cellio | I don't think that's how consciousness works

I recently read Corey Doctorow's novel Walkaway. It's set in a post-scarcity world where the super-rich (zota rich, or just zotas) hold their power by stomping everyone else down. There's enough to go around, but people have to work (at crap jobs for crap wages) anyway, while the zotas sit back. Some people hate this and decide to opt out by walking away and forming their own communities off the grid. The book follows some of these walkaways, as they're called. (And no, the zotas are not cool with this.)

Another theme of the book is conquering death -- that's how the characters view it. More specifically, their goal is to be able to back up a human's essence, at which point if you get killed you can be restored from backup (initially as a digital simulation, eventually into a new body). This is an attractive idea in SF and this book is hardly the first to explore it, but I always get tripped up by the same issue, including in this book.

That issue is: sure, it'd be nice if I could back up my brain so that "Monica" would never have to cease to exist, but that doesn't mean that backup is me. It would think so, of course; it would have all my memories. But from my perspective, my body dies -- I die. If I'm dead, do I really care if there's a simulation of me running out there somewhere?

This is not conquering death. At best it's mitigating it. Which makes it hard for me to relate to stories where people say "great, ditch the meat body and come back digitally or in a robot or a perfect body or whatever". Would people really do that? I find that hard to swallow.

Despite this point, I mostly enjoyed the book. There's one place where there's a jump in time that I found rather abrupt, and the story is far more dialogue-heavy than I'm used to, with a lot of philosophy in that dialogue. (In other words, large blocks of philosophy-dialogue or exposition-dialogue, as opposed to short, interactive dialogue.) But many of the characters are engaging and walkaway-land sounds like a cool place to live, when the zotas aren't trying to quash it.

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IIRC, Schlock Mercenary explicitly explored some of what you're talking about ("there will be _a_ me, but _I_ still die") in the last book or near the end of the one before. Unless I'm confusing it with another work that just happened to have characters talking about a similar question at about the same time.

_Duplicate_ was also an attempt to tackle that issue. The protag firmly believes the opposite, but from the perspective of omniscient reader, it's clear each new duplicate is not the same at all.

Of course, one can argue this renewal / replacement is happening in our minds every night--or every moment. Consciousness is not as continuous as we pretend to ourselves that it is.

Thanks for reminding me about *Duplicate* where, as the name implies, they're duplicates not transfers despite the impressions of the people involved.

Can you say more about consciousness not being as continuous as we pretend?

Even if it's not, deliberately ending what you view as your life so that a copy can pick up where you left off seems like a hard sell. If a new copy of me is waking up every morning and the old copies are never aware, that's different from a setting where people take steps proactively to "upgrade" their bodies or the like. How could that ever really be "transferring" your consciousness into another carrier?

Can you say more about consciousness not being as continuous as we pretend?

Hmm. This is more of a pet theory than one that I've seen elsewhere. But the brain is constantly shifting; the pathways are only barely set, in many cases. And consciousness is interrupted in lots of ways, small and large (when sleeping; when knocked out; when drifting, day-dreaming, lost in reverie, etc.). It would seem odd that the brain would be precisely the same after one of these interruptions than it was before them; but we perceive an unbroken chain, at least, from the position of "now".

If I concentrate, I fancy I can feel my brain's refresh-rate; it's about 2Hz, twice a second, the currents in my head recirculate. And there's the short-term glitch: trying to hold onto a thought for more than a few seconds is nearly impossible (though I understand meditation trains one to do this; or perhaps, to return to the same thought over and over again, which is the best I've managed to achieve). Given these "refresh" cycles...well, I'm not so sure our consciousness is especially continuous, and suspect that the illusion of continuity is like the illusion our eyes play on us as they lurch around in our heads, darting from one place to another while the brain fills in the gaps and pretends there's a world painted on canvas.

Even if it's not, deliberately ending what you view as your life so that a copy can pick up where you left off seems like a hard sell.

Yes. Absolutely. Half the premise of _Duplicate_ was a character who was darn sure that it worked differently than that--or at least was willing to sacrifice himself so that other versions of himself could survive. (The first few are forced; actual volitional self-destruction takes a few iterations...)

This is my problem with transporters, uploads, the works. It'll swear it's me; but it's not me. But then--so will tomorrow's me, and maybe he isn't right-now-me either. But we are forced into the future.

Thanks for expanding on that. Interesting stuff. (I don't know if meditation helps either.)

It feels like an important difference between the brain currents you describe and an upload (or transporter or whatever) is that the one is gradual and continuous, while the other is discontinuous. I mean, we replace all our skin in, what, a few months? Over and over again. But we never say that this isn't the same body we had a year ago, because at any given point in time the vast majority of it isn't new. Brain currents don't feel any different to me than gradual changes in the opinions we hold and the perceptions we have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Yeah, I have the same issue with such uploads. I remember discussing that when I was in Trek fandom...

Another book which has this as a plot point is Lawrence Watt-Evan's Realms of Light. It's set in a Cyberpunk-ish future where it's possible to upload people, and while it's mostly not legal, there are some places where people do it anyhow, and... well, I don't want to give away too many spoilers. (It's a sequal to another book of his, Nightside City, but it's entirely possible to read it first. At least, I did...)

...and also the main plot point of Gibson's short story, "The Winter Market". Though the cat remains both alive and dead at the end: the ending of the story, IIRC, has the protag confronting the decision of whether or not to accept the invitation of his now-uploaded ex to get (back?) in touch. Dubious as he is that someone uploaded is (1) them and (2) actually a consciousness and (3) a person.

And then there are the problems of forking (this comes up in Walkaway) and restoring to older versions to erase part of your life (which comes up in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which Walkaway is a prequel for and which I have now read). *I'm* me, but is each of the dozen independent sims of me also me? And how much of a "restore" is me if there's been selective editing? Can you cherry-pick commits too?

...and also, perhaps more interestingly, a key part of GRRM's short story "The Glass Flower", which (this is a bit of a spoiler) concerns a cyborg who keeps replacing more and more of his brain with electronic components, until there's no meat left, and he's effectively been uploaded, Ship-of-Theseus style. Even more of a spoiler: basically, the cyborg (which has memory continuity) winds up haunted by the ghost of his original meat self. Well, his mind is. Haunted.

I would like to see a story that posits that consciousness can be moved to a silicon/computational substrate, but can only do so gradually. That consciousness can be induced to gradually grow into a cognitive resource, like new hardware connected into the wetware, and then you can retire/remove old parts of its old wetware non-fatally. So that if you connect the new mind substrate (tech) to the old mind substrate (brain) and are patient and attentive and work at it, you can slowly transition a mind off the meat and into the metal, and then once it's mostly running on metal, kill the meat. But, since this is a learning and brain plasticity exercise, not unlike recovering from a stroke, it takes on the order of months or years to do.

Like the Tin Woodman. :)

I would read that too. It's a more nuanced and more interesting take on the problem.

If I recall correctly, Doctorow further complicates this issue by having some versions of the dead character (sorry; don't remember her name) be slightly different from each other, due to engineering or hardware limitations or experience.

I don't think that's how consciousness works

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