Ego Necromancy

; blurb

: What are hiveminds made of? Interconnected minds, obviously. Or is it more complicated than that? Are selves more than illusion --- a mere cope for apes pretending to be human? Perhaps truly picking the brain of hivemind means studying ego death and decomposition.

; foreword : > If the ego is the ghost that has arisen from the grave of the self,

Then expect it to act in ghoulish ways!

--- Hexen - "Indefinite Archetype"

; related : -

Substrate Inoculation

We've written about hiveminds before, though many of our thoughts are scattered about. Some major pieces are: , a long post dissecting failure modes that occur even in sympathetic depictions of group minds; and , where we turned from critique to construction and illuminated some phenomena that naturally emerge.

That last one is important, so to recap, human consciousness is awareness of the self integrated with social modeling. You have an understanding of "you" mediated by knowing the ways you are like and unlike others, as well as how others anticipate and respond to your behavior.

If we isolate certain variables --- the bandwidth of communication between minds, the cognitive resources dedicated to modeling others --- and push them to heretofore unseen extremes, something interesting can emerge from the math. It's possible to arrange these minds so that the collective has enough memory and processing allocated to reflective modeling that, for any individual member, the group's understanding is richer and more detailed than they themselves are.

Imagine one of your friends right now. You can remember various things they've said, you can predict some of what they'd say in response to certain hypotheticals. But you nonetheless understand that you cannot become your friend, and you can't really know what they're thinking or what they want.

But... what if you could? Or rather, what if you were some sort of hivemind that your friend was but a small part of. You know them perfectly, because they've shared all they are with your collective.^[Put another way, it is as if you had an introject headmate of your friend, not just similar but fully identical down to every thought and impulse.]

Let's tweak the scenario. Imagine your friend gets sick and can't keep up with their usual social interaction nor their preferred hobbies, not while stuck in the hospital. They can interact with you, but that's about it. Their illness means they suffer from a kind of brain fog --- it's difficult for them to remember or maintain a train of thought.

You didn't get sick, so you can spin up that perfect fidelity introjection of them. Your model can still think clearly, and should the two of you allow it, this "hiveself" would be far more equipped to converse with any friend-of-friends or engage with whatever media your friend was interested in.

We belabor this point to build an intuition for what it means to invert the usual state of affairs: devising a circumstance where your idea of someone is, in a meaningful sense, the realer version.

But we have not accurately specified this scenario. If "you" are a hivemind, what does that actually mean? The above paragraphs still make sense if we imagine you were instead just a really, really smart alien or supercomputer.^[Mainly because this is how it was first written.] But that is not the trope we're here to discuss.

As explained previously, key to the concept of the "hiveself" is that it's a distributed copy. Even should one give rise to a hiveself, it may be that no other member of the collective ever possesses simultaneously every piece of data that makes up one's mind; yet every such piece of data is out there, tucked away in some brain. Each of those individual thought-holders is capable drawing minor correlations and conclusions in accordance with your cognition, bouncing a small part of you off of the other info they possess.

A lonemind wakes up, checks their phone, and thinks something like: "Yay, my new book got here! I think I'll go read it in the park. Oh, just checked the whether, looks like it's raining today. But maybe I will just take a walk in the rain instead."

A hive would think something like...

One hiveling, unpacking goods down in a logistics chamber of the nest, says to another: "Did you hear? We retrieved that book we were looking for." / "Was it another request from the girl that reads in the park all the time?" / "Yep, bet she'll be there this afternoon."

Meanwhile, two guards are patrolling the entrance. "Look, it's already drizzling." / "Think any of the workers will be glad to get rain on their chitin?" / "Obviously."

The hiveling in question is sleeping in a pod while both these conversations take place. When she wakes up, her connection to the collective^her [metamind, if you will] immediately brings her up to speed on both conversations, and she decides on the rain-walk over the (now unviable) park-reading.

This is an overwrought example, made much more roundabout and inefficient than the normal way, but more complex examples would have been even harder to work through step-by-step.

For a sketch, though, imagine parts of this "hiveself" having long conversations with people while you sleep. Now, if someone really wanted to talk to you, they'd wait for you to wake up, but not every conversation requires your full undivided consciousness.

One hiveling remembers your comforting way with words, letting that soothe them in your absence. One hiveling heard about a funny anecdote you'd experienced firsthand, thus prompting one to summon some sub-aspects of you to give a more involved retelling. One hiveling just wants a quick vibe check and polls for your opinion on a minor technical topic.

As touched on a previous post, this is essentially just structured gossip --- a "hiveself" can be thought of as your reputation taking on a life of its own. It can make decisions on your behalf, and you have to live with the consequences of that.

More pointedly, consider what happens when your reputation changes stance on a topic before you do. To us, this seems like the tail wagging the dog, but it would be routine, even desirable, to a hiveling. Why wouldn't you submit to being improved by the vast wisdom of the collective?

Amusingly --- which is to say, in contrast to kneejerk assumptions --- I think hiveminds of this sort would be resistant to "telephone games" and the deleterious social consequences that result from the rumor mill transmuting figures into abstracted, essentialized distortions of themselves.

There exist languages where speech must have markers to indicate the epistemic basis of its knowledge (belief, observation, hearsay, hypothetical, etc.), and I contend that hive communication would be similar, but taken further. A hiveling could produce a chain of citation as easily as breathing --- because the sanctity of one's very mind depends on faithfully understanding one's sisters and siblings.

Would you believe all this is preamble? Or I suppose it's a graceful transition into the problem this framework eventually creates.

Hiveling or Homunculus?

Because in a hivemind like this... what actually is a hiveling? What are "you" or "I", if we're both members of this hive?

We've described this intuitively, by taking human psychology and asking what happens if we turn these knobs up to eleven. If I had a perfect model of you, and you have a perfect model of me... aren't we just one being with two bodies?

After we have coalesced, my body choosing to still act like me would very much be a choice; it would be no more or less appropriate if your body started acting as me full time and mine as you; or if we switched it up day to day, vel similia.

So you might think: oh okay, the way this works is that minds become as software, with bodies as hardware. You can install files and programs on any number of computers, and you can send commands remotely, so an analogy follows: maybe one day you run on this one with a great graphics card then another upon this one, equipped with an always-functioning printer.^[My worldbuilding is quite imaginative, isn't it?] Maybe one day someling is using all the good hosts for an important project, so you have to boot back up on the dinky fallback caste.

You hop from body to body, and perhaps this all isn't so cleanly analogous to computers (it could take years to properly mold a new brain's neurology to mimick yours perfectly), but over time, you can drift from body to body.

In summary, we can view the hivemind as having a number of selves and a number of bodies, and there is no reason to expect these numbers to necessarily correlate.

I will note the concept of "hiveself" gets a bit strained at this point: if the fragmented hiveself recombines into another parallel instance of you elsewhere, neither should have primacy. But when this happens, are you mutually hiveselves? No, perhaps "hiveself" refers only to fragments scattered through the hive, and complete instance merit a different term, or perhaps just "selves." (Brainselves?)

Let's sit on this notion for a bit longer. Consider the possibility of "ghosts in the hive" that exists as hiveselves without any hivelings possessing a complete coherent copy of their mind.

Let's now turn to something that should be an inevitable consideration whenever we imagine parallel copies floating around: branching. Two versions of you may come to different conclusions on a topic, placing priority on different goals, unable to reconcile. You are still siblings, hivemates, but you cannot consider her to be you any longer.

But the two nevertheless remain profoundly similar. The two share a long chain of memories together. In the greater hive, which indexes all hivelings, does