BY LETTER
Sophstem
Sophont Systems |
 Image from John B |
This term is usually used for systems that to not normally evolve sentience, much less sapience or sophonce: ecosystems, economical systems and electronic databases are examples. To qualify as a sophstem, the system as a whole must show sapience, not merely contain sapient beings, and must have gone beyond merely becoming a sensestem. Sophstems have evolved spontaneously when a system has gained a certain complexity through some combination of growth and natural selection. selection. Some sophstems are created by high transapient entities.
Sophstems can be very hard for ordinary sophonts to spot. Every action that happens within a sophstem is completely logical, and there seems to be no overriding intelligence, but if it is seen from without it is quite apparent that the system works in an intelligent fashion.
An envome, natural or provolved, is a good example of a sophstem. While the Invisible Hand is sometimes cited as an example, many of the best sophontologists in Terragen space have denied that such a sophstem actually exists.
Related Articles
- Sentience - Text by Stephen Inniss
Sentience is awareness, including the ability to experience pleasure or pain (or analogous drives and experiences) and make predictions about the future. A sentient being is sapient to at least some degree, and sentience is in turn a prerequisite for sophonce. Terragen animals are sentient, as are analogous non-terragen bionts, neogens, and various m-life and a-life entities. On the other hand plants and single-celled organisms (and their nonbiological or xenobiont equivalents) are considered non-sentient or minimally sentient. Modern toposophology has long had a variety of technical definitions for the kinds and degrees of sentience, together with associated tests. Some of these date as far back as the primitive investigations of the 1st century BT or before; these in turn owe something to philosophical speculations from the dawn of the Agricultural Age. - Sentience Algorithms - Text by John B and Pran Mukherjee
The flow of steps which, when followed, allow an organized system to develop and maintain a degree of sentience. The underpinning of ai design. Required massive (at the time) neural nets or even more massive emulations thereof on hardware, state vector machines, and other information age new technology, being massively parallel (capable of running many many tasks simultaneously, or at least appearing to be able to do so to an outside observer.) - Sentience, Sapience, Sophonce
- Sentient - Text by Stephen Inniss
As an adjective, having the characteristics of sentience. As a noun, particularly as a collective noun, any being that is deemed to have sentience, as in "The Universal Bill of Sentient Rights". - Sophonce - Text by Stephen Inniss
Sophonce is sentience and sapience with metacognition: self-awareness, including self-reflection and the ability to think about one's thinking. Kinds and degrees of sophonce are well defined and testable in modern toposophology, but a full understanding of them eludes even superbright modosophonts. The definitions used by transapients of S1 and higher do not translate clearly into any subsingularity format, but they claim to have a full definition of the major types of sophonce. A sophont being is a "person" under most legal and social systems in the Civilized Galaxy. Transapient informants have said that sophonce is a prerequisite for a number of other qualities and abilities that are unique to beings of S1 or higher. The term "sophont" was first coined by the 1st century BT fabulists Karen and Poul Anderson, to describe hypothetical non-terragen bionts with human-equivalent abilities and qualities. It came into general usage in languages ancestral to Anglic with the advent of the first provolves and turingrade ais. - Sophont - Text by Stephen Inniss
A person. A being that has the quality of sophonce. Such beings are sometimes called 'sapients'. For historical reasons, sophont-grade ais, may be called 'turingrade ais', even though because of philosophical and practical difficulties with the Turing Test the term 'sophont ai' would be clearer. - Sophtware - Text by Todd Drashner
Colloquial term used to describe sophont to transapient level software based lifeforms whether of virtual, ai, or upload origin. Sophtware entities are usually characterized as not being limited to a single dedicated processor to support their minds but instead operating as mobile blocks of self-referential code able to transfer themselves over information networks and among any group of processing substrates designed to accommodate them.
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Development Notes
Text by Thorbjørn Steen
Initially published on 01 June 2005.
Initially published on 01 June 2005.
