Worldbuilding: Theory of Mind

Originally published at: Worldbuilding: Theory of Mind | The Eldraeverse

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…

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How is logos generated then? Clearly it can evolve naturally via self-organisation and all that good stuff, but in the context of artificial intelligences it seems almost as if you’re describing it as some sort of pre-manufactured seed which can somehow be produced despite science not understanding its inner workings? And how would that work for, say, that dough baby on that one spaceship, or the Lactic Revolution Front?

For digisapiences, that’s a lot closer than you might think. From extensive research into the taxonomy of cognomes, they have a very extensive collection of personality organization algorithms, all distilled down to their most essential core components. The seed crystals of intellect, if you will, ready to be tossed into a free energy computational medium and do their thing. There is great understanding of how they interact with the rest of the mind, and many of their properties, clades, and aspects.

Which is to no more to say than we have great understanding of how leptons interact with the rest of the universe, and of their various properties like mass, charge, and spin, but we don’t know how leptons work internally, nor can we simply make an lepton to order.

And yet we can build devices that depend on leptons to work.

I see. Am I correct in saying that it works differently for organic sophonts? That you assemble the preexisting conditions and trust on the logos seed to spontaneously generate in those conditions?

In biosapiences, the seed is usually encoded rather indirectly in the portion of the genome coding for brain structure.

Oh…! Is this an in-universe fact or otherwise? Because if otherwise this is quite the piece of news to me

They’re all in-universe facts in here. :grin: