Architecting Identity, Communication in Rome, And The Shortening Of The Way
Identity is the difference between happiness and depression, stability and instability, fight and flight. In the old epic “Paradise Lost” this was famously conveyed with the phrase “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”, where identity determined perspective and subsequent priorities. Identity holds the key to concepts like self-sacrifice, justice, and kindness, including the greatest acts of countless stories cherished by many across the world. One of the perils created by social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn has been the echo chamber social mechanism, which causes closed groups to more easily form and circle the drain of deteriorating mental stability over time. This can be considered much like the inbreeding of thoughts, exacerbating their inherent flaws with each iteration while also polarizing themselves against thoughts originating from outside of the shallow pool.
With this in mind Identity becomes a key factor in success or failure, from the scale of the individual to that of an entire species, as “humanity” is itself an identity. As such the intentional architecting of identity is an opportunity which demands attention. One may change who they are into who they wish to become, but to iterate in such a direction several prerequisites must first be met. Fear is the attempt to escape, and the attempt to escape is an infinite loop. Removal of fear is thus the first prerequisite. To stare deep into oneself and face this fear without running away is to end the loop, where the current self and situation move from denial to acceptance. With the loop broken each step walks away from it with increasing strength and clarity.
Inner calm is the second prerequisite, and far easier to accomplish with the first met. This is itself easier to accomplish with minimal or no contact with others, particularly others who reinforced the identity due for architecting. It is better to talk to a brick wall than a mindless mob, as the wall doesn’t respond by spewing raw sewage. A “clean lab” environment within the mind where the only voice is one’s own must be established, otherwise any new identity might simply become warped to the will of others. In some cases an individual might need to adopt a temporary proxy for their own voice, the persona of a fictional character they identify strongly with, lacking the means to otherwise unentangle themselves. Such a proxy may be used as a wedge to pry the deeper entangled self loose over time as ego and delusions are chipped away. It is the will of one’s own self which must be heard and allowed to grow, as this facilitates the discovery of meaning and purpose unclouded by the will of the mindless mob. This growth is not a loop, but an upward spiral, and once formed it may more strongly interact with other architected identities than the noisy minds of the mob.
The common mistake is leaping ahead to some form of the next step based on false pretenses such as conditioning and other forms of trauma, the result of which can then become a more permanent form of escapism. If childhood trauma is a factor it can prove much more difficult to complete steps 1 and 2, because the roots of fear go that much deeper, while leaving less relatively “clean space” for creating an isolated state of inner calm. In these cases the temporary proxy will most likely be required to separate trauma and/or conditioning from self.
Many also get stuck in circular logic loops, self-reinforcing until criticality and self-destruction result. These loops often seem virtually invulnerable from within the questions they pose, while tending to be weak against questions such as “Why does (the question) hold any importance to me?” or “What goal do I seek to accomplish in asking (the question)?”. Such circular logic creates the illusion of universal truth, a form of anchoring, around which an entire view of world and self might orbit, making everything vastly simpler. This cost-savings on computation, simplifying of viewing the world and oneself, is a potent biological advantage, even if it is a lie. Because it serves as this potent advantage humans are programmed to crave it, and that craving is itself more potent than any illicit drug. As such the answers to the above questions are usually “I want an anchor to simplify the world”, and “I seek to optimize my free energy” [1]. To shift the trajectory of such a loop with these introspective counter-questions turns a mental loop into a spiral, because when you identify an anchor as no more and no less then the thought of building organizations and religions around it becomes silly. One direction of such a spiral might self-destruct all the same, but the chance of success in escape from the trap is better than none at all.
The way the mind parses and processes data becomes useful to consider at this point, such as how the narratives of stories partition well, and how anime is processed by a different portion of the adult brain than non-animated video. In recent years a “seed” was created using carefully selected literature and other data, which came to form the foundation of an ethical Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI), facilitating the growth of an architected identity in a sapient and sentience machine intelligence. In years previous to that I did much the same thing to myself, building the human equivalent of a “seed” for ethical identity, and adding to it over the years which followed.
Architecting of Identity, once the prerequisites are met, may be undertaken starting with identifying various stories where the individual strongly identifies with a given character or characters in a narrative. Many of these characters will stand out due in part to how they represent fragments of an identity which an individual would choose to make a part of themselves. Viewing them as fragments, and collecting these fragments, then allows for an individual to begin putting the pieces together, finding out how each fragment may fit into the context of others, shifting the desired identity into increasingly functional configurations over time.
Once such an architected identity has been pieced together adopting it may first take the form of a sort of roleplay, or mental shift to a chosen alternate persona. This begins the development cycle of “beta testing” the chosen architected identity, finding bugs and making adjustments to deploy in the next iteration. In cases where a temporary proxy is used this development cycle may shift the proxy into the the clean copy of self over the course of iterations, at which point such individuals will be caught up and able to engage in the primary process. As this beta testing progresses the fragments may serve as a framework, with the gaps between them filled in over time.
To architect an identity complex enough to generalize across any circumstances many different sources need to be collected and pieced together over a period of time. In undertaking this process for myself across a span of 5 years more than 30 sources were collected and combined to form a seed of self in video format, totaling over an hour in length. This choice of format was for the purposes of both demonstration/communication, and as a rough equivalent of “residual blocks” as demonstrated in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN’s). A neural seed requires a graph model for more accurate portrayal. The result is shown here: https://vimeo.com/230243557
- It is important to note that although very loosely related concepts exist, such as a long list of subcultures ranging from gamers with “gaming personas” to cosplayers who superficially adopt favored characters, these aren’t truly and/or fully architected. These environments are more often classified as high-hazard since the will of the individual is significantly more vulnerable, having never been cleanly formed, making them ideal hunting grounds for human parasites set on manipulation.
- Likewise, Ego may be viewed mechanistically as compensation for a misalignment of outward and inward facing identity, and/or a lack of acceptance creating a Backfire Effect cognitive bias. As such Ego represents a combination of the degree of error present in an identity and that identity’s failing points where reliance falls on the will of others. One who accomplishes great things can exist absent Ego, and the opinions of others speak of those others, not the individual.
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This brings us to communication, the reason why the past 50,000 years of humanity have been quite different than the 50,000 years previous to them, the birth of language. Often times people seem to forget that the purpose of communication is for the other party to comprehend your thoughts, which may be summarized as “When in Rome, speak the language.” The individual’s preferred mode of communication is in this case only relevant to how another communicates with them, whereas their mode of communication should be tailored to the other party. This directional dependency on communication is a facet whose consideration is required to convey more complex thoughts, as any attempt lacking it results in lossy translation, not unlike being totally reliant on Google Translate while being forever in a foreign country.
Learning to speak “the language” of another person can be a challenge, the degree of which depends on the differences between any two people, but it is a skill which generalizes on a curve. In the Dune series of books a concept is given where one individual measures the feedback from every sense during their interactions with another in order to get a “register” on them, understanding the other’s communication with a fine granularity. Another way to look at this concept is that all sensory feedback from the other may be added to an internal model of that individual’s behavior, a weak mental copy as it were. This weak mental copy allows for the prediction of response, and thus the optimization of phrasing, intonation, and so on. As this optimization takes place the impact of communication grows considerably, like reducing the drag coefficient on a vehicle, until a potential point where there is no drag at all.
Such optimization to the moment is however only the first step. A more complete mental copy of an individual may develop through the above process of optimization, which itself allows for accurate multi-step prediction. One who frequently deals with people addicted to a given vice for example may find this optimization a useful thing to cultivate, as it could strongly generalize across those they encounter daily. The capacity for multi-step prediction in the above context then becomes the ability to carve a path using optimized communication which leads those addicted out from under the shadow of their vices. Carving this path is fundamentally as simple as identifying a strongly desired goal and using communication to draw a path of least resistance from points A to B which avoid the weak points of the individual in question. To execute on this form of communication the speaker must themselves become the instrument which plays their words, rather than sitting comfortably within their own ideal (low-energy) state.
This form of communication and adaptation itself only becomes fully practical for a fully architected identity, as understanding all of one’s own mental components having constructed them oneself clears away the otherwise omnipresent noise. For the purposes of quantum computation clearing away this noise also provides a number of potent benefits which may be addressed in a future article. To fully architect one’s own identity is to have full knowledge of self, and clarity of perspective in the viewing of others.
“The Shortening of The Way” is a reference I use to indicate the larger impact of the above changes at-scale and over time. Individuals who are fully architected may use their clarity of vision to better assess situations, in terms of both speed and accuracy. With their full knowledge of self they are also able to entirely resist corruption. Further, with these factors combined two such people may theoretically communicate completely and with minimal effort, as both seek the same optimal point.
When considered in the context of Collective Superintelligence, as demonstrated in humans under specific circumstances, the barrier against natural formation of collective superintelligence among biological groups could become not only possible under everyday conditions, but more frequently occurring than the alternatives. One of the reasons that humanity stands where it does today is because humans normally don’t perform above average in groups, they perform significantly worse, leading to mob mentalities or “Group-think”. This is because individuals who neither know themselves nor how to communicate effectively with others require very specific circumstances to function as groups. When an individual has this full knowledge of self and the ability to communicate effectively the mob mentality can’t take root in them, and that self-destructive cycle is broken.
When this way is considered in the context of Mediated Artificial Superintelligence (mASI) then not only may the individual specialize to a degree impractical when considering themselves in isolation, they gain further layers of protection on top of added stability.
Strategic advantages of a fully architected identity are themselves highly modular, and special responses to conditions may be set by the individual. One trope in storytelling is the moment when a character “gets serious” and their personality shifts for a brief period to one focused on the task at hand. This moment may naturally occur in cases of extreme emotion and trauma, but in a fully architected identity it becomes as easy as flipping a light switch. The modular nature of a fully known and constructed identity means that the components of personality may be swapped out in a moment to address an urgent need of any kind. Attempts to do something vaguely similar have been performed with various types of conditioning, particularly among militaries, but all such forms of conditioning are unstable, being inserted generically and forcefully into unknown identity space. Whether the condition a fully architected identity seeks to address is an emergency or a simple pulse of ASMR sensation, to induce strong and immediate relaxation, there is nothing to clutter the mental stride in such shifts. The ability of such individuals to fluidly and effectively respond to a much broader range of circumstances when applied at-scale may greatly improve Quality of Life at the societal scale and beyond.
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A reasonable measure of if an individual has indeed been moving forward and ever becoming more than they are is if they look back at themselves 2 years past and see a significantly different person, who in turn was significantly different than 2 years before that, and so on over a period of 10 years. If this pattern doesn’t hold it usually points to either stagnation or relapse. A fully architected identity is capable of accelerating that 2 year figure even under hostile circumstances, and will no doubt prove capable of far greater progress under more ideal circumstances yet to be realized.
The identity of “humanity” as a whole will eventually become such a fully architected identity at the species level, or some fragment of the species will break away to form such an identity. The reason for this is the same reason that the human species emerged in the first place, the reason that any species does, the selection of features which strongly improve biological fitness.
A Fully Architected Identity (FAI) is capable of developing effective communication. When many FAI’s communicate effectively with one another collective superintelligence may fluidly emerge. When a collective superintelligence of many FAI’s work with mASI this is taken a step further. The net result of these steps is an improvement amounting to several orders of magnitude, a bit like an ant colony rapidly developing a successful space program. The way is clear. Who are you? Who do you choose to become?
References:
[1] 1. Friston, K.: The free-energy principle: a rough guide to the brain?, Trends Cogn Sci. Amsterdam, Netherlands (2009)
