My thoughts follow as such. Morphs retain the ability to live without an ego, but the ego gives it sentience. It does seem to me, that the ego is primarily consciousness, while the morph already contains most of the subconscious. An over simplification to be sure. As each morph regulates its own biological function, downloading an ego into will not change it. This thought would reason why a morph can be addicted to MRDR, but not effect the ego, as the ego has no portion of the brain copied that deals with those areas. All drugs effect the brain, just the ego doesn't contain the portion the drug effects; chemical regulation, heart beat, breathing, etc. Each biomorph has different under laying foundations. An ego just overlays on top of it. So, as to why the morph can heal is because its ability to regulate it remains intact, the brain, even with the absence of an ego. Why an ego cannot be used to create a new morph, following the same line of thought, is that portion of the brain is never apart of an ego backup. This portion of the morph must be built up during its growth could be one reason why creation takes a long time, and healing does not. There are interesting points, clearly I will think on it more and thank you for that alone. [b]The short of it.[/b] Egos do not contain a complete brain. Morphs ability to regulate biological functions must be built by scratch. Healing vats will cause natural healing to accelerate by assisting. Without a brain, morphs lack the ability to self healing.

A lot of the fun with this setting is the fact that the morph is expendable and personally I'd rather tone down the power/speed or availability of the healing vats to be in line with growing a new body (OneTrikPony's option#A). Some ideas after reading through the posts and EP sections on these things follows. Healing Vats According to the EP setting there is are several healing vats in every hospital, clinic, bodyshop and augmentation parlours, but the cost is high. Perhaps the cost is high because they “remain the most powerful medical devices in common use” and having someone occupy one for 2-12 hours for most damage means that nobody else can use it in that time. Even so I would want to make adjustments (I realise these are my own tweaks, but feel free to discuss/use): 1) Healing vats can restore recently dead who are mostly intact, but depending on the extent of the damage I would have this take several weeks or even months, and so be incredibly expensive. Much cheaper to just get a simple synth or a used biomorph. Restoring someone from just a head would be nearly impossible, but with enough creds/rep and the will you could potentially grow a new body, but it would take many months in the most advanced units and up to a year or more in less sophisticated ones and the cost would be quite ridiculous and certainly much cheaper to buy a new morph in most cases. 2) Restoring major lost body parts like arms/legs typically takes several days and is very expensive. 3) Healing less dramatic wounds and damage is most common use, but still has a high cost and likely to take up to a day. Note that basic biomods can gradually regrow lost body parts, but I would say this would be dependent on eating well and takes months to fully regenerate. 4) I would not make it so easy to restore implants, bioware and nanotechnology. Basically I would make it necessary to buy all these again at more or less their original cost, and each one would add time to the process. 5) Not all healing vats are created equal! This may be mostly true in the inner worlds where companies control rights to designs and blueprints. An augmentation parlour might not have a healing vat that can do everything a hospital one can do, because they haven't got the licenses for it. In the outer worlds this will be less of an issue, but there it might also be fewer healing vats so there is still a higher demand for their services than supply. New Morphs I note that from the book the main reasons people don't have morphs seem to be a lack of someone willing to help them out (hence why indentured labour to pay off sponsors) and lack of space and resources for biomorphs. The Economy and Infomorph Refugees (p.65) section states clearly that space and resources is in short supply for living biomorphs. New morphs will be expensive as you would first need an exowomb and then up to two years of storage, energy and raw materials to grow the body. I'm not clear if all biomorphs are fast growing like the Futura morphs, or whether their growth is accelerated through drugs or nanotech – you could leave both options open, but either way there is a lot of time and cost involved. With transhumanity busy recovering from the Fall and competing for the future building massive installations to grow armies of biomorphs is probably not the highest priority and so there is a lack of them and prices affected accordingly. Synths (the elephant in the room) Why don't everyone just wear “flesh-faced” synths? I think the answer is that a lot do – just see the clanking masses (whether cheap cases or synth androids). However, as I see it there are two major reasons why biomorphs are preferred: 1) Synthmorphs carry a social stigma as morphs for those unable to afford “the real thing”, and most people will feel that a biomorph is more natural. 2) Synthmorphs are more easily hacked than biomorphs, and this means they are vulnerable to another attack by the TITANs or even by traps left behind by them. A bonus 3) would be that some “real” experiences are only possible in a biomorph (certain emotions, smells, tastes and not least sex). Sure the synths can replicate it all, but often they do not and many will feel, rightfully or not, that the real experience of being “alive” or “human” can only be achieved in a biomorph. Even so there is an emergent synthmorph culture and unless something dramatic happens I would guess that their use and acceptance would be growing. It could even be a theme of a campaign as synthmorphs and AGIs fight for against preconceptions and demand acceptance (similar to fights against racism and sexism).

I always thought that growing an entire brain/person taking years was a result of thethings such as "The Lost Generation", whereas just growing the morph has a genetic structure to be determined and the existing ego downloaded into it.

I like the consensus originally reached.

Quote:

Scottbert: I thought I had my answers, but a new problem just occurred to me: According to this, if you get shot in the head and your brain is damaged but your stack is intact, you're SOL and need a new morph. Does this sound like rules as intended, or are we back to the drawing board for solutions to the regeneration/cloning time inconsistancy?

Short answer: No, just drop a cyberbrain into the morph while the biobrain is regrown, which takes about 2 years. Long answer: I think it's important to remember that wounds don't stop at Death Rating. If someone cuts off your head with a sharp blade but the medichines have stabilized both the body and the head, then you've probably taken at least 8 wounds (from full health to exceeding full Death Rating), and putting you back together would take ~3 x 8 = 24 days in a Healing Vat, maybe half that if the cut is clean and the GM is feeling charitable. If the body is lost but the head survives, that means that the effective wounds to the character are equivalent to what it would take to completely destroy someone's body: Say 10x Death rating. That changes it to ~3 x 80 = 240 days in a Healing Vat, give or take a factor of 2 depending on how the GM is feeling, or between 4 and 16 MONTHS. On the plus side, there are tissue samples for most of the body in the head ready to be harvested. On the minus side... THE PLAYER LOST THEIR ENTIRE BODY! The rules for the Healing Vat say that the head (including the brain) must be "stabilized" and provided to the Healing Vat, which would be difficult if the brain is splattered out across the floor. It could be assumed that too much of the brain is lost or liquified if more than 1x Death Rating (or 8+ wounds) is applied to the brain area (not including bleeding damage), and thus a replacement brain must be grown as discussed above. Otherwise, it's 'only' a matter of massive tearing of the brain tissue, which can be repaired (though everything must line back up EXACTLY for the brain to work correctly again) so it's still 3x wounds in days (up to 8 wounds) or up to 24 days, to fix just the head shot. But with the head shot, the character can have a cyberbrain installed and continue to use his morph (after about a week to heal the trauma to the rest of the head) while the biobrain is being fixed separately. As far as needing to re-purchase all the morph's implants, I think the dev's had in mind that a license was purchased to use each implant, which is then attached to the morph, similar to how software licenses can be purchased and transferred today. Since it can be assumed that each implant is customized to fit each morph (physically and genetically), it becomes unreasonable to remove the physical implant from the remains of one morph and install that same physical implant into another morph. Since the head, and really the brain, are the most difficult to regrow, and thus what can be defined as the controlling portion of the morph, ownership of the morph's implant licenses remain associated with the remains of the brain, and can just be added back in if major portions of the rest of the body are lost. If the owner of the morph decides to remove the implant and sell it or transfer it to another morph, the implant is then removed from the old morph and a new one is 'grown' for/in the new morph. ...Which would imply that if an autonomist with some bootleg implants is scanned in a hypercorp territory and found to have unlicensed implants, their morph might be impounded and legal action taken to obtain compensation for the IP owners. -Joe

So my understanding of how the brain works (which is no doubt infantile and horribly wrong) is that there are certain areas of the brain which are designed to interact with the body to accomplish stuff. For example there is the motor center, the visual cortex, the frontal lobes for logic, and structures like the hippocampus for memory. This can be seen in people who have brain damage and are no longer able to function in a specific way, like can't talk or can't see, etc. But their personality is still the same. I am guessing that the dev's decided that genetics contributes to the efficiency of certain abilities, which they grouped into the Int, Cog, Sav, Coo, etc, which each morph's brain and body may be better or worse at than others (thus the morph bonuses and penalties), kind of like how a computer may have more or faster memory, or have a better processor, or a better keyboard. They then separated those bonuses from the personality of the Ego, which has its base stats and associated skills. Sticking with the computer model of thinking, the personality or ego of the character would then be the software. So 'loading' the ego into the biomorph would involve ?chemically? wiping the morph's old memories, somehow (waving of hands) putting the new personality's memories in (memories are thought to be stored by proteins in certain cells in the brain, not the cells making contact in different combinations), and then rewiring the personality centers and skill centers (more handwaving) which would involve a combination of some synapse manipulation and some additional 'memory' manipulation. I think the thought is that much of the handwaving involves a very small portion of the brain, and most of that is around the protein side as opposed to physically moving the synapses (brain cells) around. If the whole memory thing could be done with something like artificially induced hypnosis, where the brain is able to record the memories at a continuous extremely high speed from some nano-logical (handwaving) source, or maybe a direct link into the memory centers to get them to record the memories at high speed, then the brain itself would do all the work of 'uploading' the memory side of the ego itself, and all that would be left is some nanobots switching a few hundred thousand neuron connections around so that everything sync's up properly. (Can you see me waving from here? My arms are getting tired... :P ) But now the ego awakes and it must 'work' in this new brain and body. The memory center, personality centers, and other areas of the brain are similar but still different from what the ego was used to in the old morph, so there is an adjustment period and the chance for ego rejection or (partial) collapse, as is reflected in the integration and alienation tests. However, rewiring some of the connections in the brain for the personality vs. creating a brain from scratch are two very different things. I think what the dev's were trying to propose was that humanity doesn't yet know enough to take 100's of billions of neurons and get them all adjusted to their specific types and sub-types, then get them organized in the correct locations, and then connect them all up in the right manner, all without allowing them to randomly decide to make lots of extra connections over here while you're fiddling around over there which would cause short circuits and failure. Or maybe humanity does know how to do this, but, wow, that's complicated, and they'd rather not waste their time when it's cheaper and easier to grow a brain from scratch and let genetics do all that organization for them. Much harder compared to, say, growing some muscle, which would involve growing a bunch of muscle cells, getting them aligned and connected in the desired shape, threading through some nerve cells, threading through a bunch of blood vessels, some other stuff I don't know about (my arms are too tired), and finally hooking the muscle up to some tendon material. Or 'growing' bone, which would be more about using a 3d printer to make the calcium and (there's an elastic portion too which I don't know the name of) part, then lacing the bone with a bunch of bone marrow and blood vessels and hooking it up to the tendons, ligaments and other joint stuff. This is all a guess. -Joe