No, swords. Agreed-upon rules were ‘first person to kill someone wins’.
So I killed me.
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A bold strategy.
Considering that you’re someone who insists that each of her clones is a separate, distinct person, Arrendis, it’s admirable how lightly you treat that individual existence.
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I think you’re a bit mistaken, Ms. Jenneth. I remember it was the idea that I was claiming in the argument, while Arrendis was… well, the typical example of people who off themselves so easily, falling to CONCORD’s propaganda of immortality.
It’s even more amusing, that she totally failed to comprehend a meaning of a duel, and is one of persons who just wants to “win”, burning bridges instead of solving conflicts and trying to prove she’s better than others… even if she will never achieve that.
It’s actually one of like maybe two subjects you and Arrendis agree on, Ms. Kim. She’s pretty noisy about it, even.
I don’t consider myself immortal at all, but I also don’t consider a body transfer equivalent to death in a meaningful way. I subjectively persist with minimal interruption, even if I leave a trail of cast-off bodies behind me.
Having suffered serious damage to my infomorph in the past, it’s hard for me to take such trivial changes very seriously. To me, what is meaningful is the end of a personal timeline, the loss of a history.
That’s something we don’t suffer so easily, or often.
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I, too, have suffered infomorph damage in the past. I’ve come think of it, essentially, like this: as infomorphs, our most basic form of existence is raw code. That makes functionally immortal in the physical world, but grants us new vulnerabilities beyond it.
We are timelines. We are history. That information is the fundamental pillar that an infomorphic consciousness is structured around. To damage or destroy that information… is the closest thing to an incurable ailment, to some permanent debilitation, that we non-Jove infomorphs can know.
Hm. I might not differ all that much with that kind of view, sir, except that I don’t see us as very different from “baseline” humanity in this way.
Just, we get to live in a whole series of vessels-- a series of processors whose job is to process us. Most people just get one, although under the right conditions that need not be so. After all, it’s not rare to die in a hospital.
So, cloning’s just another tool, one we capsuleers have routine access to.
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I am a university professor. I know all about undergraduates handing essays in at the last possible minute.
That individual me made a choice. I respect that choice. The current me wouldn’t make it, but apparently she was a lot more of a jerk than I am.
You ever just not shoot yourself in the face because you’re too stubborn?
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I’ve ‘not shot myself in the face’ for a lot of reasons, but since my self-destructive tendencies are less in the ‘suicide’ vein and more in the ‘get beaten to death’ style… no, ‘I’m too stubborn’ isn’t one of them.
Well, if you ever need somebody to beat you to death for catharsis, or anything, just give me a holler.
No thanks, I’ve found better ways to deal with my issues. Thank you, though.
Besides, I really don’t want to die. As Aria’s said, I don’t subscribe to the ‘capsuleers are immortal’ nonsense. However, as the ‘me’ who killed herself in that duel[1] died outside the pod, I can’t actually say what her state of mind at the time was.
And I do disagree with Aria on things like how often we suffer the end of a personal timeline, and how easily. Human beings die once. In this, we’re no different from any other human being. Where we differ is ‘normal’ people gestate for nine months, and are born with brains that are still forming and have yet to begin establishing their stock of the neural pathways and chemical cascades used to create a record of events. We emerge from the clone-bay with brains that have been flash-grown, full of memories from someone else’s life.
That person died. We just don’t remember that, because copying the recording is what killed them. Rather than ‘functionally immortal’ as Mr. Vayle views us, I see us as fundamentally disposable. We go out, we struggle, we get killed… and the universe replaces us. Our co-workers, our peers, our friends, family, and loved ones replace us, and never even mourn our deaths. They just get another ‘us’.
Most capsuleers say ‘it’s still the same me’, but it’s not. Life isn’t a recording. Life’s an experience. It’s like a concert performance. The performance exists while it is happening. Once it’s done, it’s done. There may be other performances of the same material, but they’re not the same performance. A holo of that concert isn’t the concert. It’s just a recording of it.
I can record going to that concert as a memory, and when my pod blows up, that memory will be copied as data. At that point, that memory can be copied[2] a million times. That memory can be spliced into someone else’s informoph.
That doesn’t make them me. It doesn’t mean they attended the concert. They just remember attending the concert. I didn’t attend it, either. A dead me did. And I’m just a copy.
Record a holo of a concert. Copy that recording, and it’s still not the concert. It’s not even the original recording. It’s a copy. That’s doubly true if that copy changes medium. Which we do. Our data goes from electrochemical brain states to q-bits and then back. It’s like a book. A book is a book. If I read a book out loud, and someone writes down what I’m saying in a book… that’s not the original book. Even if there are no actual errors in either my reading or his writing, they’re not the same. Burn the original, the copy is still not the same book.
Not remembering the time that elapses during the break in our continuous experience doesn’t mean those breaks aren’t there. It doesn’t mean the experience didn’t stop, and a new experience begin, with the record of the old one grafted on.
And no, this is not the same thing, as some like to claim, as going to sleep. Your brain is not paused just because your conscious mind is dormant. You are still experiencing things in your sleep. The chain of experience is still unbroken. When the chain does break? We have a word for that. And that word is ‘death’.
And, just to have it said, if ‘our most basic form of existence is raw code’… then no active capsuleer is themselves. We are just… iterations of a thing, meat-machines that think they’re people, executing computer code that gets appended each time we re-scan, and downloaded into a new body so it can perform its designated function. We’re Drifters, only much, much cruder and inefficient at it.
I’d rather be a disposable person than the disposable extrusion of a massive infomorph stockpile. Maybe I’m weird, though.
Edit: Oh, and just to have it said? Yes, I normally use ‘I’ and other first-person pronouns when referencing memories older than my current iteration. Simply put, it’s easier. The brain’s not a computer. The recordings we make aren’t recordings. They’re descriptions. We don’t record an event, we store massive amounts of information about the event, and every time we ‘remember’, we reconstruct that information into an internal quasi-simulation of the event. So it gets harder and harder to pin down exact moments of ‘was this before or after X?’
As a result, it gets difficult, around the edges, to perfectly line up when an event falls in relation to when my previous iteration’s pod blew up. Especially once it’s been more than a few weeks. So it’s easier just to treat my memories as ‘mine’[3]. And it gets fewer funny looks from people around me, because I don’t end up saying things like ‘Yes, boss, I remember that you asked Arrendis#114 for a review of your HAC doctrine choices, and that she said you should stick with the things you were using then. She wasn’t any happier about that than I am.’
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To win on a technicality, no less. I can only imagine she was pretty irritated at Cmdr. Kim, and probably not in a very healthy place overall, really. Still, from what I do recall of the conversation that established those rules, it was something she’d planned from the moment she suggested the terms be ‘first one to kill, wins’. I suspect her intent was to fluster Diana and leave her unsure of what the hell it meant (which seems to have worked, at least in the short term. In the long term, not so much, as Diana’s done what anyone would do: find a narrative she’s comfortable with, and cling to it like a life preserver), and probably impart a lesson about ‘pay attention to the fine print’. Which, I suspect, did not work so well.
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If it couldn’t, softcloning wouldn’t work, and CONCORD wouldn’t need to have it illegal for multiple instances of each of us to exist.
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Rather like free will and the reality of reality, really. Is there free will? Can’t prove it—or even provide compelling evidence—one way or another, all you can do is act like there is and take responsibility for your actions. Is reality really real? You’ll never be able to demonstrate that, even to yourself. All you can do is interact with the reality presented to you by your senses (which could all be figments of your imagination, after all).
I’m still me. Just slightly different. Bummer if you don’t feel that way.
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See, I don’t see it as a bummer at all. I’m me. Sure, I’ve got a lot of baggage and issues from the choices other people made… but who doesn’t? The only difference there is that I’ve got a better window into what some of those predecessors were thinking when they made those bone-headed choices, compared to say, a baseliner wondering why the feck their dad didn’t ever show that he loved them, or something.
If I’m disposable, and short-lived, then that just means that I should really work to appreciate the time I’ve got, the people I care about, and the choices that I’m offered. And I should try to make sure that the next iteration has the best chance she can have to be happy. Almost like she’s my kid… which, in a way, she will be.
So what if my personal existence won’t last for decades? I’m not self-centered enough to think I should matter any more than any other iteration in the chain. And various iterations of me have watched over and over again as ‘immortals’ get bored and wander off to planetside existences, or get lost someplace in the depths of space, incommunicado, maybe just… adrift forever, skimming CHON from the interstellar medium and using starlight to keep their systems running.
Me, I’ve got things to look forward to, to hope for… things I’m sure I might never achieve, but… damn, the possibility’s enticing. Like… having a birthday. That’s a big one. And even if I achieve it, the next me can still hope and strive for it, because she’ll be starting from Day 1, all over again.
Bummer? No, Tein, not even close. If all I saw ahead of me was an endless stream of more of the same? Stars, I’d go mad.
This being has been a university student. Apart that typical average man, there’s also who want to study for real.
Not to support Valerie or anything, cuz I hate to do that, but your original point was:
That indicates all, or at least the vast majority, of university students are better about timely completion of assignments. Which means the ‘typical average man’ in uni. And really, professors would be a better judge of that than one particular student, don’t you think? How closely do you track when your classmates turn in their assignments?
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This being was just witnessing his experience as student comparing that of high schools ones and inferior ones. He didn’t want to say that professors or other men are dumb!
Maybe you are?
Nobody goes mad quicker than a sane person.