This is something that has been bouncing around in my head for a while, and I don't remember if it has been addressed anywhere on the official books directly.
Could a regular animal, a dog for example, use a cortical stack?
I imagine that, if possible, this would be rare in 10 AF, as it would be seen as a waste of resources, but not unheard of, considering how attached people get to their pets (and I speak from personal knowledge here), specially among the idle rich.
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Cortical stacks on animals?
Mon, 2014-09-08 12:14
#1
obsidian razor
Cortical stacks on animals?
Mon, 2014-09-08 12:45
#2
Gardensnake
I don't really see why an
I don't really see why an animal couldn't be outfitted with a cortical stack. The issue I see with it though is how the animal would react to an unfamiliar body. I've seen how some animals react to collars, harnesses, doggie-wheelchairs, and other things they aren't familiar with and it wasn't pretty. As a side note to this, how would a pet react to a character in a new morph? Considering smell, voice, and appearance are likely different, how would the pet recognize it's owner?
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Mon, 2014-09-08 13:17
#3
obsidian razor
I would say no, unless it's a
I would say no, unless it's a smart animal and has some way to ID it's owner beyond traditional things like smell and voice.
And I suspect too that there is no reason why an animal could not have a cortical stack, but I was curious if it has been touched somewhere in the books.
Mon, 2014-09-08 23:19
#4
jackgraham
I don't see why not, given we
I don't see why not, given we've got people being sleeved into large aquarium fish in one case already.
If you've got a well trained guard animal, for example, it definitely makes sense to keep it backed up so that you don't have to train another.
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Tue, 2014-09-09 00:51
#5
ShadowDragon8685
Of course, you'd have to
Of course, you'd have to clone it into a highly exact new body, or at least trick it into feeling certain that it is in a highly exact new body... But yeah, I could see someone deciding that was a project worth investing money in: train one police baboon, implant him into a dozen clone bodies.
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Tue, 2014-09-09 06:18
#6
GreyBrother
Isn't being able to do that
Isn't being able to do that exactly the point of Smart Animals to begin with?
Tue, 2014-09-09 07:11
#7
ORCACommander
Actually a lot of animals
Actually a lot of animals would be immune to the alienation test as only a small number can recognize themselves in a mirror
Tue, 2014-09-09 09:17
#8
Lilith
This
Seconded. I mean, one of the theorized solutions to the rapid decline in bee populations is to emulate their little bee-brains into little bee-robots so they can just keep doing what they do. They're not cognizant enough to know any better. I'd link the article if I could remember where I saw it.
Tue, 2014-09-09 12:19
#9
ThatWhichNeverWas
This is covered in panopticon.
From Panopticon p.175, "Smart Animals";
"Smart animals can be equipped with cortical stacks (and can also be backed up and resleeved), though this is rare.
Most owners still do not bother given the costs of the implants and procedures, but it is growing more common, especially for beloved pets. In some habitats, resleeving animals is illegal on the grounds that placing an animal mind in a new body it does not understand is cruelty, though this is challenged elsewhere. In other stations, resleeving an animal in anything but a morph of the same animal species is not allowed.
Smart animals take quite poorly to resleeving (−30 on the Continuity, Integrity, and Alienation Tests) and especially poorly to morphs of different species (an additional −30)."
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In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few.
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Wed, 2014-09-10 00:51
#10
Erulastant
I see no reason why not. I'd
I see no reason why not. I'd go with the panopticon rules but drop the continuity test for any animal that isn't a smart animal, and drop the alienation test for any animal dumb enough not to recognize itself.
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You, too, were made by humans. The methods used were just cruder, imprecise. I guess that explains a lot.
Sat, 2014-09-13 04:43
#11
Chrontius
I see no reason not to stack
I see no reason not to stack up one's pets - anything mammalian, and most reptiles (worth keeping as pets) have enough personality to care about, (blue tegus are often described as 'cats with scales') and anybody should be able to grab some expert systems off the mesh, have their muse operate them, and collaborate with the resulting gestalt well enough to build either a convincing (to the animal) synth, or informorph form. Cloned flesh shouldn't be hard, to the extent that cloning vats are available to you, if the critter had basic biomods and mesh inserts. Or do stacks record your genome and self-image for cloning and bodysculpting of any morph available to you?
As to resleeved characters, I suspect that if you grow a puppy up with mesh inserts, they'd be (horribly underutilized, certainly, but also…) able to use that as a jumping-off point to get used to someone's physical form changing radically. If not, veterinarians do psychosurgery, right? :p
On the gripping hand, uplifting species to sapience in a stable fashion is … we have some idea how difficult that is. What about uplifting individual critters? Can I, if I find that puppy-cloning capacity is expensive and splicers and bodysculpting are cheap on this hab (where I intend to stay for quite some time) carefully uplift the egofile of one particular dog in order to turn him into a 'werewolf'?