Identity and the Mind/Body Dichotomy
Oct. 31st, 2005 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuOne of the first pieces of fanfic I ever read--though I read it as a professionally published, authorized media tie-in, was The Price of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. It was a Star Trek novel. I didn't recognize it as fanfic at the time (this was in 1978 or thereabout) except in the sense that clearly fans had written a Trek novel and gotten it published. In retrospect, it displayed a number of classic fanfic tropes--the slashy subtext, a lot of hurt/comfort stuff, to name two of them. I've heard and seen it viciously attacked as awful stuff, classic fanfic (in the worst possible way), etc. And there's some truth to that.
And yet, it's still one of my all-time favorite Star Trek novels. The authors didn't hesitate to make changes to the characters, to describe events that would forever alter the Star Trek universe. They clearly showed us a loving (in the non-slashy sense) relationship between Kirk and Spock (and McCoy), a sense of recognition between men who had struggled hard to become the men they were and could recognize what that often solitary struggle had cost each of them, and respect it even when they disagreed. They (the authors) created a villain who was truly villainous, but still admirable in his own way.
They also explored the concept of identity very thoroughly. The villain, you see, had achieved immortality. Using a variation of the transporter technology, he could create a perfect duplicate of anyone. Not a clone, not a robot, not a shape-changing alien, no tricks--a second copy of anyone, as real and as valuable as the original, indistinguishable from the original, in fact. Death need not be permanent any longer. If a loved one died, he could be recreated. So the question becomes: what price would you pay for this phoenix? Would you sell your soul? Your sacred honor?
And what happens if you wind up with TWO Jim Kirks? Each as real as the other, and each as devoted to the life he leads? Which one gets to keep his job as Captain of the Enterprise? Which one has to find another life? How do you choose? How do THEY choose?
But as troublesome as those questions are, a duplicate Kirk is still Jim Kirk. Same mind, same body. What if you can swap one mind into another body?
Which brings me to Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies by Richard Morgan. In these novels, every human being is implanted at birht with a cortical stack, a tiny device at the base of the skull, which maintains a complete copy of your mind and personality. If you are killed, the stack can be retrieved and your mind downloaded into a new sleeve (body). Of course, stacks can be lost or destroyed--sometimes on purpose. So the very rich and powerful, have their stacks regularly backed up in offsite repositories.
The very wealthy or well-connected can also have their minds sleeved into clones of their original body, or custom-tailored bodies. Mercenaries can be sleeved in bodies engineered for combat. If you're not so fortunate or well-connected, you take what you can get--generally the bodies of people convicted of crimes who've been socked away in storage for a few decades.
In the world of Altered Carbon, our hero (Takeshi Kovacs) is a former UN "Envoy" (read: stormtrooper). They're trained to be transmitted (there is FTL comm but no FTL travel) to colony worlds, decanted into a body, go underground and bring recalcitrant colonies into line via assassination, sabotage, insurrection, whatever is necessary. Their training is essentially all mental (it would have to be, if you think about it), making them all the equivalent of Hannibal Lector when it comes to reading people, manipulating them and achieving their goals at any cost. Kovacs, more than most, takes the complete separation of mind and body for granted. In one novel, he and a group of allies all go to work in a highly dangerous, highly radioactive environment. They take medications to stave off the worst effects of radiation sickness, but the fact that it will kill them all is irrelevant--they'll finish the job and resleeve. Simple.
It's a fascinating world, where there's death and then there's death. Most of the time, death is an inconvenience. Bad luck or serious malice can make it permanent (unless you're fantastically wealthy and can afford remote backups), but generally speaking, you can expect to survive even your worst mistakes. It's probably no more plausible in the real world than Star Trek's transporter-based immortality. Maybe even less.
Some magical Trek-like duplicating technology might be able create a perfect twin of you. But while the idea of being able to survive death via a cortical stack seems appealing (ignoring, for the moment, the question of whether it's _really_ you or just a copy that's very grateful that the original dead you arranged it), I suspect it's based on a false premise. The more I learn about how the brain works, the more convinced I am that the brain/body dichotomy is an illusion. You aren't some elaborate bit of biological software running on a meat computer which can be saved and then loaded into anothe meat computer. You ARE the meat computer. The meat computer is you. Tamper with the meat computer, or let it go haywire, and your essential "you"-ness can change beyond recognition.
There will be no handy backup technology. Which kinda sucks. (But then, I could be wrong. "Someday computers will weigh less than five tons" and all that....)
And yet, it's still one of my all-time favorite Star Trek novels. The authors didn't hesitate to make changes to the characters, to describe events that would forever alter the Star Trek universe. They clearly showed us a loving (in the non-slashy sense) relationship between Kirk and Spock (and McCoy), a sense of recognition between men who had struggled hard to become the men they were and could recognize what that often solitary struggle had cost each of them, and respect it even when they disagreed. They (the authors) created a villain who was truly villainous, but still admirable in his own way.
They also explored the concept of identity very thoroughly. The villain, you see, had achieved immortality. Using a variation of the transporter technology, he could create a perfect duplicate of anyone. Not a clone, not a robot, not a shape-changing alien, no tricks--a second copy of anyone, as real and as valuable as the original, indistinguishable from the original, in fact. Death need not be permanent any longer. If a loved one died, he could be recreated. So the question becomes: what price would you pay for this phoenix? Would you sell your soul? Your sacred honor?
And what happens if you wind up with TWO Jim Kirks? Each as real as the other, and each as devoted to the life he leads? Which one gets to keep his job as Captain of the Enterprise? Which one has to find another life? How do you choose? How do THEY choose?
But as troublesome as those questions are, a duplicate Kirk is still Jim Kirk. Same mind, same body. What if you can swap one mind into another body?
Which brings me to Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies by Richard Morgan. In these novels, every human being is implanted at birht with a cortical stack, a tiny device at the base of the skull, which maintains a complete copy of your mind and personality. If you are killed, the stack can be retrieved and your mind downloaded into a new sleeve (body). Of course, stacks can be lost or destroyed--sometimes on purpose. So the very rich and powerful, have their stacks regularly backed up in offsite repositories.
The very wealthy or well-connected can also have their minds sleeved into clones of their original body, or custom-tailored bodies. Mercenaries can be sleeved in bodies engineered for combat. If you're not so fortunate or well-connected, you take what you can get--generally the bodies of people convicted of crimes who've been socked away in storage for a few decades.
In the world of Altered Carbon, our hero (Takeshi Kovacs) is a former UN "Envoy" (read: stormtrooper). They're trained to be transmitted (there is FTL comm but no FTL travel) to colony worlds, decanted into a body, go underground and bring recalcitrant colonies into line via assassination, sabotage, insurrection, whatever is necessary. Their training is essentially all mental (it would have to be, if you think about it), making them all the equivalent of Hannibal Lector when it comes to reading people, manipulating them and achieving their goals at any cost. Kovacs, more than most, takes the complete separation of mind and body for granted. In one novel, he and a group of allies all go to work in a highly dangerous, highly radioactive environment. They take medications to stave off the worst effects of radiation sickness, but the fact that it will kill them all is irrelevant--they'll finish the job and resleeve. Simple.
It's a fascinating world, where there's death and then there's death. Most of the time, death is an inconvenience. Bad luck or serious malice can make it permanent (unless you're fantastically wealthy and can afford remote backups), but generally speaking, you can expect to survive even your worst mistakes. It's probably no more plausible in the real world than Star Trek's transporter-based immortality. Maybe even less.
Some magical Trek-like duplicating technology might be able create a perfect twin of you. But while the idea of being able to survive death via a cortical stack seems appealing (ignoring, for the moment, the question of whether it's _really_ you or just a copy that's very grateful that the original dead you arranged it), I suspect it's based on a false premise. The more I learn about how the brain works, the more convinced I am that the brain/body dichotomy is an illusion. You aren't some elaborate bit of biological software running on a meat computer which can be saved and then loaded into anothe meat computer. You ARE the meat computer. The meat computer is you. Tamper with the meat computer, or let it go haywire, and your essential "you"-ness can change beyond recognition.
There will be no handy backup technology. Which kinda sucks. (But then, I could be wrong. "Someday computers will weigh less than five tons" and all that....)
