this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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'it isn't somebody else, it is me!' spoken like somebody who read too much mind upload science fiction.
Reminds me of a sci-fi book series I read in high school. The premise was that a run down Earth had discovered predecessors that left some kind of central gateway to different places, and desperate or adventurous people went through in hope of surviving and finding artefacts that could make them rich.
Anyhow, in the later books technology to upload your mind had been found and used to be able to make decisions and deals without having to attend everything. Problem was that digital you pretty quickly gains experiences meat you never had, meaning it starts to diverge. Some weirdos let the diverge happen, but most people just wipe the digital you regularly and upload a new you. Of course the digital you may beg to continue to exist, making the whole procedure rather awkward. Pretty grim.
I think the predecessors in the end were hiding in black holes because of ancient evil or something. If someone else remembers the books.
Yes the idea is pretty common in mind upload style science fiction, sometimes they can merge different variants, of you have less copies for example 'beta' 'gamma' etc level copies with less capabilities. (with 'alpha' copies being 100% copies (often having multiple alpha level yous running around is also illegal, see doublesleeving in Altered Carbon).
Don't think science fiction really deals with the problems of these copies making deals with others and then having to report back what happend, which might cost as much time, or more time for the real you to get up to speed.
You may be unsurprised to learn that Stross did, in Accelerando. Annoyingly, I can’t find my copy, but there’s much forking and joining of mind-states for various purposes, and one character is held liable for the actions of a mind-copy they’d never met but were deemed to be the same person.
Banks touches on it briefly in Feersum Endjinn and Hydrogen Sonata, but not to the same extent.
Ken McLeod has a lot of fun with stuff like this, both in the 2nd and 3rd books of the Fall Revolution series and in Newton's Wake
He doesn't really play with the multiple-copies-of-one-person interacting though, from recollection. The Stone Canal touches on it, but Accelerando thinks a lot more about the interesting possibilities of what Stross calls "Multiplicity", where folk can freely fork many instances of themselves and potentially join the mind states up again later, etc. Revelation Space cheated its way around thinking about the issue by having alpha-levels be copy-protected. Altered Carbon has it be a rare and brief thing for anyone to be running in more than one place at once. I can see why they did this, but Stross' stuff is more interesting because he didn't shy away from that. I feel like this should be right up Peter Watts' alley, but I don't think he's written anything on this (yet). Uploads not plausible enough for him, I guess.
For other works that you may or may not be familiar with... Lena (or MMAcevedo, which seems like a better title) is a nice short online work that does a better job. Soma is a computer game (in the "walking simulator" style) that also has some great moments, though the protagonist is annoyingly oblivious.
somehow I hadn’t read Lena before, and I really like it! this is the style of fiction I’d love to write, if I had time to write fiction.
you have the entire qntm site to read now
featuring a strong recommendation from @cstross@wandering.shop:
this is making me want print copies of everything, and I haven’t even dug in past Lena yet
I stumbled upon this response blog post to people missing the point of Lena and it’s perfect:
and now I’m trying to brainstorm ways to slip a link to awful.systems into qntm’s inbox that don’t look insane
Yeah, I've got my Brit post-cyberpunk authors mixed up :D
I have read Lena and it's one of the most chilling stories I've ever read. Something about the semi-factual tone (of course there's something called red-washing to torture new uploads) and the statement of number of running uploads is really disturbing.
It also posits a possible , and to me more likely, future of human uploading - not a flowering of possibilities ala Tegmark but digital slavery.