Gee4orce wrote:

For me, perfect brain backups are the least believable part of EP - even moreso than the Pandora gates. I just don't think it'd be possible to account for all the quantum goings-on that are probably vital to brain function, never mind compress that into a storage medium 'about the size of a grape'. So what if backups are 'Beta fork quality' (or maybe slightly better) ? Backups are just that - backups, incase of emergency. If backups are imperfect, then that means that Alpha forks are impossible (which is a better reason for then not to exist instead of the rather weak 'social reasons' given in the rulebook).

As a neuroscientist I don't buy that there is any important quantum stuff going on in the brain until I see some strong evidence for it. But I do agree that perfect scanning of a biological brain is a fairly tough goal, and that we shouldn't expect perfect copies. I like the idea that the copies are not quite the same as the original. However, your idea essentially requires the whole EP setting to be redone. Egocasting is out, so hence it will take years to get anywhere in the outer solar system. *Very few* people survived the Fall, the rest are betas - who are significantly less brilliant than the original. Once you are a synthmorph you can preserve your identity perfectly and egocast fine, so synthmorphs will slowly be taking over. Death is a significantly bigger problem - not to mention brain damage. Overall, I see this setting as even bleaker than normal EP: a few million "real humans" slowly dwindling as members "defect" to become infomorphs/synthmorphs, a vast mass of dumbed-down copies of mankind that are even more plausible to enslave, an outer solar system where there is little point in having any biomorphs (and biospheres) except for aesthetics. As I would run things, uploading is a mature discipline in EP. Mainly because the code and equipment needed to do it well was distributed widely for the desperate evacuations during the Fall. A year before that would have been expensive best-brand technology. That doesn't mean it is perfect: to properly scan a brain you need to disassemble it quite profoundly. What biomorph brains and stacks do is that they cheat a bit by having a fairly artificial neural structure with nanotech support that can be read and written (this is IMHO where the big, hard to swallow fudge comes in - the writing to brains is less believable than reading from brains). This process is however always noisy. When you sleeve somebody their ego changes slightly in the new brain, and similarly each readout produces a slightly different ego from what was in the brain. This is small enough that most people are fine with it identity-wise. Part of this is that human identity is pretty sloppy to begin with: you will form a narrative identity from whatever memories you have, and it takes plenty of disruption to make people feel they are not themselves anymore. So even when they do change they will insist they are the same. Furthermore, our memories and personalities are to some degree attractor states that persist even with minor disruptions. A mis-connected neuron will relearn its functions based on the largely correct rest of the brain, returning to the right connections most of the time. Acknowledging that sleeving and uploading affects identity is not done in polite society: nobody wants to be told that they are not "really" who they are. The dualists and monists who could not accept the functionalist worldview hesitated to upload during the Fall and ended up TITAN food. So the people who tended to survive already had philosophies accepting this kind of identity changes. In game terms I don't think I would do much, except that characters jumping morphs too often should get a slow accumulation of "neural noise". Maybe a lowering of LUC, maybe some weird neural damage or occasional glitches. Ideally one should just convey to the players a mild sense of existential dread. Meanwhile the AGIs look forward to inherit the world.

Gee4orce wrote:

One of the key themes of EP is horror, and yet it's pretty hard to be that scared of anything if you know you've got a perfect backup copy of yourself that you can revert to if things go wrong.

The problem isn't that there is going to be a happy version of you in the future. The problem is that there will be a you who is dead, in anguish or continually insane. One of the interesting horrors of EP is that it easier to damn an ego to hell than to kill it. Put it in a torture simspace on a server somewhere and forget about it. I have had characters accidentally damn forks of themselves to an eternity of pointless, closed simspace. But yes, something many players fear more than character death is character degradation. If every return from the stack is slightly eroded (and the offsite backup is always out of date), then local death will be more painful. But that assumes you want to keep local deaths an important matter. Many people seem to think that a world where death has no meaning at all is more deeply unsettling than a world where it is permanent and unavoidable.

Technically according to who? :) The mind probably thinks it's the same person, whether killed, forked, or whatever. That's how it works. It's the whole 'is the universe destroyed and created every moment?' thing. If there's measurable degradation, that changes things significantly.

I really can't support adding souls to a game that seems explicitly designed not to have them. Does this idea depend on the forks being aware of each other's existence, or is it straight-up magic?

I think it would be fun to introduce souls to EP - but only synthmorphs and AGIs have them. Meat prevents you from having a soul. And the more copies there are of you, the greater your soul will be. Why keep old human prejudices?

All things considered, EP's fairly hard as far as its sci-fi goes. Personally, I love the idea of philosophy coming up in games. It'd be interesting to have a group of Buddhist scholars debating on this sort of thing. As for uploading and nanotech, I'd argue that's on the hard side of the sci-fi scale; it's plausible, at the very least. Psi is fantasy-land, of course, but I have no objection to it myself; it makes the game a little spicier.

I think that's largely for the same reason so much sci-fi does that kind of thing: So that those without a background in physics, engineering, biology, and so on, can get into it without wondering what buckminsterfullrenes are and why everyone seems to mention them so often. That, and Science Marches On. If you leave the details fuzzy, you don't have to look like an idiot if/when new facts come to light; the game's futurist fiction, not a Kurzweil-esque attempt at explaining how the future will look.