Instanis

Instanis is a term used in speculative discussions and some fictional works to denote a class of digital or abstract entities defined by the instantaneous creation and persistence of their state within a computational process. The term is not widely adopted in mainstream computer science or philosophy as of 2024 and remains largely theoretical or literary in usage.

The coinage combines a sense of immediacy with a suffix suggesting a class, and it has appeared in workshops and sci-fi literature to discuss idealized notions of snapshotting and precise state replication. In these contexts, instanis are invoked as a way to imagine perfectly timed instantiation that can be arbitrarily revisited or transported across environments.

Core concepts attributed to instanis include instantaneous instantiation, stateless-to-state transitions that are fully deterministic, and cross-step persistence that allows exact rebirth of a state at any chosen moment. Proponents discuss formal models in which instanis correspond to points in a time-indexed state space with zero instantiation overhead and no drift across replicas. Critics point out that true instantaneous instantiation conflicts with physical limits and current hardware.

In theory, instanis are used to reason about disaster recovery, deterministic debugging, and time-deterministic simulations, where precise state replication and rollback are valuable. In practice, related ideas appear in checkpointing, snapshotting, and record-and-replay systems, though these do not claim true instantaneous creation.

In fiction and thought experiments, instanis often function as digital doubles, ethereal agents, or protocols that can be summoned into existence at a specified time and then perpetuate their state across environments. Related concepts include checkpointing, snapshots, persistence, stateful versus stateless computing, and time travel in computation.