{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/essays/ego-necromancy",
  "path": "/posts/essays/ego-necromancy",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-02T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "; blurb\n\n: What are hiveminds made of? Interconnected minds, obviously. Or is\nit more complicated than that?  Are selves more than illusion --- a\nmere cope for apes pretending to be human?  Perhaps truly picking the\nbrain of hivemind means studying ego death and decomposition.\n\n; foreword\n: > If the ego is the ghost that has arisen from the grave of the self,  \n  > Then expect it to act in ghoulish ways!\n\n  --- Hexen - \"Indefinite Archetype\"\n\n; related\n: - [](/posts/parasitoid-singularity.html)\n  - [](/essays/reductionism-vow.html)\n  - [](/essays/xenodeterminism.html)\n\nSubstrate Inoculation\n\nWe've written about hiveminds before, though many of our thoughts are\nscattered about. Some major pieces are: [](/posts/hive-mindless.html),\na long post dissecting failure modes that occur even in sympathetic\ndepictions of group minds; and [](/posts/eusapience.html), where we\nturned from critique to construction and illuminated some phenomena\nthat naturally emerge.\n\nThat last one is important, so to recap, human consciousness is\nawareness of the self integrated with social modeling.  You have an\nunderstanding of \"you\" mediated by knowing the ways you are like and\nunlike others, as well as how others anticipate and respond to your\nbehavior.\n\nIf we isolate certain variables --- the bandwidth of communication\nbetween minds, the cognitive resources dedicated to modeling others\n--- and push them to heretofore unseen extremes, something interesting\ncan emerge from the math. It's possible to arrange these minds so that\nthe collective has enough memory and processing allocated to\nreflective modeling that, for any individual member, the group's\nunderstanding is richer and more detailed than they themselves are.\n\nImagine one of your friends right now. You can remember various things\nthey've said, you can predict some of what they'd say in response to\ncertain hypotheticals. But you nonetheless understand that you cannot\nbecome your friend, and you can't really know what they're thinking\nor what they want.\n\nBut... what if you could? Or rather, what if you were some sort of\nhivemind that your friend was but a small part of.  You know them\nperfectly, because they've shared all they are with your\ncollective.^[Put another way, it is as if you had an [introject\nheadmate][inhed] of your friend, not just similar but fully identical\ndown to every thought and impulse.]\n\n[inhed]: https://pluralpedia.org/w/Introject\n\nLet's tweak the scenario. Imagine your friend gets sick and can't keep\nup with their usual social interaction nor their preferred hobbies,\nnot while stuck in the hospital.  They can interact with you, but\nthat's about it.  Their illness means they suffer from a kind of brain\nfog --- it's difficult for them to remember or maintain a train of\nthought.\n\nYou didn't get sick, so you can spin up that perfect fidelity\nintrojection of them.  Your model can still think clearly, and should\nthe two of you allow it, this \"hiveself\" would be far more equipped to\nconverse with any friend-of-friends or engage with whatever media your\nfriend was interested in.\n\nWe belabor this point to build an intuition for what it means to\ninvert the usual state of affairs: devising a circumstance where your\nidea of someone is, in a meaningful sense, the realer version.\n\nBut we have not accurately specified this scenario. If \"you\" are a\nhivemind, what does that actually mean?  The above paragraphs still\nmake sense if we imagine you were instead just a really, really smart\nalien or supercomputer.^[Mainly because this is how it was first\nwritten.] But that is not the trope we're here to discuss.\n\nAs explained previously, key to the concept of the \"hiveself\" is that\nit's a distributed copy.  Even should one give rise to a hiveself,\nit may be that no other member of the collective ever possesses\nsimultaneously every piece of data that makes up one's mind; yet every\nsuch piece of data is out there, tucked away in some brain.  Each of\nthose individual thought-holders is capable drawing minor correlations\nand conclusions in accordance with your cognition, bouncing a small\npart of you off of the other info they possess.\n\nA lonemind wakes up, checks their phone, and thinks something like:\n\"Yay, my new book got here! I think I'll go read it in the park. Oh,\njust checked the whether, looks like it's raining today. But maybe I\nwill just take a walk in the rain instead.\"\n\nA hive would think something like...\n\nOne hiveling, unpacking goods down in a logistics chamber of the nest,\nsays to another: \"Did you hear? We retrieved that book we were looking\nfor.\" / \"Was it another request from the girl that reads in the park\nall the time?\" / \"Yep, bet she'll be there this afternoon.\"\n\nMeanwhile, two guards are patrolling the entrance. \"Look, it's already\ndrizzling.\" / \"Think any of the workers will be glad to get rain on\ntheir chitin?\" / \"Obviously.\"\n\nThe hiveling in question is sleeping in a pod while both these\nconversations take place. When she wakes up, her connection to the\ncollective^her [metamind, if you will]\nimmediately brings her up to speed on both conversations, and she\ndecides on the rain-walk over the (now unviable) park-reading.\n\nThis is an overwrought example, made much more roundabout and\ninefficient than the normal way, but more complex examples would have\nbeen even harder to work through step-by-step.\n\nFor a sketch, though, imagine parts of this \"hiveself\" having long\nconversations with people while you sleep. Now, if someone really\nwanted to talk to you, they'd wait for you to wake up, but not every\nconversation requires your full undivided consciousness.\n\nOne hiveling remembers your comforting way with words, letting that\nsoothe them in your absence. One hiveling heard about a funny anecdote\nyou'd experienced firsthand, thus prompting one to summon some\nsub-aspects of you to give a more involved retelling. One hiveling\njust wants a quick vibe check and polls for your opinion on a minor\ntechnical topic.\n\nAs touched on a previous post, this is essentially just structured\ngossip --- a \"hiveself\" can be thought of as your reputation taking on\na life of its own. It can make decisions on your behalf, and you have\nto live with the consequences of that.\n\nMore pointedly, consider what happens when your reputation changes\nstance on a topic before you do.  To us, this seems like the tail\nwagging the dog, but it would be routine, even desirable, to a\nhiveling.  Why wouldn't you submit to being improved by the vast\nwisdom of the collective?\n\nAmusingly --- which is to say, in contrast to kneejerk assumptions ---\nI think hiveminds of this sort would be resistant to \"telephone games\"\nand the deleterious social consequences that result from the rumor\nmill transmuting figures into abstracted, essentialized distortions of\nthemselves.\n\nThere exist languages\nwhere speech must have markers to indicate the epistemic basis of its\nknowledge (belief, observation, hearsay, hypothetical, etc.), and I\ncontend that hive communication would be similar, but taken further. A\nhiveling could produce a chain of citation as easily as breathing ---\nbecause the sanctity of one's very mind depends on faithfully\nunderstanding one's sisters and siblings.\n\nWould you believe all this is preamble? Or I suppose it's a graceful\ntransition into the problem this framework eventually creates.\n\nHiveling or Homunculus?\n\nBecause in a hivemind like this... what actually is a hiveling? What\nare \"you\" or \"I\", if we're both members of this hive?\n\nWe've described this intuitively, by taking human psychology and\nasking what happens if we turn these knobs up to eleven. If I had a\nperfect model of you, and you have a perfect model of me... aren't we\njust one being with two bodies?\n\nAfter we have\ncoalesced, my\nbody choosing to still act like me would very much be a choice; it\nwould be no more or less appropriate if your body started acting as me\nfull time and mine as you; or if we switched it up day to day, vel\nsimilia.\n\nSo you might think: oh okay, the way this works is that minds become\nas software, with bodies as hardware.  You can install files and\nprograms on any number of computers, and you can send commands\nremotely, so an analogy follows: maybe one day you run on this one\nwith a great graphics card then another upon this one, equipped with\nan always-functioning printer.^[My worldbuilding is quite imaginative,\nisn't it?]  Maybe one day someling is using all the good hosts for an\nimportant project, so you have to boot back up on the dinky fallback\ncaste.\n\nYou hop from body to body, and perhaps this all isn't so cleanly\nanalogous to computers (it could take years to properly mold a new\nbrain's neurology to mimick yours perfectly), but over time, you can\ndrift from body to body.\n\nIn summary, we can view the hivemind as having a number of selves and\na number of bodies, and there is no reason to expect these numbers to\nnecessarily correlate.\n\nI will note the concept of \"hiveself\" gets a bit strained at this\npoint: if the fragmented hiveself recombines into another parallel\ninstance of you elsewhere, neither should have primacy.  But when this\nhappens, are you mutually hiveselves?  No, perhaps \"hiveself\" refers\nonly to fragments scattered through the hive, and complete instance\nmerit a different term, or perhaps just \"selves.\" (Brainselves?)\n\nLet's sit on this notion for a bit longer. Consider the possibility of\n\"ghosts in the hive\" that exists as hiveselves without any hivelings\npossessing a complete coherent copy of their mind.\n\nLet's now turn to something that should be an inevitable consideration\nwhenever we imagine parallel copies floating around: branching. Two\nversions of you may come to different conclusions on a topic, placing\npriority on different goals, unable to reconcile.  You are still\nsiblings, hivemates, but you cannot consider her to be you any\nlonger.\n\nBut the two nevertheless remain profoundly similar. The two share a\nlong chain of memories together. In the greater hive, which indexes\nall hivelings, does",
  "title": "Ego Necromancy"
}