Forces and the self

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by William

If I understand your term correctly, a xox is a process whereby a brain is scanned and the information thus produced is used to build an AI with most of the memories and personality of the uploading human.

Ah, no. The Transhuman Space terminology has several kinds of "infomorphs", things with minds that run as software. Most of these are only allowed to have one copy running at a time, but that's a legal issue, not a physical or metaphysical restriction. Multiple copies are called xoxes, and are illegal because the THS societies seem to be quite scared of multiple copies of infomorphs taking over.

If you want to start a discussion about which of these things can "really" be people, let alone the same people, go directly to the thread of doom that is dedicated to the purpose, which starts here and has 1,160 posts as of today.

There are three kinds of AIs. All of them are constructed from the ground up as software, with no brain scans involved.

Non-sapient AI (NAI) has no claim to selfhood, although it talks pretty well; it's basically a smart operating system. Running duplicate copies of it is legal everywhere.

Low-Sapient AI (LAI) has some reasonable claim to personhood, and may be quite intelligent, but has limited emotions and other restrictions. They have legal rights like those of animals in some legal systems, but in others they are just tools. Xoxes of them are usually illegal.

Sapient AIs have minds as good as a human in all respects. In some legal systems they have full human rights, in others, restricted rights, in others, none. Xoxes of them are illegal everywhere there is a state-based legal system.

Ghosts are fully uploaded humans (or uploads of other biological creatures with human-equivalent minds). In THS, this is only possible as a destructive upload; non-destructive ones can't get enough detail, since it involves neuron-by-neuron emulation of the biological brain. This does not always succeed, so there's risk in getting yourself uploaded, as well as considerable cost, even if you believe that you're the same person afterwards. Some legal systems treat them as the same person, others as inferiors, or in one case, abominations. Xoxes of them are as illegal of those of SAIs.

Shadows are the best available kind of non-destructive upload. They involve a lot of non-destructive scanning, and feeding the results into the creation of an LAI that behaves like the original person.

Fragments are the results of unsuccessful attempts to create ghosts; they often have bits of the personality and/or skills, but little if any memory. They get treated like people with mental illnesses in places where ghosts are people.

So, in IN terms... NAIs clearly don't have souls or Forces. LAIs might have souls, but if they do, they probably only have Ethereal forces. If SAIs have souls,they have both Ethereal and Celestial forces. If Ghosts are the same person, then they presumably have the person's Ethereal and Celestial forces.

So, what happens when you xox a Ghost? If they don't have Forces, no problem, and the lack of Forces would suggest that they aren't "really people". If they have Forces and those won't subdivide then xoxes presumably don't work, or don't work the same way, which would be evidence of the supernatural obtained through strictly physical, if complex, means.

[William]

Okay, so xoxing sounds to me like cloning. The presence or lack of Forces shouldn't interfere with the process either way, since regular biological cloning is a reproductive method that produces a new entity. A xox seems to be a new entity to me, whether that's another corporeal object or an ensouled species that happens to have a computer as a body.

The question of whether a Ghost is the "same person" comes down to the idea of continuity of the self, which (in my materialist view) is largely an illusion maintained by the hippocampus in the real world, and I have no strong feelings on whether this should be the case or not. A person's body map is surprisingly flexible; if I obtain a drone that I can control with mental commands, the drone obtains sense inputs that I can integrate with my current sensory stream, and eventually I start processing some information on board the drone, then steadily migrate more processing functions to the drone, and eventually spend most of my time there before my old body bites the dust and the drone now thinks it's my only body, I have no real idea whether it's right or not. In In Nomine, the test would be fairly straightforward; is the Cherub who was attuned to me now attuned to the Ghost, or can the Ghost still access that old relic that I was attuned to, et cetera.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by William

Okay, so xoxing sounds to me like cloning. The presence or lack of Forces shouldn't interfere with the process either way, since regular biological cloning is a reproductive method that produces a new entity. A xox seems to be a new entity to me, whether that's another corporeal object or an ensouled species that happens to have a computer as a body.

Well, not quite. Cloning produces an organism of rather similar biology, but with a very different mind. Xoxing is copying the mind (whether onto a same body, or onto another body that is capable of hosting such a mind). (In THS, it is also only possible to copy a mind into a computer, not into a brain. But that's of little relevance here.)

I'm pointing this out because it seems commonly held that mind and soul go hand in hand.

Originally Posted by William

The question of whether a Ghost is the "same person" comes down to the idea of continuity of the self, which (in my materialist view) is largely an illusion maintained by the hippocampus in the real world, and I have no strong feelings on whether this should be the case or not. A person's body map is surprisingly flexible; if I obtain a drone that I can control with mental commands, the drone obtains sense inputs that I can integrate with my current sensory stream, and eventually I start processing some information on board the drone, then steadily migrate more processing functions to the drone, and eventually spend most of my time there before my old body bites the dust and the drone now thinks it's my only body, I have no real idea whether it's right or not. In In Nomine, the test would be fairly straightforward; is the Cherub who was attuned to me now attuned to the Ghost, or can the Ghost still access that old relic that I was attuned to, et cetera.

If we xox a Ghost into three, does the Cherub gain three attunements? If not, what happens when a Ghost is sent over WiFi?

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

If we xox a Ghost into three, does the Cherub gain three attunements? If not, what happens when a Ghost is sent over WiFi?

Sending a Ghost over wi-fi would be similar to sending an Ofanite of Lightning through a telephone landline, I'd think - the entity in question moves, and the Cherub remains attuned to him/her/it.

[Irioth]

Originally Posted by johndallman

So, what happens when you xox a Ghost? If they don't have Forces, no problem, and the lack of Forces would suggest that they aren't "really people". If they have Forces and those won't subdivide then xoxes presumably don't work, or don't work the same way, which would be evidence of the supernatural obtained through strictly physical, if complex, means.

Or alternatively, xoxes work just the same, and you have achieved the breakthrough of copying a mind-soul imprint on a different Forces framework. IMO that seems the simplest and most coherent solution with the rest of the cosmology.

[Irioth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

If we xox a Ghost into three, does the Cherub gain three attunements? If not, what happens when a Ghost is sent over WiFi?

If the xox copies work as intended, and hence the mind-soul construct has been successfully copied on new sets of Forces, then the Cherub indeed gains three attunements. I suppose in that case, it works just like the Cherub attuning to identical twins at birth.

[Irioth]

Originally Posted by William

The question of whether a Ghost is the "same person" comes down to the idea of continuity of the self, which (in my materialist view) is largely an illusion maintained by the hippocampus in the real world, and I have no strong feelings on whether this should be the case or not. A person's body map is surprisingly flexible; if I obtain a drone that I can control with mental commands, the drone obtains sense inputs that I can integrate with my current sensory stream, and eventually I start processing some information on board the drone, then steadily migrate more processing functions to the drone, and eventually spend most of my time there before my old body bites the dust and the drone now thinks it's my only body, I have no real idea whether it's right or not. In In Nomine, the test would be fairly straightforward; is the Cherub who was attuned to me now attuned to the Ghost, or can the Ghost still access that old relic that I was attuned to, et cetera.

For a supernatural setting, the Lego nature of Forces and all the sapient spiritual stuff they make up, makes IN remarkably materialist. It's just a different kind of material.

[Matthias Wasser]

Originally Posted by Irioth

For a supernatural setting, the Lego nature of Forces and all the sapient spiritual stuff they make up, makes IN remarkably materialist. It's just a different kind of material.

To an extent - certainly it gives a reductionist account of souls and persons and particular instances of things in general. But the setting also explicitly has Platonic Forms.

[William]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Well, not quite. Cloning produces an organism of rather similar biology, but with a very different mind. Xoxing is copying the mind (whether onto a same body, or onto another body that is capable of hosting such a mind). (In THS, it is also only possible to copy a mind into a computer, not into a brain. But that's of little relevance here.)

I'm not... terribly sure of that. For the most part, it seems that corporeal technology only manipulates corporeal objects, which may thereafter collect Forces. (The Liber Reliquarum gives us the Hieronymous Machine, which is able to manipulate Essence and Forces very crudely and was energetically repressed by Jean, but this is by design a surprising exception.) In the case of a Ghost, there is a material underpinning -- data in a computer -- much as the original human had a material underpinning -- nerves in a body. I could also, presuming I had fine enough control, duplicate the memories in someone's brain and carefully structure a neural net to copy their ingrained thought-patterns, but when done this would be a new person, with Forces not part of or cannibalized from the old one. (There could be many interesting supernatural connections between the two, though.)

A possibility that we haven't discussed here is much darker, too. Ghosts could be undead: humans whose souls have now been bound into their material bodies and will not survive their body's destruction to enter an afterlife. Xoxing might be a useful way for them to extend their body considerably, allowing them to survive the destruction of one body and migrate their soul to another body which had previously either been not running, or had been running in a fashion similar to a Remnant (playing a Role with its memories, but not having true free will). Successfully migrating might be automatic, or require a Trauma roll similar to an angel or Ethereal recovering from physical death.

If Ghosts are undead, angels will be furiously attempting to end the process or correct it in some metaphysical way.

If we xox a Ghost into three, does the Cherub gain three attunements? If not, what happens when a Ghost is sent over WiFi?

The Cherub would, I believe, remain attuned to the first entity, and not any of its children/copies, any more than a Cherub attuning to a man would be attuned to children he thereafter fathers. If the Ghost were sent over WiFi, the Cherub's attunement would find the place where the hardware doing the processing is taking place -- normally, a Cherub won't be able to follow one of their Attuned projecting a soul or viewpoint elsewhere, with Cherubim of Dreams being a notable exception (able to follow their Attuned into the Marches).

The criterion I would use would be, "if you cut the connection, which of these two entities dies?". If cutting a signal means that the Ghost loses camera control at the other end and wakes up here, then here is where the Cherub would be attuned. If cutting the signal means that the equipment on this end falls inert and there is a Ghost trapped in the target system, I would say the Cherub's attunement would point over there. If cutting the signal would give rise to two independent, possibly-damaged entities, or simply kill the Ghost, then the Cherub might treat both the processor and the target system as parts of the Ghost's body.

In the end, this question could be infinitely parsed with hypothetical hi-tech questions, of course, and since divine powers are the literary stand-in for magic in this game there will necessarily be some level of authorial interpretation. In the final analysis, In Nomine assumes that there are souls, there are things that definitely do not have souls, that human souls are unique, immortal, and important, and that making souls is about as hard as having kids, though slightly easier for powerful nonhumans.

[Archangel Beth]

1: I actually tend to assume that huge numbers of humans are reincarnated, rather than created from nothing. I think there's a Destiny attunement which suggests that's at least frequent, not rare?

2: I would tend* to treat sapient AIs in general rather like Kyriotates (or Shedim...). Attuning to the actual being might be difficult, with a tendency to grab their hardware instead. Several copies running at the same time? Treat like a Kyriotate running several bodies at the same time, however that tends to work out for the poor Cherub who foolishly tried to attune to one.

{ * If I treated it differently, it would be because I wanted to explore a particular MacGuffin and break people's brains. Muwhahaha! }

I would also break out the Liber Umbrarum, which has some stuff about ghostly manifestations created by someone's left-behind-but-still-connected Forces. It might be interesting to play with a copy of an AI as having the same Forces/soul as the original -- even when running simultaneously!

The presumption, of course, would be that actual memories would be resident in the corporeal manifestation (i.e., the hardware running the software), which wouldn't be that different from assuming that living humans can really only access memories that their current hardware, er, brains have stored. (See also reincarnation.) Thus, unless the AI instantiations were sharing memories with themself frequently, they would have different memories that would shape their responses. (And perhaps if they got different enough, such that the basic personality wasn't really recognizable, then they start splitting off via developing their own, unshared Forces? Oooo, fun fiddly bits...)

It might also be amusing to go the other way, and figure that each copy did indeed create a new soul (or at least the potential for one, Ethereal figment style), and thus all AI development is being sabotaged by Jean because creating souls all over the place is a screaming headache. >_>


All AIs sharing a soul would make it a bit less headachey in the regards of, assuming they have fate/destiny potential... you don't have to deal with fifty instantiations of the "same" AI showing up at once, or staggered, or whatever. Also, if you have one AI running in tandem on multiple hardware (I dunno if they do this in THS, but our space-game sure had that; I think there were five AI-capable computers ensconced in our former-PC-turned-Patron-NPC's ship, all running the same AI program and cross-checking for damage/whatever. Said Patron was a redundancy freak.)... And then she -- the NPC AI, not the Patron -- went and got herself a robot body so she could wander around and proposition other pilots, so that was six "brains" running in parallel.


Isn't there a "divided Forces" Discord for Kyriotates, where they stop being able to communicate within themselves? Or was that only in playtest at one point?


Another thing you want to think about is... how do you tell when an AI is dead? You can archive one and store it and turn it on again much later... I suppose God would know when one was Really Dead (no copies left), but the tendency for AIs to probably want backup copies of themselves might mean that AI souls in Heaven (or Hell) were rare indeed.


(It might be easiest to assume that, in the default IN cosmos, sapient AIs are not possible. Of course, since when have GMs taken the easiest path... >_> )