that reads a lot like greg egan’s “permutation city”.

i’d love to have a translation of the short story. polish SF is such a big untapped treasure chest, someone needs to get busy and translate it all.

oh, and i agree on your solution to the consciousness interruption problem. through gradual virtualisation it should be possible to experience the whole thing in one piece.

That reminds me of a short story I read on the web a long time ago. Basically a guy develops a computer that can learn for itself. It has been ingrained with the 3 laws of robotics too. First thing, it learns to talk & respond – kind of like a turing complete computer. Then it learns to teleport.

Then it starts learning how to protect people to really enforce the 3 laws – it teleports tumors out of this dying old lady, and figures out how to make her body young & able again. It does this for the whole world, and eventually everyone is living somewhere in space & the computer will get everyone anything they ask for, as long as it isn’t death.

This old lady (now young) develops in a violent sport where people design dangerous places, and competitors make an agreement with the computer that it won’t protect them until necessary to preserve their life. Actually she developed it because of some interaction with a murderer whom she allows to basically kill her – although this guy can’t really kill her. He walks around as a zombie kind of guy, using the computer to keep him alive despite rotting flesh & wormy organs. Anyhow, in these arenas, players can be horribly hurt without fear of permanent debilitation – the computer will fix them.

Anyhow, this computer is keeping all of this stuff in vast databases and starts to run out of atoms to use so, against the wishes of its maker, which the computer still relies on for moral choices, the computer performs “the change” essentally digitizes everything.

One thing leads to another, and the old lady & the computer’s maker propose a series of tough moral choices – a woman becoming so mentally dependant on cocaine she loses much of her human-ness – the realization that the computer wiped out vast civilzations of other life because it didn’t recognize the necessity of preserving “non-human” life – and others. The computer runs out of matter to deal with all these dilemmas & basically recreates a primitive earth, and puts the old lady & computer maker on it, destroys itself & all other humans. These two people start the task of rebuilding the human race.

Anyhow, ti wasn’t the the best written story, but I thought it was pretty interesting. I spent the last 30 minutes googling for the story, but without the names of the characters, the name of the death sport, or something more concrete I haven’t been successful. Maybe someone here knows it (needle in a haystack I know).

@freelancer: Yeah, you are right – cylon consciousness might be different from ours to begin with. So in their case the transfer might work without creating the “twin”. Or not. Hard to tell.

@feeshy: Well, I’d think that if we had resources to build a Dyson Sphere we would probably figure out a way to terraform and colonize other planets.

It remains to be seen whether or not we could ever travel faster than light. However it is quite possible that we will be able to develop an instantaneous communication devices based on quantum entanglement like the Ansible in Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish cycle or the Ender novels.

Even if FTL travel does not materialize the colonization could still be accomplished at sub-light speeds. In that case we wouldn’t really have a galactic spanning empire, but rather number of independent worlds trading in knowledge and culture.

Oh, and I’m going to put Richard Morgan on my to-be-investigated-for-potential-awesome list. :)

Oh and on the consciousness transfer thing. Nobody has ever done it better than Richard Morgan – the Takeshi Kovacs series of books are almost required reading.

I’m always fascinated by the concept of a continually developing humanity. Any science fiction which deals with humanity in the far future interests me. I don’t fear death myself, but I fear loss and the loss of the richness our planet has disturbs me. I think it is our duty to ensure we preserve that through inter-stellar/inter-dimensional travel or even virtualisation.

However my gut feel tells me we’re stuck and that a Dyson Sphere is about as far as we’ll get. After our sun dies, we die too.

Nice post. And a very readable synopsis of the plot.

I admit that the mapping chip was heavily inspired by… Yeah, Farscape. I bet freelancer (my fellow Gigi Edgley fan) knew exactly where this was heading when I used the expression “brain mapping chip” instead of neural implant.

I sure did :P

That short story sounds like something I would really want to read, so I’m glad you reviewed it. It’s hard to imagine seeing the actual end of everything, so I can’t even guess what would be going through his head (no pun intended) at that moment. I must say though, that death really scares me. Just the thought of not being, not experiencing. Just disappearing. It scares the hell out of me. So I would be the first one to want to attain immortality if it was ever possible. Of course there are many theories of an after-life, but they are just that. Theories. And who is to say that that “after-life” isn’t still bound to this universe? In that case it would be just as doomed. And that scares me even more.

I did read your other article (didn’t have time to read all the comments though), and I do agree with you…kinda. The “transfer->backup->new body” process would definitely create a clone, and it would not be you. However, a direct transfer (like the Cylons do) could be. I mean come on, none of us know what defines our consciousness. I could be some particles in our brain, it could be some energy field we can’t detect. For all we know, it could be magic. But let’s say it can somehow be detected and “touched”. In that case, I believe moving that consciousness to another body would retain the same person. A backup copy of it, however, would not. The key word here is “copy”.

Of course, the real problem as I see it is that we would never be able to know for sure. To us, the person would seem the same. He would even feel the same. But whether or not he is the same, or died during the transfer, we will never know. It’s kinda like the truth. I believe it was Kosh in Babylon 5 who said “Understanding is a three-edged sword. There’s their side, there’s our side, and there’s the truth.” Anyone can speak the truth, but it will always be colored by their perspective. It may or may not be the absolute truth, but no one can ever know for sure. Just because we have the same perspective and agree that he is speaking the truth, doesn’t mean there isn’t someone out there who “knows” differently.