Psience and Technology
Cognitive spaces and technology often don't mix. The reason for this is multifaceted, in part because the scientific community has yet to find consensus that a Collective Unconscious even exists, much less any deep understanding of how the human psyche interacts with it.
That doesn't mean it is entirely unstudied. Between corporate cover-ups and self-interested individuals burying research that would benefit all of humanity for their own gain, it is simply not public knowledge.
Here, we're going to discuss the types of technology that can interface with cognitive spaces and realms of the Collective Unconscious, and the 'scientific' discipline that studies interfacing with these spaces.
Note: This file is not all encompassing, and only exists as general guidelines. If you have an idea of something that isn't covered here already, that doesn't mean it's not possible. Submit a request to the staff or apply for it in your application, and we'll consider it.
Kotodama
The New World Order has derived technology utilizing Rumors that is both wholly empowered by them and owes its existence to the conceptual force known as Kotodama. It must be stressed that technology that is formed by rumors should not work. Attempts to recreate it by reverse engineering it outside of Sumaru City will fail outright.
Attempts to study it can work in a sense, but it is mostly an act of delusion that empowers Nyarlathotep. One will believe that the scientific method works, and that belief becomes a negative feedback loop where the end result happens because Nyarlathotep lets these beliefs take hold within researchers and test subjects, making them just the same as rumors.
Most scientists working in their labs go mad over time; this too is a feature. Hisataka Shinjo, the head of the New World Order's Research and Development Division, is fully aware that all of these scientists are a drip feed of sacrifices to Nyarlathotep's aims for the New World Order. He just doesn't care.
What can you do with it?
- Create things that should not exist, such as mecha that can function within supernatural spaces (excluding the Dark Hour). Duplicate legendary objects with an associated rumor that makes them extra effective in supernatural spaces. Extract esoteric energies and concepts that one otherwise could not from people, usually in the process changing them permanently. Turn people into demons and banish their psyche to the furthest reaches of the Collective Unconscious.
- Create Artificial Persona Users. Use of the Kotodama to do so has worse side effects than even the Kirijo Process. Nyarlathotep is in fact, that jerk. Note: they are not yet doing this process on player characters, and any artificial Persona Users in the NWO should come from the Kirijo Process. The reason why is apparent once one plays the 'Additional Scenario' of Persona 2 Eternal Punishment.
- The sky's the limit, so long as your creative vision is tilted towards amorality or immorality. Or you could even believe you're doing good things and be wholly delusional. The road to hell…
What can't you do with it?
- Anything good. No, seriously. It's entirely up to the will of the Crawling Chaos, and he's not known for his benevolent nature. Antagonist players must understand this rule OOCly as they utilize Kotodama to make the worst happen.
- Anything that would permanently change the form of a person, e.g. grafting cyborg parts or changing their skin to golden armor or whatnot. Technically, it can work in Sumaru City, but these people would instantly die the moment they left Sumaru or some other supernatural space because the rules of material reality would set in. This isn't allowed on player characters as a result.
Kirijo Science
The Kirijo Group's technology primarily focuses on the study of Plumes of Dusk. The most practical function of technology with a Plume of Dusk inside of it is that it will continue to function within supernatural spaces, including the Dark Hour.
Examples include: Two radios with Plumes of Dusk can connect to each other if within range. Cell phones with Plumes of Dusk would turn on, but wouldn't otherwise function for communication because servers, cell towers, etc. don't have such technology. A motorcycle will still run in the Dark Hour with a Plume of Dusk on board so long as it has fuel, batteries, and/or whatever else it needs to function.
Evokers are the primary known use currently for Kirijo Science. One of its more secret uses is a series of rings with small pieces of Plumes of Dusk that can convey a partial pseudo-Potential to its wearers, allowing them to remain more or less safely awake during the Dark Hour. It can’t let them summon a Persona, though. There are also other technologies that can create the Dark Hour effect over a short range, usually a few hundred meters, forcing normal people into their coffins and drawing Shadows to that area.
The crowning achievement of Kirijo technology are Personality Modules, which due to the loss of research from Ten Years Ago have become unquantifiable black boxes. Anything with a Personality Module will develop a personality, a Shadow to be the core of the technology it's housed within, and The Potential so long as it has a vessel through which to interface with the world.
Despite the usefulness of their technology, one cannot simply sweep the Kirijo Group's history of human experimentation under the rug. Artificial Persona Users were first created by the Kirijo Group's darkest experiments prior to the events of Ten Years Ago. This allowed them to forcibly create The Potential in people who did not yet show signs of it.
The Kirijo Group's process of creating artificial Persona Users is heavily damaging to the psyche, creating trauma that for most will never heal. For these unfortunate individuals, their Persona will at times try to kill them, even if they're not in a supernatural space. While the Group has developed suppressant medication that assists with this side effect, it has yet to address the side effects of the medication itself. Taking it for prolonged periods of time will cause progressive organ damage that is just as fatal.
Research into this realm always risks side effects which might break reality catastrophically or cause the end of all life as we know it. Thus the Kirijo Group heavily monitors it, but that doesn't mean others aren't doing it anyway out of their sight.
What can you do with it?
- Make technology that interfaces normally with supernatural spaces, in particular the Dark Hour. Create Evokers and Theurgy cartridges. Give machines a personality and soul. Pharmaceuticals that assist with supernatural problems and side effects. Create a pseudo-Potential within people, or the Dark Hour effect over short range.
- Create artificial Persona Users, there's no ethical process for this!
- Lure, capture and confine Shadows. They do not utilize this technology anymore, and consider it forbidden after Ten Years Ago, but it is technically available.
- Resonance boosting technology that assists non-Navigators with fulfilling the role. No matter how good the technology or how much one trains with it though, they'll never be the equivalent of a dedicated navigator.
What can't you do with it?
- You can't make new Personality Modules at this time. The technology is lost, and even individuals who know more than most don't have a complete picture. As a result, you can't make new Anti-Shadow Suppression Weapons... yet.
- You can't put Personality Modules in people that already have a psyche. Sho Minazuki from Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is a special case that took years. While we encourage PCs to be creative with Plumes of Dusk, we would prefer player characters not try to do exactly the same thing prior to his debut on the grid.
- Similarly, you can't clone people and put a Personality Module in them to get around this. The result of this would be a very dead clone, especially since cloning people is currently impossible anyway without Kotodama. This couldn't result in a player character.
Cognitive Psience
Cognitive psience is a discipline largely considered fringe pseudoscience by the greater scientific community, but accepted in some circles as a subdiscipline of psychology that studies the mind and how it interfaces with cognitive worlds within the subconscious. Because it often relies on premises that have no material foundation, it's derided thus as more occult than science, but those who study it believe it's only a matter of time until it can prove itself.
Popularized briefly in Japan after the SEBEC Scandal, there was about a year where several preliminary publications were made. Since then, though, they've quickly and quietly fallen out of circulation and favor. Cognitive psience research is now brutally, unilaterally crushed, its funding removed from any academic institution that tries to commit the unspoken taboo of treating it as a true scientific discipline.
Even so, a few small-time researchers who were mostly disenfranchised are quietly trying to continue their research.
For researchers who have never entered a cognitive world, cognitive psience consists mostly of healthy mental practices and exercises that one can undertake for superior mental health and fortitude. Often these can mimic other therapy techniques, such as mindfulness and other mental exercises to assert control over disordered thinking. However, some researchers speculate that it can go beyond that into altering one's thinking to change one's cognitive interiority or to strengthen concepts of the self such as the Shadow.
Entering a cognitive realm changes one's perspective entirely on the limits of cognitive psience. Sufficiently realistic model guns or toy katana become deadly weapons in supernatural spaces through the sheer perception of being real. The Phantom Thieves of Hearts and how they steal hearts and alter Palaces is entirely a function within cognitive psience's purview, whether they understand it or not. Morgana altering his form to become a bus because it's a widespread cognition that cats can become buses is cognitive psience, as is basically everything Jose does within the Metaverse.
What can you do with it?
- Every character is using cognitive psience whether they know it or not. Drawing on the Collective Unconscious' narrative for you, by how 'you' are perceived by others, is what empowers your weapons. Even should your opponent know it's a model gun, it doesn't matter, because the Collective Unconscious perceives it that way within your personal narrative.
- Alter the form of Palaces by changing the Ruler's cognition in the real world. Alter your cognitive form if your nature allows for that kind of fluidity. Use a medium to exert your will on supernatural spaces and create a temporary environment for big attacks. Throw off Persona status effects or gain a second wind of mental energy.
- Make changes within Mementos that would affect the public consciousness in minor ways. Anything more major would require a far greater power than is accessible to player characters dabbling in cognitive psience.
- Empowering your Shadow is possible, but the techniques to do so are jealously hoarded by a single person.
- Teach technology to interface with cognitive realms. Concepts on as wide a scale as 'EMMA' would be restricted until the beginning of the Persona 5 Strikers plot.
What can't you do with it?
- You can't wholesale change someone's cognition to make them into a different person. It's possible, but the ability belongs to a certain FC antagonist and is outside the purview of most characters. More minor changes are negotiable if someone has worked towards having the know-how and/or applied for powers for more specific changes.
- You can't control the form cognitive objects will take when bringing them into the real world. You can attempt to change someone's cognition to influence what objects there are to begin with, but even gold bars will often just become funny money in the material world. That isn't to say objects in cognitive spaces can have no value. You just can't manipulate them to print money.
- Trying to bring larger objects of value into the material world from cognitive spaces like cars or motorcycles will simply fail. Try to keep the objects something that a Persona User could reasonably carry by themselves. Even these objects are subject to changing form in the real world to something of potentially lesser value.
SEBEC
The Saeki Electronics and Biological and Energy Corporation or SEBEC became the subject of national attention during the SEBEC Scandal as the result of their operations in Mikage-Cho. While the press reported on the 'accidental release of an experimental chemical that caused widespread mass hysteria incidents,' many Persona User communities know better from incidents they encountered worldwide. They speculate that SEBEC's actions nearly caused the end of humanity as we know it.
Unfortunately, the Japanese government decided it was in their best interests not to release a full report on the SEBEC scandal, and no arrests were made, resulting in widespread discontent. Who should be held responsible for the Mental Health Crisis? In the end, no satisfying answer was given. President Saeki resigned in apology, and SEBEC no longer exists, quietly bought out for a song by the Nanjo Group and absorbed into it.
However, reports still exist to this day that the Nanjo Group is simply covering up wondrous, fantastical technology that SEBEC was developing as a part of the incident in question. The heir to the Nanjo Group, Kei Nanjo, is tight-lipped on what exactly happened at the SEBEC building, as are the other survivors of the incident.
Now with the New World Order's operations, it's speculated that some of SEBEC's mysterious technology might be getting replicated--which begs a question that some within its own organization are asking:
What exactly is DEVA?
OOC Minutiae
- The details of what DEVA does are not available as IC knowledge, save to the Persona 1 cast. The details of what would happen if it were used on the MUSH is similarly not available to players at the start of the game OOCly. If you have a good idea, feel free to pitch it, but be aware that ICly it's a very FAFO situation.
- Other fantastical examples of tech, such as cyborgs and similar, require cognitive spaces to function. Replicating it via Kotodama is possible, but these assets rely upon it more than most and would have difficulty leaving Sumaru City without travel through and into supernatural spaces. As a result, this cannot happen to player characters, since they require a certain freedom of movement to be functional in game.
- When SEBEC tech becomes more widely available or if/when DEVA is utilized in game, this section will be expanded.
Cognitive Alchemy
Cognitive Alchemy is the discipline that concerns itself with the 'changing' of the nature of cognitive objects. More art than science, it relies on Jungian ideas of psychoanalysis and mysticism in order to change the nature of objects that originate from various dimensions of the Collective Unconscious.
This too can include changing the nature of the self, through a process called Transmutation which can be used as a method of awakening. It is distinct from Cognitive Psience, which mostly relies on alterations of cognitive reality through subjective perception, and instead more directly tries to fundamentally alter the nature of cognitive objects and beings by changing the nature of what the 'self' is.
The ultimate expression of alchemy is certainly the forging of the 'Philosopher's Stone'. A feat that possesses a powerful narrative that can influence the Collective Unconscious entire but what that might mean for the future of humanity is currently a mystery.
Cognitive Alchemy is currently esoteric to the point of absurdity and would be difficult to learn without a mentor.
What can you do with it?
- Transmute your Sense of Self to Awaken to a Persona.
- Alter the nature of Cognitive Objects in minor and useful ways. This is not an 'instant' process that can be done on the fly, but requires time and know-how.
- Be fabulous darling.
What can't you do with it?
- Alter cognition and subjective perception instantaneously like Cognitive Psience does.
- Create complicated objects like say a Motorcycle that function on the Cognitive Plane.
- Meaningfully alter individuals who are not yourself.
OOC Note
- For more on Cognitive Alchemy, please contact the Persona Syzygy cast!
- Having the Peacock Silk cast create a T1 or T2 object for your character as per Advancement is quite possible! If you want this, then link the log of making the commission with them. The Peacock Silk cast is of course, free to require a quest as epic as clipping off a piece of Nyarlathotep's tentacles or simply running to the local 777 for an Egg Sando for Pernelle.