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Neddy Seagoon posted:Read the second part of your own quote; Sure, I’m saying that it’s not portrayed in the books as being a hard-assed questioning under normal circumstances. He lumps it in with baby showers and engagement announcements, ffs. When they are Ascertaining Quell/Mikita, yeah, it gets intense, but you don’t get the impression you are peppering gramma with trick questions. Getting a new sleeve for common people is a pretty happy and momentous occasion, so there’s a party and reminiscing to make sure the person is who they say they are but everybody pretty much knows because it’s been planned for weeks and half the family went to the clinic with her and then drove the new sleeve home. Most people aren’t criminals or famous revolutionaries back from the dead so it’s a fun little formality. Yeah, there’s probably some dick who asks a bunch of penetrating questions, just like there’s some jerk at the housewarming who has to say something about termites.
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Feb 11, 2018 10:05
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Just out of earnest curiosity, which complaints did you find weak? A lot of complaints boil down to "it was different in the book". It's not really a criticism and it is not important to know what stacks are supposed to look like or how Reaper really works. Similarly, if the show has changed who the Envoys were or what Bancroft is like as a person then it might be worth thinking about what that might mean.
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Feb 11, 2018 12:01
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I think Ascertainment is mostly for the emotional wellbeing of the friends and family. If well‐heeled interests wanted to impersonate your friend, they would use a clone or just do a little grand theft sleeve and never be subject to the heightened scrutiny a new sleeve would get. If they needed to know answers to obscure personal questions, they could throw your loved one into virtual and torture the answers out.
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Feb 11, 2018 12:16
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Lt. Danger posted:A lot of complaints boil down to "it was different in the book". It's not really a criticism and it is not important to know what stacks are supposed to look like or how Reaper really works. Similarly, if the show has changed who the Envoys were or what Bancroft is like as a person then it might be worth thinking about what that might mean. The problem is the series wants to have its cake and eat it too by following the original story but having its own history. Now, changes are fine, and they're part of any adaptation, but what is changed still has to make sense in relation to what's built upon in the original version or it just creates contradictions and plot holes. Altered Carbon is not that complex a story (fundamenetally speaking), and a lot of the big parts they rewrote were just needlessly arbitrary. Not to mention generally contradict other existing parts or raise big dumb questions that didn't need to exist. Not to mention it often comes in the form of generic low-grade television drama cliches that are so old they can legally drink, or outright-terrible writing that shouldn't have passed the first script draft. Calling the flashback episode a bad young-adult novel is bang on the money. There are plenty of angles for exploration in an adaptation, and the series admittedly has a few good ones as standalone vignettes outside of the actual plot (Skinhead Grandma and Día de Muertos, for example). It also does a decent job of expanding the secondary cast with characters that are bit players in the book just to give Kovacs people to bounce off of. But it also has bad habits like forgetting the basic premise of the setting and RD'ing every single goddamn character that dies as cheap drama when Real Death is supposed to be something you rarely see happen. Resleeve and replace them with a new actor, deal with these changes. It's part of the basic premise of Altered Carbon and a means to explore it outside of Kovacs' Envoy handling of it. Platystemon posted:I think Ascertainment is mostly for the emotional wellbeing of the friends and family. You're not thinking street-crime, which generally goes as follows; jump someone in the street, drag them into a back-alley clinic with a black-market sleeving setup. Walk to their home in their sleeve and see how far you can get with stealing their valuables. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Feb 11, 2018 |
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Feb 11, 2018 12:29
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Lt. Danger posted:A lot of complaints boil down to "it was different in the book". It's not really a criticism and it is not important to know what stacks are supposed to look like or how Reaper really works. Similarly, if the show has changed who the Envoys were or what Bancroft is like as a person then it might be worth thinking about what that might mean. I do get what you’re saying, but a lot of the “it was different in the book” are divergences that fundamentally change the narrative. I understand that some things need to change when transitioning to visual medium. Backstory is compressed, plot elements combined, certain subplots removed or changed altogether, I get that. But some of the changes made are baffling and inept. The most bizarre to me is Is changing the Envoys to some militant, hippy Jedis. To top it off, they were a rebellion localized to a single planet. All of them were apparently wiped out except Kovacs. 2 centuries later, other than *maybe* a Meth with a penchant for another planets history, who on a completely different planet going to even know enough to be as scared of an Envoy as some seem to be? It’s done for no reason other than to shoehorn Quellcrist directly into the story (and don’t get me started on her portrayal). It would have been far better to leave Envoy’s as they were. The ultimate Big Stick of the UN Protectorate. Individuals who are so dangerous and effective they’re used to quickly and completely overthrow local governments. A group that is still in use and known, so that when an Envoy actually shows up it’s time for some pants-wetting terror based on their reputation through all of Protectorate Space. lovely forest Jedis of the past from a distant planet just don’t have the same cachet. The least consequential is Kovacs with the backpack full of chems. Not in the book, but it was amusing. Same with abuela. There’s a whole spectrum in between those two that vary in terms amusing/clever to annoyance. Don’t get me wrong. In general, despite ep 7 and other glaring flaws, I *liked* the show. It’s just there’s a lot of mis-steps and inexplicable changes that keep it from being truly great. Also, there’s frustration that because of this they’ve completely hosed themselves in making any kind of decent adaptation of the other two books. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Feb 11, 2018 |
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Feb 11, 2018 13:00
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Kazy posted:This show was neat, but I wish it dealt with the problem of Continuity. I mean, if you can make a copy of you, what's to say that you die for real and resleeving isn't just copying them? You should play SOMA. (The shorter answer is that in a physical, causally closed universe there's no difference between copying and moving.)
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Feb 11, 2018 16:39
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honestly I really want to know why the gently caress netflix shows don't just drop but go into freefall after 6 or 7 episodes Reileen got more atrocious as a villain as it went on and the story suddenly got a massive generalized case of the stupid. I am curious to know how it develops in the book, because it was such a hard switch that I went wtf considering all the plot points that were presented so far. The story was at its finest when it kept itself focused on Bancroft's investigation and putting the pieces together of his suicide, plot moved along with a nice pace and was engaging The beginning was solid, cyberpunk is all about clichés and exaggeration because the future the genre portrays is "ridiculous" to our eyes (that ofc was after-the-fact genre convention because while Gibson was quite intentional to have a noir effect, others didn't quite have his literary chops so welp), so you can be pulpy without problems unless the author forgets the why of it. Then bam, tonal shift (ep7) all that exaggeration becomes massively idiotic and viewer whiplash is an actual thing that I learned that exists during that stretch Given the book/series comparisons posted here, I think the screenwriters massively hosed up the translation by putting tonal shifts that make no sense at all (such as Reileen's massive inconsistency in her treatment of Kovacs) or totally changing the context of things that imho make for a better storyline (Quellcrist being hippie revolutionary/anti-immortality/Kovacs' lover was dumb at first, but after reading how was it in the book I really do not know why make such adaptations, audiences wouldn't follow or sympathize with it? overall I am curious to see where it goes and wasn't a waste of time at all, just missed opportunities and a feeling of failed to deliver
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Feb 11, 2018 16:48
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I would say that Netflix has proved that 10 episodes is precisely the worst length for a series. But then Defenders was only 8.
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Feb 11, 2018 16:52
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Lt. Danger posted:A lot of complaints boil down to "it was different in the book". It's not really a criticism and it is not important to know what stacks are supposed to look like or how Reaper really works. Similarly, if the show has changed who the Envoys were or what Bancroft is like as a person then it might be worth thinking about what that might mean. This pretty much tallies with my thoughts. I've not read the book and I found that the premise worked pretty well. I preferred the early episodes as they were noir-ish, but like with the expanse, I could live with the change in tone and genre as it moved on. Quell worked well as a sort of muse and only causes problems if you were expecting the book. I preferred the old Kovacs to the new one - Kinneman seems to struggle with acting. I might have also said 'urgh, really?' when the ninja turned up.
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Feb 11, 2018 16:53
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General Battuta posted:You should play SOMA. (The shorter answer is that in a physical, causally closed universe there's no difference between copying and moving.) To the outside observer certainly, to the internal chronicle of you, not so much. But it isn't like the version of you that is a continuation of your conscious life can say otherwise, because it not longer exists.
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Feb 11, 2018 16:56
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Collateral posted:To the outside observer certainly, to the internal chronicle of you, not so much. But it isn't like the version of you that is a continuation of your conscious life can say otherwise, because it not longer exists. It's actually the opposite - the internal chronicle of you is far less disrupted by a fork operation than outside observers (who can see, for example, that you've been on ice for 250 years and then woke up in a new body). To the subjective first-person qualia, the, 'I', there's no change, at least until you get some sensory evidence you're in a new place. SOMA handles this really well.
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Feb 11, 2018 17:46
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General Battuta posted:It's actually the opposite - the internal chronicle of you is far less disrupted by a fork operation than outside observers (who can see, for example, that you've been on ice for 250 years and then woke up in a new body). To the subjective first-person qualia, the, 'I', there's no change, at least until you get some sensory evidence you're in a new place. SOMA handles this really well. SOMA's greatest strength is making the main character an idiot. It could easily have been a bunch of dry philosophical wanking, but instead it sharpened their focus onto the subjective vs objective bit. SOMA owns.
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Feb 11, 2018 17:51
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Proteus Jones posted:Don’t get me wrong. In general, despite ep 7 and other glaring flaws, I *liked* the show. It’s just there’s a lot of mis-steps and inexplicable changes that keep it from being truly great. Also, there’s frustration that because of this they’ve completely hosed themselves in making any kind of decent adaptation of the other two books. Plus would be challenging since the rest of the books have a big tone shift to being military syfy.
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Feb 11, 2018 18:43
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etalian posted:Plus would be challenging since the rest of the books have a big tone shift to being military syfy. I'd say that only holds true for Broken Angels. Woken Furies is much more a Shadowrun-esque tale, the deComs being pretty much RPG parties.
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Feb 11, 2018 18:50
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Some of you guys seem to miss that in the show the Quell rebellion isn't a Harlan's World issue that happened centuries ago. The show changed it to being an actual uprising against the Protectorate with fights on various planets and it's secret base on Harlan's World. In the show Envoys aren't just some backwater Shays' Rebellion, they're a bunch of crazy super guerillas who took on the Protectorate, won a lot, and almost ended immortality. Whether or not that works with the other two books I don't know. However a lot of complaints about the changes are that the changes don't make sense because they're in conflict with the thing they changed. Reaper doesn't work like that in the books, ok but it does work like that in the show and there has yet to be an inconstancy due to the change. Changing the Quell rebels to Envoys similarly seems to only really be a big issue in that the show and book Quell rebellions are vastly different in scale and philosophy. The books probably are better, books usually are. However a lot of the complaints are less about how things don't work in the universe of the show, rather how the adaptation changes conflict with the books.
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Feb 11, 2018 22:20
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Tiggum posted:Because you are the stack. It replaces the brain and is the only part of you that is actually you. The body is just like clothes. Not really. You're the code in the stack. That's why you can be backed up from your stack into a massive cloud, even remotely and automatically if you're filthy rich. That way if the stack gets destroyed, you can be restored from a backup, but of course you lose any memories and experiences you gained between the time of the backup and when the "original" you died. The code can even be written to multiple stacks at once if you have the means, although that is considered illegal as hell. But Kazy raises a very interesting point. When all that is You can be distilled down to digital data and transferred from container to container, stored in digital clouds when needed and beamed across vast distances, what does "being You" even mean? When your entire being can be reduced to digital data, any modern notions of intangible souls and whatnot fly right out the window: we know exactly what you are, and with CTRL-X/CTRL-V we can transfer all of it from one folder to another. You're just essentially bits, and when these bits get copied (or even just outright transferred) off one storage media to the other, does the ethereal Youness transfer with them, or do you, as Kazy says, "die" and just get copied as a new set of identical bits in another container. You're still identical to the original down to the last bit, but you're still unquestionably a copy. Note that this is a philosophical question, and there probably isn't a correct answer for it. But it's a fun thought exercise. Gyges posted:However a lot of the complaints are less about how things don't work in the universe of the show, rather how the adaptation changes conflict with the books. Sure sure, but that's because many of the changes (in fact I'd say most of them) are real bad compared to the originals, and like Neddy Seagoon says, introduce unnecessary plot holes and conflicts into the story. If the changes were good and actually improved the story, I don't think many of us would be complaining. Shaman Tank Spec fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Feb 11, 2018 |
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Feb 11, 2018 22:34
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dead comedy forums posted:honestly I really want to know why the gently caress netflix shows don't just drop but go into freefall after 6 or 7 episodes Book Reileen had a brief, previous professional relationship with Kovacs. She manipulates Bancroft to bring him in because she knows she can force him to abort the investigation, and once he does what she wants she pretty much loses all interest in him until he shows up pointing a gun in her face. Like most of the other posters, I'm fine with them making major changes and even prefer it, as long as it's logically-consistent. I got bored with GoT season 1 because it was so true to the first book that I knew everything that was going to happen. But a lot of the "logic on vacation" moments in the second half of AC are the result of the show writers overhauling the book motivation of characters but not their book actions, causing a lot of painful incongruities that they tried to gloss over in the last 3 episodes. e.g. Reileen having closely watched Kovacs through a series of minor characters would have been a neat episode-ender, except that it made no loving sense given that her self-proclaimed reason for bringing him to Earth was to reunite with him and he had every reason to love and trust her upon his arrival before her henchmen nearly killed him 8 times and he stumbled on her child snuff ring.
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Feb 11, 2018 22:50
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Der Shovel posted:When your entire being can be reduced to digital data, any modern notions of intangible souls and whatnot fly right out the window: we know exactly what you are, and with CTRL-X/CTRL-V we can transfer all of it from one folder to another. You're just essentially bits, and when these bits get copied (or even just outright transferred) off one storage media to the other, does the ethereal Youness transfer with them, or do you, as Kazy says, "die" and just get copied as a new set of identical bits in another container. You're still identical to the original down to the last bit, but you're still unquestionably a copy. There is only one correct answer in a causally closed, physical universe - you don't die, you are the same You, and identity is composed only of patterns of Shannon information encoded in a substrate. Death occurs when your mind state cannot propagate itself forward in time by its own rules. Death does not occur if these criteria aren't met. It's not a philosophical question but a physical one, since there is no ether, and matter cannot be 'assigned' to one mind or another - a proton is just a proton. This is, not coincidentally, the attitude taken by everyone in Altered Carbon.
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Feb 11, 2018 23:34
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If you want inconsistencies, lets start with Kovacs. He's an ex-Envoy veteran with PTSD and an anti-authority streak derived from being raised by a lovely father. Being an Envoy means he's very good at reading and manipulating people (generally by being a loud rear end in a top hat to deliberately provoke them) but that doesn't preclude not treating people like friends if they're not part of his end-goals. Series Kovacs... is just generic broody Vampire With A Past. He doesn't need anyone and is just manipulating people because he says he is repeatedly  . He tells them he doesn't understand emotions because he's Cool Broody Guy, except that's kinda a pre-requisite for mamipulating them.
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Feb 12, 2018 01:09
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Gyges posted:The books probably are better, books usually are. However a lot of the complaints are less about how things don't work in the universe of the show, rather how the adaptation changes conflict with the books. Well it's disappointing that they took one of the best parts of the books, Kovac's multibook transformation from sociopathic petty thief with an authority problem into a reluctant but loyal anti-capitalist freedom fighter through personal experience of the excesses of empire, and compressed it down into one bad flashback to YA Novel Island. They decided they needed a 'family' theme to engage viewers and humanize Kovacs, and the process of shoehorning it into the story cut out a lot of the thematic heart of the original work and much of what actually humanizes an initially very inhumane character.
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Feb 12, 2018 03:54
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So I finished watching the series, and I'm of the opinion that the show is better than the book. I also feel the same way about Game of Thrones, to give you a perspective. I think the major changes from the book, for the most part, were beneficial for the medium and made the narrative tighter. Based off of some reviews I've seen, Richard Morgan was pretty involved with the series. According to IMDB he earned a writing credit on 5 of the episodes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2261227/fullcredits Beyond Blade Runner, this is some of the best cyperpunk put to film. I'm really interested in season 2, and with the author's continued involvement, I'm confident that the changes from the book won't sabotage adaptations of the sequels.
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Feb 12, 2018 04:34
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General Battuta posted:You should play SOMA. (The shorter answer is that in a physical, causally closed universe there's no difference between copying and moving.) Uhhhh that was absolutely NOT the conclusion of SOMA. In fact the big thing in SOMA was highlighting that copying IS NOT moving. Did you play the same game I did? Its the difference between being re-sleeved and being double-sleeved. In SOMA you leave behind your past self, still conscious. Anyways the whole "continuity" thing is fun philosophy but Altered Carbon exists in a world where society has accepted that moving your downloaded consciousness into a new body doesn't effectively count as dead. You can believe whatever you want, but its totally reasonable to have a fictional society that believes that. They don't "have to" address it. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 04:44
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Just to clarify, I don't think the series was without fault. One of the issues is that adaptations of cyberpunk usually turn out bad, so in comparison to say, Johnny Mnemonic, Altered Carbon was pretty drat good.
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Feb 12, 2018 04:46
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Any murmurs of a sequel yet?
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Feb 12, 2018 04:48
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Dahbadu posted:Just to clarify, I don't think the series was without fault. One of the issues is that adaptations of cyberpunk usually turn out bad, so in comparison to say, Johnny Mnemonic, Altered Carbon was pretty drat good. Hey, Johnny Mnemonic rules!
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Feb 12, 2018 04:49
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Zaphod42 posted:Hey, Johnny Mnemonic rules! I liked the movie too, to be honest. 
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Feb 12, 2018 04:53
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Zaphod42 posted:Uhhhh that was absolutely NOT the conclusion of SOMA. In fact the big thing in SOMA was highlighting that copying IS NOT moving. Did you play the same game I did? SOMA correctly demonstrates that any mind upload operation creates a fork — two valid causal descendants, both of whom are Truly You in the first person subjective sense, real as you'll be tomorrow but now diverging from each other. Altered Carbon also handles this well: there is no 'real' Takeshi and 'copy' Takeshi in the double-sleeving (at least in the first person). Both are Takeshis, and to each it's the other one that's the copy: and both are correct. Neither one possesses some credential of subjective identity which the other lacks. When going into a mind upload, it is correct to believe that you'll go on as if nothing has happened afterwards while a copy of yourself will come into being in a digital substrate. It is also correct to believe that you will be extracted from your body and moved into a digital substrate. Both things will happen to you.
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Feb 12, 2018 05:57
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General Battuta posted:When going into a mind upload, it is correct to believe that you'll go on as if nothing has happened afterwards while a copy of yourself will come into being in a digital substrate. It is also correct to believe that you will be extracted from your body and moved into a digital substrate. Both things will happen to you. see, here's what I'm mostly curious about in this regard. let's say I get shot in the head and instantly killed. however, there's a backup of my consciousness from a few weeks ago when I went to the backup clinic. someone sticks that backup in a new body to, essentially, resleeve me. do I essentially wake up in the new body, missing memories of the past few weeks (anything since the backup) but otherwise intact and, y'know, alive? or am I still dead, and that person's just made (more or less) an identical twin of me? e: it would seem like the former case is the only scenario in which there'd be any point to this poo poo, because otherwise transhumanism is just a really hilarious and nerdy way to commit suicide.
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Feb 12, 2018 06:04
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:see, here's what I'm mostly curious about in this regard. Yes and also yes
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Feb 12, 2018 06:11
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:see, here's what I'm mostly curious about in this regard. That's a great question. If you're shot in the head a couple weeks after your backup (or, like in Altered Carbon, ~48 hours after your backup) everything that's happened to you since your backup will be lost: kind of like being blackout drunk that whole time but...way more so. Your brain doesn't 'know' it's been scanned, so what happens to you, physically, as you're shot, is no different from being shot to death without a backup. This leads a lot of people to say 'yup, I died, there's no help for me.' Which is...more or less true, from the perspective of that fork. From the POV of your backup fork, you'll wake up an instant after getting your brain scan and someone will tell you "so you went off and got shot, you lost about two weeks." If you see footage or talk to friends about what you did in those two weeks, it'll probably feel pretty loving weird, like an imposter was running your life. Is this death? I think that requires you to decide what you are. Are you ONLY the most recent, up-to-date instantiation of yourself? If you got hit on the head and developed retrograde amnesia, losing two weeks of memory, would you die and be replaced by a copy? Or are you content to say, 'whatever defines me, it's not contained in the last couple weeks, since I know I was still me two weeks ago: so my identity is intact in that backup file?' My personal take — and one I think is more or less objectively correct — is that You, your consciousness, isn't a big unitary nugget of Me-ness that's either all there or all gone. It's a live state built from your memories, your senses, your physical and mental characteristics. At every moment that state's changing. If your brain state is rolled back two weeks and started again, it's a different you...but you're always becoming a different you anyway. The information loss isn't enormous compared to the sum total of your experiences. You could almost view it as an extremely lovely 'new memory': your brain was updated (by a bullet) in such a way as to remove a lot of information. In this view it's not much different from day to day life, where you might get blasted through the head with a steel rod or get Alzheimers but still be 'you'. To give the really simple, stripped-back answer, though: you're asking, if Me Prime gets a brain backup, forking into Me-Body and Me-Backup, and Me-Body is killed, have I died? And the answer is that Me-Body is loving dead and gone, but Me Prime is alive in his valid descendant Me-Backup. So Me-Body is as dead as anyone else without a backup, but Me-Prime feels really smart and smug that he got that backup, because it's given him a second chance. In the strictest, most rigorous sense of 'death' as 'any loss of information', brain uploads cannot prevent the death of your forks, but they can allow more forks to live.
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Feb 12, 2018 06:25
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Der Shovel posted:Not really. You're the code in the stack. Der Shovel posted:But Kazy raises a very interesting point. When all that is You can be distilled down to digital data and transferred from container to container, stored in digital clouds when needed and beamed across vast distances, what does "being You" even mean? Der Shovel posted:When your entire being can be reduced to digital data, any modern notions of intangible souls and whatnot fly right out the window: we know exactly what you are, and with CTRL-X/CTRL-V we can transfer all of it from one folder to another. You're just essentially bits, and when these bits get copied (or even just outright transferred) off one storage media to the other, does the ethereal Youness transfer with them, or do you, as Kazy says, "die" and just get copied as a new set of identical bits in another container. You're still identical to the original down to the last bit, but you're still unquestionably a copy. Avasculous posted:e.g. Reileen having closely watched Kovacs through a series of minor characters would have been a neat episode-ender, except that it made no loving sense given that her self-proclaimed reason for bringing him to Earth was to reunite with him and he had every reason to love and trust her upon his arrival before her henchmen nearly killed him 8 times and he stumbled on her child snuff ring. LORD OF BOOTY posted:do I essentially wake up in the new body, missing memories of the past few weeks (anything since the backup) but otherwise intact and, y'know, alive? or am I still dead, and that person's just made (more or less) an identical twin of me? General Battuta posted:My personal take — and one I think is more or less objectively correct — is that You, your consciousness, isn't a big unitary nugget of Me-ness that's either all there or all gone. It's a live state built from your memories, your senses, your physical and mental characteristics. At every moment that state's changing. If your brain state is rolled back two weeks and started again, it's a different you...but you're always becoming a different you anyway. The information loss isn't enormous compared to the sum total of your experiences. You could almost view it as an extremely lovely 'new memory': your brain was updated (by a bullet) in such a way as to remove a lot of information. In this view it's not much different from day to day life, where you might get blasted through the head with a steel rod or get Alzheimers but still be 'you'.
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Feb 12, 2018 06:43
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Tiggum posted:Actually this made me think of something; what was the reason Reileen needed Bancroft to bring Takeshi back? Why couldn't she just do that herself if that was her end goal? Why hadn't she already done it years ago? There was the UN vote issue as well, but I don't think that was connected, except that she apparently thought it would be more convenient to combine her two goals into one overly complicated plan? Kovacs is an ex-Envoy. Having an Envoy of all people solve a case makes it look airtight, and she had guaranteed leverage over him by freighting in Sarah. Reileen has worked with him before, and he was just conveniently in Storage at the time.
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Feb 12, 2018 07:01
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Kovacs is an ex-Envoy. Having an Envoy of all people solve a case makes it look airtight, and she had guaranteed leverage over him by freighting in Sarah. Reileen has worked with him before, and he was just conveniently in Storage at the time.
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Feb 12, 2018 07:04
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honestly this really isn't that different from the Star Trek transporter problem, and I remember Star Trek's canonical answer to that being kind of really loving disturbing e: also, yeah, there is a difference, in one case i'm functionally immortal and in the other case I'm... extremely loving not. if I have an identical twin, that person isn't literally another me, they're a separate person despite having the exact same DNA; if the clone works similarly, being a separate consciousness made from a "blueprint" of mine, rather than being my consciousness, then it's entirely pointless and i've just made a really fancy meaty headstone for myself that can talk to people and pretend to be me. WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 07:22
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Not having read the books I would like to know how immortality is actually defined in those. It does not seem to be actual immortality if a backup of your memories is injected into a fresh clone body. It's not really a comforting thought that if I die and my stack gets destroyed a copy of myself will live again. At least that's not what I would call immortality. Also wondering why clones, once they become aware that their memories are not their own, don't go insane. For example: In John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" the whole body changing process is experienced by the original without breaking consciousness. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 07:35
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:e: also, yeah, there is a difference, in one case i'm functionally immortal and in the other case I'm... extremely loving not. if I have an identical twin, that person isn't literally another me, they're a separate person despite having the exact same DNA; if the clone works similarly, being a separate consciousness made from a "blueprint" of mine, then it's entirely pointless. Hammerstein posted:Not having read the books I would like to know how immortality is actually defined in those. It does not seem to be actual immortality if a backup of your memories is injected into a fresh clone body. It's not really a comforting thought that if I die and my stack gets destroyed a copy of myself will live again. At least that's not what I would call immortality.
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Feb 12, 2018 07:36
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Tiggum posted:If experiencing a break in consciousness and waking up physically changed is dying, you die every night. But sleep is a well researched field and you just "know" that in the morning you are the same person that you were in the evening. Also you dream sometimes. Having a company sell you immortality by stating that in a worst case scenario a copy of yourself will become active seems to be a rather exotic interpretation. Also wondering why the meths would buy into that and invest into super expensive backup solutions. That a copy will live on should not be a satisfying solution to the original who had his brains and stack blown out. But maybe in the books society has changed further away from individuality, that such questions are not relevant. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 07:44
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Tiggum posted:No, I meant in the show. Kovacs was in storage forever and ever for being a big bad Envoy terrorist (instead of just Erasing him because...?  ) and Rei needed Bancroft's pull with the Protectorate President to get him out.Edit: Actually, that raises another big gaping plot hole; Why is Kovacs in storage at all when he's supposed to be part of a terrorist movement against the Protectorate in the series? They RD'd Sarah on general principle to look big and dangerous, yet the actual last Envoy gets Storage because...? Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 07:48
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:honestly this really isn't that different from the Star Trek transporter problem, and I remember Star Trek's canonical answer to that being kind of really loving disturbing In Trek doesn't the physical process of scanning for transport destroy the original? Or am I thinking of something else? I remember reading that due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle it's necessary to cease all living function to accurately map body/mind. Although now that I mention that if I was reading about it it probably wasn't Trek. Neddy Seagoon posted:Kovacs was in storage forever and ever for being a big bad Envoy terrorist (instead of just Erasing him because...? Still doesn't really make sense if Rei is a 200 year old Meth with a flying high tech whorehouse that caters to the ultra rich. Even if her own money and influence weren't sufficient for the President, she could have used the money and power had Bancroft or someone like him help her out any time. pile of brown fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 07:51
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Isn't there a Star Trek episode where a technician with transporter-phobia actually experiences the transport as an uninterrupted stream of consciousness ? Not sure if that's canon though. LORD OF BOOTY posted:see, here's what I'm mostly curious about in this regard. This is what irks me about the whole concept of stacks and backups. Let's say your whole body and stack get destroyed - fade to black - a bit later a fresh clone of yourself wakes up in some lab. I think that to the fresh clone it would not really matter, since he is alive, possibly very rich and will perceive himself as the original. But the actual question is that why the former original would bother to set up such a fallback solution in the first place. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 07:57
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