I think you're meant to assume that consciousness is, like, a ~thing~ that can get moved around. It's not much different from Star Trek's transporters, it's just that your consciousness goes into a stack (and then presumably back up into the brain) rather than a copy of your body.
Backups throw a bit more of a wrench into this theory than double sleeving (which would just be creating a new person) but *waves hands*
Yeah star trek teleporters are also a bugbear of mine, I would not get in one because again, the way it's been described as working, teleporters sound like a scanner, a disintegration ray and 3D printer.
What gets me about this sort of technology is that nobody seems to grasp the obvious implication that it's not immortality. What's in the stack isn't you, it's a digital copy of your memories and personality. The mere fact that double sleeving is possible proves that this isn't a transfer of consciousness, it's just copy&paste. It might walk, talk and act like you but you're dead and this clone that thinks it's you picks up your life where you left off. Normal personality drift means we can be dramatically different people from even one decade to the next, a copy of a copy of a copy a century down the line is simply not going to be the person they started out as, they might not even be anything like what that person would have been had they naturally managed to love 400 years!
Personally that's not appealing to me? If I was terminally ill and someone told me after I die they can make an exact duplicate that will carry on with my life my reaction would be "well great but it doesn't do a lot for me, does it?". It's a philosophical avenue the show doesn't go down at all, you have the religious people who this it's an affront to god (which again if they thought about it, it's not since this is not real immortality), you have the envoys who correctly surmised that stacks+capitalism will produce a two tier society of rich people and everyone else. No one is looking at the angle of "holy shit our society is being filled out with copies rather than real people".
This is why the religious coding was a thing in altered carbon. Why they were against even spinning up a victim of a murder. Depending on your believes every time you change a sleeve you died and now there is just a copy of you running around with your thoughts and memory but no soul. So they were very much against the concept of hordes of souless copies of people running around.
But you can also question philosophically where does your soul if it exists reside? Is it actually in your body if so what part do you cut out that removes your soul or damages it. If it is not actually in your body is it some kind of higher energy form that uses the body to interact with the physical world and if so can it just hop to whatever body you happen to be sleeved in. Is a soul diminished by having two or more hosts?
It does open up a lot of good questions if technology like this becomes possible. For me I would be willing to sleeve I figure if I actually die in the process I will be up in whatever afterlife is available rooting the new me on and wishing it well.
She goes from catatonic to killing-machine over the span of a few weeks.
I know Poe was teaching her self-defense and empowering her through martial training, but her emergence from VR as some kinda kung-fu super-assassin just felt really outta left field.
They actually talk about this in the show but it goes pretty quick. Poe is doing time dilation for her so weeks in VR are hours in the real. So she actually was training probably for the equivalent of years to attain her skills.
She goes from catatonic to killing-machine over the span of a few weeks.
I know Poe was teaching her self-defense and empowering her through martial training, but her emergence from VR as some kinda kung-fu super-assassin just felt really outta left field.
They actually talk about this in the show but it goes pretty quick. Poe is doing time dilation for her so weeks in VR are hours in the real. So she actually was training probably for the equivalent of years to attain her skills.
This is correct. Though it begs the question why everyone isn't mastering stuff in VR in days.
I assume it is because it requires a lot of horse power to do the VR sim time dilation stuff like that. Poe being a high end AI could do it for one person and was carefully care taking the experience to keep her safe. So I assume mets and other people with the money/time/need can make use of this but it is probably beyond what most folks have access to.
I guess it should also be mentioned that the AI like POE have a bad name for being massive stalkers of guests which is why they have so few guests. Putting yourself at the VR "mercy" of an AI like that to learn stuff quicker is probably not an option a lot would want to risk taking.
From the glimpses we see of the other AI, Poe is unusual in having a sense of ethics and decency to go along with the obsessiveness. The seem to be a pretty scummy group overall.
This is correct. Though it begs the question why everyone isn't mastering stuff in VR in days.
It's a thing in the show. In the books it's the equivalent of having a high-end PC and they do it all the time.
First book spoiler, changed in the show:
Kovacs takes the head of the lead doctor at the clinic (not Dimi), puts him in VR together with more copies of the doctor and puts it on fast forward until one of the copies cracks and spills the beans.
I guess it should also be mentioned that the AI like POE have a bad name for being massive stalkers of guests which is why they have so few guests. Putting yourself at the VR "mercy" of an AI like that to learn stuff quicker is probably not an option a lot would want to risk taking.
Can't be worse than putting yourself at mr.Popo's mercy to use the hyperbolic time chamber.
From the glimpses we see of the other AI, Poe is unusual in having a sense of ethics and decency to go along with the obsessiveness. The seem to be a pretty scummy group overall.
I think a lot of them are kinda bonkers from lack of positive human input they all seem to crave. In a lot of them it seemed to twist to a darker desire to hurt humans or watch humans hurt each other.
At the end of the day, I think it's just that this author really didn't think the stack tech through as more than a one-off story device, so the handling of it is inconsistent by origin rather than design. The story wasn't about the ethics or ramifications of stacks, it was about some guy who shoots a lot of people to solve some rich dude's murder. Even if the author did spend time thinking about those ramifications or details, he didn't see them as important to the story and left them out.
For a setting like Ghost in the Shell, things like ghosts and cyberbrains have a fair bit of thought put into them, but that's because the setting actually focuses on the questions such things raise rather than just using them to beef up a pretty standard detective story. But that series delves heavily into ideas of self, sentience, and altered versus real perceptions in how people act and think of themselves.
In comparison, Kovacs is mostly just trying to stay sleeved, and pretty much all the delving he does is into the female characters.
My favorite Culture book is all about this, Surface Detail
they frequently end up with extras of people and it seems to be an issue, thankfully there's an infinite amount of virtual space to store extras
I mean, if you want to get into "but what does the identity of self actually mean" and "but if you're not your meat what are you?" then you end up, I think, at the conclusion that continuity of consciousness may not even be a thing, and the sense of identity and self are actually instead illusory evolved mechanisms rather than something actually tied to the meat. Like someone up thread said, if you're going to tie "self" to your meat then you have to identify which thing that you could lose which would make you stop being. And then you get into weird shit where brain damage can result in a completely different you, whom you wouldn't identify as self anymore, and the whole concept that you're really just a bunch of cells in a weird symbiotic package. Or to quote the book:
“For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.”
Not having read the books, for a long time I had thought the reveal was going to be that the son inserted part of his identity into the father's backups, resulting in the son not quite being double sleeved, but having some influence over the new "father" identity.
What gets me about this sort of technology is that nobody seems to grasp the obvious implication that it's not immortality. What's in the stack isn't you, it's a digital copy of your memories and personality. The mere fact that double sleeving is possible proves that this isn't a transfer of consciousness, it's just copy&paste. It might walk, talk and act like you but you're dead and this clone that thinks it's you picks up your life where you left off. Normal personality drift means we can be dramatically different people from even one decade to the next, a copy of a copy of a copy a century down the line is simply not going to be the person they started out as, they might not even be anything like what that person would have been had they naturally managed to love 400 years!
Personally that's not appealing to me? If I was terminally ill and someone told me after I die they can make an exact duplicate that will carry on with my life my reaction would be "well great but it doesn't do a lot for me, does it?". It's a philosophical avenue the show doesn't go down at all, you have the religious people who this it's an affront to god (which again if they thought about it, it's not since this is not real immortality), you have the envoys who correctly surmised that stacks+capitalism will produce a two tier society of rich people and everyone else. No one is looking at the angle of "holy shit our society is being filled out with copies rather than real people".
This is why the religious coding was a thing in altered carbon. Why they were against even spinning up a victim of a murder. Depending on your believes every time you change a sleeve you died and now there is just a copy of you running around with your thoughts and memory but no soul. So they were very much against the concept of hordes of souless copies of people running around.
But you can also question philosophically where does your soul if it exists reside? Is it actually in your body if so what part do you cut out that removes your soul or damages it. If it is not actually in your body is it some kind of higher energy form that uses the body to interact with the physical world and if so can it just hop to whatever body you happen to be sleeved in. Is a soul diminished by having two or more hosts?
It does open up a lot of good questions if technology like this becomes possible. For me I would be willing to sleeve I figure if I actually die in the process I will be up in whatever afterlife is available rooting the new me on and wishing it well.
The sense i got was that the religious people disagreed with it because they thought it was eternal life and that only god should be able to give eternal life, which would make total sense from a Catholic point of view.
At the end of the day, I think it's just that this author really didn't think the stack tech through as more than a one-off story device, so the handling of it is inconsistent by origin rather than design. The story wasn't about the ethics or ramifications of stacks, it was about some guy who shoots a lot of people to solve some rich dude's murder. Even if the author did spend time thinking about those ramifications or details, he didn't see them as important to the story and left them out.
For a setting like Ghost in the Shell, things like ghosts and cyberbrains have a fair bit of thought put into them, but that's because the setting actually focuses on the questions such things raise rather than just using them to beef up a pretty standard detective story. But that series delves heavily into ideas of self, sentience, and altered versus real perceptions in how people act and think of themselves.
In comparison, Kovacs is mostly just trying to stay sleeved, and pretty much all the delving he does is into the female characters.
My favorite Culture book is all about this, Surface Detail
they frequently end up with extras of people and it seems to be an issue, thankfully there's an infinite amount of virtual space to store extras
God I wish someone would make an awesome culture TV series one day, I wish so hard.
What gets me about this sort of technology is that nobody seems to grasp the obvious implication that it's not immortality. What's in the stack isn't you, it's a digital copy of your memories and personality. The mere fact that double sleeving is possible proves that this isn't a transfer of consciousness, it's just copy&paste. It might walk, talk and act like you but you're dead and this clone that thinks it's you picks up your life where you left off. Normal personality drift means we can be dramatically different people from even one decade to the next, a copy of a copy of a copy a century down the line is simply not going to be the person they started out as, they might not even be anything like what that person would have been had they naturally managed to love 400 years!
Personally that's not appealing to me? If I was terminally ill and someone told me after I die they can make an exact duplicate that will carry on with my life my reaction would be "well great but it doesn't do a lot for me, does it?". It's a philosophical avenue the show doesn't go down at all, you have the religious people who this it's an affront to god (which again if they thought about it, it's not since this is not real immortality), you have the envoys who correctly surmised that stacks+capitalism will produce a two tier society of rich people and everyone else. No one is looking at the angle of "holy shit our society is being filled out with copies rather than real people".
This is why the religious coding was a thing in altered carbon. Why they were against even spinning up a victim of a murder. Depending on your believes every time you change a sleeve you died and now there is just a copy of you running around with your thoughts and memory but no soul. So they were very much against the concept of hordes of souless copies of people running around.
But you can also question philosophically where does your soul if it exists reside? Is it actually in your body if so what part do you cut out that removes your soul or damages it. If it is not actually in your body is it some kind of higher energy form that uses the body to interact with the physical world and if so can it just hop to whatever body you happen to be sleeved in. Is a soul diminished by having two or more hosts?
It does open up a lot of good questions if technology like this becomes possible. For me I would be willing to sleeve I figure if I actually die in the process I will be up in whatever afterlife is available rooting the new me on and wishing it well.
The sense i got was that the religious people disagreed with it because they thought it was eternal life and that only god should be able to give eternal life, which would make total sense from a Catholic point of view.
From the TV show it seemed almost like "resleeving = sin", and you don't need to actually go much further in many religions
What gets me about this sort of technology is that nobody seems to grasp the obvious implication that it's not immortality. What's in the stack isn't you, it's a digital copy of your memories and personality. The mere fact that double sleeving is possible proves that this isn't a transfer of consciousness, it's just copy&paste. It might walk, talk and act like you but you're dead and this clone that thinks it's you picks up your life where you left off. Normal personality drift means we can be dramatically different people from even one decade to the next, a copy of a copy of a copy a century down the line is simply not going to be the person they started out as, they might not even be anything like what that person would have been had they naturally managed to love 400 years!
Personally that's not appealing to me? If I was terminally ill and someone told me after I die they can make an exact duplicate that will carry on with my life my reaction would be "well great but it doesn't do a lot for me, does it?". It's a philosophical avenue the show doesn't go down at all, you have the religious people who this it's an affront to god (which again if they thought about it, it's not since this is not real immortality), you have the envoys who correctly surmised that stacks+capitalism will produce a two tier society of rich people and everyone else. No one is looking at the angle of "holy shit our society is being filled out with copies rather than real people".
This is why the religious coding was a thing in altered carbon. Why they were against even spinning up a victim of a murder. Depending on your believes every time you change a sleeve you died and now there is just a copy of you running around with your thoughts and memory but no soul. So they were very much against the concept of hordes of souless copies of people running around.
But you can also question philosophically where does your soul if it exists reside? Is it actually in your body if so what part do you cut out that removes your soul or damages it. If it is not actually in your body is it some kind of higher energy form that uses the body to interact with the physical world and if so can it just hop to whatever body you happen to be sleeved in. Is a soul diminished by having two or more hosts?
It does open up a lot of good questions if technology like this becomes possible. For me I would be willing to sleeve I figure if I actually die in the process I will be up in whatever afterlife is available rooting the new me on and wishing it well.
The sense i got was that the religious people disagreed with it because they thought it was eternal life and that only god should be able to give eternal life, which would make total sense from a Catholic point of view.
Okay so going of the Eclipse Phase RPG which is not the same as the books, but uses the same concept right down to the name; Cortical Stacks are only partly the storage medium we see on the show. The other part is a bunch of nanobots that record all major neurological linkages, hormone levels and such in the brain. They then send it to the stack proper every nano second. The stack itself contains the recording and the nanobot factories necessary to maintain the recording. Once you cast out the nanobots reset the mind, erasing linkages, reset the hormones and such.
In Altered Carbon, you are your mindstate. The body is just the computer on which the "mindstate" is running on. Its like a if you write a a text, copy it, erase the original and import it to a new PC. Is it the original text written on the first computer or a copy? From a digital standpoint it may as well be. The stacks themselves are notoriously hard to damage, at least compared the series. Like you actually have to make a point to hurt the stacks and bring a very destructive weapon to do it.
In the clinic shoot out its mentioned that Kovac kills everybody in the clinic and then systematically goes around and specifically targets their stacks after they are dead. This is described as a sign of how pissed of he is after being tortured and even his enemies go woah at how hardcore he is.
Now a lot of people here probably think that using stacks is just copying and it is. Its just that in Altered Carbon people who think differently run the show. Any rich person that doesn't think resleeving is a way to live forever is dead and the ones that do have become Meths. Religious groups that believe that you can't copy a persons soul are shit out of luck. Especially in the Colonies of the Protectorate, which was founded solely by people that loaded their Mindstate into STL ships and took the long way there. Religion is not really a thing outside of Earth and Kovac is weirded out by how many people believe it.
Also the Elder race they mention where Martians. Not literal Martians, but Mars was a colony of their Half a billion years ago and Earth bootstrapped themselves to interstellar status by scavenging ruins they left behind. The books call them the Martians all the time.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Anyway, if I lived in that world, I'd do my best to make my original body last. I'm not against a copy of me going on after I die, but it's not me as far as I'm concerned. The double sleeve thing really put an end to the illusion. I don't have evidence either way that my consciousness is the same from day to day, but being able to interact with a double is proof that the stacks aren't me.
I liked it all except for a few details in the end (Episode 10 spoilers only technically):
The Hotel and company weren't prepared for an attack? Why the fuck not? Now Mickey's dead, good going guys (and AI). There were like 3 attackers.
Falconer being alive screamed last ditch effort to fuck with Tak's head. How the hell do you back someone up without them knowing? That fast? Why would she?
I'd normally be thrilled with that, I demand happy endings, but we spend the entire series with Ortega instead so this is just more realistically slightly depressing.
Wasn't thrilled with him going down for the ride, but that worked out.
Anyway, if I lived in that world, I'd do my best to make my original body last. I'm not against a copy of me going on after I die, but it's not me as far as I'm concerned. The double sleeve thing really put an end to the illusion. I don't have evidence either way that my consciousness is the same from day to day, but being able to interact with a double is proof that the stacks aren't me.
I mean, unless you're obscenely wealthy, you'd do your best to let your original body last because you couldn't afford to be resleeved more than once.
And I don't think "sleeve" is supposed to be attractive. Its supposed to be a (IMO) a commentary on how bodies have been relegated to be no more than a jacket that one (if one so desires/is wealthy enough) puts on when the last one has worn out.
chrono_traveller on
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
I'd buy that a "copy" of you is still you, provided the original is immediately destroyed.
Otherwise the divergence in perspective creates a different consciousness.
There can be only one!
That's a big reason why they prevent double sleeving. So they don't have to think about these things. Also the psychological trauma people could endure having to deal with themselves. And like taxes and criminal law. It's just easier having one of you.
I'd buy that a "copy" of you is still you, provided the original is immediately destroyed.
Otherwise the divergence in perspective creates a different consciousness.
There can be only one!
No offense, but this is ridiculous to me. If I shoot you in the head, then make a copy, it's "you", but if I make a copy, then shoot you in the head it's not you - and that second part of the sentence doesn't make you change your mind about the first?
I was hoping for Ortega's mother to go off on her that the person sitting there wasn't really the grandmother, but just a copy of her, but instead we got some random nonsense about sins and the devil because we need to make religion look stupid I guess.
Also it seems like immortality would be pretty damn easy to achieve with cybernetics given their incredible medical feats. Or what about "synths"? If you're going to die, at least put your copy in an immortal robot body and wish it well.
I never read the books so it'd be nice if this was explained there, but did the world of Altered Carbon stop progressing technologically shortly after the stack tech was invented? It's never really explained just how long this tech has been around, but what I gathered from the show was that it's at least 250 years old. How has this tech existed for that long without ever getting cheap enough for the common person to really interact with it? Is it as simple as capitalism was put to death in favor of full government control of stack technology to entrench the powers that be forever?
The show made it abundantly clear that society had determined the tech was not for the common person, but for all the time it spent on how shitty that fact is it never went into more detail about why or how beyond "It's super duper expensive, yo".
I'd buy that a "copy" of you is still you, provided the original is immediately destroyed.
Otherwise the divergence in perspective creates a different consciousness.
There can be only one!
No offense, but this is ridiculous to me. If I shoot you in the head, then make a copy, it's "you", but if I make a copy, then shoot you in the head it's not you - and that second part of the sentence doesn't make you change your mind about the first?
I don't see why it would.
If you shot me in the head and I woke up several miles away in a new body, how is that different from me having been simply knocked unconscious and carried to the hospital?
However, if I got out of the hospital and drove home to find myself already there, I would definitely consider the guy standing in my house to not be me.
Also I think the "it's expensive" thing refers to growing your own clone.
Stack technology is ubiquitous. Even the people who don't want to come back have stacks.
But poor people just get whatever sleeve is available. The bodies of criminals or other deceased persons - a finite resource. It's like being put on the wait list for an organ donation.
Whereas the rich can afford to have clones of themselves grown and custom-made to include shit like bionic arms and laser eyes or whatever.
In Altered Carbon, you are your mindstate. The body is just the computer on which the "mindstate" is running on. Its like a if you write a a text, copy it, erase the original and import it to a new PC. Is it the original text written on the first computer or a copy? From a digital standpoint it may as well be. The stacks themselves are notoriously hard to damage, at least compared the series. Like you actually have to make a point to hurt the stacks and bring a very destructive weapon to do it.
In the clinic shoot out its mentioned that Kovac kills everybody in the clinic and then systematically goes around and specifically targets their stacks after they are dead. This is described as a sign of how pissed of he is after being tortured and even his enemies go woah at how hardcore he is.
Where this theory breaks down, is how do we know for sure that the original's "soul" or "true essence" or whatever consciousness that exists in your meat sack body truly was reincarnated? The show never actually shows anything resembling proof that they have this down. It's all science, yet it's science that reads more like recording a person's consciousness while their alive than copying that and transferring the digital copy into a new meat suit. Despite their advanced tech humanity still hasn't confirmed or defined what a soul truly is. What a mind state truly is in question here, and they haven't shown they can confirm exactly what they're doing with a consciousness.
Destroying the stacks holds an all new conclusion if you don't believe that it's stopping true immortality, then it becomes simply permanently blocking someone from being digitally copied again - instead of vampire like immortality when snapping their necks is more akin to being knocked out that they'll heal from minutes later.
If you shot me in the head and I woke up several miles away in a new body, how is that different from me having been simply knocked unconscious and carried to the hospital?
However, if I got out of the hospital and drove home to find myself already there, I would definitely consider the guy standing in my house to not be me.
If only because I can't be in two places at once.
The $5 million dollar question is - how would you know that the you that woke up was the real you, or a simulated copy who has all your memories? Whatever the answer has separate results - one is the real you, the other isn't, they merely think they are you.
I never read the books so it'd be nice if this was explained there, but did the world of Altered Carbon stop progressing technologically shortly after the stack tech was invented? It's never really explained just how long this tech has been around, but what I gathered from the show was that it's at least 250 years old. How has this tech existed for that long without ever getting cheap enough for the common person to really interact with it? Is it as simple as capitalism was put to death in favor of full government control of stack technology to entrench the powers that be forever?
The show made it abundantly clear that society had determined the tech was not for the common person, but for all the time it spent on how shitty that fact is it never went into more detail about why or how beyond "It's super duper expensive, yo".
Regarding technological advancement. While not as drastic as say 1900 - 2000. Over 100 years pass between the first and third book and by the third book the needlecast backup takes place every few seconds not every 48 hours. And it's something mercs can afford (or atleast highly modified and skilled mercs who chase bounties on rouge ai controlled military bots.) The Sleeve customizations are also more advanced.
In the context of the show and I'll admit this is largely speculation. But I got the impression the wealth gap has seriously increased. Outside of maybe the cops and the workers at Psychasec and the Wei clinic there doesn't seem to be a middle class as we would know it. I get the feeling the "More then most people earn in a lifetime" price tag on cloned Sleeves would be fairly achievable on an equivalent modern salary.
Also I think the "it's expensive" thing refers to growing your own clone.
Stack technology is ubiquitous. Even the people who don't want to come back have stacks.
But poor people just get whatever sleeve is available. The bodies of criminals or other deceased persons - a finite resource. It's like being put on the wait list for an organ donation.
Whereas the rich can afford to have clones of themselves grown and custom-made to include shit like bionic arms and laser eyes or whatever.
This may be changed in the show (I've only read the first book), but in the book I think its pretty specifically pointed out that most people have to essentially live their whole lives to save up the money to get resleeved, and that people tend to not do it more than once because a) you have to save a good deal, and b) growing old kinda sucks. So they just decided to heck with it, they don't want to go through that again.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
I just finished ep 6 and everything about the last scene feels as if it were written to appeal specifically to my late 90s role-playing rule of cool loving self.
A cloaked figure armed with a sword and a gun takes out an underground fighting ring full of people while More Human Than Human plays in the background YES PLEASE
It is exactly like something out of one of many tabletop games that I've played and I love it.
One thing that annoyed me was how in a world where resleeving was ubiquitous, especially when dealing with meths, people always acted so surprised when the sleeve they were looking at had a different stack in it. There were a few exceptions, like I distinctly remember Tak figuring it out quickly once. But, I would think the meths and people who interact with them frequently would be much more aware of that kind of thing
They did mention that resleeving into too many new bodies can lead to psychosis, so I just assumed that for the most part people won't go swapping bodies unless they have a really good reason to.
They did mention that resleeving into too many new bodies can lead to psychosis, so I just assumed that for the most part people won't go swapping bodies unless they have a really good reason to.
Didn't they also mentioned that was an old problem that had been largely solved?
They did mention that resleeving into too many new bodies can lead to psychosis, so I just assumed that for the most part people won't go swapping bodies unless they have a really good reason to.
Didn't they also mentioned that was an old problem that had been largely solved?
only if you can afford a clone of the body you are in already. iirc
They did mention that resleeving into too many new bodies can lead to psychosis, so I just assumed that for the most part people won't go swapping bodies unless they have a really good reason to.
Didn't they also mentioned that was an old problem that had been largely solved?
We still have food taboos and religious restrictions based on contamination issues that were solved a century ago. There would be a long lag between solving a problem and everyone getting comfortable with it, especially when the majority of people who could afford to body-hop are self-obsessed immortals.
They did mention that resleeving into too many new bodies can lead to psychosis, so I just assumed that for the most part people won't go swapping bodies unless they have a really good reason to.
Didn't they also mentioned that was an old problem that had been largely solved?
The Emissaries took a completely different approach and basically avoided it. Other folks seemed to only rarely use other bodies with even meths sticking to clones of themselves.
Its also a thing in the books that people have to live a full lifespan each time if they are not a meth. Like get a clone copy at 20 and having to live until you die at 90. Meaning you have to spend 40 years with a plus 50 body. It apparently takes a toll on the psyche and a lot do what Ortega's grandmother does and only sleeve up for special occasions after the second go around.
So most people are used to seeing people in only one sleve.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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This is why the religious coding was a thing in altered carbon. Why they were against even spinning up a victim of a murder. Depending on your believes every time you change a sleeve you died and now there is just a copy of you running around with your thoughts and memory but no soul. So they were very much against the concept of hordes of souless copies of people running around.
But you can also question philosophically where does your soul if it exists reside? Is it actually in your body if so what part do you cut out that removes your soul or damages it. If it is not actually in your body is it some kind of higher energy form that uses the body to interact with the physical world and if so can it just hop to whatever body you happen to be sleeved in. Is a soul diminished by having two or more hosts?
It does open up a lot of good questions if technology like this becomes possible. For me I would be willing to sleeve I figure if I actually die in the process I will be up in whatever afterlife is available rooting the new me on and wishing it well.
This is correct. Though it begs the question why everyone isn't mastering stuff in VR in days.
It's a thing in the show. In the books it's the equivalent of having a high-end PC and they do it all the time.
First book spoiler, changed in the show:
That is all.
Can't be worse than putting yourself at mr.Popo's mercy to use the hyperbolic time chamber.
I think a lot of them are kinda bonkers from lack of positive human input they all seem to crave. In a lot of them it seemed to twist to a darker desire to hurt humans or watch humans hurt each other.
My favorite Culture book is all about this, Surface Detail
they frequently end up with extras of people and it seems to be an issue, thankfully there's an infinite amount of virtual space to store extras
“For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.”
The sense i got was that the religious people disagreed with it because they thought it was eternal life and that only god should be able to give eternal life, which would make total sense from a Catholic point of view.
God I wish someone would make an awesome culture TV series one day, I wish so hard.
From the TV show it seemed almost like "resleeving = sin", and you don't need to actually go much further in many religions
In Altered Carbon, you are your mindstate. The body is just the computer on which the "mindstate" is running on. Its like a if you write a a text, copy it, erase the original and import it to a new PC. Is it the original text written on the first computer or a copy? From a digital standpoint it may as well be. The stacks themselves are notoriously hard to damage, at least compared the series. Like you actually have to make a point to hurt the stacks and bring a very destructive weapon to do it.
Now a lot of people here probably think that using stacks is just copying and it is. Its just that in Altered Carbon people who think differently run the show. Any rich person that doesn't think resleeving is a way to live forever is dead and the ones that do have become Meths. Religious groups that believe that you can't copy a persons soul are shit out of luck. Especially in the Colonies of the Protectorate, which was founded solely by people that loaded their Mindstate into STL ships and took the long way there. Religion is not really a thing outside of Earth and Kovac is weirded out by how many people believe it.
Also the Elder race they mention where Martians. Not literal Martians, but Mars was a colony of their Half a billion years ago and Earth bootstrapped themselves to interstellar status by scavenging ruins they left behind. The books call them the Martians all the time.
Anyway, if I lived in that world, I'd do my best to make my original body last. I'm not against a copy of me going on after I die, but it's not me as far as I'm concerned. The double sleeve thing really put an end to the illusion. I don't have evidence either way that my consciousness is the same from day to day, but being able to interact with a double is proof that the stacks aren't me.
Falconer being alive screamed last ditch effort to fuck with Tak's head. How the hell do you back someone up without them knowing? That fast? Why would she?
I'd normally be thrilled with that, I demand happy endings, but we spend the entire series with Ortega instead so this is just more realistically slightly depressing.
Wasn't thrilled with him going down for the ride, but that worked out.
Otherwise the divergence in perspective creates a different consciousness.
There can be only one!
I mean, unless you're obscenely wealthy, you'd do your best to let your original body last because you couldn't afford to be resleeved more than once.
And I don't think "sleeve" is supposed to be attractive. Its supposed to be a (IMO) a commentary on how bodies have been relegated to be no more than a jacket that one (if one so desires/is wealthy enough) puts on when the last one has worn out.
It's different as soon as it's created, so it's only "you" right off.
That's a big reason why they prevent double sleeving. So they don't have to think about these things. Also the psychological trauma people could endure having to deal with themselves. And like taxes and criminal law. It's just easier having one of you.
No offense, but this is ridiculous to me. If I shoot you in the head, then make a copy, it's "you", but if I make a copy, then shoot you in the head it's not you - and that second part of the sentence doesn't make you change your mind about the first?
I was hoping for Ortega's mother to go off on her that the person sitting there wasn't really the grandmother, but just a copy of her, but instead we got some random nonsense about sins and the devil because we need to make religion look stupid I guess.
Also it seems like immortality would be pretty damn easy to achieve with cybernetics given their incredible medical feats. Or what about "synths"? If you're going to die, at least put your copy in an immortal robot body and wish it well.
The show made it abundantly clear that society had determined the tech was not for the common person, but for all the time it spent on how shitty that fact is it never went into more detail about why or how beyond "It's super duper expensive, yo".
I don't see why it would.
If you shot me in the head and I woke up several miles away in a new body, how is that different from me having been simply knocked unconscious and carried to the hospital?
However, if I got out of the hospital and drove home to find myself already there, I would definitely consider the guy standing in my house to not be me.
If only because I can't be in two places at once.
Stack technology is ubiquitous. Even the people who don't want to come back have stacks.
But poor people just get whatever sleeve is available. The bodies of criminals or other deceased persons - a finite resource. It's like being put on the wait list for an organ donation.
Whereas the rich can afford to have clones of themselves grown and custom-made to include shit like bionic arms and laser eyes or whatever.
Where this theory breaks down, is how do we know for sure that the original's "soul" or "true essence" or whatever consciousness that exists in your meat sack body truly was reincarnated? The show never actually shows anything resembling proof that they have this down. It's all science, yet it's science that reads more like recording a person's consciousness while their alive than copying that and transferring the digital copy into a new meat suit. Despite their advanced tech humanity still hasn't confirmed or defined what a soul truly is. What a mind state truly is in question here, and they haven't shown they can confirm exactly what they're doing with a consciousness.
The $5 million dollar question is - how would you know that the you that woke up was the real you, or a simulated copy who has all your memories? Whatever the answer has separate results - one is the real you, the other isn't, they merely think they are you.
Regarding technological advancement. While not as drastic as say 1900 - 2000. Over 100 years pass between the first and third book and by the third book the needlecast backup takes place every few seconds not every 48 hours. And it's something mercs can afford (or atleast highly modified and skilled mercs who chase bounties on rouge ai controlled military bots.) The Sleeve customizations are also more advanced.
In the context of the show and I'll admit this is largely speculation. But I got the impression the wealth gap has seriously increased. Outside of maybe the cops and the workers at Psychasec and the Wei clinic there doesn't seem to be a middle class as we would know it. I get the feeling the "More then most people earn in a lifetime" price tag on cloned Sleeves would be fairly achievable on an equivalent modern salary.
Like I can't even do anything but stare at Will Yun Lee and Dichen Lachman whenever they're on-screen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
This may be changed in the show (I've only read the first book), but in the book I think its pretty specifically pointed out that most people have to essentially live their whole lives to save up the money to get resleeved, and that people tend to not do it more than once because a) you have to save a good deal, and b) growing old kinda sucks. So they just decided to heck with it, they don't want to go through that again.
It is exactly like something out of one of many tabletop games that I've played and I love it.
Do... Re... Mi... So... Fa.... Do... Re.... Do...
Forget it...
Didn't they also mentioned that was an old problem that had been largely solved?
only if you can afford a clone of the body you are in already. iirc
We still have food taboos and religious restrictions based on contamination issues that were solved a century ago. There would be a long lag between solving a problem and everyone getting comfortable with it, especially when the majority of people who could afford to body-hop are self-obsessed immortals.
The Emissaries took a completely different approach and basically avoided it. Other folks seemed to only rarely use other bodies with even meths sticking to clones of themselves.
Its also a thing in the books that people have to live a full lifespan each time if they are not a meth. Like get a clone copy at 20 and having to live until you die at 90. Meaning you have to spend 40 years with a plus 50 body. It apparently takes a toll on the psyche and a lot do what Ortega's grandmother does and only sleeve up for special occasions after the second go around.
So most people are used to seeing people in only one sleve.