Soul downloads

I finished Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon over the weekend. My brother Charles had passed it on to me several years ago, but something about the Wired look of the cover design had put me off until I did some shifting on my bookshelves and it came to surface a month or so back. The packaging of cyberpunk has become pretty annoying to my tastes, and the blurb on the cover advertising the book as a combination of cyberpunk and hardboiled noir struck me as a humorous redundancy (cyberpunk being essentially a combination of science-fiction and noir in the first place), but once I got past the cover the theme of selves being uploaded and downloaded engrossed me and induced a Philip K. Dickish existential vertigo. Morgan's idea of how the up and down loading would happen involves in the first place a neural implant called the "stack" which stores one's identity in terms of memory and narrative, and is periodically archived to allow the possibility of being revived from a recent "version" of oneself. Beyond the body one is born into, the idea is that one gets "sleeved" by one's "stack" being implanted into another body, either artificially grown or belonging to someone who's lost the right to it. So there are questions of whether storage of anything can be sufficient to reconstruct a sense of self in an organism, whether the loss of continuity (experienced as death by the original organism) can possibly be replaced by the conviction of a new organism that it is the continued identity of the self, and how much or how little the body into which this self is injected can change/transform/reject that self. All raised at least tangentially in the course of a detective story narrative. I guess my prejudices are indicated by my use of the word "organism": a novelistic treatment isn't going to be enough to convince me that the death of the organism is real, irrespective of whether the "information" that somehow equals the identity of that organism survives. Isn't that after all a part of what art is about? And isn't that one of the differences between an organism and an imagined protagonist?