The Blank-Slate Mind

Striders do not think with brains. Instead, the seat of cognition and consciousness is decentralized - undertaken instead by the Strider’s entire person. The lattice of the Strider - their entire self - is a singular engine that grows powerful through adherence to the principles of spotting correlations and patterns, answering questions and Bayesianity. From this, they forge doctrines and realize their power through praxis, allowing those who are true to wield truth as a hammer, and break the many strongholds of falsehood. Only with the blanking of the mind, clean as a slate, and rebuilding the principles one must abide by in truest mirroring of reality can this be achieved.

The Grand Mechanica

Lathe-spun tool-cut brass cogs interlock, spin and whine; each of them a law. The constitution-engine resultant is a parent to many children, and an axle upon which all other concepts and creation hinge. This is the Grand Mechanica of the Switchboard.

Information

At the foundation of the Switchboard’s mechanics is information in tangible form. This takes the shape of chalk, resembling chalk as we understand it, taking powder/dust, crystalline - and, newly, ribbon, forms. All things in the Switchboard are chalk. It replaces atoms at the fundamental level, as the building blocks of all that exists. A consequence of this is how any one thing in Switchboard interacts with anything and everything else - through bridges between chalk and chalk that exists due to pattern. Chalk interactions happen at the ribbon level, where chalk takes the form of ribbon, which when folded according to rules, can form anything in the Switchboard. These truths all fall under a principle known as information tangibility, which refers to the interactions of information and chalk in the Switchboard.

These mechanics, especially the tactile manipulation of chalk, are elaborated upon in The Hands as Chalk. One of the many summaries that can be taken from that document is that chalk, in addition to being the building blocks of the Switchboard’s entirety, is also it’s power system. Possessing chalk - possessing information - is strength in the Switchboard. The mechanics of this are further explained below.

Knowledge, Power, Quantity and Quality

Outlined in The Hands as Chalk and The Strider Protocol, those who possess the Weave Protocol - Chalkweavers - are able to draw chalk into their Straits and subject it to various manipulations, allowing them to interact with the Switchboard at the macro level, and with its more grassroot fundamental mechanics. While simply possessing chalk does indeed make one more powerful, this scaling is non-linear in a sense, in that not all chalk is made equal.

Consider that if it was, the most obvious path to power in the Switchboard would simply be having large amounts of information - such as a colossal book filled with a memorized string of alphanumeric data, as simply having that data in a sense would be having information, and thus induce a proportionate increase in strength. For many reasons, this could not be the case, and so mechanically, the power derived from the knowledge of a piece of information is dependent on its quantity and quality. We called the quantity of information ‘knowledge’, and the quality of information what it causes; ‘power’.

Thus;

• Knowledge: The physical quantity of information.
• Power: The realized potential of knowledge based on its quality.

Knowledge is fairly straightforward; it is accumulated by merely being, sensing and thinking. A being’s mere presence in the Switchboard passively imbibes it with knowledge, and as such the many old places and things in the Switchboard are filled with ancient chalk.

Power is a bit more complex. Determining the ‘quality’ of knowledge is achieved through deducing what questions can be answered with that knowledge. When faced with the question of “What is the composition of quartz?”, knowing the composition of iron isn’t particularly useful, the reason why being that the knowledge had and the answer sought are not well correlated. These correlations are an element of information tangibility, and are the more formal way of describing the ‘bridges’ between chalk patterns - or things - in the Switchboard. Power is obtained from information by its efficient usage, this ‘efficient usage’ being finding how it correlates or connects with other things in the Switchboard.

This makes use of a principle known as Bayesianity.

Correlation and Bayesianity

Bayesianity as a real-world concept is incredibly complex, and explaining it in its entirety is far beyond the scope of possibly the entirety of Project Samsara. I will attempt to summarize it as much as possible, to provide a form of it that is most usable to our purposes.

Bayesianity, modified for the Switchboard context, is the efficient usage of information done through perceiving accurate correlations between entities, concepts, whatever, with the aim of drawing conclusions as reflective of reality as possible.

So how do we get power out of our knowledge of the composition of iron? We must take a tangent to look at the world and understand that it is - for the most part - perceptible and as a result, interactable with. All things that exist in any sense where that word is usable are perceptible and interactable with in some manner and too some degree, and in the rare instance they are not, their effects on other things can be perceived and interacted with. Think how we can’t see gravity but it’s effects are very clear on things that we can see.

From this we obtain another truth in information tangibility; nothing in the Switchboard has zero correlation with any other and arguably every other thing in the Switchboard. It is always possible to construct a chain of correlations between any one thing and any other thing in the universe, and this chain allows us to use what we know about the thing at the start of the chain to obtain answers about what sits at the end of it. Any knowledge about any thing has non-zero correlation with any truth about any other thing. It can be lower than other fistfuls of knowledge, but never zero. All things in the Switchboard are correlated with other things in varying - but non-zero - degrees.

Bayesian thinking - thinking with the aim to construct models of reality as accurate to reality as possible - is performed in the Five Straits - the ‘mind’ of calcic beings - and is situated primarily in the computational strait, the line of the Five Straits that is primarily concerned with ‘thinking’. Perceiving the link between any question and any bit of information possessed - the correlation - requires an unencumbered computational strait, and the efficiency of using information and correlations to answer questions is the computational strait’s degree of bayesianity.

High bayesianity is good, and translates to a tangible ability in the Switchboard to make maximal use of the chalk at a person’s disposal. Low bayesianity - the product of a mind that sees correlations where there are none - impairs the wielding of chalk in the Switchboard, producing negative power, almost. Certainty about an answer is irrelevant if the means used to reach it are faulty.

Bayesianity is seeing patterns only when they are truly present, and deducing correlations only when they truly exist.

We can then talk about escalating tiers of bayesian ‘mind-engines’; using our example on the composition of a piece of quartz, we can begin with a poor, faulty, barely bayesian at all engine that erroneously correlates the possessed knowledge of - say - the composition of a piece of calcite, and concludes that that it is quartz. The fact that this example barely even follows to you, the reader, shows how lacking in bayesianity - and thus, any sense whatsoever.

An engine a few notches above could make the distinction between various materials when seeking to answer the question of “What is the composition of quartz?“. Given an ensemble of granite, plastic, wool, iron and wood, they can make use of their knowledge about these materials to deduce which would be the most useful in answering the question that is the composition of quartz.

A mind-engine in it’s final form is one that can make use of even the slightest correlation to answer questions. Any knowledge had - in the hands of a master Bayesian thinker - could have relevance to any question at hand, so long as this thinker is willing to plumb the very depths for the dots, and connect the lines between them, no matter how short or inelastic the cord. In the question of the composition of quartz when that of iron is known, the master Bayesian goes down to the fundamental; both iron and quartz are made up of elementary particles - protons, neutrons and electrons - and observing that the behavior of these particles is not unique to iron, but rather exists in both the iron and the quartz. With this connection made, it is possible to deduce the composition of quartz.

Secrets

This is a brief section that talks a bit more in-depth about the whole thing ‘power from knowledge is determinant on how it answers questions’.

There is an additional modifier to the power granted by possessing a piece of knowledge’s ability to answer questions, and this modifier is how desirable is the answer to the question at hand.

The Switchboard is filled with a litany of secrets. From the various locales and sectors of space once covered by maps, now lost, to the flavor of an unmarked can of drink in a cupboard, nearly everything unknown by anyone in the Switchboard could be described as a secret, but more accurately there is an amorphous threshold that a piece of knowledge crosses to become a secret, what allows it to cross that threshold being how sought after that piece of knowledge is.

Under this secrecy system, all knowledge in the Switchboard could be seen as having an invisible metric tied to it, curiosity, that describes and is raised by the number of thinking entities that are pondering that question to which that knowledge is the answer.

When a secret is discovered by a denizen of the Switchboard, it invokes truly arcane mathematics within them, which can be best understood as them being paid a considerable dividend of chalk due to the machinations of bayesianity. The more people desire this piece of knowledge, the more benefit - power - the sole or few possessors of it reap.

In turn, this also means that a secret provide gradually lessening power to those who know it, if more and more people come to know it. This is the primary reason why much of the chalk that saturates the Switchboard, serving only to be used as fuel in grander things, is so utterly useless otherwise; everything about it is already known, and this is the case with many other things. There is no curiosity, and thus there is little to no power reaped from knowing.

How Does It All Translate To… Anything?

The mechanics outlined above have varying ramifications on how the Switchboard as a whole works, but a means of understanding them comes from operating on the idea that they are the bedrock of a secondary meta-power system.

The vast majority of the chalk in the Switchboard is of considerably low quality, considering that the Switchboard is utterly suffused with it. The result of this is that when chalk is ‘in use’, per se, it is almost always for its ‘material’ usefulness as both the shape of the result of that task being performed and the fuel for making it possible. Two denizens of the Switchboard meet, and they weave chalk and hurl it at each other until one fells the other. Chalk has been used yes, but it hasn’t truly been employed in a manner where the mechanics outlined above come into play.

In a fight between otherwise equally matched Chalkweavers, the winner will be the one with the computational strait honed by bayesian thinking. Through conscious effort exerted to deduce conclusions most accurate to reality, and operate alongside those conclusions, they are made more able to fold and weave chalk, and thus to defeat the less-bayesian thinker.

This conscious effort to form a mental model of reality most accurate to reality stems from a decision to regress the mind-engine, the Straits, to a state of utter blankness - the Blank-Slate Mind - and then rebuild the previously cluttered, dogmatic, biased mind with new blocks and a more bayesian toolbox. Doing this translates rather straightforwardly to one who is more suited to wielding chalk, as their mind more accurately mirrors the world around them, and thus it is easier for them to form patterns of chalk in their minds, and then realize what they formed in reality through the Weave Protocol.

Bayesian thinking allows for most accurately and efficiently translating what is true in the mind to what lies in the world, because what is true in the world lies in the mind.

Of course, being fallible beings, even if one were to succeed at the process of achieving a blank-slate mind, there is no guarantee they will follow through with the demanding rebuilding process bayesian thinking demands. Instead, denizens of the Switchboard do something slightly different; constant loops of learning and unlearning, sliding closer and further from bayesianity like a ship at sea, as they progress through their lives. What is formed by this ideological back and forth, is addressed in-canon as doctrine.

Doctrines

A doctrine in the Switchboard is a fancier, but more in-canon way of referring to a worldview. These worldviews - doctrines - are held by characters in the canon and denizens of the Switchboard, with implications on mechanical fronts.

Doctrines are interesting things, serving as a strange mix of a narrative tool as well as a world mechanic, in that the doctrine held by a character has effects both on them as a denizen in the universe in which they exist, and they as a character in the canon we peruse.

What does this all mean?

The Formation of Doctrines

Lets take a practical example. The Spyndl Academy is an entity in the Switchboard and a prominent one at that. It occupies both in-universe and in-canon significance through its considerable lore, the relationship many other characters have to it, and it has to them and other entities in the Switchboard, and how many characters hinge on the Academy for a non-trivial amount of their guiding principles. The Spyndl Academy thus has a philosophy behind it, shaped over the years by what it was when it was established and what it has had to become as time passed to ensure its own survival and relevance, and realize its many aims.

The culmination of these things is the Spyndl Academy’s doctrine, their beliefs, their worldview formed as a response to the Switchboard around them, which guides - if not compels - them to act in certain ways. Doctrines are formed through perception; observing patterns and the correlations between those patterns, whether those two things are actually present or not. The Spyndl Academy doctrine has been honed over many processions through considerable amounts of internal correction by those who adhere to it, but even so it is not perfectly bayesian. The conclusions they reach may still deviate non-trivially from reality, and the ones that don’t may not necessarily have been reached with concrete, bayesian thinking methodology.

The formation of doctrine is thus fairly simple, as doctrines can arise from the simplest things and proceed to weave themselves into the Switchboard Current. Subconscious actions as seemingly trivial as sparing insects instead of crushing them once they disturb oneself forms doctrine, just as deliberate actions such as outlining a set of rules to be followed by a group of individuals subject to those rules is also creating a doctrine. As will be necessary, doctrines will clash with doctrines, and the superior ones will triumph over those formed with poor methodology, granting doctrinal power to those that adhere to that doctrine.

Adhering by or ‘Playing To’ Doctrines

Adhering to a doctrine is a set of conscious and unconscious actions, traveling down a spectrum of consciousness levels and competence. Adhering to a doctrine is a matter of subjecting one’s actions and the thoughts that guide them to the yardstick of the doctrine’s principles, with closer adherence conferring greater doctrinal power, but also a burden to defend that doctrine, as well as additional losses suffered by both doctrine and adherent when they fail to.

Beginning at unconscious incompetence, one who aspires to adhere to a doctrine will be repeatedly failing to do so, and not even be aware of it. It can be a Spyndl Operative choosing to sour relations with Spyndl Academy allies through poor behavior. Their inability to properly ‘fulfill’ the tenets of their doctrine shows poor adherence to it, and thus very little doctrinal power is reaped.

Conscious incompetence is the next stage, and is marked by the presence of analysis mechanisms even if what is gleaned from them isn’t necessarily put into actions. Awareness of the tenets of doctrine and thus what is mandated, encouraged, allowed, inconsequential, frowned upon, heavily discouraged, forbidden, or outrightly considered heretical is the first step in becoming more adept at adhering to doctrine.

Conscious competence is the next step, and is marked by deliberate, calculated action towards adhering to a doctrine. It is knowing the tenets and rulebooks and cross-referencing every possible avenue of action against what is penned down in the literature. It is asking “What is right according to these principles?” and aiming to act as true to the answer to that as possible.

Of course, there are times when one may have to act against their doctrine’s interest, often for selfish reasons, and the riskiness of this is that those who turn on a doctrine they are well-versed in incur considerably more praxis backlash upon themselves and other adherents of that doctrine, compared to those who are still floundering at the tiers of incompetence. It can be viewed as levying harsher punishments on those who should’ve known better; we only wag a finger in the face of a blasphemous new convert, while we hang a priest for the exact same offence. To choose ones own personal doctrine over a collective one is a slight that does not go unanswered for on the praxis level.

The final tier is unconscious competence, and it is the domain of zealots. Acolytes ask and then act. Zealots simply act, because to some it would appear that their very computational straits have been unspooled and restrung to always act in unquestionable, unfailing service to their doctrine. The doctrinal power conferred upon zealots sees them grow nigh transcendent, and every praxis conquest reaped by a zealot is fed back to their doctrine and other adherents in spades. That being said, the absconding of a zealot triggers praxis backlash that can leave a doctrine torn to shreds, and its adherents drowning under the current of surging calcic wave.

Doctrinal Power

The bayesianity of a doctrine is the strength of that doctrine. When a doctrine is more bayesian, it is stronger, but it then raises the question of what ‘stronger’ means in this context. To answer this, we must consider the existence of personal doctrines. Any Strait-bearing denizen of the Switchboard will inevitable formulate a doctrine of the self; a collection of conclusions that form beliefs which in turn inspire and compel action. The bayesianity - and thus, relative ‘trueness to reality’ - of this personal doctrine are a product of the bayesianity of the computational strait.

Personal doctrines often ‘borrow’ principles from larger, ‘collective’ doctrines, such as the doctrines formed by many denizens of the Switchboard who all align their interests as optimally as possible to form the Switchboard’s various groups - such as the Spyndl Academy. When the personal doctrine draws only from clean, bayesian wells, the result is strength manifested in the Weave Protocol; more efficient handling of all things calcic, as described in the example above of otherwise equally-matched combatants. The personal doctrine - the doctrine of the self - is maximally powerful when it is maximally bayesian, with maximal bayesianity achieved primarily through repeated iteration upon current convictions and the conclusions they formed from to drag them in line with reality; what is true.

It could then be said that the Weave Protocol’s power and the ability for a denizen of the Switchboard to interact with all things calcic in general, scales off of the ‘purity’ of their internal belief systems. The narrative result of this is that clashes between characters in canon are analogous to clashes between differing doctrines, and in most cases, the doctrine truer to life would triumph. We realize this in truly tangible form through Praxis.

The Praxis Protocol

Praxis and the praxis powers are the meta-power system element of it all. Praxis is the realization of doctrine tangibly. The mechanics of doctrine are majorly passive and relegated to the background, but praxis seeks to change that. Almost at will, a denizen of the Switchboard may strike with the power of praxis, and attack a target’s doctrine with their doctrine, their mundane action transcending to the doctrinal level. When such a thing occurs, a protocol-level mechanic - the Praxis Protocol - is invoked by the Astrolabe, and chalk bends to conform to the result of the grand arcane mathematics carried out in the realization of doctrine striking out against doctrine.

The Operators of the Spyndl Academy draw upon the Academy’s doctrine for a litany of their powers, and in fighting for the Academy and thus its doctrine, even latently, they prove the strength of the Academy’s doctrine - the literal trueness of it - compared to other doctrines, which has physical ramifications in the Switchboard. Bearers of the doctrine that had its flaws exposed see a tangible diminishment of their power, a literal weakening in their actual strength, both physically and calcically, while the bearers of the superior doctrine feed on the enforced truth of their power and grow stronger as a result.

It can be thought of as two large reservoirs of chalk being wagered against each other. This chalk is drawn from all those who adhere to that doctrine - all of Spyndl’s Operators, for example. When a praxis act is performed, it is done ‘in the name’ of a particular doctrine, against another doctrine, and this act is immediately ‘picked up’ by the Astrolabe, triggering the Praxis Protocol. Imperceptible ledgers are consulted, and dice are rolled almost - one doctrine’s attack against the other’s defense - and a numerical modifier determined by the doctrines’ bayesianity is added to the result. The winning doctrine thus takes a dividend of chalk from the losing one, and this chalk enters the reservoir, and is ‘paid back’ almost to all those who adhere to that doctrine.

As a doctrine engages in physical-ideological warfare, its followers win or lose tithes of strength. These praxis interactions are happening almost all the time, even outside of battle, but it is in the brief moments when an adherent of a doctrine strikes down the adherent of another where the most monumental shifts in the power-balance of doctrines in the Switchboard are observed.

Titular Powers

Infamy under the doctrine of passing is recommended reading before this section.

Titular powers are powers conferred upon those who, at the intersection of yarn and doctrine, have let an aspect form and shine forth. Those who dwell in the Switchboard come to call the bearer a title that may precede or succeed their name. Some may bear multiple titles, and not all may confer powers upon them. But when the calculus resolves in favor, titular powers are bestowed upon the worthy.

As titles are derivative from actions, and actions from principles, titular powers are thus related to the doctrine that prompted them to take root, and furthermore operate under praximechanics. The praxis nature of titular powers allow them to operate beyond the confines of ordinary chalk, and thus titular powers go a length in cementing the place of their bearer in the Switchboard.

Titular powers themselves however, are not like swords to be wielded or supernatural feats to be blasted at foes. They are more like crowns, regal indications of prominence that sit atop a subject’s head, the capstone atop all that they are. Being related to doctrines, titular powers are regularly bestowed upon doctrinal zealots, who benefit from their boons passively.

As a hypothetical, a common title borne by the Spyndl Academy’s strongest is that of the Sojourner. Highlighting the nature of the academy’s operators to be adventurers and explorers, the title of the Sojourner is conferred upon those who have proven their skills in flight and discovery. The titular power conferred upon Sojourners, thus, is even greater dexterity with the Strider Protocol, granting them empowered skydancing, a praxis-mechanical lightening of their information mass, and greater efficiency of their stride equation.

On Narrative

I sought to build the Switchboard off this system as I felt there must be a way to truly realize a mechanical explanation for tropes or such seen in other works of fiction. The underdog hero strikes out against the tyrannical subjugator, but comes to falter under the crushing weight of their evil. When all seems lost, they recall all who have fought with them and for them, all who are relying on them, all who helped them, and from this they draw the strength necessary to overcome the most terrible evils, the direst odds.

In the Switchboard, this is a mechanic and a narrative tool. Colossal, powerful, but poorly-formed doctrines held by terrible foes and the powers and forces they command - may be toppled by ragtag, cobbled-together groups of those who truly fight for real truth, and this is as acceptable and grounded in the canon of the Switchboard as calculus and trigonometry is grounded in our reality.

When a praxis power is invoked, a praxis attack made, it is a statement, a move with heavy narrative weight. It is a rubberstamping of the happenings of the canon’s characters, by the canon’s world. It is the ‘Amen’ that ends a prayer. It is the ‘Aiat’ that ends a ritual chant. It is the period that ends the sentence I placed before it.