"Learning to be Me" by Greg Egan

[Will]

*looking for new link*
This is a short science fiction story written by Greg Egan about self. It's incredible. I've been reading this for the past 20 minutes and I can't stop. Enjoy.

[G.ENIGMA]

http://odin.himinbi.org/text/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Learning%20To%20Be%20Me.html

This is a short science fiction story written by Greg Egan about self. It's incredible. I've been reading this for the past 20 minutes and I can't stop. Enjoy.

When I clicked the link I got this:

Warning: This server is requesting that your username and password be sent in an insecure manner (basic authentication without a secure connection) and a request for a password
 

[Will]

Holy crap. Sorry, I'll fix the link asap.

[PipeBox]

Well, I don't want to be posting spoilers, but the ending seemed terribly callous to me.  The final response seems shallower than the pre-established personality for the sake of ending it quickly, and perhaps for chilling the audience a bit.  I'd have appreciated a bit more if he had even said something like "I am a bit bothered by <circumstances>, still, I'll have eternity to get over it, and knowing that, I don't suspect it will take much longer."  Yeah, I'm not a writer, but I just thought the ending was a breach of character.  Beyond that, and a plot hole or two aside, it really got me thinking.  Thanks for a great read, Will.

[Will]

Well, I don't want to be posting spoilers, but the ending seemed terribly callous to me.  The final response seems shallower than the pre-established personality for the sake of ending it quickly, and perhaps for chilling the audience a bit.  I'd have appreciated a bit more if he had even said something like "I am a bit bothered by <circumstances>, still, I'll have eternity to get over it, and knowing that, I don't suspect it will take much longer."  Yeah, I'm not a writer, but I just thought the ending was a breach of character.

I had the same initial reaction, but then I realized it was a study in hypocrisy. Read it again. Paranoia is fine and normal when it's his own, but as soon as he meets others with it, there's something wrong with it. Then, when he finally gets to be in the driver's seat and the original persona is replaced into that maddening state, he reveals that his paranoia was shallow all along, simply self-serving. It's perverse, sure, but it's also honest. A lot of people find themselves paranoid, but it's more rare that paranoia is honest and selfless. Maybe it's a "center of the universe" thing.

Lots to think about.  

[McQ]

I loved it, Will. Thanks for posting it. Had to read it a couple of times. I actually liked the way it wrapped up because it was so discomforting. Took me out of my happy place!  

[AlP]

That is a wonderful story! Thanks Will. I might post some thoughts but I have to read it again and think about it more.

[Whitney]

I liked the ending too...I don't think the story would have come together properly if

[spoiler:26125gah]the jewl had cared about the fate of the human; the human was just damaged goods.  I emphasizes the previous concerns about them being separate entities.  I also like that it dropped hints that this was written after the switch yet didn't make it obvious till the end.[/spoiler:26125gah]

[PipeBox]

Thanks for helping me dig a little deeper, Will.  Must be one helluva way to be brought into the world, though.  Assuming nothing went wrong, the Jewel and the person would be unsure which was which until after the brain was destroyed, where immediately the jewel's humanity would be exercised.  I'd expect the same disconnection of all jewels, to the point I'd think they'd eventually consider themselves a race altogether apart, rather than a human.  I mean, once you know you're not the human, and that your memories and mental state were not shaped by your own doing, you're pretty free to act like a new being.  While the thought structure and learnings would remain, the knowledge you were not human, with certainty, would immediately cause you to act different from how the human ever would.  I suspect this is the case, and although the motive for business and keeping the (company?) image free of tarnishing certainly would be present, I also suspect that those controlling the teacher, or its application, will have doubtlessly experienced the same thing, and bow to the experience of the immortal rather than the mortal.  But with this in mind, I cannot imagine how society functions so well that the character never mentions and "bad copies," or people who, once they realized they weren't people, acted totally out of character and did something, for lack of better terms, insane.  Leaving their bio kid on the street (after all, the jewel will eventually recover), quitting their job to go have have a good time since they've got all the time in the world to get another, or to try killing themselves in despair of being the jewel, not "authentic."  Events like these would expected to be common, and even an instance of 1/10000 would cause people to seriously reconsider that way of doing things, and unless we're to believe they'd keep their mouths shut out of some kind of jewel conspiracy for the good of jewel kind, or a selection screening to keep children who would grow a mental structure conducive to post-switch "breakdowns," the story kinda gives way.

Finally, for a guy that frets for a week over being adjusted by the teacher, you'd think he'd realize that transcription to a new crystal, exact transcription, doesn't equate to anything more than a copy - not him.   But then, nothing is truly immortal, even if it has to wait for the Big Rip, Big Crunch, or the heat death of the universe.

Still, it's food for thought for people thinking they're going to keep themselves going with a computer copy.   In reality, it would be more like birthing a completely new being, sharing your memories and thought structure, but would never truly be able to be the same, as circumstances, as much as the other two, make people.  

[Hitsumei]

I thought that it was a long criticism of physicalism using a philosophical-zombie plot device at first, but then the ending became apparent to me quite early on.

I enjoyed the writing, but didn't find the plot particularly interesting, or remotely plausible from an anthropological, civil, or legal angle. Also, the premise was flawed, a copy, no matter how identical in every way to the original is still a copy, and not the original. Theoretically, teleportation could be achieved by copying atoms precisely, transmitting the new information, and then copying the information from those atoms unto different atoms at the destination. The original body then could be recycled to be used to fabricate the next incoming teleported object or person. The copy would be precisely the same in every single way, but unless one believes in some kind of transference of a soul or some such, then in no sense is the copy actually "you" specifically, but is rather a perfect copy of you. It would be perfectly possible for both to exist, which reveals the notion of you both being precisely the same thing absurd. My past-self, and my modern-self cannot simultaneously exist.

[Eoghan]

Isn't "self" an illusion? I know it's cliché, but, well, it's true, innit? Or rather, it's neither a "real" thing NOR an "illusion". "Self" IS the sense of experience of self.

If I were in this man's position, I would have seen (what I think is) the solution very quickly: split.

-Copy my new diverged self into another jewel and implant it in a new body (one continuous sense of experience of self)
[This makes sense in the context of one of the author's other stories]
-Simultaneously halt the jewel in the original body, and reentrain it to the biological brain ("fix the teacher" in the lingo of the story).

Oh, wait, no, the second step doesn't work. I, the split off jewel self all alone in my new body, am fine, but that leaves two parallel lines of self (for practical purposes, indistinguishable but still separate) in the old body with all the old problems.

Clearly this is a terrible way to move a single self (remember I said I'm thinking that a "self" IS the sense of experience of self) from one substrate (biological) to another (computer)!

Obviously, gradualism is the answer. So long as you slowly migrate the abstract, functional pattern of the mind over to the new substrate slowly and gradually, one tiny bit at a time, a single self is maintained for the whole process.

Yeah, that's how I intend to do it when I secure my own immortality in the next few decades, and how I imagine most people will. (Assuming all that singularity stuff works out, that is; I'll be focusing on more important things in the world than my own immortality, but I'd hardly say no if that chance comes up, and, well, it looks to me right now more likely that it will than it won't.)

Ha, listen to me! I just (as far as I'm concerned) demolished an applied philosophical structure that one very smart individual thought was so robust, it was worth writing several short stories based off. Stories assuming that a future society could come to accept that structure. And now I'm expressing confidence that the structure that I (probably not particularly smart) JUST came up with in replacement WILL come to be generally socially accepted in the next few decades!

How ridiculous I am!

And yet I still feel that I'm right.  

Life is weird.

[PipeBox]

Absolutely, and welcome to a fellow transhumanist.  

I'd liked to have addressed it before, but it didn't seem in-bounds to berate the author for trying to find an awkward immortality.  The obvious solution to the whole "upload problem" is to make it gradual.  As long as your consciousness is maintained, it hardly matters where it's coming from.  Copy a brain cell, kill it or disconnect it, and the conscious mind won't even realize it's been "migrated".  You'll just slowly attribute your consciousness to something else that isn't your biological brain.  "You" will be maintained and you will at no point be a copy, as your consciousness will never be in two places at one.  This is ideal for me.  Uploading to a computer (or storage medium, to be more correct, as I can envision having additional "machine" processing power available even without memory transfer) over three years would suit me fine in all ways (presumably this would be an attached computer, though conceivably transfers could be done in 30 minutes and your physical body would never leave the transfer facility, but such a quick transfer that is irrevocable, in almost the same moment as it is started, is less appealing to me at present).

The author also overlooks another alternative, where the brain is never allowed to make memories, and all memory is given to the crystal.  This would be the most obvious choice.  Where it's a lot harder to do for the older, this method would easily allow for birthing immortals.  And as to the older, if you can be kept alive indefinitely (and kept healthy as well), then there will come a time that your expansive experience in being will so dwarf the minor amount of information stored in your bio brain as to be significant.  This solution, however, is not as ideal as a transfer, as it will mean that, foregoing some technical issue that leaves you screaming mindless and broken, if your new storage medium were disconnected, your brain would pick up right where it left off.  A huge discontinuity, but there would be two of "you", and while one would be the obvious choice for destruction, that copy, arguably the original, still would not want to die.

I'm not terribly fond of always having this body (it's frail and functionally limited), so transfers are not a problem for me, and they're also favorable for avoiding accidental duplicates, not nearly as nasty as this author's method, and, done right, your never emerge as a separate consciousness (you just change places).

All of that aside, I wholly expect to die in the next 80 years, but I wholly hope for a technological singularity in my lifetime.  And I'd really like to talk at length about this sometime, but I don't think there'd be much to discuss (so no need for a forum thread) if I just dumped my thoughts on this subject in here.  Welcome again, Eoghan.

[Whitney]

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