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  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/posts/eusapience",
  "path": "/posts/posts/eusapience",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-31T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "; related\n: - [](you-clans.html)\n  - [](hive-mindless.html)\n\nEusapience is what comes next, a state of cognition beyond human\nconsciousness.\n\nThis comes in up the newest Vermin Cathexis\nshort, but in summary: eusapience is the\ntrait that distinguishes our minds from a true hivemind.  Just as\neusociality is organization and cooperation far beyond simple\nsociality, eusapience must be cognition and awareness much further\nbeyond sapience.  But what does this actually mean?\n\nBriefly near the climax, there comes a concise formulation: \"The\nexscient do not truly know one another. They are self-aware, but they\ncan never be other-aware. They can never be eusapient.\"\n\nThis bold assertion suffices for prose --- our narrator is not meant\nto be relied upon --- but can it hold up philosophically? What does\n\"self-aware\" even mean, that this assertion could have any semantic\nmeat to it?\n\nA loose conjecture comes to me easily. Simple creatures are driven by\ninstinct and stimuli. With greater cognition, one might even form\nbeliefs and predictions about the world. But surely if an animal\ninjures its leg and must avoid putting weight on it, or stores some\nnuts knowing it will get hungry in the future, is this not awareness\nof its self?\n\nThe difference is that this awareness is a straightforward compression\nof the world. To be self-aware, it seems, should mean your beliefs\nabout yourself do not describe yourself, they prescribe yourself.\nYou begin to make choices, directing your behavior based on your\nunderstanding of yourself.\n\nThis feels intuitively right (if a bit question-begging) but it's not\nenough to really get anywhere.\n\nAs a teenager, I read a psychology book called Others in mind: Social\norigins of self-consciousness. The thesis is right there in the\ntitle. This was a profound and insightful book, with vivid anecdotes\nand theories I could not do justice to, not a hazy decade later.\n\nBut its most oversimplified idea has stuck with me. Self-awareness is\nalmost a misnomer. I would go as far as to contend that a lone entity,\nno matter how intelligent, simply wouldn't develop a sense of self,\nnot for its own sake. What would be the point? no really, think of it\n--- what is \"you\" and why do you care about it? What is \"I\"?\n\nI think because you are. Fundamentally, the word \"I\" only makes\nsense not because \"I\" exist, but because there is a \"you\" I am\nspeaking to. I am describing myself to someone who is not myself.\n\nWhat you are aware of when you are self-aware --- what your self\neven is --- is a social construct. You act a certain way so that\nothers' conception of you is favorable and in line with your own\nconception of you.\n\nIt's recursive theory of mind. I'm modeling what you're thinking, and\nyou're modeling me, so I'm modeling you modeling me.  In a way, it's\nself-creating, a bootstraping metastasis: you need to have a\nself-concept to interact fluently self-aware creatures who expect\nthose they interact with to be self-aware.  From a certain point of a\nview, consciousness is a self-defense strategy.\n\n-Imagine you're a scrambler. (Spoilers for a climatic reveal in Blindsight.)\n: ::: blockquote\n\n  Imagine you\\'re a scrambler.\n\n  Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no\n  awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and\n  persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological---but no\n  other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are\n  conscious of nothing.\n\n  You can\\'t imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn\\'t\n  even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can\\'t quite put\n  your finger on.\n\n  Try.\n\n  Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense\n  with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent\n  transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to\n  follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input.\n  Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful\n  information to share, whose lives you\\'ll defend according to the\n  rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or\n  predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or\n  destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant\n  tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which,\n  while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually\n  beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of\n  these eventualities, and many others.\n\n  You decode the signals, and stumble:\n\n  I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much\n  as any other hooker in the dome---\n\n  To fully appreciate Kesey\\'s Quartet---\n\n  They hate us for our freedom---\n\n  Pay attention, now---\n\n  Understand.\n\n  There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are\n  needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they\n  are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have\n  arisen by chance.\n\n  The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way\n  that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort\n  does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume\n  the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness.\n  The signal is a virus.\n\n  Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.\n\n  The signal is an attack.\n\n  And it\\'s coming from right about there.\n\n  :::\n\nWe can never perfectly understand who another person is. Our language\n(and our own understanding of both language and ourselves) just isn't\nprecise enough to convey it all. And even if it could, brains are so\nbig that being able to tell someone everything you are would crowd out\nwho they are.\n\nBut imagine you had a very, very high bandwidth of communication\nbetween you and your friends. Imagine it was almost always available.\nImagine your brains had evolved from the ground up, growing to\nmaturity in conditions like this.\n\n(Computers can write out the entire contents of their working memory,\nand send it over the wire. This sort of design isn't impossible,\nit's just never occurred in nature.)\n\nAt first glance, this doesn't really change the nature of what we're\nworking with. Sure, we would be able to arrive at more accurate\nunderstandings of each other if we could innately emit and process\nmore social information per second.\n\nBut you can't fit a box inside a box of the same size. It has to be\nsmaller. Your model of another person has to be smaller than the\nperson.\n\nBut does it? Really?\n\nAgain I ask: what even are you?  You have preferences, memories, and\nsort of gestalt essence that emerges from that raw list of facts about\nwhat you've done and what you like.\n\nYou probably know what 4+5 is. You probably know the capital city of\nsome distant country. Your mind has accrued so many definitions and\ncategorizations, and my next question is obvious: is that data you?\n\nNow, it's possible to have some personal connection to certain facts\nthat, on the face of it, seem dry and irrelevant. But not all such facts.\nthere is a whole bank of rote information in your skull that you\ncertainly wouldn't wish to part with, but if you were defining \"you\",\nif you had to chose between it and your episodic memory or sense of\nidentity or dream-desires, it's obvious which one is of marginal\nimportance.\n\nYou aren't a box. You're a box that contains stuff, and some of that\nstuff is more \"you\" than other stuff. Pare your brain down to your\nessential core, and what fraction of the full network remains?\n\nCould you fit another self inside?^[And I don't mean that in a plural\nway.]\n\nImagine you met someone just like you. Not literally you, but you come\nfrom similar backgrounds, you have similar tastes, you agree on so\nmany things. A person like this is a lot easier to model than a\nstranger from another country, because to a certain extent you can\njust go \"well, what would I do?\"\n\nWhen you create a zip file, part of what happens is the computer finds\nstretches of data that's the same across the files, and replaces one\nwith a reference to the other. You deduplicate, record the\ndifferences.\n\nSo, how accurate an intersocial model do you think could arise, if you\nhad a group with very high bandwidth communication and fundamentally\nsimilar brains?\n\nThey would, at least as this analysis is concerned, resultingly have\nbrains of three parts --- their self, their models of others, and\ntheir shared knowledge. Each model is compressed, referencing other\nmodels and common knowledge to approximate its original.\n\nLet me sketch a toy example. Imagine we have hivelings A, B, and C.\nWe'll handwave and say 50% of their brains are reserved for common\nknowledge; we're only concerned with the rest. The math gets easier if\nignore deduplication (or just imagine they have self-data maximally\ndifferent from each other) and to make things tricky, let's imagine\n20% of A is their inalienable self. Ditto for B and C.\n\nThis means that we can't fit all of B and all of C inside the 30% of\nA that's left for modeling; so each must be left with only a ¾\naccurate approximations of each other. Except, wait a minute! If B and\nC both have a 15% reserved for A, it doesn't have to overlap! It's\neasy to imagine each knows a different side of A. Imagine if, between\nthem, they happen to have perfect coverage of every aspect of A\n\nNow imagine A is asleep, and B and C are having a conversation. If\nthey simply imagine what A could plausibly say, correcting each other\nwhere they're unsure, then they can imagine exactly what A would\nsay.\n\nHere we have hit upon something novel. The model of you that exists\namong your hivemates' brains is just as richly realized as the real\nyou! This is something that human brains are incapable of.\n\n(There are flaws in this toy model --- every assumption made will be\nmuch messier in more realistic scenarios. But do you see the\npossibility space I'm pointing toward?  After all, even humans are not\nperfectly self-aware in practice.)\n\nIf we add more hivelings to the col",
  "title": "Eusapience (n.)"
}