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So when you egocast, are you killed?

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Fri, 2014-09-05 00:58
#1
Noble Pigeon Noble Pigeon's picture
So when you egocast, are you killed?
So in the setting of Eclipse Phase, the mind and the body are separate things, something that real life philosophers have been debating for a very long time and will likely continue to do so until the sun blows up. Cool, that means your mind can be digitized, edited, and faxed to other places in the solar system like software. Which brings up the question: when you egocast, does the "you" that existed prior to the egocasting simply die, and another "you" wakes up somewhere else? Sure the memories would all be intact, and to the person on the other side it was a flawless transition. But for all intents and purposes the person that egocast before is effectively dead. Now chalk this up to me thinking like a dirty bioconservative Luddite or having a "cognitional bias" (which, by the way, I think is an extremely presumptuous-sounding phrase and which I've heard a few times from people on forums discussing Eclipse Phase) but I don't consider that immortality. If I was told, as a player of this game, that "everytime you egocast you die but it's okay because you continue playing as a clone of you on the other side" I'm not sure I'd be okay with that. Assuming that when you do egocast your "original" self is killed, the only way to preserve your original "self" is if your cortical stack is retrieved, you are revived in a medical vat, or if you resleeve into another morph, which is impractical since to do that you'd need to be at least 10,000 km away to do so. This is why I can understand and even sympathize a little with the perspective of biocons in the setting. Everyone who has ever egocast is dead. Now you just have people walking around pretending to be people who died. And what about if you died during the Fall and you're restored from backup? Or if you're infected by the exsurgent virus and you're restored from backup? How is that any different from an alpha fork if literally 99% of so-called transhumanity are just forks? Honestly this is already a setting that already assumes that the mind is separable form the body, which we cannot yet prove in real life, so I go out on a limb and assume that yes, the original you that egocast from Venus is the exact same person to arrive onto Titan. How do they beam a human mind across space? A similar answer to "a wizard did it" in a fantasy setting I guess.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
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Fri, 2014-09-05 01:07
branford branford's picture
It's the same conundrum as
It's the same conundrum as the transporters in Star Trek and, as you observed, a primary criticism by bioconservatives in the setting and many of transhuman ideas generally. Does the "soul" exist? Can it be copied? Is a copy of you, the "real" you? Can, and should, two of "you" ever simultaneously exist? What is the essence of "you," and what truly makes "you" you? Does any of it really matter? I, for one, would certainly be hesitant to resleeve, but maybe I'm just a biological Luddite.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 01:14
Dison Dison's picture
Clearly, minds can be
Clearly, minds can be digitized and sent as data, otherwise egocasting wouldn't be possible. In most egocasts, the mind leaves the body with the cast, leaving behind a body in an effective vegetative state, unless for you wanted to send a fork. The vegetative body is then carted off to a body bank to be resold or to be kept for your return. Now, the plight faced by Fall infugees who egocast off is a slightly more thorny issue, since the brain-dead bodies were either left to die on the floor or actively shot through the skull to make sure the TITANs couldn't use the body or retrieve the ego somehow. Every infugee who went through that quite arguably 'died' on Earth, although they might dispute that.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 01:22
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
I'm a sceptical kind of guy
I'm a sceptical kind of guy who likes evidence, and who don't think we understand consciousness yet, so I'd not want to use an egocaster either (and I'd have a stack for the benefit of my family mostly and on the off chance that it actually saves me). My intuition is that egocasting "kills" you (more precisely the transmitting doesn't do anything for you - so the brain wipe kills you). I don't trust my intuition much though, and I would really like science to discover some facts on it. Those who think egocasting is fine still claim that it kills you. Their argument however is that we don't have continuity of consciousness anyway, so we're already dying all the time. They argue that we should find another target for our self preservation and they've struck on the existence of their pattern of consciousnessness or something similar. To me, it sounds like they're willing to gamble their lives based on what amounts to speculative philosophizing, a discipline with a horrible track record. I'd like to see some scientific progress on the hard problem before I tale such a risk.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 01:38
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
This is the existential
This is the existential horror represented by the WIL × 3 test called Alienation. I try not to think about it too much but it is why I will begrudge the traction of bioconservative thinking. "What if they are right?" A wayward thought of mine thinks, and I quickly quell that because it is shudder worthy.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 01:56
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
Okay, so, for those players
Okay, so, for those players who have an existential crisis about, say, Egocasting or resleeving, I would point you to the section of the rulebook discussing the issue of Egocasting or Resleeving, especially that Alienation/Integration/Continuity check. You'll notice, when Egocasting or sleeving from body-to-body, you do not typically make a Continuity test. This is because these things are done with continuity via a drawn out upload process where basically your mind is run on an emulator state and slowly moved between bodies. By the time they do the mind wipe on your previous body, you have subjectively experienced a shift to the new body, this is stated to even be true of most Egocasts (which explains why they take like 40x longer to transmit than other data). Continuity comes into play when you're cast and loose consciousness at one end (and thus, have to deal with the additional issue of, where am I, who am I, am I still me?) in addition to having a new face, brain and arms. If that still bothers you, consider that you technically lose continuity every night when you go to sleep. You cease being fully conscious and never really know if you're gonna wake up in the morning. Most people manage to sleep anyway. The hardline bioconservatives who object to the resleeving process seem to be mostly of the religious persuasion, and feel that the soul, being some metaphysical object granted by some external higher power, is not properly transferred through science because, well, that's not how faith works. Personally, while I do feel that sentient life has a sort of slightly in-quantifiable spark, that certain something, I think its more a kind of sum of the self thing, and if you keep continuity there's no reason to feel that you've "died" even if your previous body has stopped. There are destructive uploads and other quick situations which don't follow this rule, obviously (hence why many Re-Instantiated are considered "casualties", they were probably uploaded quickly, destructively and with no bodies on the other end), but for the day to day use of the tech, continuity stands. And on a personal matter, I call bullshit on "walking around pretending to be people". You can argue they aren't the same people who were uploaded and then resleeved, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. They have all the same functions as people, so they're the same. But I also say AGI and Uplifts are people and am willing to fight anybody who says otherwise, so I'm biased. If you disagree with me on a systemic level (i/e your definition of people includes some external metaphysical aspect), well, we're just going to have to disagree. (As for how a human mind gets across space, it's all neutrino or radio waves. The caveat that your Ego can be digitized and run in a digital environment means that you can just FtP it like downloading a movie. A very complex and sophisticated movie that when placed into the proper runtime environment will function exactly like a person.)
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
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Fri, 2014-09-05 03:06
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
UnitOmega wrote:If that still
UnitOmega wrote:
If that still bothers you, consider that you technically lose continuity every night when you go to sleep. You cease being fully conscious and never really know if you're gonna wake up in the morning. Most people manage to sleep anyway.
That's the part that causes the discomfort, but I try to get past it. Catnaps would be constant micro-death.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 03:49
Smokeskin Smokeskin's picture
UnitOmega wrote:
UnitOmega wrote:
If that still bothers you, consider that you technically lose continuity every night when you go to sleep. You cease being fully conscious and never really know if you're gonna wake up in the morning. Most people manage to sleep anyway. The hardline bioconservatives who object to the resleeving process seem to be mostly of the religious persuasion, and feel that the soul, being some metaphysical object granted by some external higher power, is not properly transferred through science because, well, that's not how faith works. Personally, while I do feel that sentient life has a sort of slightly in-quantifiable spark, that certain something, I think its more a kind of sum of the self thing, and if you keep continuity there's no reason to feel that you've "died" even if your previous body has stopped. There are destructive uploads and other quick situations which don't follow this rule, obviously (hence why many Re-Instantiated are considered "casualties", they were probably uploaded quickly, destructively and with no bodies on the other end), but for the day to day use of the tech, continuity stands.
I'm 100% atheistic and materialistic. I have no dualistic ideas whatsoever. I'm still sceptical of the idea. I'm not convinced of what is right or wrong, but I am sceptical of any claims on the matter given that neuroscience is still in its infancy and have not produced any strong, conclusive theory on these matters yet. How do you know continuity is lost when you sleep? This idea seems to be armchair philosophizing, since no one knows what consciousness is. Until the hard problem is solved, I don't see how we can make any meaningful statements about what makes me feel like me and what preserves and what breaks that continuity. How do you know continuity is preserved when you do one of those gradual resleeving things? If we don't wipe the transmitting ego at the end of the process, he'd wake up and feel himself. That seems to imply that no real transfer took place and that continuity still resides within the original body. All throughout history, people have been guessing about things where the science hasn't delivered results yet, and those guesses mostly turned out to be wrong.
UnitOmega wrote:
And on a personal matter, I call bullshit on "walking around pretending to be people". You can argue they aren't the same people who were uploaded and then resleeved, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. They have all the same functions as people, so they're the same. But I also say AGI and Uplifts are people and am willing to fight anybody who says otherwise, so I'm biased. If you disagree with me on a systemic level (i/e your definition of people includes some external metaphysical aspect), well, we're just going to have to disagree.
I'm totally in agreement here. A "copy" is a person. It's just little consolation for me that a copy of me have been egocasted and sleeved somewhere - I'm still here, sitting at the transmitter end, and I would very much like to not be mindwiped, thank you.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 04:02
Armoured Armoured's picture
Killed is the wrong concept.
You can only be killed if you were alive to begin with, and to my mind the EP setting (and rather a lot of modern research) has the view that that is an illusion anyway. A human brain is a lump of incredibly complex neural tissue, interconnected in a way that gives rise to sustained signal patterns that are, somehow, aware. They are particularly bad at being aware that all they are is a bioelectric feedback loop in a lump of meat, but these constructs have control of the animals they reside in, can recognize that other animals are similarly aware, and treasure their uniqueness. We are alive, aware and conscious, but all of this is not magic. Its just a result of our complex brains and communication skills. The only reason it seems mystical to anyone is because we don't understand it yet, and humans have a evolutionary cognitive flaw that makes us see gods in clouds and bushes. This makes them think consciousness is somehow special too, because it is (currently) not observable. In EP, people can read the patterns in a brain that make it able to be aware, and exactly duplicate them. If the patterns were stopped in one body before being started in another, who cares? They stopped every time that body slept. Or was knocked unconscious (that word is VERY accurate). Or did anything that changed its pattern (any stimulus at all causing learning, drugs, pain, basically any sensory input). The original mind-pattern is dead. It died a million times. Long live the mind-pattern.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 04:21
branford branford's picture
Armoured wrote:You can only
Armoured wrote:
You can only be killed if you were alive to begin with, and to my mind the EP setting (and rather a lot of modern research) has the view that that is an illusion anyway. A human brain is a lump of incredibly complex neural tissue, interconnected in a way that gives rise to sustained signal patterns that are, somehow, aware. They are particularly bad at being aware that all they are is a bioelectric feedback loop in a lump of meat, but these constructs have control of the animals they reside in, can recognize that other animals are similarly aware, and treasure their uniqueness. We are alive, aware and conscious, but all of this is not magic. Its just a result of our complex brains and communication skills. The only reason it seems mystical to anyone is because we don't understand it yet, and humans have a evolutionary cognitive flaw that makes us see gods in clouds and bushes. This makes them think consciousness is somehow special too, because it is (currently) not observable. In EP, people can read the patterns in a brain that make it able to be aware, and exactly duplicate them. If the patterns were stopped in one body before being started in another, who cares? They stopped every time that body slept. Or was knocked unconscious (that word is VERY accurate). Or did anything that changed its pattern (any stimulus at all causing learning, drugs, pain, basically any sensory input). The original mind-pattern is dead. It died a million times. Long live the mind-pattern.
Does scientific understanding of why someone is unique or how humans view the universe diminish the wonder of such uniqueness and understanding? Who gets to judge? You inquire, "If the patterns were stopped in one body before being started in another, who cares?" In response, I would say that I and many, many other most certainly do. When resleeving in EP, the original mind does not magically stop upon being "transferred" to the new location, it is intentionally stopped and wiped. It is not really a transfer, but a copy. If you choose to stop and erase the original, still viable mind, wouldn't that be considered murder of a self-aware and feeling individual, or at the very least dubiously be considered assisted suicide? You further state that "You can only be killed if you were alive to begin with, and to my mind the EP setting (and rather a lot of modern research) has the view that that is an illusion anyway." Although I confidently assume it was not your intent, this clinical and callous sentiment would justify and excuse a myriad of murder, mayhem and cruelty. It would simply be "unconscionable."
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Fri, 2014-09-05 06:32
Armoured Armoured's picture
branford wrote:Does
branford wrote:
Does scientific understanding of why someone is unique or how humans view the universe diminish the wonder of such uniqueness and understanding? Who gets to judge?
My point was that human individuals are special, and we do treasure them, despite there being nothing inherently magic about a consciousness. They are useful; they enrich each other socially, they can achieve great things. None of that changes just because they are a complex of neural patterns in an animal's brain. I should note that I'm using "they" over "we" just to try and stay in third person. I don't consider myself any better than the next marvelously aware animal.
Quote:
You inquire, "If the patterns were stopped in one body before being started in another, who cares?" In response, I would say that I and many, many other most certainly do. When resleeving in EP, the original mind does not magically stop upon being "transferred" to the new location, it is intentionally stopped and wiped. It is not really a transfer, but a copy. If you choose to stop and erase the original, still viable mind, wouldn't that be considered murder of a self-aware and feeling individual, or at the very least dubiously be considered assisted suicide?
Well, it is "killing" the person, by modern standards. It is committing suicide if the person is choosing to resleeve. The difference to today is that in EP, the technology is known. Ego transfer is as naturalized a technology as cars are to us today. Everyone knows people who have resleeved, and they are the same people as they were before. For that matter, ~90% of the population resleeved in the last 10 years. Everyone died, but they are still around. The fear wears off after a while. EP models this with larger penalties to checks when you resleeve the first time, as that fear remains. To everyone else, its just another time you go to sleep. There are groups who retain the mindset of today, but they are rare. Dying today terrifies us, as it should, because we end. With ego tech, you don't, and death hath lost its sting, to be all Shakespearean about it.
Quote:
You further state that "You can only be killed if you were alive to begin with, and to my mind the EP setting (and rather a lot of modern research) has the view that that is an illusion anyway." Although I a confidently assume it was not your intent, this clinical and callous sentiment would justify and excuse a myriad of murder, mayhem and cruelty. It would simply be "unconscionable."
That really wasn't my intention. Just because consciousness is purely material doesn't make it any less special. Killing people is killing people, it doesn't matter if they are meat-robots or magic angels.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 06:46
branford branford's picture
Armoured, as I stated in my
Armoured, as I stated in my earlier post, I know it wasn't your intention to even indirectly excuse callousness to anyone, no less murder. Cold science, and nature itself, however, cares little about human feelings. As can also be seen from my posts, and well apart from any religious beliefs, my concern is far less about the copied ego in the new morph, but that apparently so few individuals have any ethical problems with wiping-out the original, fully functioning and feeling ego that was the source of the copy.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 07:59
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
"When you egocast, are you
"When you egocast, are you killed?" Continuity test in a nutshell, there. From a player's perspective and a game mechanics perspective, it's irrelevant. From the perspective of someone in-setting, it's one of those philosophical questions that terrifies people when they think about them. Does the "you" that's looking out of your eyes and seeing what you're seeing blink away, never to be conscious again? Good question. No good answer. High-octane nightmare fuel. Some folks take a pragmatic "I don't care" stance, others turn into hardcore biocons who can't stand the idea of resleeving or egocasting. Most folks would rather resleeve or egocast as an alternative to being violently murdered, but I expect they'd rather just upgrade the bodies they already have. Others still have become serial resleevers, evidently, even though according to the book this should drive them rapidly stark-raving mad from unavoidable resleeving stresses.
—
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Fri, 2014-09-05 08:41
ThatWhichNeverWas ThatWhichNeverWas's picture
Depends on how you do it.
Losing continuity when you sleep is rubbish. Your brain stays active, and you're subconcious churns away happily - if your subconcious is a part of you, then you retain continuity. In general, yes. You die. An identical person with your memories wakes up elsewhere and goes about thier business. Assuming that the ego bridge simply copies over your mind and deletes the original afterwards. Luckily that's not what it does. Usually. According to the Main Book page 269 (Uploading-Resleeving Continuity), the ego bridge as a default uses a "Ship of Theseus" approach. You're mind is slowly transferred, with parts of the target substrate running single parts of the ego, and that being integrated with the orignal. The mind as such is never deleted; it actually moves. It's the same way you remain you despite individual molecules and brain cells are constantly replaced. You only die if you create a fork and delete the original... or if you're reinstanced from a stack/backup. No continuity = new person. It's one of the funny things about biocons... they have a point.
—
In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few. But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
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Fri, 2014-09-05 09:09
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
This is reminding me a lot of
This is reminding me a lot of the heart vs brain death debate from a few decades back :) To my amateurish knowledge base after the mind wipe i could see this as the same as a person who is in a coma but does not require life support. for all intents and purposes they are dead to society but their body still functions. But ya the mind wipe part is the truest form of death i could foresee in ep. hell there are even assassination kits for it. To this end i like to think of the body as a house. I have lived it for some time it was my home but once I am in my new body i have a new home and apart from nostalgia or sentimentality the old one is not home anymore if i never plan on merging.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 09:25
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
I think there's an important
I think there's an important note here that deserves discussion. You can do a complete copy, then destroy the original. You can also do an incremental copy/delete, copy/delete, where each section of your mind is copied, then just that section is deleted, and your brain is kept in communication over that physical gap as the transfer goes on. I'd consider the former to be clearly a death of the original. I'm not sure that the latter is.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 09:33
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
thanks nazumi you reminded me
thanks nazumi you reminded me of a good analogy. i have 2 hard drives. one blank factory issue, the other is a 5 year old windows installation. to simplify matters i will say they are both the same capacity. I have this program that will make a bit perfect copy of the original. I unplug the original and boot up on the new copy. Since the OS detects something fundamentally has changed it asks to be reactivated. Once activated it functions exactly has the original has from that point on. the old one is either now cold storage or can be reformatted and used for new data.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 09:45
branford branford's picture
@ThatWhichNeverWas, the
[b]@ThatWhichNeverWas[/b], the purported "Ship of Theseus" default ego bridge approach to ego "transfer," still seems to me to actually copy the ego into the new morph, not transfer. It's just that as parts of the ego are copied, those same parts are simultaneously deleted in the original morph, instead of copy all, then delete approach. A small nuance, but apparently a copy nonetheless. [Of course, we may simply resolve the SoT Paradox differently.] I might see an actual transfer being made from cyberbrain or infomorph state to another computerized medium, but at that point you had already been killed or committed suicide to achieve such a state, so I'm not sure it counts if you (or any subsequent you's) are already dead. :p [b]@ORCACommander[/b], first, I, too, mind-wiped and re-instantiated far too early this morning. I didn't even try to cogently respond to the thread until I caffeinated and cleaned the old morph. Definitely time for an upgrade . . . I don't think your house analogy captures what is happening when someone resleeves. It's not you in the new house/body. It's another person with your memories, that may (or may not) fondly remember the original you and your old body. In fact, even after You-2.0 "moves" into the new body, You-1.0 could still happily reside in the old body.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 09:51
branford branford's picture
nezumi.hebereke wrote:I think
nezumi.hebereke wrote:
I think there's an important note here that deserves discussion. You can do a complete copy, then destroy the original. You can also do an incremental copy/delete, copy/delete, where each section of your mind is copied, then just that section is deleted, and your brain is kept in communication over that physical gap as the transfer goes on. I'd consider the former to be clearly a death of the original. I'm not sure that the latter is.
I think the latter scenario is more a semantic exercise to convince You-2.0 that You-1.0 wasn't just murdered or committed suicide. :) It's also seems to be the "Ship of Theseus" "transfer" method earlier cited by ThatWhichNeverWas.
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Fri, 2014-09-05 12:12
MAD Crab MAD Crab's picture
Ah, the existential horror of
Ah, the existential horror of transhumanism. For extra horror, consider the humble infomorph. All of this happens every single time it switches host systems. At a lower level, it happens every time the host system context switches to another thread! And what about backup files? Are copies born and killed every time you rearrange your external storage? What makes a backup file any different from a biomorph brain that is currently prevented from making new connection?
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Fri, 2014-09-05 16:30
thebluespectre thebluespectre's picture
Related topic!
And how do you know the copy was a perfect copy? There's this thing called Lossy Compression; every time digital data is transferred, it becomes just a slight bit more corrupt. The effects are minute if it's only once or twice, but do it thousands of times and it gets unrecognizable. If you don't believe me, go look for the "I am Sitting in a Room" series on Youtube, in which a man copies and re-uploads a short video clip 1,000 times just to demonstrate. No, you don't have to watch all 1,000 videos in a row. Picture that happening to a transhuman. Let's also add that an organic brain is not the same kind of storage media as a digital computer. Analog meat-computers designed by blind evolution have advantages and limitations that a cyber-brain would simply not possess, and I have trouble seeing how they might be compatible. Is it DNA computers? Are DNA carbon-based computers the answer?
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"Still and transfixed, the el/ ectric sheep are dreaming of your face..." -Talk Shows on Mute
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Fri, 2014-09-05 18:20
MAD Crab MAD Crab's picture
Well, lossy compression and
Well, lossy compression and copy errors are two different things. Lossy compression is intentionally throwing out detail so that you can save space. It isn't used for things that you want to reproduce perfectly, and it only is done once to a particular data stream. The youtube project runs the compression a million times, which wouldn't happen in the normal course of things. Copy errors can be prevented by good programming, which isn't always done. The human brain is, so far as anybody can tell, a turing machine. Any turing machine can be emulated by any other turing machine. The computers don't have to be special.
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Sat, 2014-09-06 00:00
ORCACommander ORCACommander's picture
I'd imagine ep has something
I'd imagine ep has something superior to CRC32 checksums to detect error corruption and request resend of data and no ego facility worth its salt would dare use compression outside of emergency circumstance to transfer an ego, not to mention infinite data storage nearly obsolesces the need for compression. its like my hdd cloning example above. bit by bit exact transfer. and i imaging egocasting takes a lot longer not because of Ship of Theseus effect but rather them sending multiple redundant communications to ensure proper transfer occurred and no corruption was enroute. especially on radio egocasts which are prone to all sorts of EMI
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Sat, 2014-09-06 04:48
uwtartarus uwtartarus's picture
I learn new stuff everyday
I learn new stuff everyday here.
—
Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
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Sat, 2014-09-06 16:46
sanjuro89 sanjuro89's picture
ORCACommander wrote:I'd
ORCACommander wrote:
I'd imagine ep has something superior to CRC32 checksums to detect error corruption and request resend of data and no ego facility worth its salt would dare use compression outside of emergency circumstance to transfer an ego, not to mention infinite data storage nearly obsolesces the need for compression.
Compression would still be useful - data storage might be nearly infinite, but bandwidth won't be. You'd obviously want to use a lossless data compression scheme.
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Kurt McMahon
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Sat, 2014-09-06 19:58
jackgraham jackgraham's picture
This thread, [i]again?[/i] ;)
At the time that I wrote the resleeving rules, I was a lot more focused on consciousness (and related mental processes, like the stuff that goes on while you're asleep) as a marker for the ever-elusive "self." Some of what's going on in the current rules, well summarized by UnitOmega above, is me trying to get comfortable with the notion myself! Because if it were me, I'd have a hard time resleeving voluntarily without some continuity between the mental processes in my old body. I think if I were writing that section now, I might treat it a bit differently. Watts' vivisection of some of our precious notions of self in [i]Blingsight[/i] deserves a lot of credit. I'd still want there to be some form of continuity, but I'd be less focused on consciousness as defining the self. Scalzi's treatment of resleeving in [i]Old Man's War[/i] is also worth mentioning. It's not very deep from a philosophy/science perspective, but I think what he does with it from a social perspective is somewhat interesting. There, the people being resleeved are old folks, likely to die soon anyway. For them, it barely registers as a choice. For similar reasons, it's easy to see how people in EP are likely acculturated to some forms of resleeving. Noble Pigeon's assertion that the game treats mind and body as separate entities, though, is a bit of an oversimplification. A related topic is the material in TH on the development of AGIs. AGIs have "bodies," after a fashion, and I don't see anything dualistic about either them or humans. Your mind and your self are intimately interconnected to your physical being, so much so that developing true AGIs required emulating physical bodies in order to give them the spark of life*. Yeah, you can copy someone -- but when you put them in a different body, they become in some sense a different person. Are they "dead?" Yes. No. Maybe. But while interconnections of neural pathways, memories, &c. are portable, they're always, even when running virtually, in some ways inseparable from the body on which they're "running." I've come to think of the self as stemming from the totality of interactions between physical processes in the body, some of which we label as "mental." This is a bit of a false dichotomy, because mental processes [i]are[/i] actually physical! The processes we label as mental do dominate our picture of the self, but they're not the whole shooting match. So while I don't think of resleeving as death in the usual sense, they're definitely a transformation, and the person who emerges on the other end (unless in an exact clone of their old body) could arguably be called a different person. *Yeah, go ahead and jump all over that phrase. No, I'm not sure what it means. That's sort of the point. We want the game to drive a conversation.
—
J A C K   G R A H A M :: Hooray for Earth!   http://eclipsephase.com :: twitter @jackgraham @faketsr :: Google+Jack Graham
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Sat, 2014-09-06 21:30
branford branford's picture
jackgraham wrote:At the time
jackgraham wrote:
At the time that I wrote the resleeving rules, I was a lot more focused on consciousness (and related mental processes, like the stuff that goes on while you're asleep) as a marker for the ever-elusive "self." Some of what's going on in the current rules, well summarized by UnitOmega above, is me trying to get comfortable with the notion myself! Because if it were me, I'd have a hard time resleeving voluntarily without some continuity between the mental processes in my old body. I think if I were writing that section now, I might treat it a bit differently. Watts' vivisection of some of our precious notions of self in [i]Blingsight[/i] deserves a lot of credit. I'd still want there to be some form of continuity, but I'd be less focused on consciousness as defining the self. Scalzi's treatment of resleeving in [i]Old Man's War[/i] is also worth mentioning. It's not very deep from a philosophy/science perspective, but I think what he does with it from a social perspective is somewhat interesting. There, the people being resleeved are old folks, likely to die soon anyway. For them, it barely registers as a choice. For similar reasons, it's easy to see how people in EP are likely acculturated to some forms of resleeving.
In light of the above, I anxiously await Eclipse Phase, Second Edition. :) And if we're talking about a new edition, let's tone down the "Space Nazi" aspect of the Jovians, and definitely include stats for an EP analog of the MP-35 gun from Scalzi's Old Man's War!
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Sun, 2014-09-07 02:20
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
I would imagine that most
I would imagine that most people who resleeve place a high emphasis on continuity - in Schlock Mercenary, the topic was touched upon recently when a very bad man forked himself into someone else's head to overwrite them, and he spoke of the "selfstream;" he had a 50/50 shot of being the one who "woke up" in the other head (which was bad news because it was a black ops that definitely wouldn't let him continue to live his life, even if successful,) or being the one wishing the fork good luck. But if that's the case, you run into fundamental problems with the setting, because egocasting is such an important aspect of the game. If you suddenly need to be on Venus and you're currently aboard a Scum swarm heading from Mars to Titan, you don't have a whole plethora of options there, because you're going where orbital mechanics takes you, barring the expenditure of a mind-blowingly huge amount of delta-V. Unless, of course, you ride a beam there, because radio waves and neutrino communications don't give a flying fuck about the orbit you're on. It could be understandable if most people who egocast were secret operatives and such, but they're not. Egocasting is a normal part of life for a sizable percentage of the setting, and making them all psychopaths who routinely and habitually commit suicide so a copy can do something somewhere far away is... Well, that drops things right the hell through existential horror, past grimdark and splash-lands firmly in shitdark. I think it's best to leave this a philosophical question which is still debated in-character, and which has absolutely no answer. Moderate biocons are terrified of resleeving without a continuity bridge, but they'll egocast or resleeve from backup if it's the only way to preserve any part of themselves whatsoever. Hardcore biocons who believe in souls refuse to have even cortical stacks implanted, because they don't want any soulless homuncului pretending to be them running around. Most people don't think about it because it's a question that terrifies them if they do, they just repress it and soldier on as they must do, and some people take the stance that "Of course the me that wakes up at the other end of an egocast is still me, stop injecting your philosophy into my practical life." In the end, I imagine most people will egocast if it's nessessary, but they'd prefer continuity. Just in case.
—
Skype and AIM names: Exactly the same as my forum name. [url=http://tinyurl.com/mfcapss]My EP Character Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/lbpsb93]Thread for my Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/obu5adp]The Five Orange Pips[/url]
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Sun, 2014-09-07 02:48
Erulastant Erulastant's picture
Frankly, I'd be far more
Frankly, I'd be far more freaked out by resleeving with continuity than without. Go to sleep and wake up in a different body? No worries. Experience being copied and watch the original me being deleted in real time? Hell no. I can't really fathom why the majority in EP has the opposite view.
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You, too, were made by humans. The methods used were just cruder, imprecise. I guess that explains a lot.
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Sun, 2014-09-07 03:51
ShadowDragon8685 ShadowDragon8685's picture
Erulastant wrote:Frankly, I'd
Erulastant wrote:
Frankly, I'd be far more freaked out by resleeving with continuity than without. Go to sleep and wake up in a different body? No worries. Experience being copied and watch the original me being deleted in real time? Hell no. I can't really fathom why the majority in EP has the opposite view.
It's because it's being migrated slowly, so as to prevent you from losing continuity. You start on just your meatbrain, then slowly you're on the meatbrain and on the ego bridge, then as you're transferring, you're on the new body, too. Then you slip away from the old meat brain, until it's just the bridge and the new body, and then just the new body, but [i]you[/i], the stream of consciousness that's looking out from behind your eyes, has been preserved. It sidesteps the whole "If I resleeve, do [b]I[/b] wake up, or do [b]I[/b] fall into oblivion and die a true death and some other person who thinks they were me wakes up instead" question. I guess you could, and some places probably do, put the resleeving person under general anesthesia during the proceedure, but they still do the gradual migrate per the patient's instructions. Personally? I'd prefer to do the gradual migration if at all possible, and if I needed to egocast, I'd rather send an Alpha fork. The possibility of going to egocast and then dying completely, becoming a blank, null, non-entity, experiencing oblivion? That shit terrifies me. But as an alternative to, say, having my head cut off by a TITAN Headhunter Drone or dying in a solar flare or something, sure, egocasting beats nothing.
—
Skype and AIM names: Exactly the same as my forum name. [url=http://tinyurl.com/mfcapss]My EP Character Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/lbpsb93]Thread for my Questionnaire[/url] [url=http://tinyurl.com/obu5adp]The Five Orange Pips[/url]
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Sun, 2014-09-07 05:29
ThatWhichNeverWas ThatWhichNeverWas's picture
Don't confuse the Wave for the Water.
branford wrote:
the purported "Ship of Theseus" default ego bridge approach to ego "transfer," still seems to me to actually copy the ego into the new morph, not transfer. It's just that as parts of the ego are copied, those same parts are simultaneously deleted in the original morph, instead of copy all, then delete approach. A small nuance, but apparently a copy nonetheless. [Of course, we may simply resolve the SoT Paradox differently.]
Erulastant wrote:
Experience being copied and watch the original me being deleted in real time? Hell no. I can't really fathom why the majority in EP has the opposite view.
The trick is that the new parts are in communication with the old, and are incorporated into the self is the same way new cells are. The original “you” isn't deleted because there is no “new” you distinct from the old. The parts that are deleted are the parts that you used to use, but have moved out of. A metaphor: Imagine 2 connected rooms, with you standing in one, going to movie into the next with your arm outstretched. As your hand begins to cross the boundary between the rooms, your fingertip ceases to exist in the room you are in, and a fingertip appears in the next room. As you move forward, a progressively greater part of you has been “deleted” from existance within the first room, but “you” have not been affected because the arm in the second room is “your” arm. If you want, you can back up, and your first-room arm blossoms back into existance. Ultimately you cross into the second room... do you now mourn the you that no longer exists in the first? No, because you “are” that you. This occurs every day. Cells die and are new take their place, molecules are replaced, your tissues change their shape and composition... but you are still you because you aren't any of those things.
thebluespectre wrote:
And how do you know the copy was a perfect copy?
That's actually part of the beauty of the brain (and as such, emulations of it); it doesn't have to be. If you're using the Theseus method, then then any errors in the transmission will result in a part that is damaged... and can heal. The only risk is when the distinct componant is too large or the transfer goes too quickly for healing to occur... but in those cases the mind adapts, learning to work around the damage (and repair post-op is possible in EP). This is how people can recover from brain injuries. EP speak? Errors in transmission = Stress Damage. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go read Blindsight. Thank you JackGraham!
—
In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few. But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
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Sun, 2014-09-07 05:48
branford branford's picture
Another relevant issue
Another relevant issue related to how people view resleeving, particularly in EP, is comparing your first resleeve vs. subsequent migrations. I know that I would be terrified to resleeve, both for continuity as well as religious reasons (and I'm a liberal, scientifically-minded and fairly secular Jew). I also just don't like the idea of copies of me running around). However, after you first "die," do your subsequent "copies" also all continue to die after each resleeve, and does it matter, to them individually or to You-1.0? There is also the fact that since each copy is, in essence, "you," and even though you know that you already "died," (and if you haven't had a total mental breakdown), new "zombie you" still thinks and feels exactly like the original you, and probably wants to continue "living" despite your death. The more I think about it, the more I would most definitely not want to be an infugee from the Fall. In addition to a vast myriad of other trauma, many infugees probably don't even know what happened to their original body and ego, if copies of them exist elsewhere, such as in the possession of the TITANS, on Earth or elsewhere in the system, or if they could have been corrupted by TITANS before or during transfer, and are not really, truly who they think they are. Eek!!! Also, far too much existential horror for a Sunday morning . . .
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Tue, 2014-09-09 12:23
ThatWhichNeverWas ThatWhichNeverWas's picture
Yeah, being an Infugee would Suck.
I imagine the first resleeve is the worst. Either you decide that you don't die, or you decide that you do, but it's worth it. In either case, any future instances of you are going to use that as a baseline for thier decisions, bypassing future angst. I have now read Blindsight. Damn you JackGraham! [size=10]Always with [/size][size=9]these people [/size][size=8]retroactively stealing [/size][size=7]my ideas [/size][size=6]rumble grumble...[/size]
—
In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few. But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
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Tue, 2014-09-09 23:44
ticktock ticktock's picture
Consistency. I want it.
Noble Pigeon wrote:
Assuming that when you do egocast your "original" self is killed, the only way to preserve your original "self" is if your cortical stack is retrieved
Out of curiosity, why do you consider the backup stored in a cortical stack to be the "original" self (or original "self") and the thing that arrives at the far end of an egocast not to be? What do you see as the difference between the two?
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Wed, 2014-09-10 01:29
thebluespectre thebluespectre's picture
All of it though?
So a brain is a Turing Machine, and so is a cyberbrain, thus they are compatible. But how would a cyberbrain contain the same kind of flux that a meat-brain has? If it is not living cells, how would it simulate that constant ebb and flow and change? And should we really be suppressing things like subconscious stomach reactions when they are practically like a second brain in of themselves?
—
"Still and transfixed, the el/ ectric sheep are dreaming of your face..." -Talk Shows on Mute
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Wed, 2014-09-10 03:53
Armoured Armoured's picture
thebluespectre wrote:So a
thebluespectre wrote:
So a brain is a Turing Machine, and so is a cyberbrain, thus they are compatible. But how would a cyberbrain contain the same kind of flux that a meat-brain has? If it is not living cells, how would it simulate that constant ebb and flow and change? And should we really be suppressing things like subconscious stomach reactions when they are practically like a second brain in of themselves?
I'm pretty sure that cyberbrains as they exist in EP are emulation boxes, specialized to running an emulation of transhuman egoes. This would be how they interface to the morph to get those aptitude bonuses, and have to be larger than an ecto to do it. (Also, because Ghost in the Shell-style cyberbrains are cool. And thus the game style demands it.) I think the discussion on this is interesting enough for us, but in the EP setting people don't think about it anymore. If you are forked and then mind-wiped, they don't feel the death of one mind as much as we do today (though they obviously still have some concern for it, modeled systematically as taking SV).
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Wed, 2014-09-10 08:41
MAD Crab MAD Crab's picture
Emulation boxes and
Emulation boxes and interfaces to all those other bits of the body, yes. In the Morph guide, there are some comments about the mind-state emulation of the Savant being kinda poor, which I would interpret as just this. All those indirect factors that change how a brain responds. Its not quite accurate to say that nobody cares about this kind of thing in AF10. The Jovian's have the largest population, and they care very much about it.
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Wed, 2014-09-10 11:12
Dison Dison's picture
Mad Crab wrote:Its not quite
Mad Crab wrote:
Its not quite accurate to say that nobody cares about this kind of thing in AF10. The Jovian's have the largest population, and they care very much about it.
Not to mention all the + or - Neurodiversity movements that are presumably out there trying to define or redefine the line between neurodiversity and insanity.
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Sat, 2014-09-13 00:19
Zarpaulus Zarpaulus's picture
ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:
ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:
That's actually part of the beauty of the brain (and as such, emulations of it); it doesn't have to be. If you're using the Theseus method, then then any errors in the transmission will result in a part that is damaged... and can heal. The only risk is when the distinct componant is too large or the transfer goes too quickly for healing to occur... but in those cases the mind adapts, learning to work around the damage (and repair post-op is possible in EP). This is how people can recover from brain injuries.
Yeah, thing is, neurogenesis overwrites old memories. At least in mice, who are one of the few mammals other than humans to demonstrate that ability into adulthood. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/new-neurons-found-to-overwrite... The vast majority of your CNS neurons are there for life. There may be some atoms and molecules cycling in and out of the cells but if nothing else the DNA will have the same atoms except for the occasional bit of damage and repair.
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Sat, 2014-09-13 02:56
Myrtle Myrtle's picture
Views of resleeving
We had a discussion about this exact topic at our table after we got into EP. After scrounging the books for information, we came up with a few general positions on resleeving/forking/etc which could be common in EP. From progressive to conservative: 1. The progressive posthumanist He has no problem with resleeving and related technologies. He thinks of a self-identity which holds one Ego as the original as a naive thing and an illusion of the human brain. 2. The forced progressivist He has an underlying fear of dying when copying his ego. But he surpresses that fear and ignores it most of the time, just like most humans surpress their fear of death in their daily lives. Most people who hold this position are people who were resleeved by neccesity (because they died and had a backup or because they fled Earth by egocasting). After they resleeved the first time, they developed a "Well now it happened anyways, I might as well live with it" kind of thinking and arranged with the concept of resleeving from then on. After all, what does it matter now? 3. The softcore bioconservative Mainly a conservative variant of 2. He is okay with resleeving, as long as continuity is preserved. Furthermore, this position is mostly, but not always, against forking and subsequent merging. 4. The moderate bioconservative He refuses all kinds of resleeving and thinks of it as digital suicide. If there is no other option, he will prefer backups or egocasting to an end of his existence. His life after such an event might be a depressive one if he does not manage to cope with it, because he will think of himself as "just a copy" of the original person who "died already". It's more of an "existing on" than a "living on". Furthermore, forking is out of the question for this position. 5. The hardcore bioconservative He refuses resleeving under any circumstances, even if it means final death. This can be because he believes in a soul, which is not transferred by resleeving. Alternatively, he may be a variant of 4, who does not want that a copy of himself lives his life in his place and who wants his identity to end with his death. 6. The bioluddite He refuses resleeving under any circumstances. Further, he also refuses the modification of the original body by augmentations. This distinguishes this position from all others, because even position 5 sees no problem in augmentations. Quite the opposite in fact: many bioconservatives modify their body extensively. The reason is, that they just have this one and they wish it to live as long and strong as possible. This means that lifespan extension is an important thing for many bioconservatives, since they can't just resleeve in another body. For the same reasons, they put more ressources into their body than transhumans who think of their body as replaceable and do not bother to put that much money into a body which they'll use for some time and then replace it anyways. This logic means, that bioconservatives are often impressively augmented. The bioluddite on the other hand wants to live (and die!) in a normal, unmodified body. Death is also a part of life for him and he thinks it is wrong to live an immortal life, since humans are just not made this way. This list proved quite helpful to understand what the main views on resleeving could be in the EP universe and what our characters might think and discuss IC. If I forgot some important position or messed something up, please feel free to correct me.
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Mon, 2014-09-15 16:51
sebwiers sebwiers's picture
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:It
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:
It sidesteps the whole "If I resleeve, do [b]I[/b] wake up, or do [b]I[/b] fall into oblivion and die a true death and some other person who thinks they were me wakes up instead" question. I guess you could, and some places probably do, put the resleeving person under general anesthesia during the proceedure, but they still do the gradual migrate per the patient's instructions.
My personal experience with general anesthesia is that "do [b]I[/b] fall into oblivion and die a true death and some other person who thinks they were me wakes up instead" is still a valid question. Going from a modified body to a DIFFERENT body might not be that much of a stretch. I think doing a gradual conversion on the environment the ego experiences would probably mater more than a gradual transition in ego function, but that would be part of 'waking up".
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:
Personally? I'd prefer to do the gradual migration if at all possible, and if I needed to egocast, I'd rather send an Alpha fork. The possibility of going to egocast and then dying completely, becoming a blank, null, non-entity, experiencing oblivion? That shit terrifies me. But as an alternative to, say, having my head cut off by a TITAN Headhunter Drone or dying in a solar flare or something, sure, egocasting beats nothing.
I think I'd rather just fork and have the 'original' commit suicide (if needed to preserve resources). With critical systems, you generally want redundant operational overlap. I consider my 'self' a critical system. Yeah, that would probably lead to a lot of forks not capping themselves...
ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:
The trick is that the new parts are in communication with the old, and are incorporated into the self is the same way new cells are.
Given that ego-casting is generally used to travel multiple light-minutes (if not further) I don't see how that would be possible... the whole system would need to operate in one locale or the other, it can't share functions between two locales. Unless there's an analogy here that I am missing.
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Mon, 2014-09-15 18:45
Zarpaulus Zarpaulus's picture
sebwiers wrote
sebwiers wrote:
ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:
The trick is that the new parts are in communication with the old, and are incorporated into the self is the same way new cells are.
Given that ego-casting is generally used to travel multiple light-minutes (if not further) I don't see how that would be possible... the whole system would need to operate in one locale or the other, it can't share functions between two locales. Unless there's an analogy here that I am missing.
Gradual uploading is optional, with a max range of 10,000 km. Core rulebook, Accelerated Future, Uploading-Resleeving Continuity
Quote:
In ideal circumstances, a person who is intentionally resleeving can arrange for the uploading and resleeving process to occur without any noticeable loss of continuity. Though the experience of switching from one morph to another is still a bit jarring, the transition itself can be made into a seamless process, with no gaps in awareness or memory, which helps reduce associated mental stress. In this case, during the process of uploading, the ego bridge is also connected to another ego bridge and the new sleeve. The connection can even be made wirelessly or by farcaster link (with a maximum distance of 10,000 kilometers).
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Tue, 2014-09-16 04:56
Noble Pigeon Noble Pigeon's picture
ticktock wrote:Noble Pigeon
ticktock wrote:
Noble Pigeon wrote:
Assuming that when you do egocast your "original" self is killed, the only way to preserve your original "self" is if your cortical stack is retrieved
Out of curiosity, why do you consider the backup stored in a cortical stack to be the "original" self (or original "self") and the thing that arrives at the far end of an egocast not to be? What do you see as the difference between the two?
Because my definition of the self does not stretch to a copy of myself who wakes up across the solar system. Sure I'd consider that person that wakes up a sapient, living, breathing person, akin to an alpha fork, with just as much entitlements to living life as anyone else, but I would not consider it to be myself. The difference between me and the other person that wakes up begins the minute he begins exemplifying divergent behavior, personality traits, and so on, as he would inevitably do.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
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Tue, 2014-09-16 08:48
ThatWhichNeverWas ThatWhichNeverWas's picture
Cause of Death: Oxidative Stress
Zarpaulus wrote:
The vast majority of your CNS neurons are there for life. There may be some atoms and molecules cycling in and out of the cells but if nothing else the DNA will have the same atoms except for the occasional bit of damage and repair.
Ignoring for the moment the vast understatement about molecule turnover, you haven't actually countered my point. A neuron "may" be with you your whole life... unless it's damaged, in which case it is repaired, replaced or the surrounding structures reroute around the damage. Even the DNA is subject to Theseus, if any repair ever occurs or could occur, let alone epigenetic changes, viral alteration or (possibly) RNA transcription. If identity were as fixed as you seem to be claiming, we'd "die" every time we get punched in the face.
sebwiers wrote:
Given that ego-casting is generally used to travel multiple light-minutes (if not further) I don't see how that would be possible... the whole system would need to operate in one locale or the other, it can't share functions between two locales. Unless there's an analogy here that I am missing.
You're partially right. There is a cap on the range of a theseus transfer, defined by how much lag neurons are willing to accept between signal and response. This is afaik presently unknown, but in EP they've apparently nailed it down to an effective 100,000km limit, likely varying due to hardware/signal constraints. If you want to go further than that, you need to either take a ship, send a fork and enter a hybernative state to prevent personality drift, or use intermidate stations as stepping stones. If we go beyond the canon for a second, there is a way to travel further. You cheat. Instead of transfering directly to your desination, you instead resleeve as an infomorph as an intermediary. You then slow down your simulation rate until the transmittion lag is within tolerance, and transfer yourself over as infolife. Once instanced at your destination, you can return to normal speed and resleeve into your new morph as normal. This would, however, be really slow.
—
In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few. But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
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Tue, 2014-09-16 10:12
Zarpaulus Zarpaulus's picture
ThatWhichNeverWas wrote
ThatWhichNeverWas wrote:
Zarpaulus wrote:
The vast majority of your CNS neurons are there for life. There may be some atoms and molecules cycling in and out of the cells but if nothing else the DNA will have the same atoms except for the occasional bit of damage and repair.
Ignoring for the moment the vast understatement about molecule turnover, you haven't actually countered my point. A neuron "may" be with you your whole life... unless it's damaged, in which case it is repaired, replaced or the surrounding structures reroute around the damage. Even the DNA is subject to Theseus, if any repair ever occurs or could occur, let alone epigenetic changes, viral alteration or (possibly) RNA transcription. If identity were as fixed as you seem to be claiming, we'd "die" every time we get punched in the face.
There's a massive difference between losing a part of you and losing all of you. Also, what about epigenetics? That's just selectively coiling or uncoiling sections of the strand by attaching or removing tags. Something else you might find interesting, each cell has roughly half the same DNA atoms as its parent cell had, and half of all cells have a strand that was originally in their "grandparent" cell, and so on and so forth.
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Tue, 2014-09-16 11:05
ticktock ticktock's picture
Ok, but...
Noble Pigeon wrote:
Because my definition of the self does not stretch to a copy of myself who wakes up across the solar system. Sure I'd consider that person that wakes up a sapient, living, breathing person, akin to an alpha fork, with just as much entitlements to living life as anyone else, but I would not consider it to be myself. The difference between me and the other person that wakes up begins the minute he begins exemplifying divergent behavior, personality traits, and so on, as he would inevitably do.
I'm mainly asking why an ego backup retrieved from the cortical stack would be any more you than a farcasted copy. Is it just the physical distance? If a resleeving facility pulled two identical copies of your ego from your stack and sleeved them both locally in identical clone bodies, would you see that as a meaningfully different situation? I'm not arguing against your position, here - just trying to understand the edge cases.
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Tue, 2014-09-16 20:40
Zarpaulus Zarpaulus's picture
Let me put it this way.
Let me put it this way. Computers have two types of memory, Volatile and Non-Volatile. Non-Volatile memory is like hard drives and flash drives or CDs, cut the power and it's still there, but you can't really do anything with it on that device alone, you need to transcribe it into something with Volatile memory. Volatile memory is RAM, if you cut the power to that it's blanked, nothing. But you can edit it at the drop of a hat, when you're writing a document, playing a game, anything on a computer, you're using RAM. When you shut down a computer the RAM is wiped, when you start it back up the OS and other apps that are set to start up are copied over from the hard drive to the RAM. When the computer is on "sleep" a bare trickle of power to the RAM is maintained so that it can be resumed at a moment's notice. Animal brains only have Volatile memory. Even under deep sedation the power (in the form of glucose) to the neurons is never interrupted for long, until the organism dies and even then it takes a while for the neurons to use up the sugars they have at their immediate disposal. When sleeping many "apps" of the brain temporarily cease functioning but most are active, and there's been research suggesting that there's more brain activity during sleep than we thought before. In short, every time you shut down your computer you're killing it, and every time you start it up you're resleeving it from a stack.
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Tue, 2014-09-16 22:17
Noble Pigeon Noble Pigeon's picture
ticktock wrote:Noble Pigeon
ticktock wrote:
Noble Pigeon wrote:
Because my definition of the self does not stretch to a copy of myself who wakes up across the solar system. Sure I'd consider that person that wakes up a sapient, living, breathing person, akin to an alpha fork, with just as much entitlements to living life as anyone else, but I would not consider it to be myself. The difference between me and the other person that wakes up begins the minute he begins exemplifying divergent behavior, personality traits, and so on, as he would inevitably do.
I'm mainly asking why an ego backup retrieved from the cortical stack would be any more you than a farcasted copy. Is it just the physical distance? If a resleeving facility pulled two identical copies of your ego from your stack and sleeved them both locally in identical clone bodies, would you see that as a meaningfully different situation? I'm not arguing against your position, here - just trying to understand the edge cases.
Well I can't say I know a lot about neuroscience or how the brain works, but my assumption is that if you are restored from a cortical stack, something that's inside your skull, then the original ego is still preserved. So, yes, physical location basically.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
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Tue, 2014-09-16 22:48
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
They're not likely to have
They're not likely to have dragged your whole body along with your stack though. If you died and were recovered from backup, they would remove the stack and pass it off to your insurance company, who would pass it off to whatever morph service handles your resleeving or instance you as an infomorph to let you have access to your accounts. At which point you'd be instanced in a body with a different neurological makeup (including an emulated one) and instantly begin diverging from the backed up Ego.
—
H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
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Wed, 2014-09-17 02:57
Noble Pigeon Noble Pigeon's picture
UnitOmega wrote:They're not
UnitOmega wrote:
They're not likely to have dragged your whole body along with your stack though. If you died and were recovered from backup, they would remove the stack and pass it off to your insurance company, who would pass it off to whatever morph service handles your resleeving or instance you as an infomorph to let you have access to your accounts. At which point you'd be instanced in a body with a different neurological makeup (including an emulated one) and instantly begin diverging from the backed up Ego.
I should have elaborated. I basically meant that I believe in Eclipse Phase that if you are restored from a cortical stack (body or no body, likely the latter) then the original Ego is preserved.
—
"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.” -Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address
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Wed, 2014-09-17 03:16
UnitOmega UnitOmega's picture
But restoring from the stack
But restoring from the stack could be considered less contiguous than some of the methods of Ego casting. You are, after all, moved to a digital storage-only medium than loaded into a new body from that medium, which is roughly analogous to the Ship of Theseus method, only with that resleeving method, you're conscious the whole time, and thus presumably able to maintain the same sense of self. There's no need to black out and wake up somewhere and wonder if you are still yourself. You are still you because you remember being you and being awake the entire time. You can't actually be sure if you're being sleeved from stack, you've been effectively dead storage for some time, you would just assume you are continuous because your last memories would presumably involve your death. I also personally argue that there's nothing "preserved" about an Ego to be lost in a resleeve of any method, farcast or not, since sleeving from a stack requires a new body that has new neurology and hormones etc. to work with anyway. Egos used to resleeving in EP seem to be able to tell the difference between their own nominal thoughts and feelings and things acquired from the morph. Egocasting, you still contain all the previous information, experience and memory that comprised You. The You that was moves to become the You that is, and contains all the same things which made up you prior, so there's no reason for the sense of self to be lost (other than telling yourself "No, I'm not me anymore", I guess). An Ego an Ego. Though, I guess, it kind of boils down to what you think the self is. As far as I call it, the self is the information of You, preferably in a contiguous format. You never stop feeling like you're yourself so long as you can continue to contain and recall all the information which comprises your self prior to the immediate point in time. Your personality, your attitude, what you do in relation to the information that your self contains can change over time. Humans as "people" change, but you maintain your sense of self. Resleeving in any format regardless of cause or distance, should be like that gradual process, only much more rapid (which can cause some shock to the system).
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H-Rep: An EP Homebrew Blog http://ephrep.blogspot.com/
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