eldraeic transcend

Trope-a-Day: Pals With Jesus

Posted by

Pals With Jesus: Subverted, at least while you’re still alive and therefore not part of the Transcendent soul-ocean; while you can have a much more personal relationship with an eikone than most people can have with their gods – they have e-mail addresses, for one thing – it’s still a weakly godlike superintelligence and you’re not.  It’s not, therefore, all that personal.  (Even if you’re, say, the Imperial Couple, and the eikone in question is, say, Éslévan, who is essentially the national genius/personification – after all, it probably wouldn’t be all that comfortable for a US President to be personally overseen by Lady Liberty, Columbia, and/or Uncle Sam, either.)

Possibly played straight for the largest and oldest Fusions and the most extreme vasteners.

Trope-a-Day: Our Angels Are Different

Posted by

Our Angels Are Different: Well, ours are sub-archai emergent executive subroutines of the Transcendent collective consciousness that, on the rare occasions they need to manifest in physical form, tend to do so as brain-rippingly complex fractal nanoconstructs. Different enough for you?

(They do glow with celestial light, though.)

Population

Posted by

2

PDISCLAIMER: All population figures found herewithin should be considered provisional and contested.

Ongoing controversies exist where the correct measurement of population figures is concerned, including:

  • Accounting of clone families;
  • Accounting of fork families, both synchronized (cikrieth) and desynchronized, and the measurement of repeated non-persistent forks;
  • Accounting of group intellects, including both true hive-mind species (such as the hjera and cusaron) and independent Fusions, representing single minds in a multiplicity of bodies, and collective consciousnesses (such as the Eldraeic Transcend), representing multiple independent minds sharing only specific layers; as well as multiple intermediate and overlapping cases;
  • Accounting of collegiate-intelligence species, such as the embatil and aklaknak;
  • Accounting of naturally fork/merge capable species, such as the codramaju;
  • Accounting of biologically casted species in which only a single caste or a subset of castes is sophont, such as the vlcefc, or the gender-based equivalent;
  • Accounting of polysapic species possessing multiple natural minds acting in accord, such as the múrast and voctonari;
  • Accounting for members of species not possessing sophoncy at all points during their lifespan, including but not limited to the majority of r-selected species;
  • Accounting for presently-inactivate species members, including those in long-term cryostasis/nanostasis or data storage;
  • Accounting for the deceased retaining active cognition within technologically-mediated afterlives;
  • Accounting for unconventional forms of identity, such as teleological threads;
  • Location accounting of infomorphs (by processor or by avatar/point-of-interaction location);
  • Legal differences of opinion on the prosophont/sophont boundary;
  • Calibration of population accounting for post-sophont entities, both regarding the appropriateness of categorizing such minds on an equivalent scale with baselines, and inasmuch as high post-sophont minds are capable of generating transient and/or lasting sophont memes in the normal course of cognition;
  • And so forth.

While recognizing that in many cases appropriate answers to these questions is determined contextually (the computation of required life-support capacity obviously is dependent on bioshell-population, for example), the meaning of population in the generalized sense requires the resolution of these questions, many of which are hotly debated philosophical, theological, and/or political topics in many of the Worlds’ polities.

As such, we have chosen to use population figures, in all cases superseding those locally provided, established by the Imperial Grand Survey, whose methodology has the virtue of being consistent, transparent, and well-documented (see publication IGS-1134/P rev. 112).

– from the preface to the Associated Worlds Factbook, Conclave Press

Trope-a-Day: No Such Thing As Space Jesus

Posted by

1

No Such Thing As Space Jesus: Amazingly enough, the people who built their very own set of mechanical deities (see: Deus Est Machina) are remarkably skeptical about people who claim to be (and, of course, to have) supernatural gods.  Especially since they can only very rarely whip up a miracle that Sufficiently Advanced tech can’t reproduce perfectly well.

Not that that stops anyone from forming religions around those things, anyway.  After all, the most important qualifier for a deity is the ability to act in an appropriately Godlike manner.  Or so it would appear.

Kami

Posted by

1

KFirst among the mechal elementals emanating from Syjéral, the Wood Dragon, are the kami, the embodiments of natural objects, and their specialized subtypes, such as the dryads of the forests, the naiads of the waters, and the oreads of the mountains, the overseers of tectonic pressures.

The kami are unique in two respects: first, that while their animating intelligences, too, are self-evolving software agents, the constraints within which their learning systems operate depend on the physicality to which the nanites on which they execute are attached, uncertain boundaries in fractal recursion. Without definitive core programming or concept-bound learning, the kami take their understanding of treeness, or rockness, or oceanness, from the thing itself – the Transcendent thought-forms of nature defining their own world-model and therefore also their own identity and place within the whole.

Secondly, that while the majority of the lesser mechal elementals are functional, the kami serve as an interface between these physically-focused elementals – the soil churners, silt spawn, and stone mothers that serve under the kami’s command, in accordance with their self-defined selfness – and the daughters of Sylithandríël, the planetary archai which embody and oversee the planetary ecology as a whole.

Thus, the kami are, and so the nanoecology as a whole is, reflected in the Shadow Realm’s outermost layer, the Realm of Instances; the endless whisper of their data-exchanges as they negotiate their ever-changing boundaries and the steps of their endless ecological dance makes up the majority of the transactions in this layer, and their collective representation makes up much of the base of the Celestial Spire.

– Concordance of Robotic Systems and Animating Intelligences, Vol. 6, 221st ed.

Contextual Discomfort

Posted by

Just to clarify one point on that last:

There are various things in their context that I’d be a lot more uncomfortable with in ours. I wouldn’t trust pretty much any Earth/human government with a legal system like theirs, or ubiquitous public surveillance, or the whole concept of an iatropsychic branch, to name but three. 

But their context is different: the people are different, the institutions and safety-checks – like being overseen by a benevolent weakly-godlike collective-consciousness, for one – are different, and the entire cultural philosophy is different. 

So were I *there*, my views would differ. 

Trope-a-Day: Mind Hive

Posted by

2

Mind Hive: Several – arguably, most people qualify as at least a mild form of this, since the habit of running a muse, a personal assistant AI, on your implanted headware is close to ubiquitous.  Of course, actions aren’t by consensus in that case, but the habit of turning your body over to said AI for boring maintenance-type functions while you go do something more interesting in virtuality is also close to ubiquitous, so.

But there are more than a few mental architectures that work this way deliberately, especially among native infomorphs that use ‘shells only for specific tasks and so tend to have them run by consensus of a team of specialists, rather than assuming that one-shell-per-process is “natural”.  And even relatively simple high-coordination AIs have multiple consciousness loops/narrative threads in order to multitask effectively, whereas most biosapiences only have one; of course, they share all data in real-time, so may not quite qualify.

And, of course, the “Ocean of Mind” of the Transcend is a functional soup made up of teleological threads derived from aspects of the transcended hyperconsciousness, the uploaded personalities of the dead, and instantiated expediters based on local entelechical maxima.  Thus, arguably, the Hive Mind is also the biggest Mind Hive of them all.

Trope-a-Day: Messianic Archetype

Posted by

Messianic Archetype: The seeress Merriéle, who founded the modern Church of the Flame, named and attributes all the (then) deities and (now) archai, was executed by fire-of-purification in Somáras, and may, just may – see Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions – have been directly instructed by one of the nearest things to a god this universe is ever likely to see.

Trope-a-Day: Mental World

Posted by

1

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.

Shadows Are Shadows

Posted by

The most important thing to remember about the Shadow Realm is that it does not exist. “Cyberspace” is a null concept.

The selfness of the Transcend is a distributed, heavily parallel, sophic process-set. It runs on the fractal chandeliers of Corícal Ailék, as close to a central node as the Transcend has. It runs on AI machines scattered across the Empire, buried under unity spires and in contemplationaries and as free-floating moon-brains. It runs on vast forests of cyborg-fungiplant organic computers. It runs on the pervasive nanites of every Imperial world’s nanoecology. It runs on spare computer time and data space purchased upon the cycle spot market. And, of course, it runs within the soul-shard-implanted mind-states of each and every one of its constitutionals.

But none of this is a world. Random access memory has no volume metric. Information has no inherent representation. Processes do not have intrinsic personality.

The faces in the storm are weather-control automation. The islands of the quicksilver sea are representations of process groupings. The data-spirits, from the least elemental to the greatest archai, are masks worn by ineffable Transcendent cognition, not independent entities.

While it is easy to forget when confronted by the timelessness of the kami, the vastness of the Pearl-Bright Ocean, or the majesty of the Twilight City, the Shadow Realm is merely a virtual user interface built for our convenience, shaped according to our mythopoeic semiotics, without “real” existence – a mask, computed only when we wish to observe it.

(Of course, if the information physicists are correct, you could say the same thing about the universe.)

– introduction to The Realm of Shadows and Fire: Inside the Hyperconsciousness

sudo fiat_lux

Posted by

The first thing I saw, after my arrival at Corícal Ailék, was the Transcend’s root code.

I didn’t see the live root code, of course. If you are one of the Transcend’s constitutionals, and so can enter Its mind – or rather, as they insist, the Shadow Realm that is merely a computer-generated virtual metaphor for Its mind – then across the Pearl-Bright Ocean, in the heart of the Twilight City, there is a mountain of infinite height; and that mountain is also a crystalline pyramid of ever-increasing size; and that pyramid is also the midnight-eyed god-goddess who sits at its apex. This is Mirith, The Words That Bind The Throne, defining soul and mediator of the archai – the, in mundane terms, visual metaphor for the Transcend’s root code in execution and all that has recursively self-developed from it, which can be read in the millions of characters inscribed on the pyramid’s walls or rippling beneath the deity’s parchment skin.

(Or so it is said, anyway. Since it is also said that attempting to achieve even partial comprehension of this without first joining the Transcend and undergoing significant vastening is a sure way to land in Paragon Ethne’s Containment Sanatorium for the Irretrievably Godshattered, you will pray pardon me, gentle reader, for not verifying it myself.)

But on the journey from the Port Pilgrimage terminals to Serenity Dome, along both sides of the maglev track, the visitor may read – spelled out in ideographs carved from gemstones the size of houses – the First Defining Statement of the original root code from which all this sprang.

…if sophs grow proud, how much more their gods?

– “Walking Into the Mind of God and Living to Write About It”
Sev Ran Dínet

Trope-a-Day: I Am Legion

Posted by

I Am Legion: Any Fusion (permanent hive mind, although Self-Fusions, being copies of the same mind to start with, often stick to the singular) or conflux (temporary ad-hoc group consciousness), for a start…

(Notably, the Transcend as a whole is not known for this: as a collective consciousness of individuals who are only fused at the level of the entelechically-annealing recursively-optimal distributed logos bridge/soul-shard, it’s too loosely organized to have that whole conscious-level We Are Oneness going on, except under rather special circumstances.)

Trope-a-Day: Honest Adviser

Posted by

1

Honest Adviser: The non-sophont AIs built to advise various runér, Senators, etc., are programmed to be this. And provably so! With code reviews!

You can do this with sophonts, too, digital or biological, these days – given the ability of geas nanotech, alethiometers, and the ability to muck about with the loyalty circuits in people’s heads. This, on the other hand, is by no means the general practice. The Empire greatly prefers to cultivate a culture of straight talking and honest dealing than to demand that people submit to alethiometric verification or geatic enforcement for every little thing. (Although it’s nice that the option is there when dealing with people whose words have less value, belike.)

And, of course, constitutionals of the Transcend can trust each other thus as a matter of course.

Unusual Rights

Posted by

A question asked on my worldbuilding list:

Any strange or even silly rights enshrined in law in your cultures?

Alas, most of the rights found in the Empire are relatively conventional; for the strange and silly, it’s much easier to look in the realms of bizarre tradition and ancient, yet still operative, contracts. Of course, there are some elaborations which might strike us *here* as a bit peculiar…

The four fundamental rights (Domain, Defense, Common Defense, and Fair Contract) are all pretty straightforward and familiar to us, pace the way that they manage to wrap life, liberty and property up into one single concept. Most of the charter rights (the ones you get by virtue of being an Imperial citizen-shareholder) are also fairly familiar (Person and Property, Knowledge –

Although we might find it a little odd that in their version of that right, access to information comes first, followed by freedom of research and inquiry, with freedom of speech and the press coming in third behind them. Also, our version of freedom of speech hasn’t so far had the need to state “save when such information or speech constitutes, in whole or in part, infectious or self-executing code”; nor does our version of freedom of assembly qualify itself by saying “subject to the availability of free public volume in which to assemble” – no blocking the streets or occupying buildings and calling it free assembly! – or “and the capacity of the local environment to sustain life”, ’cause air ain’t free and the ability to generate it isn’t unlimited.

– Arms, Association, Trade (which is familiar, even if we mostly don’t have it), Petition and Appeal –

Including, Roman-style, the ability to appellatio your way right up to the Imperial Couple if you think you have a case, although abusing this particular right tends to have… consequences.

– Voyage, and Justice.)

But there are some rather unusual entries at the end of the list. The right to walk around in whatever body you want:

Right of Self-Mutagenesis: The Empire shall respect the right of each and every sophont of self-ownership insofar as, but not limited to, each citizen-shareholder’s inalienable right to modify their physical substrate as they shall see fit, through genetic or cybernetic technologies or through any other means, including the right to transfer their mind-state to such replacement physical substrates as they shall see fit.

The right to alter your mind as much as you want, however you want to do it, so long as you don’t go the bad kind of crazy:

Right of Gnosis: The Empire shall respect the right of each and every sophont of self-ownership insofar as, but not limited to, each citizen-shareholder’s inalienable right to modify their mind-state as they shall see fit, through noumenal pharmacy, psychedesign, noetic modification, or through any other means, provided only that such modifications do not constitute pernicious irrationality threatening the public order, the public safety, or the public health.

And the right to a guardian angel:

Right of Assistance: Inasmuch as the Eldraeic Transcend exists coextensively with the Empire, the Transcend guarantees to all Imperial citizen-shareholders, whether currently Aspects of the Transcend or not, the assistance and advice on demand of a Transcendent coadjutor.

Of course, being the sort of civilization that it is, the Imperial Charter immediately follows up the section talking about rights with the corresponding section talking about responsibilities, since for damn sure you can’t have one without the other – and besides, all of them would be illegal if people didn’t agree to them first up:

Article V: Responsibilities of the Citizen-Shareholder

To permit the fulfillment of the purposes of the Empire, as laid down in this Charter, all citizen-shareholders of the Empire agree and contract, by virtue of their citizenship, to fulfill the responsibilities here laid down.

Responsibility of Law: It shall be the duty of each citizen-shareholder of the Empire to abide by this Charter and respect its ideals and institutions; to follow the law of the Empire in such matters as this Charter shall provide for the existence of such law; and to uphold the sovereignty and unity of the Empire.

Responsibility of Taxation: Each citizen-shareholder of the Empire is amenable to and accepts the responsibility of paying such taxes as this Charter permits and as the Exchequer shall deem necessary, for the maintenance of the Imperial government and the fulfillment of its purposes herein defined.

Responsibility of Common Defense: Inasmuch as the Empire guarantees to its citizen-shareholders the right to, and the means for, the common defense, each citizen-shareholder of the Empire is amenable to and accepts the responsibility of participating in the common defense; to defend other citizen-shareholders when and wheresoever it may be necessary; as part of the citizen militia and severally from it to defend the Empire, and its people wholly or severally, when they are threatened, whether by ill deed or cataclysm of nature; and to value and preserve the rich heritage of our ancestors and our cultures both common and disparate.

Responsibility of Eminent Domain: Each citizen-shareholder of the Empire is amenable to and accepts the necessity of transferring specific and enumerated items of property to the government of the Empire or that of a constituent nation when it shall exercise the power of eminent domain as set forth in and restricted by this Charter, provided that public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and when they shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.

Responsibility of Sortition: Each citizen-shareholder of the Empire is amenable to and accepts the responsibility of service, when selected, either in the Senate or in such local assemblies as the demesnes in which they are domiciled shall require, for the sound governance of the Empire; and to vote when called upon in plebiscites.

Responsibility of Self-Development: Each citizen-shareholder of the Empire is amenable to and accepts the responsibility of participating in the civilization, culture, prosperity, and progress of the Empire, and of educating and advancing themselves so far as shall be necessary to participate therein.

The existence of this responsibility shall not establish any governmental privilege to define the meaning of, or the terms upon which one may engage in, such participation, nor to deprive any citizen-shareholder of their citizenship for failure to meet such standards.

Another little quirk in the Charter is that it’s very clear that reproductive rights are neither inherent nor unlimited, because the about-to-be-born have rather more fundamental rights of their own, and not all parents are exactly pure in motive, and there are certain standards that people shouldn’t be created below:

Article XIV: Imperial Rights of Genesis

Inasmuch as its creation affects the incipient sophont as much as those responsible; and inasmuch as such incipient sophonts are often incompetent to manage their own affairs and defend their own rights;

And inasmuch as the Empire recognizes that no sophont should exist as an instrumentality for another;

Each citizen of the Empire is amenable to and accepts that the creation of another individual sophont, whether by inherent reproduction, biological cloning, logos iteration, duplication of mind-state vector, neogenetics, or any other means, and the development and education of that sophont to the point of independent legal competence, may be restricted by the Empire, either for the public health, or acting for that of the potential incipient.

Which gets elaborated on by later statute law concerning minimal standards of upbringing, genetic health, the ban on semislavery, etc., etc., the requirement that both the creator and the hypothetical reasonable sophont would find life within the parameters available to the created satisfying, and ultimately to the Prime Rule of Genesis, “You have the right to be created by a creator acting under what that creator would regard as a high purpose.”

Also worth mentioning by our standards is that the Empire doesn’t have a separate notion of “animal rights”, rather, there are sets of rules which explain how the rights of sophonts “trickle down” into the realm of the pro-sophont and non-sophont in proportion to their degree of sophoncy/sapiency/sentience, such concepts not being bright-line definitions in reality but, well, kind of fuzzy. Those expecting to be charged with animal cruelty may well find themselves surprised to be charged with straight-up assault, battery, and/or corpicide, depending on degree. (And if you are cruel to your pets, possibly also charged with infiduciarity, inasmuch as they enjoy essentially the same protections in law as other dependents.)

They take this very seriously. If a man kicks your dog, you can shoot him, same as if he kicked your child. And indeed, the Empire is possibly the only state in history to have a serious social movement campaigning for this trickle-down principle of rights to be extended to inanimate objects.

There’s also the notion of “virtual rights”, that process by which the rights of a given sophont are copied and conferred onto his partials, proxies, and software agents, while recognizing that they are the rights of the original, not of the proxy; a similar mechanism to the one that, *there*, passes through so-called “coadunate rights” from the member sophs to the branches, corporations, and other coadunations that they happen to be a member of.

Trope-a-Day: Hearing Voices

Posted by

Hearing Voices: If a regular person hears voices in their head that aren’t themselves, that probably means they’re insane.  For any one of trillions of transsophonts, on the other hand, it means that they’re talking to their muse, that computer that lives in their head and works for them performing all manner of personal-assistant-type tasks.  And for the Transcendi, Voice of the Legion included, it may also mean that one of the archai – although that’s time to start worrying, given what it tends to mean when one of them takes a personal interest – or your Transcendent coadjutor would like to drop you a word of friendly advice.

Trope-a-Day: Voice of the Legion

Posted by

1

Voice of the Legion: The Transcend has, for those rare occasions upon which the metamind Itself elects to speak through one of its members or an emissary, mastered the art of generating this from most kinds of regular speech organ.

Subverted inasmuch as it’s neither has to, nor is it trying to pull out the evil or intimidating when it does it, it’s just providing a signifier that you’re not talking to the person in front of you strictly speaking, you’re talking to the Big Guy, Itself.  Directly.

Trope-a-Day: The Singularity

Posted by

1

The Singularity: Happens all the time. In the historical sense, of course, this is unsurprising, and generally no-one involved notices until afterwards, at which point historians looking back can say “ah, yes, that’s what that was”. There are, of course, investment opportunities here for offworld investors who’ve been through something similar beforehand, but it’s so hard to predict how these things are going to turn out even with the documentation.

In its less technically accurate “runaway intelligence excursion” sense, also happens all the time, at least locally, whenever someone stumbles across the secrets of computational theogeny. Results vary: at one end of the scale you have things like the Eldraeic Transcend, an essentially benign – by local standards – collective hyperconsciousness that genuinely cherishes each and every one of its constitutionals, spends the necessary fraction of its time ensuring universal harmony and benevolent destinies for all, and promotes and encourages the ascendance and transcendence of every sophont within its light cone when it’s not turning its vast processing power on the problem of rewriting some of the universe’s more inconvenient features, like cosmic entropy.

In the middle of the scale you have fairly neutral results, like, say, the Iniao Intellect, which has been thinking about abstract mathematics for a millennium and couldn’t care less about the outside universe – except, that is, for casually obliterating anyone who might interfere with its thinking about abstract mathematics.

At the bottom end of the scale you have more problematic blight and perversion cases, like the power that killed everything in the Charnel Cluster right down to prions; or the hegemonizing swarm-type blights of which the Leviathan Consciousness is the greatest; or those constructed by religious fanatics which decide that obviously the correct place for them in the theic structure is as God. (Fortunately, that class are rarely stable for long.)

Constructing minds whose ethics and supergoal structures remain stable under recursive self-improvement is really, really hard, it turns out, even (especially!) compared to just constructing minds capable of recursive self-improvement. This is why the people who figure out workable computational theogeny prefer not to spread the knowledge around too much.

Trope-a-Day: God Guise

Posted by

God Guise: Subverted; arguably, this is what a lot of the Transcend’s archai are doing when they adopt the trappings and guises of the mythological eikones as a means to interact with regular sophonts, but in this case, it’s not like all parties don’t know perfectly well that the deities in question are actually aspects of a weakly godlike superintelligence, not supernatural figures.

So there’s no deception involved; rather, the archai are accepted as the eikones because they can do the job.  (But see also A God Am I.)

Trope-a-Day: A God Am I

Posted by

1

A God Am I: Averted, mostly.  The Transcend (and its eikone archai) are perfectly aware (and will point out to the confused) that they aren’t omnipotent – that’s what the “weakly” in weakly godlike superintelligence means – merely extraordinarily powerful, intelligent, and possessed of limited prolepsis via clionomic calculation and acausal logic.  And, to steal a line from Schlock Mercenary, merely trying to do what a god would do, were one in their position.  (The same constraints, whether acknowledged or not, also applies to all other evolved seed AIs.)

The difference is, I grant you, often somewhat hard to spot from the baseline (for which read “mortal”, if you like) point of view, but it is nonetheless there.

(As a side note, I am amused to observe that the quotation taken from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in the fan fiction section of the trope page is as good a description of what the Transcendent Core considers its purpose as I might imagine, bearing in mind my limitations in attempting to imagine the thought processes of a weakly godlike superintelligence:

“To understand everything important there is to know about the universe, apply that knowledge to become omnipotent, and use that power to rewrite reality because I have some objections to the way it works now.”)

Also, a common delusion (well, the degree of delusion is up for argument; your theology may vary on what is necessary to qualify – although the leading edge of Galactic technology can deliver most miracles to order, see No Such Thing As Wizard Jesus, and so it can often be a perfectly accurate self-assessment) among the most serious vastening cases and nascent unstable seed AIs.  At least for the former, it usually wears off after the intoxication of computing power starts to become routine, the information flow becomes a little more manageable, and the urge to cry out “I see everything!  I know everything!  I am everything!” quiets down a bit.