Holy wrote:

I wondered a bit about infomorphs and came up with some questions. If you would like to comment on this I would be happy.

1. How does an infomorph look to others and itself? Are they pure creatures of thought or do they have something like an unique apperance?

There is nothing like a "pure creature of thought". A human-like brain converted to software will need a body representation to function (just consider how integral the body is to feelings), although it doesn't have to show up visually. And people typically want to look like something so other's can identify and relate to them - entities that do not care about that are seriously posthuman. So infomorphs will no doubt at least have a visual avatar, but could quite likely have tactile, olfactory or any other sense elements in their representation. ("You know the worst thing about dealing with the Tiu clade? Their theme music. It is so annoying!")

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Does a transhuman need some picture of itself in order not to go mad?

Might be necessary for many people. Your body image is rather strongly linked to your sense of self (read Oliver Sachs descriptions of how weird the world, body and self can get when you have parietal lobe malfunctions). Not having a "body" might lead at least to dissociative mental disorders.

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Can you definetly identify an infomorph by looking at it ("seeing" the patterns underlying it's representation in Simulspace)?

Avatars are likely just AR pictures, and doesn't have to tell you anything ("Yet another SimWorld clipart body.") You want to look for cryptographic identifiers, like some authentication tag ("Sir, the avatar has an authenticated signature belonging to Mrs Herone Gaultier, CitId 2055071848229, c-nethandle HeroneGold45") or maybe a unique combination of software if the infomorph wants to hide ("Sir, the software running the avatar is a Cognite ExoS4 5.40.b. Comparing the plugins, remote file dependencies and delay pattern there is 96.3% that this is the same informorph that accosted you earlier this morning.")

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Can you trap an infomorph in simulspace without it realising that it is not in the pysical world? If yes, could an infomporph trained in simulspacedesign, programming etc. realize that it is trapped?

I think most people in EP are pretty good at recognizing simulspaces by now. Small things like physics being slightly off (did the programmers really check whether the bookshelf *tastes* bookshelf, or that dust accumulates in the right way?) Making an indistinguishable from reality simulspace takes a lot of effort and computing power. It can be done, but the effort is huge. Of course, AGIs might not see the difference between the physical world and simulspaces in the first place: sometimes that real wolrd naivite can come back and haunt them seriously.

A [b]Simulmorph[/b] is a bundle of graphics and code written to represent an ego in, and allow that ego to interface with a particular [b]simulspace[/b]. There's probably not allot of crossover of simulmorphs and simulspaces because the simulspaces wouldn't all use the same game engine (or "reality engine"). An infomorph is just an ego running on hardware, Probably dedicated hardware, probably a cyberbrain, that is not encased or attached to a morph. The cannon material does not imply that there is any simulation of embodiment or environment when being instanced as an informorph. However, an infomorph could immerse itself in the rich AR environment generally present in any human habitat and participate in that environment via an AR Avatar. As to identification of an informorph; all ego's running on hardware will have a specific brain print. See Panopticon.