Utari's Puppies (Formerly Off-Topic Thread)

The data being transferred is the complete electrochemical state of my brain. Nothing more. Data describing meat.

And all of those dead Arrendises were Arrendis. To the extent that some bodies may still exist, they’re still dead Arrendises. Which is why I didn’t say I’m ‘the only one’, and I didn’t say I’m ‘Arrendis the Only’ or even ‘the Arrendis’. I said:

There have been others. They’re currently not alive. Presumably, there will be still others yet. They’re not currently alive either. That’s it. They’re all perfectly valid candidates for ‘Arrendis’… they just don’t happen to be in a state that can answer you right now.

1 Like

However, you have seen your soul. The “meat” exists in multiple places if you keep a few jump clones (and who doesn’t these days?) and is disposable. The electrochemical state of your brain is entirely reproducible, in fact well-nigh instantaneously.

But if that data that formulates your thoughts, your will, your emotions is lost? Arrendis will cease to be. No more shall Arrendis live. You shall be dead, certifiably dead. That data, that is the important part. The thing that is not reproduced, the thing that is transferred, the only thing that is common between all the Arrendises that make them Arrendis at one point.

It’s the data.

1 Like

Nothing is ‘transferred’. The data exists as meat. The meat is measured. That information is sent to the medbay. And the new meat is grown to match it. At that point, the information only exists as the new meat. It is not ‘transferred’ any more than the actual atoms of a book are ‘transferred’ when the book is copied by hand, and burned afterwards.

And at no point is that anything more than physical in nature. There’s no ‘soul’, no ‘spirit’. Just the meat, and a temporary format used to grow the new meat. There is no continuity, only the illusion of it, because I don’t remember the picoseconds after the prior me had her brain cooked.

1 Like

You say that, but the data must get from your exploding pod to your new body. It’s up to date to the very last picosecond! You think you’re meat, but you’ve been all manner of meat, by your logical admission. But you are only one set of data. It may not be physical, of course, you may not be able to touch data or pour it into a cup (easily), but it is there. It is measurable. It absolutely exists. And it is all that defines your existence. The data of your existence, over and over sent from pod to clone to pod to clone, that’s you Arrendis. And it is undeniably there.

1 Like

The process you describe is not continuity. It is copying. It is like saying that reproducing a document while the original burns, and then doing it again, means only one of that document has existed. That’s three different documents that appear identical. And no, I’ve only been one set of meat. Other meat has had the same label applied, that’s all.

And there is no storage format for data that does not have a physical existence. If it is measurable, then it is physical. Show me something that is not physical that can still be measured.

1 Like

Have you forgotten what you’ve told me, over and over? Different Arrendis, but all that is different is the particular housing of meat in which your data was stowed. And yet, here you are, the same Arrendis. In transmission to your new brain as your old body was vaporized, it would have been nothing but energy, free in space. And the data itself has been the same. Perhaps you will measure it in gigapulses, but it does not matter. If you were rammed into a body half your current size, you would still be Arrendis, half the weight.

That data is you. There yet ephemeral, calculable yet transmittable, real and yet conceptual.

1 Like

Energy. Is. Physical.

And if I were ‘rammed’ into a body half my size, I would be uncomfortable, and I presume the owner of the body would, as well. But the moment my burn scanner activates… I end. The data is not the same.

You have a handwritten invoice. It’s transcribed onto Galnet. Is that the same invoice? No. It’s a copy. A different copy. It contains essentially the same information, but it is not the same one.

Likewise, when the information contained in the electrochemical state of my brain is copied into a stream of data across the fluid router network… that is not the same thing. It is a copy. Nothing more. It’s not me. It’s a blueprint for building another Arrendis, just like me. But still a different one.

I. Am. The Meat.

1 Like

she ded

she type

x30,000

4 Likes

Perhaps a different body, but the same data. The data has to be sent packeted, but it has one transit point, which ends, and one transit point, which begins anew, and your flesh is transitory. You think you are your body, for you can see it, touch it, fiddle with it how you’d like, but it is gone, and you are still here. What is here is only the current up to date data, wearing a new suit.

1 Like

No. A copy of the information. The information describes a thing. It is a description. Nothing more. A blueprint.

1 Like

Ephemeral, perhaps, harder to conceptualize yourself as data in a meat package, rather than a meat package. Your head is nothing more than a sort of data storage unit in which is stored the essence of your being, that thing which thinks of itself as Arrendis. And if I could intercept that data, I could capture you. Truly end you. Otherwise, you rise and continue.

It’s fascinating stuff, knowing that for all else, the flesh is the end and they live in their one moment of instance. However, for us, we can die and know that the flesh is transitory, the soul can be copied, transcribed, erased, downloaded and installed.

1 Like

Except the data never exists of itself. It has no existence outside of its medium. At its most ‘ephemeral’, it’s a description of meat. It’s meaningless without meat. It’s not the meat. It’s just how the meat needs to be shaped, how it needs to be charged, what chemicals need to be released where.

That’s it.

See? This is the delusion of immortality I spoke of. No. The flesh is no more transitory for us than it is for baseliners. We die. We end. And someone else wakes up that remembers everything before our ending, but not the ending itself. We die unmourned, unmissed, and ultimately… replaced and forgotten.

We are far more transitory than baseliners. And we’re disposable.

1 Like

And yet, if the data never existed, how do we get here? You see yourself as meat because it is comforting to know yourself as you see yourself in a mirror, not how you know yourself in your head. But the thing in the mirror can be replaced, the thing judging it cannot. You can’t escape that part of yourself which you hope is transitory, but that thing judges yourself, has to live with itself, remembers the things it wishes it could forget, dislikes its shortcomings.

That doesn’t die, and it doesn’t die for a reason. It’s because it is integral to you, the part that translates, the part that is common. It’s comforting to think of the body as a thing which you are, but were that true, none of the assumptions you reached above would be manageable. It would mean that you no longer exist. You are no longer owner of your things. No longer answerable to your name. No longer a member of your tribe.

How can any of those things survive? Because that which is you went from body to body, carrying all its emotions and identity with it, unable to survive without it.

It’s not so easy to escape yourself. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Arrendis. Either you are gone and you are no longer Arrendis, and have really spent too much time peddling her philosophy of death of which you have no direct experience, or you’re actually all of Arrendis that ever really mattered.

1 Like

Except that I never said the data never existed. I said the data has no existence outside of its medium[1]. It’s like sound. Sound doesn’t exist in and of itself. It only exists in the compression waves traveling through a medium to strike our ears.

The thing in the mirror is the thing judging it. The thing judging it, the mind, is not real. It is an illusion created by the electrical activity in the brain and nervous system. It’s a lie. And no, the whole nonsense about it translating, about the infomorph comprising and containing the soul… that’s patently ridiculous. What does it mean for softclones?

You know, those things available to baseliners, too, where the create a backup description of their brain with a slower, non-fatal scan, and have it in storage along with their genetic template? That thing the Navies use to back-up non-capsuleer officers (and have available for the rest of their crews, if those people choose to use them)? There’s no ‘store a description of the last moment of working meat, then use that to build a new set of meat’. It’s an old description.

In Alizabeth’s example, for instance, it’s a description many years old. So if that’s the soul, we can make hundreds of them. The only thing that prevents there from being a hundred of me right now is CONCORD regulations. Would that mean there’s hundreds of my soul? If all of us died at once, how many of us would there be in the afterlife? Which life would we remember?

The original Arrendis no longer exists. I only own my predecessor’s things because CONCORD says I do. My name is the ‘unique identifer’ CONCORD uses for my pilot’s license. I couldn’t escape it if I wanted to… again, ask Alizabeth. And my Tribe… Yeah, thanks, Anna.

Point of fact, Archbishop, there’s people in my Clan who believe that about me, yes. I can’t even say for sure that they’re wrong.

That which is me is the meat. It was built to specifications set in the final moments of the prior Arrendis’ life. That’s the only reason it remembers her life. That’s it.


  1. You know, you have a habit of doing that: responding to things I haven’t said, setting up straw men to refute. You should probably stop.
1 Like

By all means, Arrendis, things can be hard to comprehend that are ephemeral. Just because data is not a piece of rock you can hurl does not mean it does not exist. I am presently sending a letter to someone from my pod. In this instance, one might say “there is no letter, it isn’t a thing” which is pedantic, if anything. There is obviously a letter, these switches and circuits have given this particular data form into a letter I plan to send. It has its own character, its own purpose, its own existence. It is very obviously a thing, whether or not one could throw it at a wall.

Sound may not feel like a “thing” (I would argue that as matter and energy are transmissable through relativity, energy is very much a thing just like the matter it travels through), but it is a thing you just described. It is sound. From it, you may infer a source, some manner of impact or at the least the movement of matter. And you are not, of course, Brain, you are Arrendis. And that would make absolutely no sense if the data itself hadn’t meant anything, because the data is that programming you said earlier that told you you were Arrendis, and that it was impossible for you to change (how’s that?).

After that, we get into some very interesting questions. If our souls, our identities, all that we patently are can be translated as data and implanted inside a new piece of, as my good friend calls it, wetware, have we then copied a soul? Created a new soul? This is where the case of Alizabeth becomes so interesting from a philosophical standpoint, as it could be said that, from her perspective, she moved backward in time, not quite becoming someone completely else, but not quite remaining who she was. Yet we did not (although many of us were killed, we still quite rationally have opinions on whether she is responsible for her actions or not) and we thus move forward with the time we have.

It’s really fascinating stuff, if it wasn’t for the rather obvious ethical dilemmas of what happens when we accidentally twitch the levers of God and make a mistake. I am confident that God tends to clean up this mess (much as I appreciate you, Arrendis, I highly doubt God needs a hundred of you, and keeping to the analogy, it’s His source code). However, it’s quite a burden we take on our shoulders with this power. The ability to rewrite our souls over and over (hopefully making sure we only retain one active consciousness) is argued between a blessing and a curse, but is more certainly an enormous responsibility. Through our machinations, we now play directly with the essence of what ‘is’.

That’s why there’s no “that’s it” about it, it’s fascinating! Here we are, with a window into the process of the infinite, the distinct possibility of all our essence laid bare in code, situations like Alizabeth’s which require contemplation and attention, and more than anything the awesome responsibility inherent with carrying on after death, yet not quite being dead. I can’t imagine dismissing all that and pretending such considerations simply don’t exist; they very much do and we very much cannot ignore the implications of our own actions.

You don’t ask me to call your former bodies “them”, you are Arrendis, in all the weird, wonderful ways that you are Arrendis, in all the ways that matter. For sure not immortal, and yet somehow still with us after death. All because we found out how to take all that was important about you and send it all across the cluster to another body. I mean, the literal embodiment of a transitory flesh? It is sort of horrifying, but truly fascinating.

1 Like

You know what they say, If you believe a lie long enough…

1 Like

I prefer to think of it as being interested in implications.

1 Like

Except, again, you are arguing against something I never said. I never said it doesn’t exist. I said it doesn’t exist independent of its medium.

Sound is not energy. Energy creates sound. Sound is the compression wave, the edge of slightly denser air being pushed forward by the energy of its trailing edge expanding. Until it strikes something, until that compressed air impacts on your eardrum, there’s no sound. There’s only a shockwave in the air.

I also never said it was impossible for me to change. I said it was impossible for me not to be who I am programmed to be. So once again, you’re arguing against something I didn’t say. Please constrain your arguments to the things actually said, not the things you’d like me to have said.

Really, at this point, I don’t know if you can’t understand what’s being said… or if you’re just desperate not to let yourself understand it.

Consider a symphony performance. It is a thing. It exists. And you can record that performance. You can even replay that performance. That recording is not the performance. It is a recording. The performance was a thing in and of itself. When you play that recording, those players are not playing again.

If you take that recording, and use it to transcribe the notes, that transcription is not that performance. If you take that transcription, and give it to musicians, you can have them play the symphony from the transcription. If they play it perfectly, note for note, that is still not the original performance. It is another performance that may be indistinguishable to many listeners. It still won’t be the original performance.

And, since all of this comes from you claiming ‘god’ is self-evident, and yet you cannot actually provide any support for that which cannot be demonstrated to be flawed and not at all ‘self-evident’, it’s really a bit premature to go falling back to appealing to ‘twitching the levers of God’ and invoking the thing that hasn’t been demonstrate to exist as a thing that needs or doesn’t need anything.

There is no soul. There is only the emergent property of the brain’s activity, which we call the mind. And for all your dissembling, you haven’t demonstrated even one shred of more.

Edit: And for the record…

No. I don’t. I don’t ask you to call them anything. Each of them was Arrendis in their time. Now I am. They’re dead Arrendises. I call them ‘them’… because they’re not me. I’m not them. I’m a copy of one of them. Who was a copy of another one. Who was a copy of another one. And so on, back 114 times, to a foolish girl whose Clan scraped up the money to send her to Capsuleer training after she tested compatible, in the hopes that she would survive and send back more money they could use to improve their lives.

She died, getting her implants, and the first copy woke up. But it was only a copy. It was not her. And my awareness of that, and the awareness of at least a hundred and ten prior Arrendises, makes it, and has made it, very difficult to return to the Pator III (Huggar) - Moon 2 Republic Security Services station. I do get back there, from time to time. I do see ‘my’ mother… I usually even let myself think of her that way. My mother. Mom.

But I was grown in a tube, from reprocessed biomatter harvested from cadavers, on synthetic bones, with a facial mesh that was molded to the appropriate features. I just carry copies of the memories and marks of her dead daughter. Which is really a wonderful place to have to let my thoughts go during all of this, just because I prefer the truth over your reassuring lie. So, you know, once again, thanks for that.

2 Likes

You are kinda ignoring the actual science behind what she’s saying. The why is nothing. A random number generator in essence created by the genes of your parents. Your beliefs of it being god’s will or whatever doesn’t change the fact that personality traits can and generally are developed as a combination of your parents traits, more than likely via environment. God. Did not. Create. This. You are what your upbringing created, minus mental defect or other outliers.

Your brain function, memories and such passing from one body to another is nothing miraculous either. Its science.

1 Like

Been killed in my pod 205 times now. Gotta say, if there was some sort of godlike omnipotent entity that actually gave a ■■■■, I don’t think I would have all those deaths, just one and that’s it.

1 Like