[[ NETWORK_THEORY->SOULS ]]
A Direct Approach
02

A THEORY OF SOULS

> "People only have substance within the memories of other people. And that's why there were all kinds of mes. There weren't a lot of mes per se, I was just inside all sorts of people, that's all."

	Intelligences are (typically) bundles of sensors, processors, and actuators, with a memory. If the body senses, processes, actuates, and remembers all on its own, where do souls fit into this picture? 
	Idea: Souls are the *imprint* of these processes on some background substrate, the memalia network. Thus, when a body decays in the presense of another intelligence, the wires cross, and some or all of the sensor/processor/recorder/actuator imprint (which is now detached from the original host body) is now attached to the nearby intelligence through decay agony. This is colloquially known as "possession". But if souls are organizational structures built into the network, how can they exist inside of memalia?
	Instead, let's try a flip-sided approach. We take souls as fundamental. Brains still create imprints, but this isn't the soul. Rather, the soul is a fundamental object which dwells within this structure, piloting it. Once again, imprints are bound to nearby intelligences through decay agony. Now, the soul is dragged with them.
	The soul is not the mind. Rather, the soul lives inside of the mind, and the mind is a coherent memalia subnetwork, the imprint created by the brain. All souls live on the network, under this description, interfacing with meatspace through intelligence hosts, to which they are bound. Possession is the process of cutting off the original host (killing the child), and providing a replacement for the imprint to bind to. The role of the body is to construct a memalia system which accurately reflects meatspace, so that the soul effectively lives in meatspace. Animatronic AI aren't as capable of this, hence the Freddy mask trick, among other things.
	Where do souls come from? How, specifically, are they created? These are good questions that I don't have answers to. We do know how they are "released" from the network, though: Agony connections are what tether them to it, and agony is counteracted with positive emotions. Hence, happy feelings free souls.
	Additionally, with sufficient agony and convenient positioning, or with unusual dissemination of remnant, the mind may be overconjoined, connected to much more than one host body. The previously coherent structure of sensor/processor/etc is now deeply tangled and interlaced with the surrounding network, becoming decoherent. It "breaks". BV is an extreme case of this, but I posit that on a smaller scale, it is a common occurence. Hence, "The others are like animals". 

	I believe I have shown that, using the simple underlying theory of memalia networks, the ideas of "possession" and "broken souls" both emerge naturally.