How Often Do Humans Legitimately Win?

[Drashner1]

Is quite difficult, as per setting's rules, compare their "intelligence" or "operative system", call them as you want, but I think that is quite simple to agree that both share traits that an animals maybe barely shows, like planning, creating objects or imporving themselfs.
My disagree was more on the human-bear side.
As usual I should think twice and explain myself more, sorry!  

I was somewhat yanking your chain with this, but...

The tricky bit - and also what I was implying with my previous post - is that we've long held that each new S-level results in transapients at that level having mental attributes or capabilities that are as alien/inconceivable to us (or all lower S minds below them) as self-awareness presumably is to creatures that lack it. We used to refer to this as 'Quality X' and discuss it quite a bit. Alas, the problem with trying to describe such things in any detail is that we are trying to conceptualize concepts that are literally beyond human comprehension. As such, we've mostly moved away from discussions of this (but perhaps we should revisit the idea?) in favor of transapient traits that are mainly multiples of human traits rather than purely alien abilities.

While transapients certainly have some capabilities in common with modos/humans - they also have the aforementioned 'Quality(ies) X' and it could be that the bulk of their mental resources and attention are spent on operating those Qualities X and using them in their societies - rendering them incomprehensible to us in those areas.

Again, my  bad way to express myself: there is no way a modos civilization could beat a Moon Brain, I never intended to insinuate that.
Still, on a single S level gap there could be an opportunity: the amount of antimatter needed to crak open a Moon Brain would be quite a lot, but probably any S1 can put its manipulator on the right amount to blow the home of any S2, if its target is not very widely dispersed among habitats, orbitals or the entire crust of a planet.

See our intertoposophic conflict pages and also bear in mind that an S2 is several hundred thousand times smart than an S1 and can observe the universe around it to an equivalent degree beyond an S1. Sneaking up on it is not going to be an easy thing.

Also - antimatter isn't really very good as an explosive in and of itself, although it is very reactive. Which means it's going to be closely watched and stealing any of it isn't going to be something one just does - particularly if one is an S1 operating within the range of an S2 (S1 are likely to draw the attention of an S2 simply because they are more complex than baselines and therefore likely to be more interesting).

The God Web Itself!
"The Version War Period" paragraph. It doesn't describe the S level of the attackers but from the fact they were a whole clade I doubt  they were more than S2 and, anyway, we are talking about a wormhole for archai use during the Version War, so at least S4, if not directly S5.
Pretty nasty way to leave this valley of tears...[/quote]

That article needs updating. It dates from 2002 when our conception of wormholes was very different.

Basically, other than towing in an object massive enough to disrupt the wormhole (which would be noticed), there's nothing modos can do to disrupt a wormhole. Nukes aren't going to do anything to a wormhole, basically.

Hope this helps,

Todd

[Drashner1]

There seems to be some confusion here regarding what advantages transapients have by virtue of thinking at a higher toposophic level, and the separate advantages they have as virtual entities. A Superturing AI could also control multiple bodies at once, collate data from a vast array of senses and evaluate thousands of different courses of action simultaneously, while still being blind to possibilities that only a transapient could see. It would just as hard to "kill", at least from a modosophont perspective. If they know they're in danger, they could have backups all over the place, vots acting on their behalf to look out for potential threats in the spaces they inhabit, and so on.

Not all transapients are virtuals. It's not clear what the percentages are,but that's likely contributing to confusion on this point.

It's also not clear just how much more capable than a human a superturing is. It could be hundreds of times more capable - or only the cybernetic equivalent of a Superior. Agreed that such a being would still be far belong a transapient.

This is where the human vs animal analogy breaks down, in my opinion, because both humans and animals are embodied beings with limited ability to surpass what our bodies let us do. In a virtual universe, there could be any number of methods to determine if you'd eradicated a particular mind or its descendents and copies from your sphere of influence, and game theory for evaluating such conditions might well be unsolvable for modosophonts. Perhaps only a transapient could ever know if it had truly won or not. A setting like this does not go well with Hollywood-like stories where the criteria for victory and defeat are easily for modern humans to make sense of.

Interesting ideas ! Generally agreed. Will need to think about this and what it might look like.

Todd