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March 3, 2005
Gestalt
Corey Doctorow has a new short story i, robot that's been published on The Infinite Matrix. It's a good story - as many of Corey's are. I'm not going to give away the ending directly, but you might want to read it before you continue.
Go ahead, I'll wait...
The story got me thinking about a subject, fairly common to science fiction, that occasionally confounds me - that of "consciousness transfer."
A number of science fiction authors have used this idea - Greg Egan uses it to good effect in a few novels, as does Richard Morgan in Altered Carbon.
My first memory of really thinking about the notion was reading a book called Mind Children, by Hans Moravec in around 1988.
He postulates a scene in which a person lays down on an operating table; the skin of their scalp is anesthetized and the top of their skull removed. A sensor hand maps the patterns of their thought, pushing through grey matter, recording and destroying one miniscule layer at a time, until it rests on the brain stem. The person on the table experience a momentary reality discontinuity before "waking up" in the machine - looking down on their discarded body from outside it.
I remember at the time being very uncomfortable with this idea - I couldn't quite bring myself to accept the idea that the me that is me would survive this transfer. The consciousness in the computer would have all the memories I did, would have been shaped by the same experiences but "I" would be dead - having died on the table as my brain was destroyed.
I couldn't quite pinpoint a moment during the procedure when I died - but I was pretty sure that by the end of it I'd be dead, and that the ghost in the machine wasn't me.
Years later, I still can't eloquently express my discomfort with the idea. I've seen it used in ton's of science fiction. At each encounter, I try to get a handle on the seed of the discontent, and each time it eludes me - floating just outside my periphery, refusing to come into focus.
Posted by dberger at March 3, 2005 10:32 PM
Comments
So, not going to be first in line to give the Trek transporter a try? You gotta decide whether you believe "we" are the meat, or some kind of disconnected ethereal consciousness that just *rides* the meat. Despite my disdain for religion (which usually is squarely in the latter camp), gotta admit I'm not sure myself - at least not enough to say "Beam me up, Scotty."
Posted by: Hendel at March 4, 2005 3:32 PM