Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
(The article is relevant to the recent discussion of downloading 
consciousness)
  

    
I *have* written a nonfiction book! I co-wrote the Complete Idiot's Guide to
Publishing Science Fiction for (rwilmeth) at MacMillan USA, in 2000, with
Karl Schroeder.

But I think you mean a non-fiction "think" book. It is an intriguing (and
potentially lucrative, of course) idea. But my problem now is finding time
to write *fiction* and the few nonfic articles I write here and there.

I have a kind of wet-dream of getting enough $$ at some point in the near
future that I can put a down-payment on a house, rent out part of it to
cover the mortgage, and then write and blog full-time. I'd teach a little,
and consult a little, and write a LOT. I know I could sustain a novel
project and a nonfic book project side-by-side in that situation.

So someday, maybe.

I missed the Harper's article -- I'll keep an eye out for it.
  

    
You should read it. Ellen is on the Well and probably would be happy to 
send you a reprint.
  

    
I'd like to muddy the pot still further: back in 1989, I suspect I
died. (Or came bloody close to it, anyway.) General anaesthesia for
microsurgery on the back of one eye is _deep_ -- the level of reflex
suppression it involves used to be one of the tests for brain death. I
have this rather unsettling memory from either side of a complete gap
in my existence that began with a barbiturate infusion and suddenly
segued into feeling woozy and lying on a trolley outside the other door
of the operating theatre. 

Normally we don't spend much time wondering if the "I" who wakes up
tomorrow is going to be the same "me" who is planning on going to bed
in a couple of hours; but in fact, we are eliding over a period of
suspension of consciousness (albeit incomplete, because memories are
still being laid down and processing continues). But deep general
anaesthesia is something else entirely. Whatever comes up at the other
end is ... well, it's running in the same brain, using the same
synaptic hard-wired connections, but there's a discontinuity in there
somewhere.

Far as I can tell, the distinction between this, and a whole cloned
organ system or brain stem, is one of degree, not of kind. But then, I
don't believe I'm the same person I was at the beginning of this
interview, much less ten years ago ...
  

    
Part of this 'transfer of consciousness' thread got me thinking about Jack 
Finney's _The Body Snatchers_. The one aspect of that story that disturbed 
my suspension of disbelief was the fact that continuity from human to pod 
person was strongly implied, but I just couldn't get it. Larry Gates and 
King Donovan, in the film, are telling Kevin McCarthy that he'll feel so 
much better when he becomes an okra person, but I kept thinking how that 
was nuts, because he wouldn't be feeling anything. He would be dead.

(Sorry, Cory, I know we're drifting away from the magic kingdom... but it 
was ever thus.)
  

    
Speaking of Magic Kingdoms, a large chunk of England's equivalent just
went up in flames (including the haunted house) ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2726951.stm

(No word if Jack Valenti was seen sneaking away from the vicinity
clutching an empty gas can and muttering darkly about building a new
multiplex on the site, though :)
  

    
God, that is *tragic*.
  

    

Cory, why do folks who decide to deadhead have to go into jars?  Why can't
they just leave a CD-ROM with their backup and their genome code with a bank
or a law firm?
  

    
Two factors:

1. It's more dramatically interesting for them to be invested in jars

2. Deadheaders can opt to be woken up from time to time, in a machine, and
take a look around so that they can evaluate the possibility of reanimating
(wake me up when it's over).
  

    
[Forwarded for Peter Hollo, raven(at)fourplay.com.au ]: 

Hi Charlie,
Interesting seeing people argue on the Cory-discussion about personal
identity issues we explored in 2nd-year Uni ;) Another 

I'm interested that "scraps" and others haven't really addressed
Charlie's argument about the fact that your entire physical being gets
replaced over decades... And I'm interested by Cory's assertion
earlier
on that my body with any physical change to it *isn't my body
anymore*.
Huh? But in that case, from moment to quantum moment you are no longer
the same person. Trivially true, but in a deep sense really untrue. [I
know later on he clarifies that someone who for instance comes back
from
Nepal a changed person is "both the same and not the same". So
personal
identity is a pretty subjective and wishy-washy thing isn't it? *g*]
What does it take to "be the same person as..."? This is the question
at
the heart of the matter.
(Nevertheless, in the case of cell-replacement, one could argue that
is
a gradual process and there's no rupture or disjunction.)

Still, the argument for continuity of consciousness is fairly
precarious
too. When you go to sleep, and then wake up, there is a distinct
rupture
in your continuous consciousness. If you're undergoing an operation,
you
may be given an anaesthetic and asked to count down from 10. People
often wake up after the operation completing the count-down! Big
rupture! [Er... Charlie later mentions having had this very experience
himself.]

Then again, there is a neurological condition where a person's
self-perceived stream of consciousness can go for a holiday, while
they automatically walk/drive home, do the dishes, or whatever - only
to suddenly "wake up" and seem to have materialised some minutes or
hours later. This sort of fuguing also brings into question the idea of
a straight-forward link between continuity-of-body and
continuity-of-consciousness. [jacob mentioned experiencing this simply
from alcohol abuse!]

Tangentially, Greg Egan's fascinating, in his earlier short stories,
for exploring a lot of these issues. His story "Mr Volition" (for
instance), while exploring directly the concept of how much conscious
control we have over our own actions (answer: not nearly as much as we
think!), also indirectly points to the fact that our sense of
continuous unified consciousness is fairly illusionary too.
What's more, can I point out that Egan's "Learning To Be Me" has the
explicit twist at the end that the person narrating the story is the
one with the completely uploaded brain? It's a very strong argument for
materialism and for (gradual) "transfer of consciousness".

The question of what happens if two bodies end up running me (say) at
the same time is only problematical if you insist that there is _ever_
a
single, unified, self that exists, and that there is a real unified
stream of consciousness that identifies as ME... Any body (or
upload/engram/robot/whatever) that instantiates me in as deep a way as
my brain/nervous system/body does at the moment has a good claim to
being me. The question, then, of who *really is me* is (perhaps)
rather
incoherent.
Shades of "MOI, c'est l'original!" (remember, the clones arguing in
City
of Lost Children? *tee hee*)

And finally, on the philosophy of this issue: it's been pointed out
that
what's important to us (seemingly) about consciousness is just that
*subjective* aspect of it. All that stored information in the
computer,
or that fully-animated restored human over there; they're not "me"
because I'm me from my point of view. "What it's like to be me", my
internal sense of identity, seems to be irrevocably caught up with,
well, ME!
But... I do think that the same points about
questionable-continuity-of-consciousness apply to continuity of
subjectivity. Is the bare fact of one's own subjectivity really what's
most important about who you are? Or is it not all those other facts -
memories, aesthetic preferences, particular abilities and
non-abilities...?

Reading further, I like what jacob said in a couple of posts...
And I'm interested in what scraps later said:
> I've tried to think of sleep as a similar consciousness break -- I
have dreams 
> about that, in fact -- but it doesn't work for me.
Seems like what it comes down to then is "I JUST DON'T LIKE IT!" Jon
Lebkovsky is coming from a similar perspective. Consciousness is some
sacred and magical substance...?

Cory: Can I point out that this "selection" business is a bit of a red
herring. It's certainly not a reasonable evolutionary argument to say
that "those who accept uploading/backing-up will survive" - surely a
belief in uploading/restoring of consciousness is not hereditary?
I guess if the number of new-born humans decreases to near-zero,
_then_
this sort of future is pretty inevitable - is that the implication,
then?
It is inevitable, though, that some people, due to religious beliefs,
quirks of education, or just instinct, will be pretty _violently_
unconvinced (so to speak) by the concept of restore-from-backup. And
it'll be hard to stop them reproducing and educating/indoctrinating
their children in their beliefs. I'm pretty serious about the violence
(see the behaviour of those opposed to abortion, for instance).
They'll
believe the restored people don't have souls and are probably evil
(zombies or whatever)... And therefore I suspect the road to the
Bitchun
Society will be long and arduous and bullet-ridden...

May I ask what is this "slip(s)/slippage" thing is that goes on in a
lot
of the posts?
Cheers,
Peter
--
  

    
Perceptive, though from my perspetive the idea that consciousness is 
'disrupted' is so accurate that it's inaccurate, i.e. disruption is 
probably the rule; continuity is somewhat illusory, dependent on 
consistency of perspective and physical/temporal 'place.' Consider the 
Buddhist concept of impermanence, 'emptiness.'

But this is probably the wrong magic kingdom? (I.e. apologies for my 
ongoing contribution to drift).

Cory, I'm wondering how your work with EFF has influenced your fiction? 
  

    

I think I've made an argument a little more rigorous than "I just don't 
like it."  If Peter were paying attention to more than what he wanted to 
refute, he would have noted that I like the idea of transferred 
conciousness very much, and that of course I intend to take advantage of 
backup technology if I have a chance.  I just have never seen a convincing 
scientific response to the idea that the original consciousness still 
experiences death and will wish to avoid that as long as possible.  

I think part of the beauty of the Egan story is that while you know you 
are of course being addressed by the new consciousness, that doesn't 
answer the question of whether the old consciousness perceived extinction, 
and since the part right before the end dealt with the original 
consciousness's awareness of its losing control, I think you're free to 
read it as experiencing death, if you want to.  Peter comes at it from the 
other point of view, and prefers to read it as a continuous consciousness, 
but we as readers are simply in the same situation as friends: we are 
observing a consciousness that is in every way the same to us, but that 
doesn't mean that it is the same one.  (And first person narrative does 
not imply a coterminous relationship with the consciousness telling the 
story; we are not "inside" their heads, any more than we are with anyone 
else telling us a story about themselves.)

I didn't respond to Charlie's gradual-change argument simply because it is 
not analogous.  The gradual change of all of your cells means there is 
always a continuity.  At any rate, it doesn't address my question: Okay, 
then, what if you bring the backup to life while the original still lives?  
Now, when the original dies, is it not experiencing death, simply because 
a duplicate exists?

I am not unwilling to believe that my original consciousness doesn't end; 
I just want a =physical explanation=.  I don't think that's mystical; it 
seems to me that the other side of the argument is mystical.  I don't know 
how to get around that disconnection between us.
  

    

Additional note on "Learning to Be Me": the fact that the narrator 
dismisses the fears and concerns of the original consciousness at the end 
is a srong argument that it isn't the same consciousness at all, isn't it?  
If it were the same consciousness, wouldn't he be understanding, wouldn't 
he have a strong empathy for what that felt like?  Woouldn't his initial 
reaction to be massively relieved?  There's no doubt that the 
consciousness is telling us he believes himself to be the same person; but 
does he seem very much like the same person?
  

    
Peter, you *are* a different person after an amputation. You're a different
person after major surgery. You're a different person after coming through
major crises, cognitive therapy, drug rehab...

"Identity" in a consciousness-uploading world is response to stimulus. How
do you know that Cory-2 is the "same person" as Cory-1? Because Cory-2
*acts* like Cory-1. When Cory-2 asks himself, "Are you Cory?" he will answer
in the same way that Cory-1 would. When Peter asks Cory-2 a question about
consciousness uploading, he will answer it the same way that Cory-1 would.

But Cory-today will not answer important questions the same way that Cory-
last-year would. Before I completed my first book-length project ("The
Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction," co-written with Karl
Schroeder), I had started and failed to complete dozens of book-length
projects. After I finished that book, I handily completed D&OITMK. The Cory-
before-Idiot's-Guide *was not capable* of finishing a book-length project;
the Cory-after-Guide was.

If you uploaded your consciousness and the Peter-2 in the machine (or a new
body) had major, important, sophisticated cognitive capabilities Peter-1
didn't have, would Peter-2 be the "same person" that Peter-1 was? How many
new abilities and capabilities can Peter-2 have before he is a "different
person?" If Cory-2 answers the "Write me a book" question differently from
"Cory-1," in what sense is he the same person?

--

"Slip" and "slippage"

The WELL's conferencing system notifies you if someone else's message is
posted while you're composing a reply. It "slips" in ahead of yours. Because
the WELL is a centralized system, unlike Usenet, it has the capability of
notifying authors if their posts do not appear next to the last-read post in
a thread they're replying to.

--

Re: selection.

It's not a red herring, because selection pressures apply equally (and more
rapidly) to ideas and mores than they do to genotype. Short-lived rejecters-
of-rejuve will have less opportunity to amass wealth, to spawn offspring, to
partake in quality-of-life-enhancing medecine (got an "incurable" disease
that fells you in your 35th year? Just restore to a 25-year-old body every
10 years). Their children will be in a social matrix of immortality. They
may always be edge-cases who reject this: immortality-Amish (yes, I know,
the Amish don't reject tech per-se), but they're marginal, not mass.

--

EFF and fiction

Well, on the one hand, working for EFF is pretty demanding and has in some
ways limited my discretionary time to write novels (OTOH, publishing novels
and partaking in the business/promotional side of publishing has had a
similar effect). But working for EFF has also given me a lot of fresh
insight into this meaty, social-context-meets-technological-context business
that, I think, makes my fiction stronger.

There're a couple of nerd/technocrat points of view that are widespread and
extremely problematic (skip ahead if you've heard me deliver this spiel):

* Nerd determinism: Our superior technology will trump your silly laws

* Nerd fatalism: Your politics are so corrupt and unstoppable that there's
nothing we can do to stop them

The consequence of this is that the technology narrative is almost
completely distinct from narratives about civil polity and how actual,
complex societies make actual, complex decisions.

In a civil liberties context, this is deadly, since the slashdot hordes are
reluctant to swing their mighty weight to defend their interests in
political arenas. And it's not just greasy nerds -- technology executives
(coddled by years of having the military do their lobbying for them) are
rolling over and bearing their bellies for the comparatively miniscule
entertainment interests that are attacking them in legislative, policy and
courtroom arenas.

Witness the tired saw from DRM vendors, that they need to "compromise" with
the entertainment industry in order to create cooperative solutions to the
"problem" of advanced technology.

Imagine if Marconi had taken this point of view and crippled radio until he
could figure out how it could be brought to market without bankrupting hard-
working, deserving Vaudeville performers. Or if Sony had decided to
"cooperate" with the MPAA studios that tried to keep the Betamax off the
market and shipped a device with no record button. Or if the technologists
at the 1995 National Information Infrastructure hearings had bowed to the
Hollywood demand that the Internet be rebuilt to accomodate surveillance in
furtherance of preventing infringement.

In the context of my fiction, EFF is a source of really deep and interesting
stories about the complex pressures that shape technology. From mandates to
compromises to standards-bodies, the secret life of technology is a story
told in policy. Internecine intrigue has always been a recurring theme in my
work (a consequence of being raised in leftie circles, which are rife with
this kind of politics), and EFF is giving me more and better context for
these sorts of stories.
  

    
One of the very best nerd-deteriminism/nerd-fatalism stories is the running
journal that Jamie "jwz" Zawinski kept of his travails as he struggled to
renovate and reopen the DNA Lounge, a nightclub in San Francisco. Jamie
starts the story full of nerdy vim, posessed of all the answers required to
accomplish his task. He gripes about the sticky zoning rules and permit
process, and works his way through crushing frustration with the system, and
then with a general willingness to participate in the process, and
culminates most recently with him berating the hippie act that played his
New Year's Eve show and distributed packages of logo-marked rolling-papers
to the audience, because he's got enough trouble with undercover narcs
trying to entrap his staff into supplying them with drugs.

(Can anyone find the URLs for those journal entries? I can't seem to locate
them)
  

    
Sup with OpenCola?
  

    
Better ask 'em -- I left the company over a year ago now... They're still
going in Toronto, but I'm not a part of the outfit.
  

    

My copy finally arrived at the office today and I read it instead of
working.  It's great, and I'll probably run through it again before asking
too many stupid questions.

One thing I noticed and wondered if it was deliberate was the combination of
first-person narrative with very little upfront description of the
protagonist.  It's not that by the end of the book you don't have a pretty
good idea what he's about, but I confess for about 1/3rd of it I had
mentally substituted Cory for Julius (hey, he comes from Toronto and he
likes Disney World and he writes like you, what can I say).  I actually like
that -- I think that forced character descriptions upfront are kind of awful,
and I like being encouraged to think about what the actions of the character
mean about him as a person, rather than having it shoved down my throat.  I
just wonder if you had that in mind.
  

    

I don't think the book suffers because Cory failed to do a Dragnet-type
intro like "I'm a cop.  I carry a badge."  I agree that forced character
descriptions suck and stick halfway down my throat.
  

    
In re fear of death after download, you might want to change "After you've
done it enough times, it doesn't bother you," to "After the successor
entities have done it enough times, it doesn't bother _them_."  One of the
earliest treatments of this theme I can recall reading is Raymond Z.
Gallun's "People Minus X."   In that story, the successor entities recognize
that they're not the originals, but they don't worry about it.

I agree with Scraps that Greg Egan does the best job of worrying about the
issue from the pov of the original brain/body entity.  In Permutation City,
he extends the speculation to downloaded copies running on computer hardware
and deals with the nightmare of waking up in the CPU with the knowledge that
you can be turned off at the whim of the original.

If I woke up an exact copy of the present me, I might eventually spend less
time worrying about "natural death" but I don't think I'd ever be
enthusiastic about speeding up the process as a matter of personal
convenience.  I'd be too convinced that the current "I" will never wake
again.  I think that's what Scraps was getting at.

Daniel Galouye explores metaphysical aspects of copied consciousness in his
Fantastic novella, "Descent into the Maelstrom."  It's a great story that
practically no one remembers, today.  In it, the protagonist "running"
simultaneously in several brains begins to experience a synesthesia, where
all of the consciousnesses merge into one.
  

    
This is the best topic on the Well.

I just read it all, so I am going to fillibuster a little just to
catch up...

First of all, I used to think I was smart and could think quickly
until I started reading what comes out of the tips of Cory's fingers.

Then I read that Whuffie is from Arsenio's woof and his high school
years and say, oh shit he's so young....

And I remember MIT's Ringo! That was great. Does it still exist?

Restoring from backup brings back memories from my Metaphysics of Time
Travel class with David Lewis (a genius) at Princeton. I never was
convinced that I would look forward to my restore, but this discussion
is reawakening my doubts. I think the argument that says we will not
relish the restoration of our consciousness makes the Star Trek
transporter experience equally suspect. Why should I be happy to be
disintegrated, beamed, and then reassembled?

The point about gradual changes is a little more nuanced, and reminds
me of the Tin Woodman. He was replaced bit by bit. Same thing with how
a rope may have none of the same strands left at the end. We are all
(it seems) more comfortable with gradual changes. In philosophy we
called this the Sortes paradox.

The cliche' about waking up without the most recent memories and
discovering a crime at work seems to recur in Vernor Vinge, as in Steel
Beach.

I was going to ask (finally, a question) Cory if he has an opinion
about Iain Banks. I read a lot of sci-fi growing up but gradually
throttled back, generally because I could no longer sustain interest
just with a good idea. The quality of the writing became more important
to me and that filtered out the Philip Jose Farmers of the world. But
I read everything by Banks I can find. In his Culture world the Minds
seem to be able to "grab" the entire quantum/electrical state of any
ordinary human-equivalent consciousness, store it, restore it, and so
on. As a materialist I would have to accept that this could be possible
some day, but in the meantime I'd be worried about scientific hubris
and the possibility that we were still missing some key ingredient (not
a soul but just some subtlety of the whole - and again with the matter
of quantum states it might not be so easy to just photocopy a neural
net).

On the matter of "instantiate many copies of themselves in parallel"
again Banks has his characters sometimes sending mind-states off on
missions but not always willing to reintegrate the experiences on
return, for fear of tampering or just foreignness and too much change.

Re Echelon and TIA: "Seriously, Cory's right: there's a huge danger
from broken algorithms, stupid assumptions, and 'the computer said
you're evil so it must be
true'." I'd be equally worried about a squished squished fly turning
Tuttle into Buttle

Re, "Oh, and Istanbul, is, of course, the Interzone from William S.
Burroughs' works." I thought that it was Tangier. (Sidenote: my first
major web project was a hyperzine started in 1994 and called
Enterzone).

RE "It's set in 1902 rural Utah (a setting I ripped off from Tom D.
Fitzgerald's "Great Brain" kids books)" - what great books those
were/are! I think I read "Me and My Little Brain" first and then
eventually all the others. Somehow they built really well on the Little
House series deeper in my memory store.

Another a propos of nothing comment: I really enjoy Cory's flights of
fancy and his obvious joy of wordplay, coinage, neologism. I think of
jazz improv but maybe hip-hop sampling is a more current metaphor.

Back to the "what's in it for me?" I think that goes to the heart of
the self memeplex, which may just be a comforting illusion, a series of
stories ("of 'my' life") that my tracking consciousness tells and
retells itself.

The DNA guy's blog is at LiveJournal
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/), which does not have
permalinks, but does have day links, so someone could dig up the
referenced entries by date and post them if so inclined.
  

    
Jacob: I definitely didn't want Julius to be me -- there are elements of me
in his story (all characters reflect their authors), but he's not me at all.
When I see Julius in my mind's eye, I see a kind of weedy guy with shaggy
light-brown hair and a pointy nose...

But I'm glad you're digging the book! And hell, if picturing me in Julius's
body helps, be my guest.

--

Lenny: "After the successor entities have done it enough times, it doesn't
bother _them_."

That's a very good way of phrasing it.

--

Xian:

Ringo's long gone. Patty and Upendra folded it up and started a company
called Firefly with the tech, which got sold to MSFT for its "Passport"
technology.

Iain Banks: I have a dirty confession. I can *not* get into the Culture
novels at *all*. Something about the style and pacing -- I've never finished
one.

But! I absolutely *love* his thrillers. I thought that Dead Air was
spectacular.

Interzone is Tangiers: you may be right, come to think of it.
  

    

Ringo and Firefly were such fun.  Damn.
  

    
interesting re Banks. Somehow it doesn't surprise me, since his style
is perpendicular to yours. I've just started reading some of his "Iain
M. Banks" titles, though, and they are quite different. 

Apparently Tangiers was quite the borderless
everything-for-sale-for-the-right-price kind of place at one time...
  

    
>>Lenny: "After the successor entities have done it enough times, it doesn't
 bother _them_."

 That's a very good way of phrasing it.<<

Actually, unless you manage to do a back-up *after* the point when an
individual's death is inevitably going to happen any second now, no matter
how many instantiations of a person there have been, the death will be the
first one each successor entity will face. Even if InfiniCory has done a
freshen-up clone & restore 30 times, for Cory-31 (the most recent
instantiation) it's been a long history of occasionally lying down on a bed
healthy and looking forward to a long future and waking up on a different
bed (or in a growth tank or whatever) never having experienced death. The
umpteenth version down the road may know intellectually that he's chosen to
die a bunch of times, but has never faced that decision in actual memory.