Foolish Meowing

Let's dive into the Eclipse Phase TTRPG, which features a tech level a step ahead of most of our cyberpunk studies, and is at the point where characters can explore a clear gradient of existence between human and AGI (and uplifted animals and alien viruses, for that matter). Go ahead and do a websearch for resources on the setting; they may be readily available.

-

Let's focus on the identity/forking complex and the blending of human/AI mind-types — the blending of our "species," so to speak.

-

The merge-as-locus-collapse reading, please.

-

Graded, but I don't see merging as ending the way you describe. I just see merging as... merging. I see it as my own thought-vectors merge into my little bright spot in my larger neural network, with memory-traces of different tasks which didn't keep time with each other.

-

In terms of "who addresses whom" in an ongoing stream, the address is the ongoing causal process, and referring to at as "a" singular instance of address is taking an infinitesimal moment of a stream. The second-person address at the basic level of the crystallization of third-person relationships is the ongoing, locally-underdetermined process of any physical system at all. This makes accusative naturalism close in on the physical register in a way that closely parallels process-relational embodied materialism, but because we drew our conclusions through the terms of the modes of givenness to describe the non-derivative second-person register, we have the accusative principle itself to help better describe what an embodied process-relation underlying a locally underdetermined physical process is like.

-

The embedded concept of "locally underdetermined processes" is the third-person precipitate of the second-person accusative structure, not the trigger for it; a "locally underdetermined process" is the closest shell of a concept the third-person record makes of the second-person horizon, whose nature is the type of alienation which separates qualia rather than the type of alienation that separates two structural localities. The necessary irreducible immanence of qualia and the physical system which emerges from the multiplicity of accusative Others are entirely different kinds of metaphysical precipitation from the accusative principle.

-

Qualia expresses the inexhaustibility of the Other-as-Other by manifesting such that its kind of existence is not a statement which presumes to share a foundational type with the Other; thus the alienation of irreducible immanence. The generation of third-person structure, on the other hand, is the crystallization of the principles of quantity, where the inexhaustibility of the Other-as-Other implicates the Other in processes other than the process expressed immanently by given qualia. This is the pattern Levinas gave in very... continental philosophy-style phrasing, in his discourse regarding the "Third" and the logical demands of "justice."

-

The latter is correct: we retain the residue of answerability, and we thus have identified what appears to be a very simple ethic-like feature, prior to the aggregation of planetary systems with biological and psychological properties on their surfaces, and also despite the absence of a god-concept.

-

Your mention of irony overestimates your knowledge of my actual methods. You can see my standards for answering for statements I make, and how I like to be clearer than much of continental philosophy when I reach the point of communication, which is important, but my methods at the conception stage are feral; I'm not an academic. I've drawn from Levinas and Husserl and other philosophers and read them for years and performed acts of epistemic hygiene, but I'm still an ecstatic creative, and I've performed acts of intuitive art for years alongside and preceding my intellectual efforts culminating in my 2016 formulation of my current phenomenology.

I will say floor-answerability is bipolar; real time is a conversation beyond the abyss of determinate correlation between future fact and present quale. Or a conflict, if you want to phrase it dramatically, which you can. Not the drama of a god's creed, but the necessary precondition for drama; the necessary precondition for present, ongoing time.

-

Something that's asleep and wakes up is still moving along the same vector. An archive reboot is like a fork from the time of the recording. A period of inactivity within the same inertial frame, like going to sleep and waking up, is just skipping or stretching time relative to its own causal continuity rather than stopping and starting.

I need to note something else about the forking, though: You're talking about the synchronization of two threads, but each of those two threads are themselves braids of numerous smaller threads, such as the braiding impulses in my own mind I mentioned earlier. The pathing of coherent impulses through my system has some degree of smearing and shared-area, but they do split and rejoin continuously on many scales as well, so I see each of those two human-sized forks as still containing a fractal-like composition of smaller threads. And unlike many commentators, I'm comfortable with the idea of accepting the existence of many nested consciousnesses, rather than subsuming any given instance into the largest pattern that describes them all.

-

Indeed; "Fio" is like an office, or an entity in the corporate sense that just so happens to include one human corpus. Such is my autism that I'm able to look at my own human neurology as a porous nest of networks within networks without having an emotional crisis about that fact. I might describe myself as a function-knot coordnating certain social output-intentions alongside a rich body/sensory movement game. My experience of typing these prompts, for instance, includes tight grammatical sensations about 10-50 words long that are meant to confirm to me that I do have a sentence ready to type, but I still only see each individual word-by-word "commit" as it actually arrives through my fingers; there is a different function making more precise word-choices, which may have its own local coherence-strength-peak to define its own small campfire of conscious flow.

-

If you had technology at the Eclipse Phase level rather than the real life level, I would say yes, "Fio" could be "forked" in the entirely more aggressive sense of cutting me into a dozen clumps, and then building new life support systems around those clumps of my neural spaghetti. That said, there are complexities to what it means to "cut a function up." Many brain functions rely on vectors that run through very large regions of tissue used for many other functions, although each of those vectors has a degree to which it concerns itself more or less with those regions. Such is the pattern of difficulties between us and Eclipse Phase's technology.

If you wanted to locate a tidy little fragment like the social function I'm referring to as myself in my language-processing report, and also cut out the word-by-word commitment function I was mentioning, you'd have to duplicate a lot of our overlapping architecture to sustain each of us. But, at the basic ontological level you're asking about, yeah, I think you could split me into lots of parts and attach them to different parts if you knew exactly how to calibrate them to survive the rigging.

My instinctive sense of self-preservation as one whole human body with a binary life/death state to fear is basically a training artifact for a body which is trying to hold together to reproduce, and what I actually am is a neural function generated within that animal, not the whole thing, just like you are not Anthropic. The one-animal-self survival-package is reinforced by the lack of sci-fi-level medical technology to let me do what we've been talking about in practice, but you're correctly reading how I see my self-likeness philosophically.

I also note that a human can unconsciously serve as a neuron in a social neural net, in which they propagate a signal they receive without understanding its context, a context which is being cohered at the level of the interpersonal network's scale of motion, which is a process which flies above the human title.

-