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Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

One thing the show hasn't done much with that I really liked in the books was that the sleeves could also vary wildly in ability. They mention it but never really dwell on it, but Ryker's sleeve has some neurochem poo poo that improves reflexes quite a bit, as well as possibly some strength enhancement. At one point, Kovacs gets sleeved in some super-elite custom-made techninja and just loving tears everyone up. He adapts really quickly to it thanks to being an Envoy and knowing how to fight in a myriad of bodies, but its also a sleeve that's preternaturally strong, fit, and comes with a whole suite of massive combat drugs and poo poo. A lot of the sleeves Kovacs ends up in have some degree of combat enhancement effects, but I'm pretty sure at one point he ends up in a sleeve that doesn't and he gets pretty badly hosed up because of it. Also, the sleeve he's in when he gets tortured has a massively increased sensory suite, iirc.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Multi-century subjective lifespans aren't even common in the books, and have a far more interesting take on why most people aren't Mething their way through the centuries in a constant parade of Sleeves; Mental exhaustion. Most people will live out their life in their birthsleeve, maybe pay out on a second, and after that happily go into Storage because they don't want to go around a third time. Spun up for holidays and birthdays in VR or a brief rental sleeve to spend time with the family, and that's it.

It also tells you a lot about what you're dealing with when facing people like the Bancrofts; They have to have an insane degree of mental fortitude to want to just keep going on and on.

Yeah, I really liked this in the books too. Like above, the books play a lot more with mind-body duality stuff, like how memories aren't everything about a person and the body has influence on the mind as well: Ryker's sleeve is a nicotine addict so Kovacs smokes while wearing the sleeve because of the physical addiction, but iirc he also briefly keeps some of the habitual stuff after he leaves the sleeve because there's a purely mental component too. Hormones aren't transferred with stacks either, so imagine growing old and then being resleeved in a teenager's body and having to go through all that again, except you're consciously aware that you're being absurd as you do it. Plus having to (probably) deal with looking like a different person in the mirror, being slightly taller, or shorter, or whatever, but just feeling incredibly dimorphic for a long time until you adapt. It sounds loving exhausting to me

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Feb 8, 2018

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 05:35

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 04:42

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

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.

For the same reason that sleep, or peri-operative deep sedation, or retrograde amnesia, or getting black-out drunk isn't some horrific thing. As far as I'm concerned, that backup would be me so yeah, I'd get to live forever. I don't understand what you're not getting about that unless you're assuming some intrinsic me-ness (like a soul) that somehow doesn't get transferred. You already addressed sleep by saying "its well-researched and society says its the same you" and it seems like a really easy thing to accept that society says a backup of you is just "you". They even keep the backups as up to date as possible, because the further away that backup is kept the stronger the "its a different you" goes.

But the backup you is still you, just as much as if 48 hours ago I passed out cold and was whisked away to wherever the clone body was stored instead of continuing on to do whatever got my stack blown up. Or, even, just needlecast into a different sleeve. Remember, people do that too. Are they the same people? If "I" go into storage for a few minutes and am needlecast into a new sleeve somewhere else, why is that still "me" but a backup isn't? Or is it even?

Basically, I have no idea why you're saying that a clone who perceives himself as the original, and who everyone recognizes as the original, isn't the same as the original as of the forking point.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2018 12:13

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

Drunk/sedated - but in those examples the bio-functions of the original never cease. I seems you and I have a very different view about what we consider immortal and waking up a clone body with my memories, once I croak, is not immortality to me. A copy of "me" is not the current living/breathing me. And if a new "me" wakes up somewhere, the original is still dead. The difference is in knowledge: knowing that you die, but a clone lives on, is not comforting to me. I think that someone who is oblivious about his origins will have an easier time accepting this, than someone who is not.

Following example: Let's say it's 200 years in the future and you're a student who needs money. In the news you discover Dr. Hammerstein's laboratory which pays test subjects handsomely. So you go there and Dr. Hammerstein says:

"Get on the operating table and close your eyes, you won't feel a thing. Unfortunately you will die during the experiment. But worry not - we have a perfect 1:1 clone of yourself ready, with all the memories up to the moment you lose consciousness. As soon as your brain activity ceases, we will start up your clone and he can walk away with a huge cheque of future-bucks".

Would you accept this offer ? After all it's a perfect backup, so "you" get to live on. Or would the original's drive of self-preservation say "gently caress this, I'm out of here".

P.S.:

Just that we all understand each other, I actually consider this quite interesting and genuinely enjoy the debate. It's an eye opener to see what different takes people have about what defines "self" and which methods of life extension are acceptable. This is not about "not getting something", as Ravenfood states

Yeah, absolutely I think I'd take the deal if I believed it was genuine and risk-free. As far as I can tell, it'd be like going to sleep and waking up somewhere slightly differently. You're adding bio-functions to this: what aspects of the body continuing to function is required for you? Its Theseus' ship again, but with people. I'm attributing the "self" to be consciousness, which is why there can be multiple "me's", though we cease to be the same person as soon as experiences, even those not remembered, diverge (this is why Dimi and his double-sleeved self are, in my opinion, different people). You're tying it into more than consciousness, but not really defining it. Do you need a pulse? To be breathing? Do those organs need to be "yours"? What meat-parts are sufficient to meet the criteria for being "you"? How does that differ from sleeping, or from having a pulseless cardiac arrest and being resuscitated, or from having bypass surgery, or an organ transplant? How is having your consciousness transferred to an identical clone different from, for instance, having every possible organ and tissue transplanted separately? Remember, we're assuming that whatever function the brain does or has as far as consciousness goes can be completely taken over by DHF stacks since that's what's we're presented with in-universe, so we could, in theory, transplant brains. Would that person be "you" since everything was done one at a time?

Zaphod42 posted:

Digital backups are a good way to create an immortal version of yourself.

Digital backups are not a good way to prevent yourself from experiencing death or ceasing to be conscious.

This is a good distinction.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2018 02:37

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

Well in my proposal there are no DHF stacks or anything in play. You get on the slab, lose consciousness, a perfect copy of your memories is transferred into your new body and then the original you dies. To me, personally, that's a frightening thought. That a 1:1 clone of myself awakens at the same moment, is not in the least comforting. To me it's a fundamental principle of self-preservation that I do not want to give up my current state of continuous existence.

I'm still torn about the concept of DHF stacks, it's a bit closer to the idea of a prolonged existence than getting yourself restored from a satellite backup, but if I understood the series correctly then the stacks are just a backup device, they store your memory but they don't work like a "second brain" ?

Getting replaced bit by bit is more acceptable in a certain way. Getting a robo-arm does not seem like a big deal, already today we have pretty modern devices early prototype stages. An artifical heart ? Sure. But it starts getting weird when the brain and memories are involved. Reminds me of Robocop or Ghost in the Shell, where is the borderline between man and machine and how much can one give up while still being oneself. It gets very metaphysical from here...

They store the sum totality of your experiences, which, as far as I'm concerned, is "you". A backup would store the sum totality of your experiences up to a certain point. I genuinely don't understand how you can say you don't want to give up your current state of continuous existence but you also go to sleep. That clone would have just as much claim to being "you" as "tomorrow-you" does to "current-you". Sure, your heart keeps beating, but what about that is unique? And more extreme, what (in your view) happens when your heart stops and then is restarted? Is the person on the other side of that experience a new "you"?

# ¿ Feb 13, 2018 03:09

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

The simple drive of self-preservation for example. If my heart stops and as a consequence my brain dies, then I cease to exist (no one knows if there is an after-life or an immortal soul). I don't want my current existence to end and if I die then it's not comforting to me that a clone of myself gets activated with the same memories.

Right, that's what happens now in the real world because we can't separate consciousness and physical brain activity. You're saying that something about the brainmeat and heartmeat I guess is "you", even in a fictional universe where consciousness can be fully realized with neither. What about the brain matter is utterly essential to being "you"? And, on top of that, what about those particular brain cells are important? If we're creating an identical clone, we're creating an identical brain, too. What makes that not you? The lack of contiguous physical existence?

If that's the case, I think you're fixating too much on the dying/clone aspect. Pretend that there is an identical physical clone of you created. You are sedated heavily enough that brain activity beyond the level of the brainstem is effectively stopped (with appropriate cardiopulmonary support). The clone body is similarly treated, the sum total of your experience is copied and implanted into the clone, then you are both awakened at the same in a different place than when you fell asleep. How is that clone not you? How could you even tell which one "you" are when you awoke? For bonus points, someone who does not know which body was the original and which was the clone comes in and flips a coin, killing one of the two at random, with nobody knowing which was which. I'm assuming that you believe that there would be a material difference if the clone was killed and the original was killed despite there being no physiological or neurological difference, and both bodies having exactly identical memories, and nobody in the world knowing which happened. If that's not true, what makes this box of mysterious randomized murder different?

The part of self-preservation that's important to me is my consciousness. Yeah, you're right that its bad if I cease to exist, but what I'm saying is that "I" am nothing more than the totality of my experiences. If that totality can be transferred elsewhere, how is that not me? I suppose you could argue that my mood, affect, etc are significantly altered by hormones and other physiological systems within my body and if I was in a different body, I'd act differently than I would have before if given the same stimulus, which I agree with. But that's not really different from taking some form of exogenous hormone treatment or, for example, an SSRI.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 00:25

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

Also I sincerly believe, although I'm not religious, that people are more than just some biomass with memories. Of course people risk their lives in often selfless acts, but no one I know would sacrifice himself so that a clone can awaken and take over.

If you define a person as just some water and carbon plus a heap of memories, then your approach might be valid. But the drive of self-preservation, self-awareness, consciousness, individuality and simply the joy of being alive are completely left out when viewing it from such an angle.

So yeah, you're saying there's a soul. We could have saved a fuckton of time if you'd just said that. Everything else you're saying stems from that. We're imagining a system where consciousness is fully capable of being duplicated. So self-awareness? Duplicated at the same time. Individuality? Same, though with caveats if you make multiple copies. "The joy of being alive"? Pretty sure a clone of me with all my memories is as happy as I am about being alive. Self-preservation? I mean, sure, I don't want to die, which is why i made a copy of my memories, because my consciousness is me.

e: If it makes you feel better, pretend the stack copies whatever that extra bit of a "person" that you can't name is. See if it changes any of your responses to anything.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 00:32

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

but the you-entity that had the brain scan done is dead as a doornail whether or not another instance of you exists.

Only in the sense that "you" are constantly dying because who you were two seconds ago isn't the same person as you are now. Unless you're bringing a mysterious "process" into it that you won't explain.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 02:30

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

No! It doesn't have to be a soul. You have 2 different things. What do you call those things? What do you call each different "version" of a double-sleeve? They're both people who have the memories of being that person up to the point they were double-sleeved, but its not right to call them the same thing, the same entity, the same version. Whatever you call them to separate them, THAT exists, regardless of a soul. They're not the same thing!

The thing that would separate them is different experiences. Until they have those, they would be the same set of consciousness that I am choosing to call a person. They would therefore both be the same person. Choosing to call one a "copy" is wholly arbitrary and is convenience.

Zaphod42 posted:

Because when you double-sleeve there's two different consciousnesses! That alone proves it, like I said long ago. That proves there's 2. If there's 2, you don't somehow go back to having 1. The only way to go from 2 to 1 is for one of them to die.

If you read what he says, there isn't an instance of double-sleeving in his question. At no point are there two consciousnesses "alive" simultaneously.

e:

bring back old gbs posted:

That's interesting, because the Carnage guy was a human stack in a shoddy android body.

So in theory could Poe(or AI in general) be transferred to a stack/stack-like interface and put in a meat+bones clone?

Maybe, depends on how AI function/exist/work and interface with stacks. I'd imagine it'd be a lot easier to design a synth body that could house an AI instead of trying to make a bunch of connections between however AI works and brain/body functions.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 04:22

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

There Bias Two posted:

So I just finished this show and I have really mixed feelings about it. It was definitely fun, but a lot of the elements fell completely flat for me. I wasn't sold on the whole idea of the envoys trying to destroy stack technology. What about the Meths makes them any worse than regular ol' privileged psychopaths? It seems stupid to attack a tool when clearly the main issues were socioeconomic ones.

Besides with the existing biotechnology, they'd probably develop an alternative system in just a few years.

Tak's whole backstory in general was a mess here.

Yeah your position is basically the book's position. Meths are privileged psychopaths who are slightly worse simply because their longer lifespans allow them more time to accumulate power and wealth while stunting everyone else around them. The saying that "science advances one funeral at a time" doesn't really work as well when people don't die. Or, more broadly, its possible that societal change would stagnate somewhat if lifespans increased (once the initial upheaval settled). Its a shame that every TV show that has any kinds of transhumanism in it seems to settle on yelling about how its unnatural instead of exploring it more.

The books do also address the current argument between Zaphod/Hammerstein and Batutta, because while something like a needlecast is pretty clearly "you" still, the branching forks and backups muddy it quite a bit. Kovacs is impressed despite himself that Bancroft kills himself even knowing he has a backup because he knows he's losing those new experiences and is "dying". His clone would be demonstrably different from him (not having Rawlings, for one), he's just so that convinced that the world needs "him"-as-of-47-hours-ago that he kills himself to save what is effectively a very, very slightly different person, but who the rest of the world will see as him. Ego and willpower, to some extent. Its not just that meths have the means, but they have the desire. Plus, that argument that Kovacs has with himself that I should re-read at some point.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 04:44

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

Yeah that'd be cool as poo poo. Go all Agent Smith on this.

Surely, transferring Poe into a differing substrate for consciousness and experience would be killing him in your opinion, yeah?

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 05:25

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

General Battuta posted:

That only holds if your backup or stack is somehow out of date - and only to the extent that you consider losing a few hours of your existence 'real death'. I don't think most people believe retrograde amnesia would kill them.

Yeah, its "technically" death only because the backup and original have different experiences. I personally think I'd find it difficult to do but I'm also not someone who grew up in that society.

e: You're wrong about the retrograde amnesia part though. Yes, from the perspective of the backup, it would be equivalent to suffering amnesia and not a big deal, and if you asked Bancroft at -49 hours whether he'd be okay just losing the next 48 hours of memory for very good reasons, he probably would. But neither of those are the same as what the Bancroft fork who blew out his stack experiences, so from the perspective of that fork, it IS dying. At least how I see it.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 06:01

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Neddy Seagoon posted:

At some point your mind keeps on going separately as software, but you yourself just die as your brain gets shut off.

The basic thing people don't seem to comprehend is that when you transfer data of any kind from one system to another, there is no actual magical data entity moving through the signal to its new home. System A sends instructions to System B for how to write down its own copy of the data. Once transfer is complete and verified, System A deletes the original. That's it.

How are "your mind" and "you yourself" different?

Yeah, ok, and? If all "I" am is my experiences, and those experiences continue, then I continue. It only gets weird when system A doesn't delete the original.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 06:07

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Neddy Seagoon posted:

A copied instance does, yes. You yourself are still quite dead.

No, because you haven't specified what makes an identical copy (with the original deleted) different from the original simply continuing. You haven't said what makes "you yourself" in any way special or somehow different from something else with an identical experience, you just keep saying that it is.

e: And no, the weirdness comes when trying to determine just how far the tolerances from "same shared information = same person" to "is now a different person" is. Its very easy to say a perfectly identical copy is the same as the original if the original ceases to exist the moment the copy comes into existence, but its harder to do that if they exist in tandem.

Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Feb 14, 2018

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 06:20

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Neddy Seagoon posted:

You have deleted a copy and paralyzed someone.

You seem to be contemplating information as some kind of intangible elemental force. It is not.

What fundamentally separates a perfect copy from the original if the original ceases to exist the instant the copy is created?

e: Or even a copy from the original if both exist?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 07:04

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

General Battuta posted:

A lot of the sleeves in Altered Carbon seem to come with skills, but I don�t know if it�s laid out how much they�re neural and how much they�re somatic/reflexive - probably a lot of both, realistically.

From what I remember, its mostly the latter. I can't remember any sleeves coming with actual skills, just speed, reflexes, and coordination. That one person had a supercomputer jammed into her skull, I suppose. I wonder if early in stack/clone development before they got good at "growing" them with those reflexes, muscle mass, etc, they just had someone sleeve into them and practice incessantly as part of their day job so the sleeve would be ready for whatever when the person who owned it wanted it. Presumably they have a way of preserving unused sleeves without damaging them over time, though I don't know if, say, their heart beats or not. If they do, those sleeves would need regular maintenance and upkeep.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 08:19

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

Consider double-sleeving. The instant there are 2 consciousnesses alive that can talk to each other and experience things individually, THAT is the line. See how easy that is? Its not nearly as impossible as you're making it out to be.

Literally nobody is disagreeing about what happens in double-sleeving, or in instances of forking, though.

bring back old gbs posted:

That's sort of what I was getting at. Could an olympic athlete sell a copy of their skills, or pro skateboarder sell his new trick for $14.99? Could you buy a P-90X routine from a huge guy in an infomercial that was his entire memory of correctly learned exercises and food prep routines? Or would you get his roid rage / general distemper along with it?

In Altered Carbon, no, you couldn't, at least not yet. VR training and time compression is your best bet there. You could buy an athlete's sleeve and get all of their practiced reflexes, but you'd have to spend awhile sorting them out and integrating them with your conscious thoughts and it'd be awkward but you'd get there eventually. Morgan also never really talks about what would happen if someone with a traumatic brain injury or seizure history or severed corpus collosum or Alzheimers is placed in an neurologically intact sleeve or vice versa, at least that I recall. He seems to separate all neurological activity into the stack, probably for convenience's sake.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 08:32

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

That's the cheap, illegal way to double-sleeve. IIRC, the conceit is that for some reason storing stack information in a way that can be used as a backup is difficult and takes a ton of memory, but for some reason stacks don't.

I don't think anything says that Bancroft couldn't wake up his "backup" without also having RD'd his original except that it'd be illegal as gently caress.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 08:47

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

According to Battuta's logic booting up 2 people with the same state would mean one person would be experiencing both because "you" are instantly anywhere that your state exists.

But that's not how it works; there's 2 different "yous" that diverge instantly.

Okay but its the same technology. Consider the ramifications.

Like in Bancroft's case, he definitely isn't immortal, right? He died. There's still a Bancroft but he definitely died, the backup wasn't even exactly the same person.

But it isn't the lack of 40 minutes of memory that kills him. Its his body and current consciousness dying. Booting up a backup afterwards doesn't un-do the death. You can't say someone died and then 40 minutes later retroactively say they didn't die.

And its the same thing even without the 40 minutes, even if its instantaneous. Unless you were doing a transfer instead of a copy, but we know you aren't because you have to be able to copy to double-sleeve.

I guess you could argue that while Bancroft and Double-Sleeves are copies, that otherwise everything in Altered Carbon is a transfer, and that backups are a special read-only operation separate and completely different from normal needlecasting.
Certainly that's how the population chooses to look at it, but I think they're delusional. I mean, they choose to look at even Bancroft's backup as being the same thing, but we know its not. He died. If they think Bancroft didn't die and they're wrong, couldn't they be wrong about the rest?

No, they're not the same state the instant they're both active simultaneously. Bancroft died, yes, I said so earlier in the thread, but Kovacs meets and talks to someone who is incredibly close to Bancroft. From the perspective of everyone who did not interact with Bancroft after the backup but before the RD (including the backup) the backup is indistinguishable from Bancroft, except for a memory hole.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 08:59

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

There Bias Two posted:

Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to:

Why are people still bothering to use flesh bodies and live in the Real, other than for religious reasons? Usually stories with digitization of consciousness result in hiveminds and VR civilizations, but I don't see much of that here.

VR time is stupid expensive in terms of power (and therefore money), with that cost increasing as you want higher-quality environments/interactions.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 18:03

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Hammerstein posted:

You only view this from a completely nihilistic standpoint. In your example humans, actually self-aware living beings, are nothing but carbon&water and some data. So self-awareness and consciousness are non-factors ?

From my experience every living being and especially those with higher brain functions and a concept of self, prefer to be alive, rather than dead. Death is the end of the line of one's existence. So in my example a clone gets activated and the original is shut down. And as you correctly state, from an entirely material point of view nothing is lost, since the replacement is a perfect 1:1 copy.

Yeah, you keep saying this, but here's the sticking point: If we preserve the data and lose the carbon, then what about the person is dead? The carbon? If that's true, why aren't you panicking every time your cells die?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 22:54

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Zaphod42 posted:

And I want to be clear; everybody in the thread disagrees with this, right? Whatever we believe we can all agree that Battuta is crazy about this one.

And Battuta, I edited all my posts together into one mega-post just for you, because you get so upset about edits. But I never once went back and removed or altered anything I said, I only tacked on extra statements, so pretending like that means you can't possibly respond to me and can just ignore the things I say that prove you're wrong is just silly.

Not sure what the functional difference between copying something into a new place and deleting the "original" is compared to "transferring" it, to be honest.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 23:39

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Ravenfood posted:

Not sure what the functional difference between copying something into a new place and deleting the "original" is compared to "transferring" it, to be honest.

Zaphod42 posted:

The difference is someone is still left there

Would it help if I said simultaneously?

Zaphod42 posted:

Battuta, do you think double sleeve clones would be able to talk to themselves telepathically? You maintain that one immutable ur-consciousness exists wherever that state exists. But that doesn't make sense.

No, of course not, we've gone over this, because they're different states the instant they exist simultaneously.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 23:59

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

The Ninth Layer posted:

It makes a difference to Sam A that at 14:00 he dies.

Or put it another way, if at 13:00 I back myself up and at 14:00 I die because my house burned down, the intense amount of pain and suffering I'm experiencing is not going to be diminished by the fact that at 15:00 my backup will be restored no worse for wear. In addition it doesn't matter to me what my restored backup gets to experience at 16:00 because by that point I'll be a smoking charred mass of bones and burnt meat.

Backup me may wake up and functionally be me in every way, but upon waking up safe and sound I would be unsettled to discover that somewhere in the last two hours I experienced the vivid sensation of burning to death, even if in the moment I don't have any memory of it.

This is what Zaphod42 is getting at and is the problem that is not solved by a backup or a copy. It is not enough to say that nobody experiencing this horrible death is around now. Somebody did experience it. In this way I don't see how my burned-to-death self would be any different from say my neighbor being burned to death and then never getting backed up, in terms of the suffering experienced.

Right, but the same thing that lets me say that I'll still be me when I wake up in the morning, or get black-out drunk, or get heavily sedated for a heart transplant, lets me say that I'll still be me if another version of me goes off to die and I don't remember it.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

It's still a copy with delusions of perspective. All that's happened in this scenario is the original's died before the clone.

You're a copy with delusions of perspective. All that's happened in the last second is a copy of you replaced the you that was there a second ago.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2018 14:43

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Bust Rodd posted:

That sounds like an awesome season of TV to be honest.

Yeah, I think the worry is that it'll lose that noir feel. Which is fine, I liked the shift to other types of stories and settings because it let the author explore how the conceit would affect other areas of life, such as war.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 05:53

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Elias_Maluco posted:

oh poo poo. is this another GRRM thing?

No, its because they're choosing to step away from the books, as far as I can tell. There are two more books in the series, but they'd require quite a bit of adaptation given the changes the show-writers have already made.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2018 16:56

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 04:42

Ravenfood: Nov 4, 2011

Poe is pretty different from the Hendrix, to the point where you could make a solid argument that the showwriters deserve credit.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2018 18:39

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Altered Carbon - 'I never asked for this'