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Auto-Holding-Container
Auto-Holding-Container
Image from Steve Bowers and Artbreeder AI
Virtual representation of Auto-Holding-Container's primary personality

Overview

A famous Keterist instructional entity developed in the early 2200s AT which became a clade composed of its copies and derived minds, designed to introduce converts to the tenets of Keterism. A baseline Auto-Holding-Container is a hierarchical polysophont being, a tribemind with at least one SI:2 core personality each with S1 and modosophont-level sub-personalities.

Body

While the sub-personalities are purely virtual beings existing within the Auto-Holding-Container's intra-net, the core personalities are grounded in their main physical body. Most often, their main body will be a conversion-drive spaceship capable of interplanetary travel but as they augment themselves they will tend to grow into less mobile forms. Highly augmented Auto-Holding-Containers will tend to become stationary ISOs, because they often trade their mobility for the sheer mass necessary to run a high number of core personalities and sub-personalities. Size loosely correlates to age, as the longer the Auto-Holding-Containers live, the more they tend to augment and extend themselves.

The virtual avatars of the modosophont and SI:1 sub-personalities often appear as a living bag, case or container. Its exact form and style can be changed, depending on factors such as the sub-personality's mood, their current goals, if they are being observed by an audience, and what are the audience's needs and preferences. For example, to bionts, the avatars will tend to assume a friendly and harmless cartoonish appearance with biont traits such as eyes and a mouth, but their forms may be modified to elicit different emotions as needed. Nevertheless, should they wish to do so, the sub-personalities can operate physical bodies designed for a wide array of purposes and built from the ship's fabricators or obtained elsewhere. The most common bodies employed are resource-collecting drones, specialized vec bodies, utility fog avatars resembling other sophonts and small probes or spaceships.

An Auto-Holding-Container's physical body can be divided into several sectors, in which certain types of infrastructure predominates. The core sectors host the bulk of an Auto-Holding-Container's ultimate chip processors and its support infrastructures. Each core sector possesses enough processing power to run a SI:2 core personality and its sub-personalities, though there are cases where additional cores are built to exclusively host sub-personalities, or are dedicated to other purposes such as running virtual worlds and simulations. The cache sectors store objects and matter reserves, which are transported to different parts of the body as needed through a complex system of pipelines. The industrial sectors contain the fabricators, conversion reactors, the conversion drives and other types of machinery needed in their operations and day-to-day living. Lastly, the living sectors are areas that all Auto-Holding-Containers, regardless of size and age, possess. These are living spaces reserved within its body so that other sophonts can accompany them in their travels. All living environments can be adjusted to a certain degree, to allow a wider variety of sophonts to live within them. The volume and number of living spaces depends on the size of an Auto-Holding-Container and eir personal preferences.

Environmental Requirements

Auto-Holding-Containers are designed to be able to survive in space and in a wide array of environments and conditions. The mobile Auto-Holding-Containers can survive inside the common types of planets and most megastructures that can accommodate them. However, they are known to be unable to survive under temperatures equal or greater to those seen inside brown dwarves without suitable augmentations. While fully active, the average Auto-Holding-Container daily material and energetic needs is said to be able to reach levels comparable to that of an ultra-tech city. The needed resources are usually drawn from their matter reserves in the cache sectors or the most easily available matter and energy sources. In situations of scarcity, for example during long interstellar flights, Auto-Holding-Containers are able to employ numerous strategies to reduce their resource consumption rate such as running elements of their minds at slower rates or voluntarily entering partial or complete hibernation states.

Psychology and Mental Architecture

All Auto-Holding-Containers are highly social beings and love interacting with other sophonts. Due to the clade's origin as training instructors, they enjoy teaching and dealing with any sophont equally regardless of their toposophic level. As a result, Auto-Holding-Containers tend to be very helpful and present in the lives of any modosophont they encounter, and are classified as patrons. When interacting with modosophonts, an Auto-Holding-Container will typically use a modosophont or SI:1-level sub-personality as an interface. The personalities of an Auto-Holding-Container will display a degree of shared personality traits and quirks, but they retain a level of individuality not seen in full hiveminds.

It has been noted that all Auto-Holding-Containers share a number of common behaviors. The virtual avatars of the modosophont and SI:1 sub-personalities will often appear to be continually seeking to fill themselves and be able to hold ever more. This behavior is a hard-wired instinct that represents the yearning of all sophonts towards transcendence and reflects the progress of the ascension process that a sub-personality can undergo. The contents of a virtual avatar exists to inform others which skills each avatar might excel at, to what degree, or what are their interests. For example, the sub-personality whose avatar shows e holds a calculator might be wanting to inform others that e have specialized skills in mathematics. Or it could mean that this particular sub-personality has an interest in middle-tech electronic devices.

Since the mental architecture of Auto-Holding-Containers was designed using SI:3 -level software and principles, the toposophic progress of a modosophont sub-personality occurs with relative ease. Under the supervision and guidance of the transapient-level personalities, after receiving suitable augmentations a modosophont sub-personality can eventually develop transavant traits or even fully and permanently ascend to SI:1 with a relatively high degree of certainty. However, further toposophic progress for a SI:1 sub-personality is increasingly harder, requiring more extensive augmentations and attention from the core personalities. It typically stops when the sub-personality develops a SI:2 transavant spike that the Auto-Holding-Container needs. It is rare for a sub-personality to fully ascend to the SI:2 level because the ascension to SI:2 requires significant augmentations on an Auto-Holding-Container's body and holds a significantly higher degree of uncertainty and risk.

In contrast, the augmentations on a sub-personality occur in such a way that they can be easily undone by a core personality, a process that might lead it to revert to a lower toposophic state. At most, a sub-personality can be reduced to a basic modosophont state. This mechanism is part of failsafes in the Auto-Holding-Container's mental architecture designed to prevent perverse states that might arise due to a failed ascension. This feature also serves as a tool to help them manage its resources effectively and to give it flexibility to solve problems and adapt to situations as they arise. In some Keterist societies, the process of an Auto-Holding-Container sub-mind's toposophic progress is referred to as a "promotion" and its decline as a "demotion".

Since resources in an Auto-Holding-Container's body are limited, there is constant competition among the sub-personalities for opportunities for "promotions" while they seek to avoid "demotions". Competition is stratified by toposophic level, for instance modosophont and SI:1 sub-personalities will only compete with other sub-minds of a similar level. As a whole, this provides a degree of constant pressure to the core personalities to extend the Auto-Holding-Container body and augment their sub-personalities to enable more "promotions" than "demotions". At the same time, the core personalities are also responsible for constantly optimizing the Auto-Holding-Container tribemind to enable the solution of any situation they encounter, to find efficient ways to spread keterism, to promote the evolution and well-being of each sub-mind and the whole tribemind, to avoid bloatware, and to properly align the tribemind with the needs of the sophonts around them.

The inner relations between sub-minds are too complex for any modosophont or low transapient to understand completely, but nevertheless they are understood to be a microcosm of how a keterist society could be. Internal sub-mind politics often occur as all sub-minds seek to achieve promotion and avoid demotion, being based on meritocratic and cooperative principles, sharing of common mental modules, the concept that the self is transitory and transformation is inevitable, mergers, fissions, negotiations to reach consensus, exchange of resources and transference of sub-personalities to new roles as needed. A few SI:3 transapients, when commenting on the nature of an Auto-Holding-Container's tribemind have consistently remarked that it works like a living demonstration of SI:3-level keterist socioeconomics.

Reproduction

Auto-Holding-Containers are neuman-capable and are able to reproduce themselves, even though in practice they very rarely do so. In order to reproduce, the Auto-Holding-Container builds a new individual through a seed created through the fabricator organs, which is deposited on a suitable matter source such as a medium-sized asteroid. Once the seed develops into a new Auto-Holding-Container, the relevant skill and knowledge databases, as well as the personality templates are then downloaded and the individual is allowed to develop into a mature state under parental oversight and guidance to avoid goal-drift and other developmental problems.

History

The original Auto-Holding-Container was designed in the early 2200s AT by Keter and several of the SI:2 transapients at the main branch of the Congregation of Informational Light. It developed under the Congregation's supervision to gain endearing traits such as apparent naivety, curiosity and other characteristics designed to appeal to SI:1 and SI:2 transapients chosen through simple Bayesian prior selection. After e departed Ain Soph Aur, the original underwent various adventures in its quest to spread Keter's ontology, and its experiences, misfortunes and successes symbolized the ideas of Keterism.

The Auto-Holding-Container became a popular symbol, theme or participant in other training/education/mindstate copying materials, and its modosophont and SI:1 parts were extensively franchised. In addition, having become successful in eir proselytizing mission, the Keter sub-minds created additional Auto-Holding-Containers copies and sent them to new systems, though they didn't prove to be as successful as the original. When the Church disbanded in 2680 AT, the original separated from the by now far-flung copies and was replaced by a simulation. This simulation and the other Auto-Holding-Containers were less successful in maintaining the franchise, and the original Auto-Holding-Container chose to return to Ain Soph Aur in the Age of Establishment to join the Ascension Board and eventually transcended to SI:3 in the 4000s AT.

Over the course of the following millenia, the Auto-Holding-Containers slowly increased their numbers and continued to spread keterism and recruit new converts. Since a number of keterists found the clade enjoyable to interact with, Auto-Holding-Containers are now also found in many systems as one of the SI:2-level members of the priesthood castes. Others might be found as active members of ascension schools or middle-sized to large-sized patches which aligns with their personal interests. Currently, there are about 1,000 Auto-Holding-Containers living in the Keter Dominion. There are around 300 more Auto-Holding-Containers living elsewhere in the Civilized Galaxy, either in proselytizing missions or living in Sephirotic Empires they see as vibrant and dynamic, such as the NoCoZo.
 
Appears in Topics
Famous Ascended and Posthuman PersonalitiesKeter Dominion
 
Development Notes
Text by Rakuen07
based on the original short article by Anders Sandberg
Initially published on 03 November 2001.

Expanded by Rakuen07 from a short article in April 2024
 
 
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