If you grew up in the society Egan describes, would you “switch over” to the jewel/computer brain in your head?
If someone you loved “switched over,” would you feel grief for their having died? If so, how would you reconcile those feelings with the person who remains, acting just like the person you cared about, seeming to remember all of their life, and thinking of themselves as still being the same person?
Egan ends with the lines:
I ought to be able to empathize… yet somehow he simply isn’t real to me… I think of him now as a pale, insubstantial shadow. After all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself, his deepest inner life, his experience of being, was in any way comparable to my own.
What do you think about this? Should the organic brain people and the “jewel-heads” that they become (or are replaced by) regard each other as unknowable mysteries? Should we regard other organic brains as unknowable mysteries, including people of other life backgrounds, ethnicities, genders? If you say no to the latter questions, why should the jewel-heads and the organic brains say yes about each other?
Varley’s world makes changing bodies (even one’s sex) relatively straightforward. Does a dramatic body change affect “who you are,” or does your identity depend more on your memory, personality, values, or something else? After what kinds of changes would you say “That wouldn’t be me anymore”?
Someone dies and gets “restored” from a Varley-style “backup” from a week ago. The restored person has no memories of what happened over the past week (from after they were backed up). Are they the very same person who died, or a new person who only thinks they’re the same? What makes you say so?
Compare two cases. In case A, Jill gets in a physical fight with Jack leaving him seriously injured. Then she happens into some traumatic situation — say a near-miss accident — that results in her forgetting all about the fight. We’d still count her as morally responsible for Jack’s injuries, right? She should still have to pay his medical bills, rather than Jack himself or the whole society. Maybe she should also have to compensate him for his suffering.
Now consider case B instead. Here Jill gets “backed up” on Monday, then gets in the fight and injures Jack on Tuesday. This time, afterwards she dies and gets restored from her backup on Wednesday. The restored Jill of course has no memories of the fight, which happened afer she was backed up. She we still hold the restored Jill responsible for Jack’s injuries? Who should have to pay his medical bills in this case?
In Egan, your “stuff” (biology) changes from brain to jewel — which in his story is a computer but as we said, you could also imagine to be a different biological organ or organism. In Varley, it’s just your “pattern” that’s copied. You’re restored to a physically identical clone brain. In some cases, it might even be your very same original brain, if that’s still healthy but had its patterns messed up and needs to be reset. Which seems to carry “you”: the material your mind runs on, or the information and connections that make up your mind?
Imagine tomorrow, your Egan-style jewel takes over and your original biological brain is shut off. What if anything should you expect to experience? Compare with dying today and a Varley-style restoration wakes up tomorrow. Would you experience that waking up?