Diaspora and Permutation City put totally new questions in my head.
If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is? In Permutation City there is an experiment where brain states are played back backwards or in a random order, but to the person perceiving it, it seems like just business as usual.
I always assumed that after my brain is destroyed there would be just nothingness. But maybe if the "next state" will again exist some time in the future (or past?) from my perspective it will still be a totally continuous experience. Death might seem like just a bad dream.
He plays a lot with this stuff. In Diaspora consciousness is just a piece of software. Since this software can be run at a much higher speed than wetware can, each moment of real time seems much longer to the uploaded. But when they want to, for example when waiting for an interstellar trip to complete, they can "skip forward" and let the brain emulator run them at a much slower pace to make the trips more bareable.
I thought running a consciousness backwards or in random order would be as far as he goes, but in Diaspora they even go a step further, having every state be a completely separate structure in a completely separate universe. The book assumes that to the participants even that would seem like a continuous experience.
It really makes me question what I really am, how malleable is this "me"?
Wow, thanks for taking the time to put into words one of the main aspects that make these books so powerful. At first, there is a strange anguish in being immersed in a world where human minds are just programs, and consciousness seems to be a feature emerging from their structure. Especially when they must consider the possibility of modifying and forking themselves or transferring themselves from one medium to another, one can't help but think, "No, my consciousness couldn't possibly work like that, it's too special".
But as the book progresses, you get more and more comfortable with this universe, and with the fact the your consciousness could work like that. You learn to be at peace with this conception of the mind, and this feeling of peace is the main element that stuck with me after Diaspora. I suppose this may also pervade other works that belong to the vague cyberpunk genre.
> If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is?
I liked Permutation City, but I regard it as something of a cognitive hazard because it's not obvious which parts are realistic and which parts aren't unless you have a fairly specialized background. The above is something that wouldn't actually work, for the simple reason that the later states depend on the earlier ones, so you can't calculate them without first calculating the earlier states.
Yes, this bothered me as well when reading Permutation City. But for the sake of argument, say we posit infinite computation (let's not worry about how that's possible), then would that objection still apply? Then it seems not all that necessary that the states are in order, but just that they exist at some point, regardless of mechanism.
If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is? In Permutation City there is an experiment where brain states are played back backwards or in a random order, but to the person perceiving it, it seems like just business as usual.
I always assumed that after my brain is destroyed there would be just nothingness. But maybe if the "next state" will again exist some time in the future (or past?) from my perspective it will still be a totally continuous experience. Death might seem like just a bad dream.
He plays a lot with this stuff. In Diaspora consciousness is just a piece of software. Since this software can be run at a much higher speed than wetware can, each moment of real time seems much longer to the uploaded. But when they want to, for example when waiting for an interstellar trip to complete, they can "skip forward" and let the brain emulator run them at a much slower pace to make the trips more bareable.
I thought running a consciousness backwards or in random order would be as far as he goes, but in Diaspora they even go a step further, having every state be a completely separate structure in a completely separate universe. The book assumes that to the participants even that would seem like a continuous experience.
It really makes me question what I really am, how malleable is this "me"?