Spoilers ahead, of course.

Wayfinder wrote:

I have a problem with the Exsurgent Virus. How could it possibly affect the Ego? Viruses, by definition, affect pure physiology; the purpose of which is to alter one's physiology in order to produce more of itself and spread itself. But according to the book, it seems that this virus not only changes a morph to use Psi powers, but enables the Ego to use other Morphs in the same way provided the morph is not a mechanical machine or an infomorph. Just how is this possible?

You can see the morph as firmware and the ego as software. The virus infects the firmware (and modifies it; in real computers these changes are pretty limited, but analogies only go so far) but it also makes sure to infect the software. So if you move the software to new hardware it will infect the firmware there too - and new software using the infected firmware will also get infected. The separation between psychology and physiology is pretty soft in biological organisms, much softer than in computers. Software viruses can in principle actually change mediums. Consider a virus that tells (very stupid) people they must copy it by hand to new computers, but also runs as a normal virus on its own. This virus exists both as software and a meme. A slightly more sophisticated virus might infect computers, but if it finds the computer is attached to the right electronic tools it also makes USB-enabled devices that if inserted (by curious people) into computers they infect them. I can even imagine that if I knew an exploit for a badly designed DNA sequencer machine I could make a biological virus which would trigger the exploit if sequenced, and then execute code I have added to the biological virus DNA (say, in order to infect other lab equipment and get any infected DNA synthesis machine to make more of the virus DNA). There is no reason beyond efficiency why artificial viruses could not be multimedia. Of course the whole psi thing is slightly dodgy from a hard sf perspective. If you accept that some form of information processing in some medium can have psi effects, then it is not clear that that cannot be used to spread the virus. So infected minds would be able to infect their body using handwavy psi, and perhaps the reverse.

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Why would such a virus do such a thing? No other virus bothers with gifting its host with special powers when its principle purpose requires so much less?

It does it because somebody made it that way. Right now there are viruses that when they infect cells make them immune to antibiotics and fluorescent. They were made in the lab, but are fine examples of viruses that do much more than evolution would normally have aimed for.

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Is this really a virus in the clinical sense?

Clinical viruses have up until now always been natural phenomena. I have no doubt, given my above hack ideas, that soon we will see artificial things that replicate but do not neatly fit into these categories.

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How is it spread? Is it quarantined?

The exsurgent virus clearly exists in several forms: nanomachines, biological viruses, software and perhaps others (memes? psi?). Each can spread in different ways, and given the AI it has is pretty smart (at least when run on the right host system) it can reinvent itself to new media and circumvent countermeasures. So the best we can say is that some strains are quarantined... with a high probability.

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This has implications that undermine the whole premise of transhumanism, if you think about it. But I'll let you all think about that.

Huh? In what ways does a fictional virus undermine the premise of transhumanism? Even if we lived in a dualist world with soulstuff and matter we could still consider how to enhance both.