To get things started, here’s my views on the existing Neuroforms in the Quickstart:
Static: A character that can’t change their minds quickly, but is also resilient to other people changing their minds. No mesh, so can’t access the infosphere and can’t be mesh-hacked.
Dynamic: The opposite of Static, Dynamic characters can change their core values in real-time, and download skills just as easily. Any lens imaginable is available from the infosphere. On the other hand, Dynamic characters can be mesh-hacked, and risk installing a dangerous lens. Dynamic minds have flexibility and power, at a cost in safety.
Dataform: Dataform minds have no particular location and can interact with the infosphere swiftly and easily. The main advantage is that they have no particular location (can be at many places “at once”), and are more at home in their information-rich environment. The fact that they tend to interact with people very far from wherever their mind is being stored means that dataform minds are rarely at risk of direct physical reprisal for their actions. On the other hand, dataform minds have a difficult time interacting with physical objects; they need remotes to do their work for them. Many high-tech security measures that could be avoided by simply walking into a room and listening can’t be avoided by dataform minds. Finally, dataform minds need a substrate and often can’t bring it with themselves. So, a dataform that runs on the infosphere would find itself extremely hampered anywhere there is no infosphere.
Group Mind: Not actually on the list of Neuroforms, but referenced by Distributed, Hierarchical, Individualized, and Matryoshka. Group minds are what happens when a number of things that could be full minds in-and-of themselves combine together to make a single, larger mind. Generally, Group Minds have the advantage of having much more processing power and greater flexibility of ideas. They have all the advantages of a group of people working together, without any of the interpersonal problems that plague conventional organizations. Group Minds suffer in two ways. First, bandwidth. When your brain needs to talk to itself, a thought is only a few synaptic connections away. With a mesh, it can be even faster. If you are in a Group Mind, a thought requires several brains acting in concert, which means waiting for network delays. Light-speed delays can slow thinking, forcing Group Minds to stick relatively close together. Second, vulnerability. Damage to any part of a Group Mind harms the entirety of it. Losing a brain may not be so lethal, but it would cause permanent personality damage. Worse, conventional hacking techniques can be used to attack a Group Mind.
Distributed: Distributed minds are more resilient to damage by having alternative sites of thought, at the price of being easier to harm by having more places to attack. They suffer the full bandwidth issues of group minds, without necessarily gaining the mental flexibility. Distributed minds are also unlocalized; they have no particular “location”. Depending on the substrate, they may suffer the flaws of Dataform. (Honestly, this is a hard one, as it’s orthogonal to most merits/flaws generated by neuroforms that are also distributed).
Hierarchical: Hierarchical minds try to avoid some of the vulnerabilities of the Group Mind, by creating entirely new vulnerabilities. On one hand, the loss of (almost) any individual no longer causes personality damage, and the mind is capable of making rapid (albeit lower-quality) decisions without concerning itself with network delays, when speed is more important than quality. On the other hand, there’s now a single point of failure in an otherwise distributed system. Lose the hierophant, lose the mind.
Individualized: With a lot of sub-personalities, the mind can ensure the best one for any particular job is active. This means swapping out core values, and possibly skills, at an extremely high rate. On the other hand, the personalities may not get along. Having interpersonal conflict within oneself can be detrimental, causing the mind as a whole to falter, make poor decisions, or act against its own interests.
Matryoshka: Aia. Matryoshka are usually Hierarchical, Distributed, and Individualized (certainly they are in the Aia). Matryoshka represent the blurry distinction between societies and people. Moreover, they can continue scaling, allowing societies of societies. A mind within a Matryoshka can be at the top, in the middle, or at the bottom.
In the Aia, the higher the level of consciousness, the smarter the mind. The minds at the bottom have near-animal intelligence and are Slaved. The minds at the top are incredibly powerful. The ones in the middle are rather powerful, but find themselves as pawns to things that are veritable gods, who they can’t be anything but loyal to. A result of this arrangement is that lower-tier minds are much faster than the more powerful minds they are supporting (a reversal of the normal higher-Cog = faster paradigm). The top-tier minds need to wait for the lower ones to resolve their struggles before they can make decisions (as resolving the struggle is making a decision). A bottom-tier mind moves as fast as a microprocessor, a mid-tier as fast as a human, and the top-tier as fast as a swift dictatorship.
Parasitic: Parasitic neuroforms are generally less powerful than their substrate neuroform, and tend to suffer as social pariahs in many places (and are outlawed in others).
Savants and Slaved are pretty clear with respect to disadvantages and, in the case of savants, advantages. (Savants may want more extreme advantages/disadvantages than +/- 1).
And some new ones:
Blended: Besides being Matryoshka, Aia minds lack clear boundaries between one-another. Any given Aia is composed of any number of smaller Aia, but those smaller Aia may be parts of other Aia as well. It’s kind of like having a person who is sharing their lungs with one other person, and their kidneys with another one, and so on, only that these are parts of their minds and personalities. Blended minds are extremely flexible (making Dynamic look Static), partially because any time you look for a particular one, the best you can find is an approximation of a previous blended mind. Blended minds tend to have ever-changing core values, and ever-changing abilities. While they may have the equivalent of continuity of consciousness, they’re so “Theseus’ Ship” that any long term plans need to be extremely flexible. Organizing a party next week is the equivalent of a multi-generational project.
Self-Similar: A group mind where the elements of the mind are near-clones of one-another. If a Self-Similar mind is Hierarchical, the hierophant is also similar to the internal minds. Self-similar minds lose the flexibility related benefits of ordinary group minds, while keeping the bandwidth-related disadvantages… mostly. There are two advantages to self-similar minds, over normal group minds. First, damage to the mind is less sever, since losing a single instance does not change the overall personality (in this sense, it has the resilience of a hierarchical mind without the vulnerability). Second, in an emergency individual minds within a self-similar group mind can quickly make decisions that they can be confident would match the consensus decision. This grants a certain degree of protection against bandwidth related issues. Compared to a baseline dynamic mind, a self-similar mind is equally flexible and powerful, vulnerable to hacking attacks, and resilient to damage.
Polysubstrate (narfanator calls this Varied): A mind that is polysubstrate is running on many different systems, each following their own rules. This grants a degree of flexibility and intuitive jumping that even group minds are incapable of. On the other hand, polysubstrate minds can be a little insane, as various parts operate at different speeds and contradict one another. Because a polysubstrate mind is composed of many different parts using different technology, attacks tailored against any particular type of mind are very likely to hurt part of it, but can’t break all of it.
