An Infomorph is a virtual body of information that can possess emergent features such as personality.
The term was first fully conceptualised in Charles Platt (author) novel The Silicon Man referring to a consciousness uploaded or downloaded into a computer (mind transfer) from a biological entity:
“An infomorph is what we call intelligence held in a computer memory,” Butterworth put in. “Like an information entity” [1]
The term has been, historically, used in two key contexts:
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Whether the vision shared in Platt’s novel will ever be more than a theory is uncertain, but computing power is still increasing exponentially (see Moore's law for more details), and the publications from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University consider the philosophical and technical feasibility of this theory at some point in the future. [2]
The theory involves knowing the absolute workings of every aspect of the mind and the ability to measure this in a specific individual, may be theoretically possible (though Heisenberg's uncertainty principle may apply if it is discovered that the brain's workings on a quantum scale are relevant to the workings of the mind), but the rate of appreciation of knowledge in neuroscience and psychology is far slower than the rate of increase in computing power. There are also philosophical questions to be answered, the most important being the nature of consciousness and whether it is possible to transfer a consciousness or if this transfer would effectively be a copy.
Alexander Chislenko re-appropriated the term Infomorph in his 1996 essay Networking in the Mind Age [3] to refer to a distributed info-being that would exist independent of human intent:
The growing reliance of system connections on functional, rather than physical, proximity of their elements will dramatically transform the notions of personhood and identity and create a new community of distributed "infomorphs" - advanced informational entities - that will bring the ongoing process of liberation of functional structures from material dependence to its logical conclusions.
Chislenko re-defines the term outside of it’s original mind uploading construct and uses the category of “infomorph” to refer to a virtual body of information similar to an autonomous Software agent. He describes the infomorph as distributed beings with no permanent bodies. Their most defining feature will be their near-perfect information handing abilities. In this context infomorphs are described as a form of distributed artificial intelligence who process autonomy, raising a series of important functional, legal and philosophical questions:
His work questions the ontology that may emerge betwen humans and info-entities and how human beings will communicate with bodies of information abstracted from the physical environment.
More recently, Amber Case, pioneer of Cyborg anthropology contributes to the definition of the infomorph in her A Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology:
Technically, those who participate on social networks and contribute information to the web are partial infomorphs. Those who are deceased but leave behind a historical set of writing or documents could be considered infomorphs as well. One's informorphic footprint can be larger or smaller based on the amount of material they've created during their lifetime, and the amount of that material that is distributed to the general public.[4]
While the concept is a common one in Science Fiction, the term itself is idiosyncratic and not widely used. It has, however, appeared in various guises: