I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.— Woody Allen
A small but fervent clique of geeks and dreamers has long imagined a future in which people can upload their consciousness into a machine. In doing so, humanity would end-run our messy biological entropy and thus achieve immortality.
(Warning: The following contains a mild spoiler for Old Man's War)
The deus ex machina at the heart of Old Man's War offers this same dream, with a twist: the consciousness of an older citizen is transferred into a brand new body, rather than into a machine. Specifically, their brain pattern is transferred into an enhanced clones of themselves, grown in a vat (at an accelerated rate) for the day the enlistee is ready to begin their service in the Colonial Defense Forces.
On the surface it seems like a clever mortality dodge, but it glosses over certain crucial questions:
- If your brain is recorded from one source of organic matter, then "uploaded" into another: is that still really you?
- Is a transfer of consciousness from one physical body to another actually a transfer, or is it instead the destruction of one being and the creation of another?
Their argument went like this: If all of your matter is broken down and recorded in one place, then recreated in another place with all new matter, then that's not really you! Your new body might seem identical, down to the last molecule, and every aspect of your new self might look, feel, and work in exactly the same way — but that thinking and breathing being is a fundamentally new one. The old one and its constituent components have ceased to exist. The "you" that existed in a simultaneous progression since the moment of conception is now gone.
From a metaphysical perspective, this is problematic. To say the least.
The same goes for consciousness transfers, be they of the brain-to-brain kind as in Old Man's War, or the brain-to-machine kind of "brainbox" so feverishly longed for by certain Singularitarians.
Scalzi's simultaneous consciousness dodge
In order to skirt this issue and provide temporal continuity between the old consciousness and new consciousness, Scalzi has the brain transfer subjects in Old Man's War experience simultaneous awareness from both viewpoints (p.79). I'm willing to suspend my disbelief to a pretty great extent, but this actually pulled me out of the book. How are the brains supposedly linked? It's two separate brains, and they should be two separate consciousnesses, in the same way that twins are different organisms once they've separated from each other. Simultaneous awareness is a neat idea, and was probably fun to write, but it
distracted me enough to temporarily take me out of the story.
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[1] - Later versions of Star Trek got around this by saying that the transporter "converted your matter to energy, transported it, then reassembled it into matter." Far-fetched though it may be, this workaround technically keeps "you" as a continuous being.
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Other posts on Book Club for Old Man's War, by John Scalzi:
by Cormac McCarthy. Posts about this book: