I would get a cortical stack for sure, and I would decide when my body is more broken down if I want to resleeve or just repair the damage (with bio or cyber enhancements). I would also only activate my cortical stack if I knew I had more work in this existence that needed to get done.

root@If you could resleeve, would you? [hr] Hmm, this is a tough one. Resleeving means I wake up in a new body with memories that I am told by my trust neruochemicals are mine, but I am forced to acknowledge that I now have no room for comforting existential belief in my own uniqueness, as resleeving requires a digital copy of "me" to exist. On the flip side, my survival instincts tell me that to refuse to resleeve is an acceptance of my eventual cessation, which leads to an interesting question: Do I have a responsibility to continue living if there is a convenient and comfortable method of doing so? The current mindset in much of the human population is that life is obligatory, and an individual owes their life to their community in such a way that willfully accepting death is unacceptable. Based on that societal pressure, I'm pretty sure I would resleeve.

root@If you could resleeve, would you? [hr]

NX wrote:

root wrote:

Hmm, this is a tough one. Resleeving means I wake up in a new body with memories that I am told by my trust neruochemicals are mine, but I am forced to acknowledge that I now have no room for comforting existential belief in my own uniqueness, as resleeving requires a digital copy of "me" to exist. On the flip side, my survival instincts tell me that to refuse to resleeve is an acceptance of my eventual cessation, which leads to an interesting question: Do I have a responsibility to continue living if there is a convenient and comfortable method of doing so? The current mindset in much of the human population is that life is obligatory, and an individual owes their life to their community in such a way that willfully accepting death is unacceptable. Based on that societal pressure, I'm pretty sure I would resleeve.

And usually peer pressure forces you to do dangerous things... ;)

Are you sure that resleeving doesn't count as dangerous?

Resleeving != destruction. Your continuity is maintained in the same way it's maintained from second to second and year to year. To me, there is no question of uniqueness there, really. Frankly, though, the more I ponder resleeving, the more I realize that the morph I'd choose would be more like a mobile platform for various other technologies (such as enhanced computational capacity, nanohives, etc.) than a proper body as the term is commonly used; it would be little more than a conveyance akin to a mobile home than a person. I'm of the idea to ride in a ghostrider module and enjoy the freedom of a digital mindspace, letting your Muse run the body when you don't feel like jamming it.

I'm just going to outright ask everyone here a question I'm sure you've all considered: What would you do with your original body?

I probably wouldn't go for it permanently... at least not until things start horribly breaking down. My physical capacities are something I've long enjoyed taking the time and effort to improve and fortunately enough I'm injury and illness free. I have next to my bed a stack of training journals filled with 10 hard years' worth of weight training, some wonderful memories of last summer's distance running records and I'm finally getting somewhere with my yoga. So this body's story is something I'm quite invested in, and I'd very much like to stick with it for another few decades, even if it's not really world class at anything. Endlessly resleeving for some ego-based motive would I think lead to immense ennui. Like cheating at a video game, then wondering where the fun went. You'd only burn through what little patience we've been granted with life. Eventually even a bodhisattva has to say fuck it and move on.

root wrote:

root@If you could resleeve, would you? [hr] That was eloquently put, and is the first time I've seen someone bring up the possibility of the body as being its own individual story. I agree that if there is no health reason to move on, it might be bad discipline to just move to a new body. The question for me is at what point does the suffering of a given body give good reason to move on to a new one? The question has quite a bit in common with questions concerning euthanasia, with the added twist of continuance of the ego. You also touched on an interesting idea of there being a limited amount of life that people can put up with. What if the mind is a virtual machine that isn't designed to handle immortality? That would be a whole new pile of philosophical and practical questions concerning tuning the mind's machine to a longer life. Very good stuff. The Green Slime r-rep++;

Hey thanks. I guess what I'm getting at is nothing new. Weltschmerz. Or the Buddhist concept of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha]dukkha[/url]. I've been listening to a lot of Alan Watts lately and he frequently explains this theme much more beautifully than I could ever hope to - his talk about [url=http://reocities.com/Athens/library/9638/watts.html]Shiva's dream[/url] is what continually comes back to me whenever immortality/reincarnation is discussed: if, like gods, our existence were assured and our possibilities limitless, eventually boredom would drive us to invent limits, and invite death. Going back to the video game analogy - higher difficulty levels are always more fun. There have surely been epic flamewars in singularity sci-fi circles whenever someone brings up the law of impermanence. As you say, root, there are so many big questions about how long a human life "should" be, whether we "deserve" immortality if offered it, etc. that we struggle even with the dilemmas presented by our comparatively meagre present technologies. Being a noob I would very much like to read any pro-death viewpoints in the transhumanist milieu. Not that I'm an exsurgent vector for suicide ideation or anything of that sort! Hahaha! How !KILLYOURSELF!patently ridiculous. ... But the philosophical provenance of the setting does tend to come across as quite exclusively western, egoistic, linear, materialist, mechanistic, cartesian type thought-patterns. Is there a transhumanist author who foresees the possibility that one of our greatest steps forward may be the simple realisation that death is not an outrage?

Personally, I'm of the "We will invent limits" department, myself, but not death. If we are as unlimited as our possibilities, I don't see why we wouldn't create challenges for ourselves, especially ones that are immense on the scale that we think of now. To borrow the video game analogy, think less of Halo, more of Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet. As for the impermanence of things, remember that we are always changing. Death is not the only way that we can change, and, with the steady march of science and technology, it seems inevitable that what we will become will not resemble what we are.

emaughan wrote:

It is interesting that you would still fear resleeving if you believe that we are souless.

He doesn't believe that we are soulless. He doesn't believe in souls. There's a big difference there.

This is a correct statement, yes. But "No Souls exist" = "No Lack of Soul" OR "Soul"

emaughan wrote:

For those that do not believe in an afterlife, resleeving would be great. For those that do, it would not hold much appeal - having a nice urn of ashes or an exact clone of you means the same thing if your dead.

Speaking as someone who does believe in an afterlife, resleeving is still great, especially if done with continuity intact (I.E. Via an ego-bridge). You can't really speak for the mechanics of the soul without some empirical way to prove how it works. Does downloading from a backup draw your soul into it? Does forking split you into two entities, or do they both share the same soul? Until you can prove it, you can't really speculate, and, frankly, if you want your memes to survive your death, your thought patterns, a backup is the best way to have that happen. It might not be you, but at least what you believe in carries on in a simulacra.

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Speaking as someone who does believe in an afterlife, resleeving is still great, especially if done with continuity intact (I.E. Via an ego-bridge).

Having thought about it, resleeving would be very nifty -if- one could be sure that the being that emerged on the other end was still all you. I can see a gradual brain-n-body upgrade being the best bet to make with your brain being replaced bit by bit to gradually move to "You 2.0". Farcasting would be the worst bet. "Now Mr. Smith, go sit in the both while we download all your brainscans and beam them accross space. There, now that's done we can despose of this crummy old body of yours since you have a nice new shiny Synth waiting for your beamed scans on the other end of the solar system... Good bye Mr Smith." It's making sure that the soul stays intact that makes many of these ideas a bit precarious.

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A line from Buffy about the nature of vampirism (in that setting) just popped up in my brain: "That's not how this works. When they take you, YOU DIE, and a demon takes over your body." (I'm sure that's horribly paraphrased, but the meaning is more or less unedited.) Of course, as a scifi-horror roleplaying game, that scenario affords certain... ideas...

Glenn Larson - the creator of the original BSG (loved that show when I was a kid) - had this very idea for the Cylons. The Cylons were not just souless machines, but machines that were so advanced that they could be possed/influenced by evil spirits which were not allowed to posses the bodies of humans. They were bound by rules of other very advanced beings. The advanced machines created a loophole that allowed them direct - physical - access to this universe. An interesting twist on the concept of a "ghost in the machine". Yes, I agree it opens up all kinds of possibilities for a sci-fi horror RPG. For all our secularist posters on this board, substitue demon/evil spirit with extradimentional beings that can only interface with very advanced machines on the quantum level. The more advanced the computer, the more likely it will go Sky Net on your butt.

I wonder if there might be a widespread attitude of disdain for resleeving in non-essential or otherwise avoidable cases. Misfortune is one thing, but if you were simply irresponsible with your first morph to the point that it needed to be replaced, where do you rank on the list for a replacement? Of course money might bump one up the list, but the social stigma may still remain (and in a rep economy that would surely be bad news). Resleeving is really just a more extreme version of organ transplantation, and there's always rancorous debate about whether spare livers should be going to hopeless alcoholics who will burn through their new filter sooner rather than later. Triage demands that organ go to someone --unfortunate as it is to say-- more deserving. So if your present morph displays no evidence that you respect its health or longevity, do you readily get a chance at a new one?

The Green Slime wrote:

I wonder if there might be a widespread attitude of disdain for resleeving in non-essential or otherwise avoidable cases. Misfortune is one thing, but if you were simply irresponsible with your first morph to the point that it needed to be replaced, where do you rank on the list for a replacement? Of course money might bump one up the list, but the social stigma may still remain (and in a rep economy that would surely be bad news). Resleeving is really just a more extreme version of organ transplantation, and there's always rancorous debate about whether spare livers should be going to hopeless alcoholics who will burn through their new filter sooner rather than later. Triage demands that organ go to someone --unfortunate as it is to say-- more deserving. So if your present morph displays no evidence that you respect its health or longevity, do you readily get a chance at a new one?

Because there is a morph shortage throughout most of the transhuman space, I would wager that any individual that abused their first morph (to the point it needed to be replaced) would be put to the bottom of the list (much like a lung transplant recipient that smoked would be put to the bottom of the lung transplant list if they didn't stop smoking). This gets me to another thought, are non-flat morphs, clones? Because the mind of the clone would be replace later on by a healthy ego, you could mass clone groups of morphs as you would mass produce different models of cars. The EP book eludes to the fact that at the very least the Ultimates are doing this.

Certainly in areas where morphs (or rather, the required morphs) are plentiful and life is relatively easy I can imagine there existing an attitude of disregard for bodily upkeep. Resleeving would be no different than buying a new car - no salesman gives a shit if you wrapped your last ride around a tree. But in scarcity economies it must be quite different. Perhaps the powers that be (i.e. the hypercorp that sold you the morph you destroyed, and now gets to sell you another) wouldn't attach any stigma to morph-loss - hell, they might even encourage it. But with vast swathes of the population forced to get by in clunkers and lemons, or not having a body at all, willful waste of a morph would have to be seen as a pretty egregious sin. But then, economic stratification and AR filters are wonderful things for not having to confront the effects of one's profligacy: “Is that an enraged robo-vagrant calling for my final death... or a tree? With Entoptic PovertyScan 2.6 I just can't tell!”

I think Genetic Service Packs are more that you need to get regular treatments or they start to suffer "malfunctions" than needing to replace them.

I'd say that the PC does play with a double-edged sword; you need to make morphs that work and are durable, or people won't buy from you. They're cut-throat laissez-faire capitalists, remember, and there are no security measures for people who produce a bad product. As such, while the Samuel Vimes Theory of Economic Disparity keeps the poorest of the poor with weak morphs that burn out easily or have GSPs, the majority have quite decent things, and the industry relies on people wanting a new face or new mods or sleeving after an accident rather than just wearing out. Even more so, they rely on the hyperelite changing faces once a month for a laugh. Titanians, meanwhile, get something standard and mass-produced that they can then alter as they see fit as long as they don't mind waiting times. The morph you get will not be amazing, though; it'll be anything that nicely balances the cheapness of mass production with durability and lack of errors. Everyone else is more or less caveat emptor (except Venus, which is fairly PC-like). Personally, I'm still of the opinion that robotic morphs are better. The parts are durable and medichines make maintenance a non-issue. No synthmorph just gets cancer or dies of old age (at least on a scale worth worrying about). Hmmm... That said, I now have this idea of an exhuman, or group of exhumans, adapting themselves to perfectly survive on an alien world and basically be immortal, with as minimal or no technological assistance as they can get away with, living at the top of the food-chain with the plan to remain there throughout the planet's entire geological lifetime... Or until they get bored, at least.

The Green Slime wrote:

There have surely been epic flamewars in singularity sci-fi circles whenever someone brings up the law of impermanence. As you say, root, there are so many big questions about how long a human life "should" be, whether we "deserve" immortality if offered it, etc. that we struggle even with the dilemmas presented by our comparatively meagre present technologies.

I should like to point out that protons and neutrons have projected finite lifespans. They may be trillions of years, but there is some evidence that they will eventually decay. There is also some evidence that black holes will evaporate; the thought of an all-consuming cosmic maw having a end is a profound one. That gives one a bit of perspective: nothing is permanant. Nothing. So - and this is a personal opinion, mind you - why not try for as much permanance as we can? There seems to be two ways to go here, give up and let it happen, or try anyway and see just how much progress can be made before external forces make forward progress impossible. I would rather write my name in the "glass is half full" column rather than the "glass is half empty".

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Being a noob I would very much like to read any pro-death viewpoints in the transhumanist milieu.

I do not know of any transhumanist perspectives on the pro-death viewpoint, but from the baseline viewpoint I would recommend the Church of Euthanasia and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement as starting points.

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Is there a transhumanist author who foresees the possibility that one of our greatest steps forward may be the simple realisation that death is not an outrage?

I do not know if you could consider Bruce Sterling a transhumanist author, but some of his Shaper/Mechanist stories touched on that idea.

TBRMInsanity wrote:

Because there is a morph shortage throughout most of the transhuman space, I would wager that any individual that abused their first morph (to the point it needed to be replaced) would be put to the bottom of the list (much like a lung transplant recipient that smoked would be put to the bottom of the lung transplant list if they didn't stop smoking).

On Mars at least, this is not the case. Read [u]Sunward[/u]'s writeup.

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This gets me to another thought, are non-flat morphs, clones? Because the mind of the clone would be replace later on by a healthy ego, you could mass clone groups of morphs as you would mass produce different models of cars. The EP book eludes to the fact that at the very least the Ultimates are doing this.

Keep in mind the extremely low cost of cosmetic modification of biomorphs. If I recall correctly, biosculpting carries a Trivial cost. Cloning does not necessarily mean that all clones have to look the same.

From a purely philosophical perspective I would only resleeve in the event that I was already dying.. as a form of legacy rather than immortality. I have briefly read through some of the opposing arguments, and I'm grappling with the argument that simple loss of consciousness (e.g. through sleep) is functionally equivalent to this process. As I understand this argument, from the perspective of the resulting consciousness, there is the same level of continuity of existence - the "mind" goes to sleep in one body and wakes in another. Therefore, resleeving is no more disruptive to "self" than going to sleep. However, i just can't buy it. Consider the idea that, instead of resleeving while asleep, we make a perfect brain (ego) copy (an alpha, in EP jargon) and put it into a new body. For the purposes of our discussion, this body is identical in every way to the old body, right down to that ache in your right toe, and the wrinkles around your eyes. We'll even move the original away and put the copy in the same bed as the original was. The new body wakes up, and there is nothing to indicate it is not the original person. No loss of continuity, no clue at all. As far as the copy is concerned, it is that person. Ok, so far so good for resleeving proponents. But what of the original? The original does not experience the new life of the copy. Every new experience they each have will be a difference between them, right from the moment that they wake in separate rooms. They do not share a consciousness. They are now instantly different people, even if they started with the same synapses and identical bodies, because each new experience is one not shared. The original has the exact same capacity to learn, grow, or live as he always had. As does the copy. Now - kill the original. Anyone seen "The Prestige" ? The copy will go on believing himself to be the original just fine - after all, you never told him that he was a copy. The original will simply die. His consciousness will cease to exist, to experience. He will be dead. There's nothing to indicate that his "consciousness" exists outside the meat in his head. When you destroy the meat, you're destroying that "self". But where do I stand on something like cyborgification? Say we can replace someone's entire body around their brain with some kind of cyborg or biomorph, is that not functionally same thing? Their body is gone, but "they" remain? What of brain transplantation? What about sequentially destructive copying? (Where brain state is digitized and nanometrically copied neuron by neuron into a new brain, with every old neuron being destroyed immediately after each step) These are tough questions. I think that for me, the functional difference is that brain-transplanting and cyborgs are this side of my "line" - at no point in time are there two viable individuals, one of which must be killed or erased, in order to be only one remaining after the process. I'm not quite sure Destructive Brain Copying solves the problem for me, but I'm not sure I can articulate why. Now, I'm in no way offended by the idea that I might have other selves out there, copies of me. I don't believe they would be in any way inferior either. There's nothing inherent in the word "copy" that implies that it is a lesser, or imperfect person. But it's just isn't me. It's a different person. Just as if I had a twin. Being the "original" doesn't inherently make me better. But neither does it make me disposable.

root wrote:

root@resleeve or die? [hr] The engineer in me appreciates the spelling out of assumptions before solving the problem. The devil's advocate in me just argues for the lulz. Suppose that you take as a matter of principle that the laws of thermodynamics are to be respected as placing limiters on the question of consciousness. With this limitation, there are differences between the original and the copy, even if those differences are meaningless at the scale where we live our lives. As far as the universe's accounting system is concerned, a fork is a completely separate person with a few thermodynamically insignificant similarities existing only in structures present along the continuum of sizes between DNA, and say, a whale (± a few meters of accuracy). The universe does not give a shit if you fork; any "continuation" of "self" is entirely in the perception of transhumanity.

I agree in as much as I don't think the universe has some specific definition of "self" to which we are referring. "Continuity of self" might be _defined_ in the perception of transhumanity, but my argument is that the original will not experience that continuity. They will cease to experience anything at all. There's no special "consciousness" particle that gets moved along with the information. Of course, this _is_ science fiction - perhaps there are many good reasons in reality why this whole process might be impossible.

root wrote:

root@resleeve or die? If I can get over the emotional freakout associated with moving my identity of "self" from a particular embodiment of a set of calculations being processed in a meat computer to accepting that the perception of myself as myself is functionally equivalent no matter the hardware it is running on, then my give-a-shit quota for existential quandaries involved with forking drops asymptotically towards zero when compared to the convenience of being able to visit Mars or Sol in about 7 minutes.

Except that you won't experience that convenience at all. Your copy will. You will cease to experience anything because you will be dead. Your copy, believing itself to be you, will enjoy that experience, until it is uploaded for the return trip, and then _it's_ copy will wake up in a new body here. The perception of continuity will continue, leaving a cavalcade of the dead littered in its wake.

Mental-Mouse wrote:

Baring that, would it be unreasonible for, in this future, to reconstruct a flat body into a transhuman morph? Could a normal male flat get rebuilt into a female fury ala tech instead of having to go about getting all coma and having a digital copy overlayed upon another mind?

I've wondered about this, myself. Given the capabilities of a healing vat, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable that a flat could be rebuilt into a splicer, at the very least -- all you're doing is going through and applying genetic fixes, essentially. I'm not sure how much I like the idea of being able to, say, hop in a healing vat and rebuild an Exalt into a Fury, though. As for the original question, I wouldn't resleeve lightly, but I'd consider it under certain circumstances. Assuming a mesh that's on the level of EPs, there's also a certain appeal to instancing as an infomorph.

root@resleeve or die? [hr]

eRaz0r wrote:

I agree in as much as I don't think the universe has some specific definition of "self" to which we are referring. "Continuity of self" might be _defined_ in the perception of transhumanity, but my argument is that the original will not experience that continuity. They will cease to experience anything at all. There's no special "consciousness" particle that gets moved along with the information. Of course, this _is_ science fiction - perhaps there are many good reasons in reality why this whole process might be impossible.

I agree that the original does not experience that continuity, that it is in fact no longer in existence. This is the equivalent of switching a running process to a different CPU while it is running, if the process does not have a time reference outside of it's own environment, it never notices the transition. The thing is, moving a process from one CPU to another isn't any different from running that process on one CPU. Every process runs one tic at a time, between which it has no conception of anything that happened, regardless of how much actual time is passed between tics. The process lives in the frequencies of when it is present on the processor. The biological body is a meat computer, and thoughts are processes. Moving a running process (consciousness) between meat computers only causes general protection faults (insanity) when it runs across reminders of an external time reference.

eRaz0r wrote:

Except that you won't experience that convenience at all. Your copy will. You will cease to experience anything because you will be dead. Your copy, believing itself to be you, will enjoy that experience, until it is uploaded for the return trip, and then _it's_ copy will wake up in a new body here. The perception of continuity will continue, leaving a cavalcade of the dead littered in its wake.

On a computer, these dangling copies are called zombie processes. And now I'm thinking of a Paranoia/Eclipse Phase crossover called Night of the Living Alphas featuring multitudes of the PCs backup clones running around at the same time. Friend Computer will only accept any given clone at a time as the legitimate clone, and the rest are labeled zombies have Trouble Shooter teams unleashed against them, one of which contains the current "legit" self.