Uploading and the Teleportation Problem

Have you played the game SOMA? It does the implicit horror of uploading well, IMO.

The idea of 'uploading the consciousness' hinges on the conception that the mind is software running on computing substrate (the brain). This view is flawed, IMO. The mind is an emergent quality of the brain itself. It can't be separated, because it's not a distinct entity. Copied, maybe, if your story's tech is magic enough, but that's where you run into the problem that you point out: the copy isn't you. Even if the original is destroyed in the process, it still isn't.

You are the continuity of experience of a single, physical central nervous system, and if it goes you go. The copy is an imposter, and if he gets to have my memories and also be immortal and get awesome virtual powers, well then f$@k that guy. I'm meddling with his upload to induce crippling existential copy-angst.

I get around it in the WIP by making it that the mind can't be uploaded from the substrate, but the substrate itself can be altered in any way. made more durable, taken out of a biological body and put in storage or another physical body, etc. Robert Reed does this in his Great Ship books, where people have replaced their brains with indestructible ceramic versions of the same, making them basically immortal.

I looooove the Takeshi Kovacs series (first book is a bit shaky, but the others are brilliant, albeit a bit slow to start).

It portrays so exquisitely how messy people would continue to be within such a high tech reality (e.g. fretting about whether your parents can afford a "resleeve" as they get older, deadbeat-dads coming out of prison in a new body and simply walking past the family who is waiting for them, mobsters uploading an enemy's mind into an animal's body to drive them insane, rich kids driving hoverbikes at 300mph wearing only flip-flops and spray-on bikini because they can afford a new body if they kill the one they're in. It's wildly futuristic and yet so gloriously human.)

It also brings up, in the reader's mind, all the weird philosophical questions that the characters themselves never think about because this world is the one they take for granted. For example, at one point, the main character gets uploaded into two bodies, and while the reader is thinking, "Whoa! So which one is him? Or are all his iterations just computer copies of a guy who's dead now?", the character himself is mainly thinking that whoever did this sure is breaking some serious laws. He doesn't have any existential crisis; beaming into a new body is completely pedestrian to him.

Albedo said:

Have you played the game SOMA? It does the implicit horror of uploading well, IMO.

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I'm glad you mentioned this. It was something I was thinking of suggesting myself, but since it was a game... But yeah, quite impressive what they did it, one of the better narratives in a game in recent years, I was both surprised and impressed with it. Also rendered into a quivering heap of Jell-O from time to time.

James PatrickKelly's "Think Like a Dinosaur" deals with some aspects of this issue. (Not, as I recall, from a body-horror perspective.)

jjdebenedictis said:

I looooove the Takeshi Kovacs series (first book is a bit shaky, but the others are brilliant, albeit a bit slow to start).

It portrays so exquisitely how messy people would continue to be within such a high tech reality (e.g. fretting about whether your parents can afford a "resleeve" as they get older, deadbeat-dads coming out of prison in a new body and simply walking past the family who is waiting for them, mobsters uploading an enemy's mind into an animal's body to drive them insane, rich kids driving hoverbikes at 300mph wearing only flip-flops and spray-on bikini because they can afford a new body if they kill the one they're in. It's wildly futuristic and yet so gloriously human.)

It also brings up, in the reader's mind, all the weird philosophical questions that the characters themselves never think about because this world is the one they take for granted. For example, at one point, the main character gets uploaded into two bodies, and while the reader is thinking, "Whoa! So which one is him? Or are all his iterations just computer copies of a guy who's dead now?", the character himself is mainly thinking that whoever did this sure is breaking some serious laws. He doesn't have any existential crisis; beaming into a new body is completely pedestrian to him.

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Yeah, the society Richard Morgan created was pretty bleak. The inequity was startling: the technology to preserve people's minds in the event of body death was so cheap that everyone had it: unfortunately, not everyone could afford a new body. I remember the buckets of memory chips belonging to dead soldiers that no-one knew what to do with. The Takeshi Kovacs books have got to be the darkest space opera setting I've ever read, and they don't even have any universe-threatening horror elements at all, just people being shit to one another.

Shoeless said:

I'm glad you mentioned this. It was something I was thinking of suggesting myself, but since it was a game... But yeah, quite impressive what they did it, one of the better narratives in a game in recent years, I was both surprised and impressed with it. Also rendered into a quivering heap of Jell-O from time to time.

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Decent game, and a great story. It was deeply philosophical science fiction disguised as a survival horror game. In fact the survival horror elements were almost superfluous to what made it so compelling.

Did you turn yourself off at the halfway point?

Albedo said:

Did you turn yourself off at the halfway point?

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I did. Seemed like the merciful thing to do, so I didn't debate it for very long.

Honestly? Uploading is a creepy yet fascinating subject I want to explore sometime. What happens in those incidents? Is it the real person or simply a copy and can other memories be uploaded into another person? (That would make a fascinating mystery, someone uploading memories of a murder to another person).

It's also kind of freaky. My clone gets to take my place and everyone goes on. Do feelings carry over as well? Can that clone become its own person?

I'm going to go look into the books you guys mentioned.

I'm kinda playing with something like this with my android character Sally. She was essentially made at first to be the daughter that the scientist who created her never really got to have, and was uploaded with a bunch of real memories from the scientist's actual daughter (who only ended up being five before she died), plus a load of fabricated memories to "make up for lost time" as she would have been ten by the time the scientist had finished her work. While Sally did eventually find out she was a robot, she never really ended up forgetting those memories, and still has a hard time telling which ones are her own, the original Sally's, or memories fabricated by the scientist.

I've also played with this idea a little differently with the Ios, a species of sentient machines. When they were first created, their creators used some of their own uploaded memories to teach their new robots how to properly function within society. Many centuries later, after their creators were long gone, they still used a lot of these uploaded memories as templates to help generate new Ios. While some Ios still have trouble telling memories apart, much like Sally, many just see these as fragments of the past, never to be forgotten, but not something to dwell too much on.

Also, as Albedo mentioned SOMA earlier, I find it interesting that most of the personalities uploaded usually ended up going absolutely nuts, and that Simon, only stayed sane because he was walking around in a, well, a corpse, but it still looked and felt to him like a human body. Not only that, but when he uploaded his consciousness to a new body, the old body and its consciousness were still there. Makes that ending really hit hard too, the thought that a copy of you is going on, but not you. Hell, the whole game is like that, and it's still freaky and confusing and just... breathe Metal Arm, breathe! So yeah, both a neat concept, and fucking terrifying when you get down into the nitty-gritty of it all.

Mur Laffterty's "Six Wakes" delves pretty deeply into concepts along these lines.

The main characters are all clones whose consciousness is transferred repeatedly from one body to the next. Are they really the same person? What if the upload is "hacked" or if you upload from an old file or upload two copies at the same time? When our book club read it, we rapidly dissolved into arguments about what makes up personhood and identity.

Fun stuff.

Maybe I have some kind of obsession with this. My current Bobiverse series deals with the upload scenario--it's central to the plot, as the protagonist in the series is an uploaded copy of Bob Johansson, who gets killed off in the first chapter.

My next book, Singularity Trap (currently in edits) deals with a guy who gets infested with nanites that gradually replace him with a metal version. So that's the "continuity" option.

Albedo said:

The idea of 'uploading the consciousness' hinges on the conception that the mind is software running on computing substrate (the brain). This view is flawed, IMO. The mind is an emergent quality of the brain itself. It can't be separated, because it's not a distinct entity.

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I very much agree with this, and personally would upgrade "flawed" to "untrue".
SF has used the 'upload-mind' trope for a long time, and in general has dealt with human consciousness really badly. IMO this is because we're still wedded to the idea of a separable spirit inside a person.

Kjbartolotta said:

Whenever I think of cloning and uploading, I'm reminded of Fifth Head of Cerberus, which I'm going to not spoiler in case some of your haven't read it. Great book for an AW bookclub, btw. Just sayin'.

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Another Wolfe fan!

Albedo said:

This view is flawed, IMO. The mind is an emergent quality of the brain itself. It can't be separated, because it's not a distinct entity. Copied, maybe, if your story's tech is magic enough, but that's where you run into the problem that you point out: the copy isn't you. Even if the original is destroyed in the process, it still isn't.

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To what extent has this been proven? And I'm not being argumentative, just curious about the science.

shortstorymachinist said:

To what extent has this been proven? And I'm not being argumentative, just curious about the science.

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Good question. For proof, not sure, because human consciousness is really a nascent field of study, and opinions on it are bound to be wrapped up in philosophy. What convinces me, though, is that identity seems to be distributed. What I mean by that is, take for example of someone who after a stroke develops asomatognosia: where they suddenly stop recognising a limb or another part of their body as part of them. You can show them that their limb is part of them and they can recognise logically that it is, but they'll still deny up and down that it's their arm. What that suggests to me is that the part of self-identity that says "I have a limb and this is it" is contained to a particular part of the brain, that can be physically damaged, with the loss of that part of identity. Ergo, the mind arises from all the different parts of the brain working together. It's not software that can be duplicated in another brain or a model of a brain in a computer. The mind is the brain.

This topic feels like it was meant for my sci-fi novel! I loved the Takeshi Kovacs novels, but I kept asking myself what that 'sleeving' technology would have been like when it was first being developed, and eventually this question nagged at me hard enough that I wrote The Immortality Game. I like playing with the ideas of immortality through digitalization, even though I believe the person isn't truly the same, though he or she may feel mostly the same. So my book could very well be viewed as a far distant prequel to the Takeshi Kovacs books.

shortstorymachinist said:

To what extent has this been proven? And I'm not being argumentative, just curious about the science.

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Check out the work of Nicholas Humphrey.

This is a subject close to my heart. My most recently published novel (Outside) deals almost entirely with an uploaded society, which meant that I had to grapple with many of the things you mention above. I went with the "complex software running on organic hardware" vision of what the mind is. I chose this path not because the scientific study of the actual upload process isn't interesting--it is--but because what I was really interested in writing about was the society, and how it would work, under what rules, and what restrictions were needed to keep it running smoothly.

My debut novel (Siege) also contained uploaders (as the bad guys this time) so I had to do a lot of thinking about what motivated them not only to become uploaders, but also to wage a territorial war which might seem completely useless for that particular kind of society. This one was made easier by the fact that I'd already written Outside when writing Siege, so I had some of the initial thoughts already organized (the books sold to publishers in the inverse order to that in which I wrote them).

My uploaders seem to work reasonably well and form stable societies. For a dystopian version, I'd recommend reading Alastair Reynolds' take (in the Revelation Space novels). They're a minor plot point, but so believable under the assumption that it won't work out how everyone thinks it will!

I touched on it slightly in Outside, but it's a fascinating topic which deserves a much deeper look. I can easily imagine a holy war against this kind of tech... but I can also imagine a smart and flexible religion being an early adopter and being able to dictarte just what kind of a world people get uploaded onto! Fertile ground here.

Kjbartolotta said:

Every story I've read including uploading tends to depict the religious response to that technology as Crazy Fundy Islamic/Christian Morons, hate progress. But sci-fi tends to have a hard time with not oversimplifying religion.

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I think perhaps you've oversimplified religion.

Look, in this case, as in most, there'd be three types of reactions, whether you're talking Christian, Muslim, or other:
1) All for it, or at least see it as a good, positive thing.
2) Meh.
3) Horrible, horrible, indication of the end-times, invention of the devil, must be stopped.

Guess which group we'll hear from the most?

It's not at all an oversimplification to think that some religious people will go apeshit. From Falwell and Tinky-Winky's purse, to diatribes on everything from Halloween to Meditation, to Wesboro vs pretty much everyone and everything, it's a simple fact that there exists a subset of nutcakes who can be depended upon to react in the most vocal, negative, and ludicrous way. That brush doesn't tar all Christians, though, any more than another wack-job running people down tars all Muslims.