04-30-2021, 08:13 AM
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.
Subsumption is one way you could do it, but you could never know for sure if you'd merged with or corrupted every possible copy of your opponent unless you detected telltale signs of their influence on the local culture or economy. Simply destroying the node they physically rely on isn't equivalent to killing an embodied being. An advanced Superturing entity might even have different parts of its mind residing on physically distinct nodes much as a supercomputer spans multiple server racks across a building. It's far from clear what would constitute a victory in a universe of virtual beings, and we should separate this issue from that of toposophic conflict, since biological transapients exist too.
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.
Subsumption is one way you could do it, but you could never know for sure if you'd merged with or corrupted every possible copy of your opponent unless you detected telltale signs of their influence on the local culture or economy. Simply destroying the node they physically rely on isn't equivalent to killing an embodied being. An advanced Superturing entity might even have different parts of its mind residing on physically distinct nodes much as a supercomputer spans multiple server racks across a building. It's far from clear what would constitute a victory in a universe of virtual beings, and we should separate this issue from that of toposophic conflict, since biological transapients exist too.
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.