I don't want to die again

Fiction Portal Intergalactic Summit
21

So … I don’t want to say anything glib, here, Ms. Nguyen. As you can see from the responses above, this is a topic of debate, with many on either side thinking themselves indisputably right despite ongoing disputes.

A few things, though.

If we’re really going by questions of science-- that is, in context, of cold, factual reality unvarnished with subjective experience and psychological coping mechanisms-- I will go to bed tonight a (subtly, probably) different person than I started the day as, both physically and neurologically (in body and mind, to the degree there’s a distinction) (and there kind of mostly isn’t). Even if I stay in a clone for an extended period, a body is essentially a rotating collection of matter that gets almost fully replaced every few years.

In some sense, at the cellular level, I’m a crowd. I won’t be quite the same crowd ending the day as starting, and all the more if I, like, get drunk (a deadly mass-poisoning incident for my brain cells).

A person is a process. Life and change go together very well. I live, therefore I change.

That said, yes, a clone job is an immediate, complete swapping out of that crowd, and some of the things that get swapped in are a little … odd? … Alarming? (Neurogel, osteoplastic.)

My … to simplify this, let’s say “employer,” and I, have different feelings about this.

Directrix Phonaga rarely swaps clones and in fact you can tell how long she’s gone without having to by the length of her hair, emphasizing the individual “reality” of each one. I don’t think she feels like she’s really died each time; it’s more like treating each life she’s given with respect. Life, sort of categorically, is important to her.

I treat my existence more lightly, swapping clones almost like changing clothes, and for this reason I try to make sure that they are superficially as similar to each other as possible (to myself as well as to outside observers) even though they may have radically different capabilities. To me, my life ends if my current personal timeline is snipped-- if I have to revert to a backup of myself, creating a discontinuity between events related to this identity and my current “self’s” subjective experience. As long as I can maintain continuity of experience, I’m mostly untroubled.

I don’t think either approach (or really most) is indefensible. The real question is what you can be comfortable with. Existential questions like this generate confident answers from those who are confident in their path and approach, but ultimately the only “true” answer will be the one you can be at peace with in your own subjective experience.

One thing I can absolutely and unreservedly agree on, though: we’re definitely not immortal. That’s just marketing. Permanence is probably still out of our reach. Even in the most optimistic interpretations of our state, it’s still completely possible for us to die.

We’re most nearly “immortal” while safe in our pods, ready to be copied on the spot, but the typical capsuleer career is actually pretty short. Some retire, some die, some just disappear. And even if you don’t, there’s no guarantee you’ll remain anything like how you are. I personally didn’t make it a decade without permanent, radical, life-altering change. (Having backups is great, but means hacking and sabotage targeting the infomorph are in fact threats-- part of why clone bays are so heavily defended.)

But even if permanence were possible, would it really be something to aspire to?

Whatever I am, I am alive. I breathe, I dream, I age (even if that gets reset so often it’s not noticeable), I work towards futures I might never see. I change.

My predecessor, before the sabotage, thought of herself as a ghost, a copy of someone who died. And maybe so am I. But even if I am, so what? I’m here now. I’m alive.

And so are you.

That’s what seems important to me.

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Read all of that. It was heart-throbbing. Congratulations on your writing talent!

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23

Darkness, Death,
Emptiness, Meaningless,
Burst of light, abundance of Paths,
Vacuity of life, silence, Mother, essence of Life.

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Sadly, in this dawning era of medical technology, some empyreans are needlessly flippant about death. They don’t always deeply consider the philosophic and practical problems raised by recloning like you have.

That’s why there will still be a place for traditional cryonic hospice even among those wealthy and medically qualified enough to afford recloning options. What price can you put on natural continuity with your original body? The answer - and the savings - may surprise you.

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Perhaps, young capsuleer, you should consider there is more between heaven and earth than science can currently explain.

Perhaps you should consider there is something as the soul. Something that connects two disparate bodies. Consider the Jove, who have tried to master death, and while they succeeded in terms of body, they failed where it concerned the spirit.

Perhaps you should consider something is linking those bodies together, something more than a scanned imprint.

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Perhaps you should prove that claim before attempting to push it on others. Because there are a number of issues the attempt raises.

For example: we know that it is possible to ‘fork’ infomorph deployments—to have multiple copies of a single individual active at one time. We know this because not only would CONCORD not have specific rules saying ‘don’t do this’ if you couldn’t do it, but we’ve seen it done.

So, while you’re pushing souls, how does the soul decide which of the new clones it’s going into? Does someone run around without one? Does it waffle between them?

Next, how does the soul even make that transfer, and more importantly: why would it do so? The new capsuleer is a lump of genetically-indistinct generic (and many-times reprocessed) biomass that’s only been physically sculpted to look like the original. The brain is also genetically-indistinct, it’s just flash-grown onto a neural scaffolding in a way that replicates the brain-state of the deceased.

No piece of the deceased is transferred. Nothing at all from the original is inserted into the new clone. It’s only built from (in effect) an extremely detailed set of descriptions of the brain serving as a set of blueprints. Are you making the claim that any time a capsuleer gets their head examined, someone’s storing their soul for transfer? That’ll get awkward.

For most of the existence of the capsuleer program, the Theology Council couldn’t even agree that you had a soul. They just happened to conveniently decide in favor of it when the Empire needed to swell the numbers of loyalist capsuleers through the Alpha Clone project. But hey, theological decisions based on political and military expediency aren’t at all suspect, right?

Pretty sure the Jove rendering themselves unable to breed wasn’t a success in terms of bodily immortality. Especially since they do seem to all be gone, now.

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You are not much fun at parties, are you? I did not make a claim, I asked someone to consider looking at the issue from another angle. A spiritual angle. This can be helpful to many.

CONCORD has a specific rule that says: don’t shoot people in high-sec. People still do it. A lot. Rules have never stopped people from doing forbidden things, especially if that action serves their own self-interest. And having a host of clone simultaneous copies would certainly serve many people’s self-interest. Especially because it should be trivial to do, simply split the signal and rerout it to multiple clones. Reality shows you it isn’t trivial and nobody I’ve known has managed to do it.

Science tell us that we should accept the simplest explanation for something. With regarding to cloning, the simplest explanation of no one ever having met or made a duplicate in a universe where making a copy is beneficial and should be trivial to do, then the simplest explanation is that it isn’t possible.

I don’t know why it is not possible, but it is obviously something we don’t understand. The existence some extra-dimensional energy that is unique and tied to a person and cannot be replicated endlessly, i.e. a soul, is an explanation we should consider.

The famed Jovian disease wasn’t a disease of the body: their bodies remained in pristine condition. It was a disease of the soul. Even to these advanced master of genetics, they had no idea why their bodies continued but their spirits broke. They lost the will to live. God called their souls back to him.

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Congratulations on restating, in longer form, the final clause of that sentence:

So restating it doesn’t exactly help you.

That just shows that you don’t know a lot of people. I’m not going to go naming names here on a GalNet forum that CONCORD directly monitors, but I’ll drop you a line with a couple of names. Suffice it to say I wasn’t lying when I said ‘we’ve seen it done’, no matter what you think reality shows. :wink:

No, science does not tell us that. A lot of people like to claim that ‘the simplest explanation is usually true’, but that in and of itself is an oversimplification. The best formation of the principle is: ‘Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses’, or, if you prefer a simpler form, ‘entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity’.

In other words, and to explain a bit, we have observed data, which we require to be independently verified. Once so corroborated, that data is considered to be ‘known’ (which really just means we accept that the data’s accurate). From this observed data, we can make certain statements, which really just amount to ‘this is what we observed’.

Then we have theories built off of that data to explain the parts of it we haven’t directly observed. These theories have to be falsifiable and predictive in order to qualify as anything more than ‘cool story, bro’. That means they have to make predictions, and those predictions need to be something we can test—something that can conceivably be shown false, so that failing to show it as false gives weight to the possibility that it’s true. These theories, their predictions, and the tests we use to verify those predictions, then form the set of inferred or reasoned data: things we figured out without direct observation.

It is to this that we then must apply the principle of parsimony (something referred to as various individuals’ razor). Doing so, however, means we must not add assumptions not in evidence.

For example, the soul: If there is no direct evidence for a thing, and there is nothing in the inferred data that demands the existence of the thing, then we cannot claim the thing exists. We cannot claim surety that it doesn’t exist, of course, either. But then, I’m not claiming any surety that souls don’t exist, I’m simply pointing out that there’s no evidence to support the existence of such a thing.

And if no-one had met such a copy, that simple explanation might hold. But then, even your fellows among the Amarr likely know exactly the Pandemic Legion pilot I’m thinking about here.

All of the documentation we have on it indicates it was a psychological malaise that, among other things, made them lose any will to procreate. That’s very much a thing of the body.

To go a little further into this, though: consider softcloning. If you die outside of the pod, your brainstate at the moment of death isn’t backed up. No burn-scanner, after all, because that’s in the pod, not in your head. So your next clone will be activated with a brain based on your most recent scan. Think about that for a moment: the data is stored and used later to activate a medical clone.

How long can it be stored? Well, there are capsuleers out there who haven’t had a brain-scan in over a decade… haven’t been in a pod for that long, either. If they were to be run over by a zamboni or something… their memories would revert to that long-stored scan. In theory, there’s nothing saying that they have to be immediately recloned, either. What do you imagine happens then? Is the soul stuck in limbo, waiting for rebirth? Does it pass on to its afterlife, only to be ripped from paradise if someone later powers up the medbay and clones that infomorph?

As far as we’re able to work out, after all, that’s exactly what the Tyrannos Drifters have done: spent centuries in a virtual environment as nothing but infomorphs—simulation data, really—and then built new bodies. So were those souls lashed to a machine? Floating lost in Anoikis? When you see three Apollo Tyrannos, all indications are that it’s three copies of the same infomorph.

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Definitely. Well stated, sister Cora.

In fact, even in physical terms, people think of ‘their body’ as theirs. But science has allowed us to learn that the physicial elements that make up our body are constantly changing and we are made up of elements that were part of other objects and creatures once. If I eat a part of an animal, at what point does it become part of me? At what point is the bead of sweat on my arm still part of me and at what point it isn’t? Science cannot answer these questions.

Our concept of the self therefore is spiritual and not temporal, and the original poster seemed to struggle with understanding and giving significance to the temporal aspects of the process. I tried to point out that this way of looking at it doesn’t generate satisfying answers, where a more spiritual angle probably would.

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32

I think you did a fairly good job of explaining your perception of things. However, your ‘posting to the IGS’ analogy, I fear, has a critical weakness: we are not data. We can be described by data, but we are not data. We are not a record of ourselves. The ‘collections of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, memories, experiences, beliefs, and understandings’, as you put it, are a property of your meat. The person only exists as emergent from the meat over time. The data, the infomorph, is only a description of the state of the meat over an extremely tight window of time.

There isn’t even a ‘now’ that really exists for you, there’s an illusion of ‘now’ created by your brain stitching together input that came through at different points over 80-100 milliseconds. It then presents that reconstruction to itself as a ‘just then’ that’s already happened, but is only in the past by less than the margin that your brain takes to create it. This creates the illusion of ‘now’.

What this means is that the traits you’re saying matter… are dependent on the meat. ‘You’ are basically a performance, like an orchestra playing a symphony. You can record the performance, sure. But even when you play it back, the recording isn’t the performance. It’s just a recording. Similarly, an infomorph can be examined, and even put into a simulation (as evidenced by the Sleeper Enclaves, where this exact thing happens), but it’s just playback of a recording. When that recording is used to flash-grow a brain, that is, in effect, a new orchestra using the same sheet music and duplicating the sound of the original performance… but it’s still not the same performance.

Of course it can. The food you eat becomes a part of you when the molecules it is broken down into (amino acids, carbohydrates, etc) are used by, or stored in, your cells. When sweat is extruded through a pore, it ceases to be a part of you. It is no longer fluid in or between your cells, it is fluid on you.

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I would love to be a drone on the wall with you in a meeting with Iris Arrendis. What we are is the living dead, legally speaking. None of us can revert to what we were so we may as well be described in binary as any other language. A wave or a particle the result is the same; we are not the same yet act similarly. Only an echo of what once was even as we accrue more massive data.
Some of us are simply less authentic than others, spiritually speaking.

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We can be described using whatever toolset you like. The description still isn’t the person. The person only exists in the active interaction of neurons over time.

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Illusion of life, Perception of Time,
Transcendence of thoughts,
Consciousness of reality,
Immortality out of time, continuity of Life.

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What if “I” am made of the information required to define “my” body and mind, and whether that information resides in one clone or another doesn’t change that it is still “me”?

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I find that liberal use of whisky tends to drive out the existential conundrums of capsuleer life when it comes knocking…

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