Consciousness in Runehack

Sometime recently, I turned 10.000 days old. I really wanted to publish an article on such an opportunity, but I didn’t have anything ready. I’m still working on the Moorwell article, having a hard time getting to it because of the hardships I’m currently experiencing. Perhaps a short article on an obscure topic of consciousness will do for this occasion.

Didn't want this article to not have any art in it, but it's difficult to find a picture for a topic like "consciousness", so... let's pretend this is a digital ghost as described later in this article.
The picture comes from the Daily Renders June 2021 collection by Josh Pierce.

Consciousness

One of the core concepts of the world of Runehack is consciousness. It’s different from something being merely alive or animated, consciousness means awareness of yourself and your surroundings. What are some oddities about the consciousness present in the world?

For one, people of this world have a concept of submemory, which is a part of one's memory that persists even if it's not in one's memory. So a fairly popular but unverifiable theory suggests, that consciousness is somewhere not in one's body, perhaps not even in the physical world. The following aspects of consciousness would suggest that this theory might hold true.

Dreams and Elves

When someone falls asleep, their consciousness enters a dream. It's not known whether there is an actual place where the dreams happen, or if it is just a mind's illusion. Strangely, the elves of Runehack possess a mysterious ability of dream-walking, which lets them enter other people's dreams while sleeping. The dream-walking is largely forgotten for several reasons: the impracticality of setting it up, the moral quandaries of using it, and the ease of instant communication thanks to the runetech connected to the Mistweb.

Each elf retains a supernatural link to its blood, even once it leaves the elf's body. When an elf falls asleep, they can sense the presence of people who are very close to their blood (a couple of inches or centimeters at best). This distance is unlimited when the ring moon's light shines upon the elf. The most reliable way for an elf to dream-walk would be to touch the sleeping person whose dream they wish to enter, but some elves create pendants that hold a small amount of their blood to give to people. An elf in another person's dream is largely ignored by the dreamer and their dream characters. If the dream-walker attempts to shape another person's dream in a way lucid dreamers would, the dream characters will turn aggressive towards the intruder until they are removed from the dream. This aggression can be overcome in two ways - either if the elf is trusted by the dreamer whose dream they have entered, or if the elf does so during the Blood Moon (lunar eclipse).

The practice of entering the dreams of someone who an elf hates, only to haunt the dreamer with an uncontrollable nightmare has led to the elves being judged in many societies. Thus, this practice has become a taboo, something that parents don't even teach their elven children is a possibility anymore. When an elf in the present day finds out, it is either through an old scripture, experimentation or from someone else who has found out already.

Consciousness Duplication

Thanks in part to Nixly’s genius, the technology that allows for one’s mind to be copied is real in this world. It’s a lengthy process that takes roughly an hour or so to complete, during which one’s head has to wear a scanning helmet made for this purpose. Using this technology, plenty of people have been backed up and turned into runebots and/or ghosts. The difference between a ghost and a runebot is a presence of a physical body characteristic for the runebots, as opposed to a hologram-like illusory visage of the ghosts. A ghost can enter a runebot body, and a runebot might be able to produce a ghost.

After Nixly has been retrieved from the Wineholm, her creation has been integrated with the potential to interact with the Mistweb, allowing the people whose brains have been scanned to interact with the technology. This marked the invention of the first truly conscious Artificial Intelligence... in a way. While its existence is based entirely on the runes, it is not actually artificial - it has existed before being scanned and emulated.

The first experiments were to restrict these minds to the runebot bodies, which turned out to be quite successful. Afterward, Nixly suggested the creation of a utopia at the bottom of the sea to test out the potential of her ghosts (illusory projections of these emulated minds), creating an afterlife of sorts for those who can afford it. The city was called Everling, and anyone who's wealthy enough can send their mind scan there to live on forever, as long as the city's server keeps running. Slowly and cautiously, the ghosts are nowadays getting integrated into the common society, limited by a plethora of restrictions.

Rumors claim that memories between a person and the emulation of their mind scan can "leak" over long periods of time when one of them ceases to be, whether it's due to the emulation stopping irreversibly, or because of the person dying. There are no actual records of this sort of thing happening, which is why it's treated as a mere myth by normal people. And yet, there are still people who would consider this to be yet another proof that one's consciousness exists outside of this world.

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That's about it for this topic. I wanted to write, and it seems I finally succeeded in motivating myself into doing so. Thank you for reading, I hope you've enjoyed it, and have a nice day!