The Secondary Cerebral Cortex of the Psion (by Kettle)

[Syntax]

I found this article on the Veritas Society page interesting. I'm fairly sure the Omnis have something similar or possibly better, but it rings of something Omni-esq. Artificial skill anyone?

Oh, here's the article:

http://forums.vsociety.net/index.php?topic=11619.0

(As a note, I have no idea if this is what is meant by artificial skill. This is merely the opinion of another non-Omni. Have fun.)

[Oyama]

It's not "artificial skill" as we put it, that comes up in G5 and onward. It does however bear resemblance to something taught very early on, though Kettle is presenting the concept in a slightly different manner and we don't use a construct for what we do with this concept as its unneccesary, so what he's doing with it is slightly different from what is taught. One thing it seems to do (if I'm interpreting it correctly) is present things scanned in a more literal way, rather than abstract symbolic, so that it is more easily understood, which is useful for a lot of things, but less so with the weirder concepts in Omni. And again, this can be accomplished without a construct. One could also say that it filters out mental "background noise," making the use of the senses clearer (and making the distinction between pure imagination and actual senses easier), but this is speculation on my part. If it does do this, it could be useful early on, but this kind of sensing skill is developed fairly quickly in Omni if one practices diligently (and amps "brighten" one's senses anyway, so making this distinction gets a lot easier just by virtue of being amped).

[Syntax]

I see what you are saying. In truth, I didn't put much thought into it. The concept of having a second brain seemed super cool to me. One of my interests is in extending the mind using spells. I think I read secondary cerebral cortex and then my primary cerebral cortex went numb. It's amazing how the big words dazzle the little brain.

G5 and onward is where artificial skill comes in, eh? Interesting, only not really, as that tells me nothing.

Actually, it does give me a rough reference point.

(I need to learn to fish better.)

Say, how about that G5. Pretty neat how that thing does the thing, right? (Or is that too obvious.)

I'll just go back to my hole now.

[Oyama]

G5 and onward is where artificial skill comes in, eh? Interesting, only not really, as that tells me nothing.

Actually, it does give me a rough reference point.

(I need to learn to fish better.)

Say, how about that G5. Pretty neat how that thing does the thing, right? (Or is that too obvious.)

Well I'm not exactly allowed to teach it now am I?

Obviously Arthur has already given his analogy for it in other posts, but I'll try to elaborate on it to make it easier to understand exactly what he is talking about. If something on a tv screen (or the tv screen itself) is scaled up, and gets really big without a resolution increase, when you try to look closely at it, the pixels (each individual piece of information making up the whole) are scaled up too and are huge, so you're not really gaining any new details, it's the same amount information (i.e 1 pixel), therefore raw power only gets you so far. With a resolution increase, the space that used to be covered by one pixel is divided up into many more pixels, so you can see greater details and more pieces of information in a spot where you used to see only a single unit of information. Essentially, the size of your minimum unit of information gets smaller, so you can see the units that made up what used to be a single unit of information, therefore your precision and ability to work at higher levels of detail increases.

While this analogy is easy to understand in terms of senses, and it's not too hard to connect it to casting (if you think of a pixel as not only the smallest unit of information that you can see, but also the smallest unit that you can manipulate/control), I can think of another analogy that illustrates the effect and the benefit it has on casting. Imagine your hands get bigger. The muscles get bigger and therefore the hand gets stronger. However, when the hand gets REALLY big, despite huge amounts of strength, there are certain things that remain beyond your ability, because they require more than just raw strength.

As an arbitrary example, imagine a button that you wish to press. This button requires 5,000 lbs. of force to press, and is located deep inside a hole that is 2 millimeters wide. Your exceptionally large hands can easily exert enough force to press the button, but they are so big that they cannot fit inside such a small hole (keep the jokes to yourselves please ). So was your massive amount of strength enough to allow you to press the button?

Now imagine that you gain something that allows you to keep the same amount of strength in your hands that you had when they were huge, but makes them much smaller. Now you have the ability to wield the same strength with a much higher level of precision, and thus you can both exert the 5,000 lbs of force to press the button AND you have enough precision to get it in the hole. That's what a resolution increase does for casting.

[EDIT]: The hand analogy kind of makes it seem like adding power decreases resolution, but this isn't the case. Just clarifying, because analogies can get confusing if taken too literally.

[Syntax]

The above just made me very happy. The previous times that I've read this, it made sense, just nothing clicked. This particular reading was different. I think I understand a way of getting there. It may take a few more weeks/months, as I am moving very slowly, but the seed is there as a half formed solution in my head. (Hopefully, unless I am totally deluding myself--it's happened before.)

Thank you for your VERY CLEAR explanation. Happy X-mas to me from you. /festive_dance

[EDIT]Never mind, false alarm. [/EDIT]

[Oyama]

I'm interested in what the "half-solution" you came up with was, and where you plan on going with it. I had come up with a theoretical idea of how to accomplish resolution increases while I was G4, but it didn't really work (part of the problem was that I didn't fully understand what resolution actually meant/translated to until I experienced it), and G5 turned out to be WAY simpler.