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03/30/2006: "Eastercon and identity"
After my fairly enjoyable panellist experiences at the World SF Convention last summer, I've been invited onto a panel at the British equivalent - or Eastercon - a few weeks hence. Well, maybe invited is too strong a word; I did fill in their online form for prospective guests.
The exciting thing about this is that, unlike Worldcon, I'll get to talk about a subject about which I (at least in theory) know a thing or two. The first panel is on Sentience, and my co-panellists are provisionally listed as including Richard Morgan, whose Takeshi Kovacs trilogy contains some of the more interesting thoughts on continuity of identity in recent SF (as well as some of the goriest deaths).
For those who don't know Morgan's work (ctd.)
For those who don't know Morgan's work, the premise is that, in the far future, everyone - or everyone who chooses to & can afford it - will carry a Stack at the base of their brain, into which their consciousness, memories, etc can be backed up at regular intervals (or constantly; the distinction matters). Upon physical death, the Stack can be removed and 're-sleeved' into a freshly cloned body, whereupon the person can carry on as before.
Ostensibly, Morgan seems as much concerned with telling fast-paced, 'hard-boiled' noir stories than with prodding about with existential ideas, but his philosophy background is never far from the surface. And for me, it's just impossible to avoid questions about who precisely it is that walks around in the new sleeve.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not coming over all duallist about this. If it were actually possible to map every single neuronal connection & neuropeptide in my brain, and copy it perfectly elsewhere, I think in a very real sense that would be 'me'. There is, as far as I can tell, no soul, no ghost in the shell, that must for all time defy the best attempts of neuroscience to detect it, & the best attempts at copying or uploading. My thoughts & memories & tastes & fantasies & principled aversion to giraffes can all be explained in terms of physical phenomena, & could theoretically be shown as flashing lights on a highly advanced EEG. I have no problem with any of that.
The questions that perplex are a little different. For instance, what if the copy wasn't absolutely perfect? Or what if the back-ups are only made every 24 hours, meaning that when re-sleeved, I will have lost up to a day of new memories? Is the re-sleeved me really 'me', or some previous version of me, or what? I suppose a lot depends on how much is lost. No-one who has sat up drinking 'til dawn with Slovenians can doubt that it's possible to lose an evening's memories, while still hanging on to a sense of continuity of identity. I might have felt like death & looked like shit, but when I surfaced the next day, I was still the same guy that scooped that last glass of what our hosts ambiguously dubbed 'The White Stuff'.
But there must come a point, eh? A point after which I'd have lost so much of the identity-constituting memories, or personality traits, that I might actually start to wonder if I was the same person at all. This was actually dealt with fairly well in a Series 1 episode of Battlestar Gallactica, in relation to Cylon back-ups. Safe in the knowledge that their personalities would be preserved every few hours, and given the equivalent of re-sleeving in a genetically identical body, which of us would really fear death? (Morgan tries to get round this potential tension-killer by threatening really horrible deaths, or even Real Death, i.e. destruction of Stack).
When the Cylons start to get scared is when the President points out that, this far from Cylon Homeworld, there's a very real chance that the back-up signal won't make it home. Yet presumably, the Cylons would have stored a back-up before setting out on their covert mission. The worst they have to fear, then, is the loss of the accumulated memories from that time onwards. As I said, loss of a day's memories might not be all that devastating (though if it was the day Famke Janssen sat in my lap, I think I'd be a tad begrudgeful). But I guess it makes sense to say that there would come a point where loss of all the memories since the last back-up would start to feel like a real loss.
This might be because so much time has elapsed: losing a few hours, no big deal; losing a few years, different matter. Or it might be because some life-changing events had been lost. But the prospect of reverting to a copy of my personality last stored in 1989 would seem, to me, scant consolation in the face of impending (body) death.
I realise that none of this is related to sentience as such, but I think it's pretty interetsing stuff. And it matters in the real world: when we think about living wills, for instance, and whether they should still apply after the people that wrote them have turned into/ been replaced by blissfully demented souls who don't remember writing them, and don't care about dignity & independence & all the concerns that motivated their previous self to write the decline treatment in advance. Are we respecting the competent person's wishes when they are incompetent? Or allowing one person to impose their will on another? How much has to change before we can't meaningfully talk about one person any more?
Hopefully I'll get to talk to Richard Morgan over a beer about this. And hopefully, I'll remember some of what he says.
