On The Relationship Between Transcend and Transcendi

Kicking this one uphill from a comment to an actual post, since it may clarify matters for any other readers, too, with questions in this area:

Okay. Let me try this again.

All minds, as defined in the ‘verse, are Minskian societies of mind, masses of independently running agents on a shared substrate, from which consciousness, volition, and all other mental properties emerge. (“The Country of the Mind” in Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels would be a good symbolic representation.)

This, for example, is how technologies like the gnostic overlay work; by patching some new voices into the chorus.

The Transcendent soul-shard (hence its technical name, logos bridge) serves as a bridge between two societies of mind, carrying messages back and forth, allowing both the participation of the constitutional’s agents in the Transcend’s mentality and the participation of some of the Transcend’s agents in the constitutional’s. This blurs the strict lines of identity, arguably, but it’s not a complete subsumption of identity such as occurs on joining a Fusion; rather, every time a new constitutional Transcends, both they and It become somewhat different people in various ways, wedded together most intimately, but they don’t achieve identity of identity.

(Incidentally, as I think I mentioned in a 2012 piece, the main reason the Transcend keeps an economy and a governance around, is that they work. Sure, technically, you could replace market coordination with coordination mediated through coadjutors and Transcendent oversouls, but because of that mathematical theorem that demonstrates that even a hypothetical Omniscient Calculator could only at best equal the performance of a free market, not beat it, you’d have nothing to gain except wasted cycles and the lack of a convenient interface to the rest of the universe. Similar logic applies to various other applications.

Basically, you don’t send an oversoul to do a simpler instrumentality’s job.)

One thought on “On The Relationship Between Transcend and Transcendi

  1. I’m still not entirely convinced that you can wed two minds together like that without either fundamentally distorting one’s self-concept or falling afoul of the principal-agent problem — since, presumably, the Transcend as a whole has access to “private” information that other constitutionals don’t, and can make its decisions for “what is good for ‘you'” based on information that you-as-you wouldn’t necessarily have access to (including, say, the private thoughts and goals of other constitutionals).

    And since the subject’s already been broached: My question about the economy wasn’t meant to suggest that a centralized system would be preferable to a free market — far from it! — but rather as something along these lines: In an environment where a multitudinous measure of costs, benefits, and personal utilities can be calculated and shared relatively cheaply, does it make sense to still try to squash all these into a single “price-value” (that may not necessarily reflect a uniform cost even when compared with goods that trade at the same price) for an exchange intermediary? Is there a possibility that a central currency itself (and the attendant financial management institutions that go with it) is itself the “centralizing force” holding the market back when you could feasibly make an exchange based solely on point-to-point mutual utility calculations?

    Or, stated another way: What if being held back by money is what’s keeping a free market from being even freer?

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