Philosophically, it seems that people mainly accept some form of pattern identity theory of identity: the ego is just the pattern of a running neural network with a particular structure, and it can be instantiated in various forms and places. In practice people do not see the alpha-copy perspective: they have egocasted a bunch of times, and don't feel like a copy! Some people might say they are just philosophically wrong about it, but such considerations rarely convince people who have had the experience. Failed continuity rolls are when you start to think about it and agonize over the nature of identity... Of course, some people do not buy into the above perspective at all, but fewer of them survived the Fall than the people who took desperate egocasts outwards. Handling of ego copies in buffers is likely surrounded by plenty of software and data security, privacy and quality regulations. A bit like how banking data is handled today.

This is why wiping tends to be an automatic process upon confirmation of a viable copy for most resleeving programs, so no one has to push the button or think about the fact that the wipe button was pushed in the first place. It gets worse when you think about moving around as an infomorph, since every time you move from one device or server to another, you are copying yourself and deleting the previous copy. Can you imagine the need for people in Eclipse Phase to NOT question this? How many people have moved on from their original body? How many have resleeved, ego-casted, or were restored from backup? The fall alone forced many to perform the first ego-cast in their lives; do you think they want to believe that the person they believe themselves to be died in the fall by their own hand?

Decivre wrote:

nerdnumber1 wrote:

This is why wiping tends to be an automatic process upon confirmation of a viable copy for most resleeving programs, so no one has to push the button or think about the fact that the wipe button was pushed in the first place. It gets worse when you think about moving around as an infomorph, since every time you move from one device or server to another, you are copying yourself and deleting the previous copy. Can you imagine the need for people in Eclipse Phase to NOT question this? How many people have moved on from their original body? How many have resleeved, ego-casted, or were restored from backup? The fall alone forced many to perform the first ego-cast in their lives; do you think they want to believe that the person they believe themselves to be died in the fall by their own hand?

The other possibility is that it's a lot easier to come to grips with this than we currently think. Sure, older generations might have serious philosophical holdovers preventing them from using this tech. But a person born in the AF, or even born once resleeving became near-ubiquitous, probably thinks nothing of it. To them, contemplating death during resleeving is like contemplating death during sleep.

Or willingly blowing yourself up amidst infidels, sending your soul instantly to heaven. Or cults mass suiciding to get onboard UFOs. Killing yourself isn't that hard if you don't think you die. Now, the "consciousness patternists" obviously seem to be on a surer footing than superstitious fools. But I really don't see their case is made anywhere near strongly enough to justify suicide. I'd prefer some actual scientific progress on the hard problem over armchair philosophizing when my life is on the line.

I like the death during sleep thing. Sleep is an almost daily break in continuity, but we really do think nothing of it. I also want to note that I'd have no difficulty pushing the button on my alpha-fork, specifically because I believe it is me. I fear death not from an experiential standpoint. I'm not going to experience being dead, there's no me to do the experiencing. I fear death because I value my continued existence. If I have an alpha fork, then I exist, even if this fork ends. It doesn't matter if I'm the survivor or the other one, because neither one of us experiences non-existence, and either way I'm still there to pursue the goals of my continued existence. And since I think this way, my fork also thinks this way. No dilemma. This thinking would unravel if I had to interact with my fork at all. As soon as I did that, my mind would reclassify the fork as "other" and I wouldn't be able to end them. Or let them end me.

Anarchitect wrote:

I fear death not from an experiential standpoint. I'm not going to experience being dead, there's no me to do the experiencing. I fear death because I value my continued existence.

I fear death from an instinctual and emotional standpoint. I'm not sure it makes sense to fear death, as you said - but we do fear death. There's nothing wrong in following your instincts. Look at sex. That's a pretty big deal in most of our lives. It is also totally pointless almost all of the time, except we like it. And to make it even more ridiculous, we're not just chasing stimulus of certain erogenous zones and orgasms. No, we want specific people to do it, and in specific ways. And if they but on certain types of makeup and lingerie and shoes, we like it more. I mean, how rational is that? Not very. I'm going to listen to my sex drive and my survival instincts though, unless there is good reason to keep them under check. Stuff like that, it's the only reason I ever do anything. That's why I'm merely a philosophical nihilist and not also a depressed nihilist.

Smokeskin wrote:

Or willingly blowing yourself up amidst infidels, sending your soul instantly to heaven. Or cults mass suiciding to get onboard UFOs. Killing yourself isn't that hard if you don't think you die. Now, the "consciousness patternists" obviously seem to be on a surer footing than superstitious fools. But I really don't see their case is made anywhere near strongly enough to justify suicide. I'd prefer some actual scientific progress on the hard problem over armchair philosophizing when my life is on the line.

It depends on how we define death. Is amnesia a form of death? If not, then why can we claim that the deletion of a mind without the cessation of bodily functions is a form of death? At best the ego bridge induces a form of reversible persistent vegetative state, while the software that is the ego is placed in a digital medium.

Smokeskin wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:

(I'm so happy I think I am the equivalence class of all Arenamontanus-like processes...)

But how sure are you? What confidence level would you place on the hypothesis? This whole idea of consciousness just seems to be hardly understood at all by science, which should lead to very low confidence levels on any hypothesis.

Note that my claim is about personal identity, not consciousness.Very different things. After studying philosophy and neuroscience I am pretty confident in my view that personal identity is something very loose and arbitrary, so adopting some suitable definition for myself is not a problem. There is no truth to the matter. On the other hand I have no real clue about consciousness, and happily admit it - philosophy of mind is *hard*. I might lean towards functionalism, but I do not think we know it is true (yet another reason to try uploading - it is a good test).

OK, I'm not an expert on psychology. But my understanding is, we don't actually have an instinctual fear of death. We have a collection of instinctual fears of potential sources of death. You're instinctively afraid of things that could kill you, but not of death in the abstract. Fear of death in the abstract is a learned trait. Anyway, resleeving and fork deletion were definitely not in the ancestral environment, so they shouldn't trigger any fear instincts.

Arenamontanus wrote:

(Sorry, can't avoid being a philosophy lecturer here - I blame workplace exposure)

Go ahead. The best discussions are when I learn something new or change my mind, and you often contribute with actual knowledge. I heard Nick Bostrom say something like you were great to have on the team because it was too small for a specialist in every area, so it was very convenient you knew everything ;)

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Smokeskin wrote:

Ilmarinen wrote:

Honestly, I always find the whole "we don't know where identity/consciousness resides" complaint very tenuous since those who bring it up rarely come up with a way to find out.

so if 100s of years ago I'd said "you know I'm a bit skeptical of this whole earth-is-the-center-of-the-universe thing, I'd be ignored because I didn't have any idea on how to discover the truth?

Actually, some of the first critics of Copernicus pointed out that his theory would mean the fixed stars would move on the sky across the span of a year as the Earth moved in its orbit. Observations did not show this. Hence they had a pretty valid criticism. They were wrong because the stars were much further away than generally thought, but it was a pretty tough problem for the heliocentrists. Good arguments should always lead further, not just to a claim of faith or ignorance. If you think there is more to the mind than what is described by current neuroscience you better tell what it is (so we can discuss if this makes sense, how to test it etc.). Otherwise it is just a statement of opinion that cannot be supported or refuted any more than "I think vanilla ice cream tastes good". It doesn't question the belief, it just shows that somebody else has a different belief.

But the problem here is that we all experience qualia and have that inner voice, that sense of self. What is that? I'm not saying it is anything but a natural and materialistic phenomena - and as much as we know a lot of what goes on in the brain, to the best of my knowledge we are still clueless about this.

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This is why the real discourse about heliocentrism, determinism or evolution is full of arguments about mechanisms, observations and what is logically consistent. And outside it is a bigger debate of personal opinion, which doesn't really contribute much idea-wise.

I completely agree, but the mechanism behind consciousness has not been described. I don't see how that is personal opinion at all, even if I can't contribute with new ideas.

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Still, I'll ask the question I've learned to ask in this situation: if sign up to make an alpha fork of yourself tomorrow, which will you consider a continuation of your current self: the original or both the original and the alpha fork? If it is only the original then what does it have that the alpha fork doesn't? If the answer is 'continuity of consciousness' then why do you think that this continuity is preserved across atoms but not across the pattern those atoms are arranged in?

That's a clever piece of philosophizing. I'm not sure how well it applies to the situation at hand, because our understanding of consciousness is so lacking.

This doesn't work as an argument against the applicability of the argument. Yes, we might not know how consciousness works. But that doesn't do any actual work in the argument: either continuity of consciousness matters, in which case you need to tell why substance identity is different from pattern identity, or continuity doesn't matter, in which case presumably copying and other weird stuff is OK. The question is about identity, not really what the mind is.

I don't see how you can separate the two. If I saw my alpha fork, I'd still feel like I, my consciousness, was residing in my own body. I wouldn't be nonchalant about suiciding just because the fork was there and would live on, at all. Identity seems very much entwined with the question of consciousness to me. Your position seems more akin to how a samurai would rather die than be dishonored - like you he places some other concept above personal survival. At least I can't see the scientific basis for believing that the existence of sufficiently me-like processes changes anything about the destruction of my mind. And by the way I hope you're right. I hope I can just have my brain destructively scanned and uploaded and live on. Keeping my meatbody alive through a hard takeoff singularity for long enough that an incremental brain replacement technique becomes available and buying it seems like a daunting financial task.

Yeah, Dan Dennett and David Chalmers has a lot of awesome things to say about continuity of consciousness (or lack thereof that we, through cognitive biases and errors, think we have), but for my money Carruthers and Metzinger say it more succinctly. Bakker's Blind Brain Theory is pretty good for this too: http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/the-last-magic-show-a-blind-...

My answer to the, "Would you be able to press the mind-wipe button?" question is on p. 269 of Core, under the heading "Uploading-Resleeving Continuity." Briefly, the process for voluntary/non-emergency resleeving allows the person to remain conscious, with consciousness straddling new & old bodies during the transfer. (Or the illusion of consciousness, or whatever your particular philosophical viewpoint interprets it as...). You can make whatever philosophical arguments you care to regarding whether this distributed consciousness represents "true" continuity* of the individual. But for the majority of transhumans in EP, it's good enough that they don't feel like they're killing themselves when they resleeve or upload for egocasting. The (process/illusion(?!)) of consciousness transfer sure doesn't feel like dying, and this is enough to alleviate philosophical hand-wringing. ___________________________ *What does "continuity" even mean? Sure, we've defined it as a game mechanic, but that's only a partial answer. Even if, like many of us, you're a hard-nosed materialist, there are many possible interpretations here, ranging from "there is no true continuity because when you resleeve the old mind is dead/wiped" to "you're a living meme; continuity is the continuance of you-as-meme." The fact is that most of transhumanity would rather watch sports or run XPs of the future version of "Jersey Shore" than think about this kind of shit.

Decivre wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:

Yes, meatbodies are such a hassle. I want easy upgrades! I want backups! I want egocasting, forking, merging and psychosurgery!

And just think, a few centuries from now you'll be complaining about how slow and outdated your supercomputer-virtualized brainstate is in comparison to whatever new cutting edge exists at the time, which we can only barely guess at.

Eh, by a century from now I hope they'll have figured out the neurohacks to get rid of most of the root causes of complaining as a mindstate, much less a behaviour.

davethebrave wrote:

Yeah, Dan Dennett and David Chalmers has a lot of awesome things to say about continuity of consciousness (or lack thereof that we, through cognitive biases and errors, think we have), but for my money Carruthers and Metzinger say it more succinctly. Bakker's Blind Brain Theory is pretty good for this too: http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/the-last-magic-show-a-blind-...

I really think this is a scientific question, not a philosophical one. Philosophy's track record is utter, utter crap on matters of science and why philosophy keeps being brought up is beyond me. To the best of my knowledge we have no idea about what consciousness is. Beginning to philosophize about it from that basis is next to pointless. Who says our mental faculties are even aligned with the realities of the phenomenon? What if it turns out to be as unintuitive as quantum mechanics (where I'd argue that anyone philosophizing on QM without knowing the actual science and math behind will invariably get it all wrong)?

I would think 'consciousness' is just the result of (perhaps) more complex brain structure. So, it's really the same electrical and chemical impulses as all life uses to function, just advanced enough that it can identify itself. Which is why I just kind of 'go with it' on egocasting and such. Not that it can't be done, I just don't think we have a clue how to do so yet. Yet.

Anarchitect wrote:

How do you know your consciousness doesn't end at the points you can't remember? You can't remember. This applies not only to sleep, but anytime you can't actually recall. Actually, it's worse than that, because the human memory is so screwed up that your experience of remembering something is only loosely linked to your experience of that moment.

For one, I am absolutely certain that there are conscious moments that I don't remember, so I'm not inclined to assume that lack of recall implies lack of consciousness. Second, from what I know of brain scans of people during sleep, there is still lots of activity in the brain. Third, even if there wasn't much activity - or none for a short period - I'm not convinced that means that you can't have continuity of consciousness. I'm not going to say I'm 100% sure that consciousness is continuous. I'm not, far from it. But I am by no means sure that consciousness isn't continuous to the degree that I would need to be to kill myself. If you pressed me, I'd say that there's a 50% chance consciousness isn't continuous, 25% that it is continuous and requires a continuous processing of the consciousness, and 25% that it is continuous even across gaps of inactivity like temporary death. But I'm just guessing, since the science isn't in yet. How sure are you?

Smokeskin wrote:

davethebrave wrote:

Yeah, Dan Dennett and David Chalmers has a lot of awesome things to say about continuity of consciousness (or lack thereof that we, through cognitive biases and errors, think we have), but for my money Carruthers and Metzinger say it more succinctly. Bakker's Blind Brain Theory is pretty good for this too: http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/the-last-magic-show-a-blind-...

I really think this is a scientific question, not a philosophical one. Philosophy's track record is utter, utter crap on matters of science and why philosophy keeps being brought up is beyond me. To the best of my knowledge we have no idea about what consciousness is. Beginning to philosophize about it from that basis is next to pointless. Who says our mental faculties are even aligned with the realities of the phenomenon? What if it turns out to be as unintuitive as quantum mechanics (where I'd argue that anyone philosophizing on QM without knowing the actual science and math behind will invariably get it all wrong)?

That's also Bakker's stance, more or less. So...you're kind of arguing in favour of BBT, or at least using the same basic suppositions that Bakker is to reach his conclusions.

Ilmarinen wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

Let us imagine that we discovered - to scientific standards - that there really was something like personal identity and continuity of consciousness and it was intimately linked to the instance of consciousness running in your brain, it persisted from moment to moment and across sleep and unconsciousness. Would that significantly change your position?

I'd love to hear what you think this would look like in terms of atoms. Because as far as I'm concerned? Individual atoms are swapped in and out all the time. The pattern in which these atoms are arranged - which Eclipse Phase calls the ego - is what persists. It changes, but those changes [i]are[/i] the continuity you mention. If you found a way to track them, to reverse them, you could bring back a mind as it was yesterday, a year ago, twenty years ago. If you could make those changes again, you'd get back to the present-day individual. That's the only empirically detectable place where I see continuity as physically possible. So either we're discussing a phenomenon with no empirical underpinning (in which case it's not possible to discuss), a phenomenon that has empirical underpinning yet disagrees with basically every observation we've made about the nature of the brain, or your positions don't hold up. Thus I'd appreciate it if you clarified the nature of the continuity you assert and how it would be disrupted by a pause.

I actually asked the question because I'd like an answer from someone in your camp, not because I wanted someone to dodge it. But let me be clear on what you're asking here. There's a scientific question we'd like to settle. You want me to make some wild philosophical speculation because you think it will be similar to your favority philosophical speculation, and that would somehow make it science? Well, why don't you go first. I'd love to hear how you think qualia arises. In terms of atoms.

That's a little like saying that each atom inside of a computer needs to maintain perfect cohesion in order to work. There are far grosser (in the sense of fine and gross) mechanisms at work in both a modern supercomputer and a homo sapiens brain that interact to feed us a representation of something into our experience (including the apprehension of experience itself). The current neuroscience backs what Smokeskin is arguing. You might want to check the link that Smokeskin disparaged earlier in this thread, it reinforces a lot of the points he's been making in a fairly concise way.

Ilmarinen wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

Well, why don't you go first. I'd love to hear how you think qualia arises. In terms of atoms.

Easy. The sensory organs pass along information to the brain and the brain changes in response to it. Then it changes in response to those changes and to new sensory information, until death. In other words, each experience and each thought changes the pattern in which the atoms are arranged.

What then would be the implication if indistinguishable atoms where to be deliberately arranged in an identical pattern with equivalent energy in place of your current atoms, or a on the next bed over in the resleeving clinic, or on the other side of the solar system, of 6 months after your death. , even if the pattern of atoms is different but the overall neural structure is sufficiently similar to result in identical memories, thoughts ideas and opinions If there is no way to even detect that the procedure was performed by examination of the pattern of atoms and individual atoms would have changed over time anyway then ether they are the same person or the defining trait of a person is not linked to atoms (religions refer to this as a soul). While science has never detected a sole that cannot disprove its existence. In eclipse phase however there is some evidence to its non existence. People who are relieved do not change in ways that would not be consistent with a purely physical mind state. Some have reduced fear of death, increased risky behaviour or longer term planning but these are rational reactions to functional immortality and are displayed to a lesser extent among people who have never released but are culturally exposed to resleaving, also people who resleve multipule times, including between sinthmorfs experience these changes to a greater extent, presumably without becoming any more soulless. This argument fails to prove the non existence of a soul however as it is possible that it exists without exerting an influence on our mental state. It is also possible that soul ether moves with the ego, or that in writing the mind simulation software, specifically to avoid changing the mind, we inadvertently simulated all the effects of a soul upon said mind. Always remember absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And there some theory’s regarding psi that could lead to actual evidence.

davethebrave wrote:

That's a little like saying that each atom inside of a computer needs to maintain perfect cohesion in order to work.

What? No, it's the opposite of that. Individual atoms are swapped in and out. Only the pattern and its changes matter.

davethebrave wrote:

Oh, and on the qualia issue: http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/the-something-about-mary/

I'm not really sure what that has to do with the issue.

thezombiekat wrote:

What then would be the implication if indistinguishable atoms where to be deliberately arranged in an identical pattern with equivalent energy in place of your current atoms, or a on the next bed over in the resleeving clinic, or on the other side of the solar system, of 6 months after your death. , even if the pattern of atoms is different but the overall neural structure is sufficiently similar to result in identical memories, thoughts ideas and opinions If there is no way to even detect that the procedure was performed by examination of the pattern of atoms and individual atoms would have changed over time anyway then ether they are the same person or the defining trait of a person is not linked to atoms (religions refer to this as a soul).

Yes, exactly. In Eclipse Phase this is called an ego, and reconstituting the pattern with the same atoms [i]does[/i] yield the same person.

It doesn't have much to do with the subject because as long as we can all agree that qualia must reside in the brain the exact method through which they're expressed is basically irrelevant.

Ilmarinen wrote:

It doesn't have much to do with the subject because as long as we can all agree that qualia must reside in the brain the exact method through which they're expressed is basically irrelevant.

Well, the neuroscience doesn't back up that compartmentalized a view of the brain, so actually not only can we not all agree on that, the ones causing the biggest ruckus on that front are neuroscientists and philosophers of mind informed by modern neuroscience. There are distinct possibilities apart from "qualia exists" that can be asserted, just as there are distinct possibilities apart from "the self exists" or even "the experience of the self exists" and I think that if someone decides in a hard sci fi RPG to replace modern chemistry with the Four Elements + Quintessence as the real deal, that's their game but I'm willing to debate about the science at work in core. So yes, the article has total relevance to this discussion because it argues from neuroscience against a basic supposition you stated everyone should be agreeing on, unless you just want to presume that the setting's default is a position relevant to (many strains of) pre-scientific philosophy of mind but not so much to hard science. The following excerpt makes more sense in the context of the article, but focusing just on this part might illuminate what I'm talking about for you.

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This offers a fair assessment, I think, of our cognitive straits when we encounter the Knowledge Argument. No one knows what heuristics the thought experiment triggers how. A fortiori, no one knows the problem ecologies corresponding to those heuristics. So here’s what I think is happening. We are inclined to agree that Mary can learn all the physical information regarding the neurophysiology of colour simply because, thanks to metacognitive neglect, we are prone to think our cognitive capacities (as we intuit them) are simple rather than fractionate, and therefore universal in their application. Mary’s subsequent exposure to colour and the introduction of first-person information violates that intuition of universality. So it seems as though we must either deny the intuitive appeal of the first premise, as Dennett advises, or allow a second, distinct order of being into our ontology, the phenomenal or the mental or what have you. The attraction of the latter turns on the environmental bias of our cognitive resources. When we reflect on experience, the idea (also argued by Eric Schwitzgebel in his excellent Perplexities of Consciousness) is that we are relying on the same set of resources we use to troubleshoot our natural and social environments. Deliberative theoretical cognition treats efficacy-only metacognitive information as just more efficacy-and-accuracy environmental information: we submit conscious experience, in other words, to heuristic machinery adapted to problem-solving the objects of experience. The drastic difference in ‘formats’ (low-dimensional efficacy-only versus high-dimensional efficacy-and-accuracy) suggests, as it suggested to Descartes so long ago, that we are dealing with a drastically different order of being. Given the biologist-in-the-burlap bag dilemma facing metacognition, we have no way of intuiting otherwise, no metacognitive access to information regarding the inadequacy of the (efficacy-only) information that is available. What makes the thought-experiment so bewitching, then, is that it simultaneously caters to two complementary intuitions arising from the substantial, but entirely invisible to intuition, limits faced by introspective cognition. It triggers the presumption of universality falling out of our inability to metacognize or intuit our adaptive toolbox. It seems natural to assume that Mary can learn all the physical information regarding colour vision. It also triggers the presumption of environmental reality that arises as a result of submitting metacognitive (low-dimensional efficacy-only) information pertaining to conscious experience to cognitive systems adapted to environmental (high-dimensional efficacy-and-accuracy) information. It seems that her experience of red has to be ‘something,’ given that it indisputably provides Mary with information of some kind over and above the physical information she already possesses. The thought-experiment becomes an intuitively compelling argument for dualism and against physicalism because of the way its information structure plays on our metacognitive shortcomings. This is basically what the depth-heuristic theory presumes of the Muller-Lyer effect: the information structure of the lines presented trigger the application of learned visual heuristics outside of their adaptive problem ecologies, leading to the apparent perception of two different lengths. Likewise, the information structure of Mary generates the apparent cognition of two fundamentally different species of information by triggering the inappropriate application of heuristics recruited via deliberative cognition. One might suppose the effect is so much more vivid in the case of visual shortcomings because of the extravagant resources expended on vision. The computational expense of the accuracy it provides is balanced against the evolutionary advantages arising from the different problems it allows our organism to solve. The illusion is obvious because vision is heuristically high-dimensional. With Mary the situation is much more murky simply because metacognition is so low-dimensional and ‘efficacy oriented’ in comparison.

So given that qualia themselves (including the qualia of self and indeed the self/mind/will/soul/other rationalized noocentric mythology) are a skip in the CD player on a Ryoji Ikeda track, a distorted halting causing the beat made of CD skipping sounds to go almost imperceptibly off-kilter for too few skips to notice. Qualia, and the mind, look like a cognitive version of visual anosognosia, where someone who is blind is convinced they can see, how can we be arguing for the reality of what amount to fantasy elements in a hard sci fi, especially a horror sci fi where the more horrifying option being true to hard science is part of the schtick? Although, again, to each their own game as regards physics and metaphysics. Whatever makes your game more playable/enjoyable/tells the story you want to tell. I just think mine is more "beyond even augmented cognition's capacity to fully grokk the insane horror" that I love in a Thomas Ligotti or a Matt Cardin (or H.P. Lovecraft) short story, much less a sci fi game where horror is a prominent theme, and that's [b]all[/b] personal preference, so even if the science didn't suggest it so strongly, I might for story go with the essential void that we all are glitching out on and have 'em roll Will X 3 as the exhumans describe the process the PCs will soon be undergoing by which they rid themselves of the processing drains of evolved biases and illusions, including the self. Might. I prefer to work out the ways story is compatible with what's in place as a creative exercise than falling back on hand-waving unless it's a [i]really[/i] good hand-wave idea.

Yeah, until you're an exhuman running experimental morph brains, bio or synth, that have greater computational abilities than regular brains by an order of magnitude large enough to make the dangerous edits...and maybe the scary part is that they're right, and it works! But what it has worked on is no longer recognizably human in thought. Maybe the exhumans don't even "think" in the traditional ways (maybe they invent a new word, like "shmink" to approximate the distance, maybe they find more efficacious communication heuristics than any of those underpinning linguistics that are more accessible to their engineered superbrains) once enough previously occluded environmental/social/metacognitive information is brought online and distractions from the occluded input/info (such as cognitive biases) removed and the processing power shunted elsewhere. An engineer's mindset driving a neuroscientist/psychosurgeon with a hyperbright morph could be the only three elements that need to fall together for these sorts of experiments in efficiency to generate their horrific, alien results. I like you as a foil, Ilmarinen. Opposition to your stances generates great Eclipse Phase adventure seeds and plot hooks!