matter can subpoena your data after arraignment, but then, it can also subpoena the contents of your brain, so that’s a relatively minor consideration. But you have to be indicted first on the basis of an actual case to answer – law enforcement does not get to go on fishing expeditions through your person, papers, and personalty in the course of an investigation if they can’t muster up the necessary burden of proof to indict you.
But even post-indictment or post-conviction: ordering third parties to create circumvention tools, as uncompensated takings of labor, even? That would violate their contractual obligations? That would weaken everyone‘s security and thereby punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty? No, no, no, a thousand times, NO.
(Legally speaking, though, the investigators can ask you for access to data, etc., and you can refuse to permit it. The law takes into account that people may have many reasons not to provide such access, and enjoins the courts that they may not consider such evidence, even circumstantial evidence, in favor of guilt, and the courts do so.
…that said, if it turns out later that the reason you refused to provide such access was to cover up someone else’s criminal act, then that’s sufficient to have just got yourself charged with misprision of felony, which in Imperial praxis covers the responsibility of everyone to report any crimes of which they are aware. But that’s a somewhat different issue.)
Also from Specialist290:
Given that the eldrae place immense importance on both everything having a quantifiable exchange value and every sophont having a strong reputation, have there been any groups that have tried to combine the two into a single mechanism (a la Cory Doctorow’s “whuffie”)?
A few undoubtedly have, but so far no-one’s solved the fundamental problem that reputational capital ain’t quite like financial capital: when you spend it, you still have it, or ought to, because obtaining something in exchange for niceness doesn’t make you a worse person while obtaining something in exchange for money does make you poorer. Since the economy isn’t actually post-scarcity, that so far being impossible, this makes those attempts prone to distressing outbreaks of volatility and “reputation runs”. Leaving aside the problem that reputation in different areas isn’t really comparable and may be assessed differently by different people when computing metascores, hence the proliferation of rep-nets and meta-rep-nets with different emphases.
The two are highly intertwingled, of course, with discounts and freebies and exclusive access, etc., offered to people with high appropriate rep , and even the odd case of the opposite (say, the Ephemeral Contract rep-net, used to penalize bad customers as well as bad customer service), but there’s not yet a pure reputation economy out of the experimental phase.
Less of a question and more just some thoughts on a comment, from Zarpaulus:
Your consciousness is only a small part of what makes you, you. How many of your decisions can you fully explain? How many actions do you perform automatically?
When you sleep your consciousness is on minimal power at many points but your subconscious is working the whole time. It’s like putting a computer on “sleep mode”, it’s still running, just with as little power as possible. Even comatose your brain is still functioning.
Maybe it might be more appropriate to say that consciousness isn’t an app, it’s the gestalt of everything your body is doing. There’s no separation of Mind and Body.
Frankly, the idea of “pattern continuity” stinks of Cartesian Dualism. And I thought Descartes’ philosophy sounded like “I can’t accept that the world would be so cruel otherwise, therefore God exists.”
I’m going to come right out and say it: The problem I have with dualism is pretty much matched by the problem I have with what I might call anti-dualism, except that alliteration is fun, so I’m going to call dualism-denial.
I mean, sure, there’s no Cartesian dualism. We’ve refuted that. There is no magical mindstuff, no nonphysical soul plugged into the pineal gland, none of that. The brain is not an antenna sticking into the cognitive realm. So far so good.
The problem is when people then assume that refutes all kinds of dualism, like property dualism or what I would call metalevel dualism, or informational dualism.
Which is to say: there is such a thing as a triangle, not just graphite marks on paper. The Pythagorean Theorem exists in a sense distinct from the molecular vibrations caused by someone expressing it. There are definable things called Microsoft Windows, or Word 2016, or ThatAwesomeNovel.docx that are distinguishable from the pattern of magnetic domains storing them. Likewise, there is a thing called a mind which is distinguishable from three pounds of neuron soup, even though – like all the others – it is expressed in the structure of the neuron soup. (Or of the magnetic domains, or of molecular vibrations, or of graphite marks.)
Specifically, it’s the abstract information encoded in them. Which can’t exist without a substrate, certainly, acknowledging physicalism this far, but is no more identical to that substrate than the concept of arithmetic is identical to a copy of Elements of Arithmetic, Second Edition, 1992.
tl;dr Minds are concepts, information entities. I am my mind, a complex algorithm giving detailed instructions how to me. My brain is the physical instantiation/substrate of that algorithm. The rest of me is that brain’s vehicle, manipulators, and support system.
And pattern identity is no more than saying – well, if you image the hard drive of a computer, extracting all the encoded information, and copy that image onto new hardware (or even into a virtual machine) and then boot it up, and it behaves in exactly the same way and has the same stored data and is in all relevant ways indistinguishable from the original, then in every fundamental sense, it’s the same computer, innit?
Likewise, all copies of the same mind-algorithm are the same mind, ergo the same person. Selah.
(As for the consciousness argument: I’ve seen that a lot, mostly from people claiming that the studies showing that we initiate actions before our narrative thread of consciousness becomes aware of it somehow refutes free will. Which has always struck me as obvious nonsense, unless we’re assuming that the mind constitutes only those bits of it we can look at (from an internal point of view).
…which is to say, my spreadsheet solves mathematical problems. It isn’t not solving problems simply because it only shows me the final results. Likewise my mind – which is to say, I – am not not exercising volition simply because I only output the final result to the narrative-thread-of-consciousness display device.
It’s only a problem if you define “the mind” as “the conscious, self-reflective self and that alone“, but all that proves is that you can get nonsensical results if you pick a suitably silly definition to start with – which is why, to draw this lengthy digression back on topic, is why they reject continuity identity theory. Placing special emphasis on that one subroutine, the narrative thread of consciousness, is mistaking a part for the whole.)
Mind Plagues
cultural contamination (n.): The passage of memes and their sociotypes between cultures, often with associated unrest, due to contact between them.
Attitudes to cultural contamination vary widely across known space. The extreme poles of this are the Voniensa Republic, whose policy is to avoid cultural contamination to the greatest extent possible, to avoid “interfering with the natural development of indigenous cultures”; and the Empire, which considers that any worthwhile, mature culture ought to be robust enough to cope with a few foreign ideas. (And, indeed, where “primitives” and “barbarians” are concerned, often goes out of its way to cause as much cultural contamination as it possibly can.)
It is a truism of memetics that cultural contamination is always bilateral; it is fundamentally impossible to avoid two-way communication of ideas in the course of social contact, and as such each culture involved in contact will always be contaminated by each other culture. Attitudes to this also vary widely, in this case along tripolar lines. These poles are represented by again, the Empire, which not only considers its own culture robust enough to handle foreign ideas, but actively mines cultures it meets for any good ideas it might not have had itself yet; the Theomachy of Galia, whose obsession with theological and ideological purity causes them to avoid foreign ideas at all costs; and the Annik Sodality, which while enjoying foreign ideas from afar, eschews assimilating or any of them lest they offend the imitated or their own sense of disentitlement.
Finally, since this book is one marketed to the cosmopolitan or would-be cosmopolitan Worlds’ traveller, you too, gentle reader, are a vector of cultural contamination.
Try not to let it bother you.
– A Star Traveller’s Dictionary
Trope-a-Day: World Building
World Building: You’ve been reading this blog, right?
Questions: Lost Property and Intestacy
A couple of questions here from Specialist290, which I happen to already have the answer to, so let’s knock those off straight away:
A pair of questions whose answers might overlap just a bit:
1. How does the Imperial law handle cases of lost, mislaid, and abandoned property?
Down in the Imperial Service, strictly speaking within the Central Office of Records and Archives rather than any of the Ministries, is the Office of Title and Estate. Their job, as their name implies, is the proper recording of property titles and other property rights, which drops this firmly and inconveniently into their bailiwick.
(I take a moment here to note that you don’t need a title on file for personalty which you hold all the property rights over, which is the normal case, or where the ones you don’t are any sort of standard-form financial contract – but if you’re getting fancy, it saves time and trouble later to write these things down and send in a copy before anything ends up in dispute.)
Dealing with property of unclear title, the above three cases, is the job of a small and irked sub-bureau of theirs. Not initially: initially, law and custom gives the finder of such property a reasonable amount of time to return it to the owner themselves or to let the owner pick it up from them, because that saves everyone time and trouble. In the modern era, it’s especially trivial, because everything knows who it belongs to and will tell you, if it hasn’t already called them itself and asked to be collected.
If that doesn’t work, they turn it in to said small sub-bureau, or more accurately the staffer representing it ad-hoc, at the lost property desk at the local Imperial Services office. They can engage in more thorough searches of their records and other generalized detective work to figure out exactly who it belonged to and get it back to them.
(And, in the case of intentionally abandoned property, indict them for “trespass by chattel”.)
Ultimately, if it proves impossible to determine who the rightful owner is, it ultimately escheats, and then becomes available for homesteading by anyone who cares to pick it up at the warehouse, as other res nullia.
2. How does Imperial law treat intestate estates? (Part of me thinks that this is probably more of a historical footnote in this day and age, but I’d imagine there might still be that occasional one-in-umptillion case where someone dies without a will just before they remember that they’re overdue to renew their reinstantiation insurance…)
It’s also the job of the Office of Title and Estate, who process all the transfers of title during administration of the estate with some rubber-stamping help from the local Court of the District or, if it’s big enough, the Court of Claims.
In the event of intestacy when they don’t have a will to follow, there are sets of default rules. (This was the subject of controversy very briefly during the Great Conclave, when the question was asked as to exactly what right they had to distribute someone’s property in ways that they might not have approved of, shortly thereafter answered by pointing out that if they had something specific in mind they should have bloody well told someone, and if they were inconsiderate enough to die without filing the proper paperwork they can’t really complain when someone has to pick up their mess for ’em.)
The original set of rules for the intestate starts out with the general principle that for participants in marriage contracts, all non-entailed or otherwise held-in-manners-with-their-own-rules property becomes property of the marital coadunation. After that, for eldrae, the search first skips down the generations, first to children (who are expected to reach an equitable settlement between themselves, or else the court and Office will make a less preferable one for them), then to siblings if there are no children (likewise), then back to parents (if there are neither). If there are none of those, then it becomes the trust of the head of your lineage and/or the genarch of your House to resolve the issue and decide where it goes, including potentially into the familial properties.
If you are the genarch, die intestate, and the process gets this far because you have no direct heirs, it goes to the next genarch, once the appropriate processes find one. If there’s no-one of the blood who can be the next genarch, then technically it would escheat, but the process has never actually got this far ever. I don’t think any genarch has ever either died intestate or lacked heirs, in fact, so.
There are alternate sets of rules, the Empire being polyspecific, for species with very different traditions and biologies, but they generally run along similar lines.
Trope-a-Day: The White Prince
The White Prince/Sheltered Aristocrat: See also Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense for the purely financial aspects of this (post-scarcity vs. poverty), but this also applies across the Associated Worlds and their Decade Dissonance, and in general… well, let’s just say that the most developed civilizations are more or less Utopias, and Utopians have, shall we say, problems in appreciating the problems of non-Utopians. Which we might as well go ahead and define as people for whom pain is not transient and for whom misery and suffering are not quaintly antiquated abstract concepts.
(ObQuoteStuckInMyHeadWhileWritingThis: “Oh, I’m in pain! I think this is what pain feels like!”)
…of course, in their case, the naiveté where the social issues of “precivilized history” is concerned is matched with appalling competence in technical issues, with the predictable consequences appropriate to that.
The Things Are Also People
First in this initial set, a terribly useful phrase in first contact situations or when wandering around an unfamiliar starport, Floating Market, or lost sophont office, lest you commit a dreadful solecism and confuse a robot, a piece of luggage, a pet, vehicle, furniture, or potted plant for a fellow traveler of an unfamiliar species. Or even worse, the other way around.
Xamelcétar an-val ke mekt anan darávar?
IMPERATIVE + forgive + PRED. / OBJECT CASE + I / LOOSE-LINK SEPARATOR / is it the case that / you (you alone) / sophont + PRED.
“Excuse me, but are you sophont?”
…well worth memorizing for the avoidance of all sorts of awkward situations.
– p. 2, Trade Eldraeic for Beginners
Trope-a-Day: Which Me?
Which Me?: Averted. Since forking is common, Eldraeic has long since adopted proper naming and pronoun conventions to distinguish I-prime from me-secundus and me-tertius, and even me-tertius-beta.