I have some question regarding psychosurgery.
1. Using simulspace acceleration (or time contraction).
There is a private server listed in the gear section on p. 315. Its capable of running a simulspace environment and 50 egos. Is this enough to do psychosurgery at 60x speed? What other tricks might someone do with this?
2. Merging forks who have been treated with psychosurgery.
The process of merging also integrates any stress, traumas, and
ego traits acquired by the fork back into the original ego.
So stress, traumas, probably disorders, and ego traits (good and bad or just bad?) can be acquired through merging? What about merging with forks that underwent psychotherapy to reduce stress and the like? I'm wondering if a patient can go about living their life while a psychosurgen heals a fork of that patient.
On a the same note, can one under go Deep Learning or Skill Imprints, then merge the forks with the primary fork?
3. Using psychosurgery on yourself? No forks.
Can you perform psychosurgery on yourself? Not on a fork of yourself, but instead on the very same ego doing the procedure. Are there any complications you might run into? Probably not the best idea, but I want to know the results.
If nothing else, what about merging?
4. Do egos need to be active to receive psychosurgery?
This matters for procedures such as skill imprinting. After imprinting a skill, the skill starts degrading at a rate of -10 per day. If the affected ego must be running to receive this psychosurgery, then you're probably limited to having only 1 imprinted skill at any given time. If you try to imprint another skill, then the previous imprint skill might wear off by the time you are done.
Re: #2
I think that stress from all components is cumulative. This means that you really need to work with psychotherapy to reduce the stress in each ego to 0 (or as close as you can) before trying to merge them or you risk picking up additional disorders (or just going insane) if the composite stress is too high.
On 1, a private server should be enough to run a simulspace (and use time dilation) for Psychosurgery purpose. Note that you’d have to program the simulspace first and give yourself the admin rights you want.
Agree with ICU2 on nb. 2. A merge just adds up everything each Ego has. If both have the same trait, it’s redundant (you can usually only have one instance of a trait) so there’s no effect, but stress stacks and traits that are in either one of the Ego end up in the final merged person.
For the rest, my understanding was that Psychosurgery was always performed on an alpha fork, in a secure environment, and then if the procedure was successful, the Ego was replaced with the “fixed” version of itself. This way, if the doctor makes a mess of things they can always roll back to the initial state: much safer this way. Another way to see it is that the surgeon works on the inactive Ego but not before making a backup of the patient prior to the procedure.
So based on that, you could do it on yourself.