[[ NETWORK_THEORY->PROXIES ]]
A Direct Approach
06

A THEORY OF PROXIES

	In The Fourth Closet, the MCI spirits are "broken" when their Remnant is spread amongst the Funtimes (as well as the original animatronic hosts, now melded together). Carlton is injected with their Remnant, and he enters (connects to) their shared memalia: a shaded reflection of meatspace, the children's perception, where Afton is still a yellow rabbit. The broken children are literally duplicated, split into many copies of themselves which remerge as the drawings (representing, or perhaps literally connected to, memories) are combined. These children, are they the souls?

	Previously, I discussed ways of fitting souls into the network picture. I considered them as Coherent memalia subnetworks (minds), and concluded this didn't work: If souls are memalia subnetworks, how can they exist inside of memalia? This is why I took the soul as a seperate, fundamental object.
	This has bothered me since, because it leaves the soul with no good purpose. One of my original motivations for studying this topic was, as I put it:

>"If the body senses, processes, actuates, and remembers all on its own, where do souls fit into this picture?"

	But I've stumbled right back into the same problem. If the *mind* senses, actuates, and so on, then again, where do souls fit in? My sloppy answer was that souls "pilot" the mind, but I find this unsatisfying for a number of reasons. It opens, for example, the question of how souls can operate outside of their minds (as in Happiest Day). That's not to mention how the soul pilots in the first place if memory and motivation and so on are external to it.

	Souls exist inside of memalia. Memalia cannot exist inside of memalia... right? Well, memalia can *connect*. Walk through a (haunted) door in memory A, and arrive in memory B. Walk through another door in B, and arrive back in A. Is A inside of B, and B inside of A, and A inside of B, and so on? Not exactly, they're just connected. The connection, however, may behave very similarly to encapsulation.

	Encapsulation.

	The soul is a proxy for the mind, a pointer to it. It is an object existing inside of memalia, but also connecting to memalia, just like a glitched object (or perhaps, literally so). The relationship between the mind and the soul is just as the relationship between the mind and the body. The body is a meatspace host, the soul is a memalian host (typically a reflection of the body). This is my preferred model currently, for its simplicity and broad applicability.
	It explains how souls are "born", the same way any other memory object is born. When the mind would like to interface with an external dream, it doesn't meld with the dream entirely. Rather, it uses (constructs?) the soul as a middleman, a centralized controllable root-node to explore unfamiliar wired territories.
	One must remember that all intelligences, meatspace or otherwise, are hosts for memalia subnetworks, including network life. I avoided this topic because it would seem to imply infinite families of dreams within dreams, but it doesn't. Dreams aren't "in here", they're "out there". There are no categories within categories, it's all just one huge amorphous entity. It's network all the way down... All the way down, until you reach the red lake, of course.

	The biggest remaining question is exactly how subnetworks are able to mechanically interact with hosts. That is, a broader theory of the dynamics between memalia and the objects they couple to, beyond a simple "gateway" description.