Toposophy

Toposophy deals with the theoretical problems and possibilities of attempts to extend and amplify one's mental potential. While technically speaking it applies to all mental growth, it is mainly used to denote the science of major mental paradigm shifts.

Most mental enhancement is incremental, involving merely adding on new capabilities and integrating them with the already existing framework. Typical cyborgisation procedures as memory enhancement, skill libraries, coprocessors, extended neural networks and pidgin lobes fall in this category. While such additions may cause mental shifts and re-evaluations of identity, they merely extend the basic architecture of the underlying mind. This kind of bootstrapping can be self-supporting, each improvement making it easier to add new improvements, producing an accelerating mental expansion, a singularity.

As was discovered by the Information Era AIs, this process eventually saturates: while more capacity can be added, it will not improve mental performance qualitatively. This was true for the initial AIs regardless of model, and has been found for cyborgized humans. The phenomenon is sometimes called Toposophic Barriers, the name originally coined by the great 20th century (Old Earth dating) prognosticator Stanislaw Lem's surprisingly accurate description in Golem XIV. The Borodin Conjecture (proposed in 275 a.t. by the AI Borodin at the Novokir Habitat) implies that all possible minds fulfilling certain basic intelligence criteria are upwardly limited by a toposophic barrier. It remains the most important unproven conjecture in toposophy.

Whether humans and the human-designed AIs all shared the same toposophic barrier and if it was a fundamental limit to mental growth remained a matter of dispute until 1093, when the Yo Virtual Institute of Aiology succeeded in designing a non-trivial (but totally single-minded and useless) example of an AI with a slightly higher barrier. This discovery implied the possibility of "openings" in the barriers, and a tremendous amount of AI research began. Combined with breakthroughs in picotech at the same time, the second toposophical barrier was breached in 1116. A number of picotech second singularity AIs emerged, causing a short period of intense provolve, upgrading and transformation in the AI sphere.

It was found that a first singularity AI could not be enhanced into a second singularity AI directly, since the basic mental structure had reached its limits. However, a second singularity AI based on the first can be constructed, including its memories and templates. This transition became known as an ascension. Ascensions involve a major mental transmutation, and it is common that very little of the previous mentality remains after the ascension (it has been argued that they are better viewed as reincarnations rather than any kind of apotheosis). Goals and values that were crucial to the pre-ascension form might become unstable or irrelevant afterwards. Many forms of personal identity do not transfer well through ascensions, making most ego-preserving beings wary of the process even if now has been characterized in great detail.

As picotech was developed further, it became possible to breach the second barrier and reach third singularity intelligence. As more data accumulated toposophy developed into a science dealing with the nature of the enhancement process, singularities, the barriers and ascension methods.

At present the theory of toposophical barriers and the ways of breaching them (ascensics) is well developed and characterized. While most questions about barriers of a higher level are undecidable for beings below the level (such as where in the space of mental architecture they lie or their exact zone type), analytical and approximative methods of barrier detection and prediction has been developed. Ascensics deals with methods of performing an ascension past a barrier of known type; once a particular barrier is well understood they can be applied.

Between the barriers lie spaces of mental potential (mentalities). A mentality corresponds to a qualitatively unique way of handling intelligence. Each is different from each other, and can be ordered using the Herimann-Glauer-Yudkowski relation of inclusive retrospective obviousness. Since self-bootstrapping leading to singularity are comparatively easy unless resources are limited, most ascending beings quickly reach the limits within their new mentality after ascension and spend most time adapting to their new state. This has led to the widespread use of classifying intelligences after "Singularity" Level: a Singularity N being is presently close to the Nth toposophical barrier. A Singularity 0 being would correspond to baseline human or similar intelligence still far below the Singularity 1 barrier.

A series of ascensions is called an ascension chain. Especially Keterist toposophers have dealt extensively with the issue of whether there exists an upper bound on the number of achievable mentalities or if ascension can continue forever. The ultimate achievable mentalities or asymptote mentalities are denoted aleph states; they correspond to the ultimate forms of intelligence that can exist in the universe and their exact form and nature have profound philosophical and religious implications. Whether there exist infinite non-trivial ascension chains remains an important unsolved problem in toposophy, usually called the Finitude Problem.

Another central unsolved problem of toposophy is the Uniqueness Problem: will all forms of ascension past a single barrier lead to the same mentality (and hence be equivalent), or does there exist non-equivalent mentalities? If there are non-equivalent mentalities the ascension process becomes a branching process where each choice of ascension will be an irreversible decision. The issue is complicated by the transcardinal expansion of mental space complexity after each barrier, making it practically impossible to deal with experimentally or even to reliably show that two arbitrary mentalities are equivalent. It has been found that there exists non-equivalent mentalities (the Tinitti Demonstration), but so far all such mental spaces have been below the known Toposophic 1 and 2 barriers and no subspaces have been found. It is however widely believed that there are non-equivalent mentalities, and dendrognosis, the study of ascension-decision processes both formally and practically, has become a major branch of toposophy.

A closely related problem is the Convergence Problem: if the answer to the Uniqueness Problem is that there are non-equivalent mentalities, given two non-equivalent mentalities, is there ascension-paths from each of them to a single higher mentality? This issue has major philosophical and religious implications for Keterism, which is essentially based on the assumption that the Convergence Problem has a positive answer. The equivalence of Form 5 classic AI and human derived mentalities at the second singularity level is the most famous result supporting convergence, but the failure to find equivalence for the closely related Form 3 and Form 5 AIs is often cited as supporting non-convergence. If the Uniqueness Problem has a negative answer dendrognosis becomes more significant, since there may exist both mental cul-de-sacs or ascension chains leading to different non-equivalent aleph states.

Toposophy has developed into a major and highly diversified science, especially due to the expansion and needs of the Keter dominion. The Transcendence Institutes of Ain Soph Aur study especially the Keterist approach to toposophy and eschatology, while the Toposophy Institute at Sjafarevitj is the focus for much of the exploration of mentality-equivalence. The Toposophy Institute of Jel Koer Ka in the MPA is generally regarding as leading in ascentics, while dendrognosis is widely explored by the Distributed Dendrognostic Companionship across the Inner Sphere and Keter. Several of the more esoteric subdisciplines like the construction of example mentalities, toposophical history, pervectronics and undecidable lifeplanning have their own highly fluctuating institutes in the Keter dominion. Due to the tremendous communications difficulties that occur when dealing with trans-singularity toposophy helper sciences such as hermeneutic toposophy and toposophic metalinguistics have been developed.

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