Robert Sharp

(This post contains vague spoilers, which should not damage your enjoyment of the stories in question)

Would I restore my mind from back-up?

I’ve been reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow’s first novel.  It is a science-fiction thought experiment on what might happen if we all had immortality, and scarcity of resources had been abolished.  Money is redundant, because one can simply utilise public replication machines to generate whatever food or tools you need.  Instead, people earn credibility points (Doctorow calls it ‘Whuffie’) for all the good things that they do – The protagonist, Julius, earns this by maintaining the rides at Disneyland.  Through these tweaks to reality, Doctorow gets to meditate on human purpose and ennui in a time of plenty.

The central, fantastical technology available to the characters, is the ablity to upload and back-up to hard-drive your mind and all your memories.  Should some accident or murder befall you (as of course it does to Julius) you can get a-hold of a clone body, and overlay your complete consciousness onto the tabula rasa.  Doctorow has played with this sort of technology before, in the delightful I, Rowboat (yes, a knowing pun on Asimov’s I, Robot) and another story involving an absconded mother (the name of which escapes me just now).  Apparently, such technology a staple of science fiction:  Back-ups and clones are certainly used in the Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day and I am sure they are found in Philip K. Dick and elsewhere in the canon.

For those who wish to live forever, brain-backups and reboots are exciting idea, but the immortality on offer would be false.  In both The 6th Day and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, its clear that in taking a snap-shot of your brain, you are not preserving your consciousness (or your soul) but simply making a copy of it.  As both Adam Gibson (the Schwarzenegger character) and bad-guy Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) discover in The 6^th Day, it is possible to make a clone of yourself before you die!  When your original ‘version’ dies, the fact that there is a replica of you living on somewhere is of no comfort as your own light fades.  When you finally expire, you know your soul cannot fly away and awake in the new clone, because the clone is already wandering around making memories of his own (see also ‘Second Chances’, a Star Trek: TNG episode with two Commander Rikers).

Stepping into the Star Trek transporters or Fly-style teleporter carries the same philosophical risk.  I simply wouldn’t have the guts to step into such a machine – Not because I worry that my psychology or physiology might be altered due to a malfunction, but because even if the thing works perfectly, the guy stepping in is not the guy stepping out.

One of the few places in fiction where the idea that the soul does not persist through back-ups and cloning is in The Prestige.  Its a film I’ve previously slated for seeming to violate the rules of mystery-telling, but on reflection I think it is internally consistent (the opening shot of the film fortells the final revelation).  Both the Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale characters discover, in their own very different ways, that you cannot achieve immortality through the creation of a clone or a twin, regardless of how that might appear to the rest of the world.  In the end, both characters rightly weep at the demise of their clones, but Jackman’s character is the more tortured because he has caused the death of his ‘original’ self, merely by choosing to step into the crackpot machine in the first place.    This is a sadness that seems to be missing from the characters in Cory Doctorow’s stories.

However, realisation that backup-and-restore is not bona fide immortality would not discourage me from plugging in my brain and making a copy.  This is because we naturally value the things we have created, and we want to see them persist.  I would like to pass on bits of my DNA through children and grandchildren.  I would like people to read the thoughts I have written down, even after I become an ex-person.  A human consciousness restored from my uploaded back-up would be indisputably my creation, a more detailed product of my life and times than anything I might write or carve, or anyone I might sire.  Far better that they, in particular, get to witness the heat-death of the universe (Doctorow, with a nod to Douglas Adams) or the “more glorious dawn” of a Galaxy-rise than some other, generic homo sapien.

Due to English PEN’s various free speech campaigns, I’ve been cited in a couple of print publications recently.  I welcomed Jack Straw’s announcements on libel reform in The Bookseller, and celebrated a minor victory on Criminal Memoirs for Inside Time.  There doesn’t seem to be a permalink for the latter article, so I’m reproducing it below.

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I did not comment on Nick Griffin’s Question Time appearance last month because I was on holiday.  But I did catch it on one of the BBC World channels which are helpfully broadcast into South Africa.

Overall, my impression was that the other pannelists collectively agreed to discredit Griffin with ad hominems, rather than engage with, and demolish his arguments.  Several obvious and definitive retorts went begging.  For example, in response to Griffin’s unsophisticated critique of Islam, Baroness Warsi could simply have pointed out similar hateful lines from the Christian bible.  Instead, she made a round-about speech on the contribution of Muslims to Britain which looked like abvoidance of the question.  Likewise with the pathetic nonsense about “indigenous” Britons.  None of the pannellists seemed to counter this in the definitive manner I would have liked to see.

What they needed was some poetry.  I am delighted to discover The True Born Englishman by Daniel Defoe, written in 1703.  An excerpt:

The western Angles all the rest subdu’d;
A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:
Who by the tenure of the sword possest
One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest
And as great things denominate the small,
The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole.
The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite:
And these the mixture have so close pursu’d,
The very name and memory’s subdu’d:
No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:
The silent nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman’s the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.

It reminds me of England, Half English by Billy Bragg:

My mother was half English and I’m half English too
I’m a great big bundle of culture tied up in the red white and blue
I’m a fine example of your Essex man
And I’m well familiar with the Hindustan
Cos my neighbours are half English and I’m half English too.

Update

Andrew Sullivan makes this point in The Sunday Times, in a post about race in America: ‘Scratch white America and beneath it is black‘.

Here’s another piece I have just had published at Comment is Free…  Later, I will publish a selection of comments I’ve received, and try and respond as best I can.

After the article was published, I and the Guardian were contacted by lawyers for Khalid Bin Mafouz.  I had incorrectly stated that the Sheikh sought to have damages awarded in the USA, but this was not correct.  It was the fear that he would seek damages, which promoted US legislators to action.  You can see the correction made, below.

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While various campaigning groups spring up left, right and centre with the aim of reforming Britain’s mangled political system, it seems that our friends abroad have already grown tired of waiting for us to get it right. It is time, they have decided, to take matters into their own hands.

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Poet (and colleague) Sophie Mayer is posting a poem-a-day throughout April, getting in on the action of America’s National Poetry Month.

This frantic, deadline based creativity reminds me of Layer Tennis, still going strong and coming to the UK right now.

Perhaps someone should inaugurate some kind of competitive poetry competition? Not quite as adversarial as MC Battles, more a lettered exchange, where (like in Layer Tennis) you get points for developing and complementing (if not complimenting) your opponent’s work. Having said that, the obvious name for the competition is Versus.

But until that venture gets off the ground, we’ll always have PoetCasting.

Update

Excellent: Likestarlings (h/t Sarah).

Today I start a new job, as Campaigns Manager at English PEN, promoting literature and human rights worldwide.  A dream job for a blogger, I reckon.

As before, consider this full disclosure to the bloggers’ register of interests, and sufficient explanation should this site suddenly begin to feature more posts on imprisoned writers or UK libel law. 

One of my first acts will be to go an hear Giles Ji Ungpakorn speak about Thailand’s archaic Lese-Majesty laws at SOAS, 7pm. Its chaired by Carole Seymour-Jones, chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. PDF details here.

Meanwhile, down the rabbit hole, The Printed Blog is a US newspaper created entirely from blog content.  The founders are currently “beta testing” the newspaper at “select locations”.

It reminds me of Things Our Friends Have Written on The Internet.  The Main difference being that The Printed Blog is a paid for product, not a labour of love.  I know Blurb.com offer a blogbook service.

As the internet becomes exponentially more popular, and the international credit-crunch hits home, newspapers have been identified as a failing industry.  Clay Shirky criticises their business model in Here Comes Everybody and Andrew Sullivan has been chronicling the possibility of a newspaper “bailout” to save the New York Times.  Its odd that a publication that uses twenty-first century technology to supply its content, should be experimenting with a twentieth century sales and distribution model… so I’m not confident it will succeed.

What could redeem the project, is if the publication is launched as a customisable, subscription product.  For example, I could select the blogs or newspapers I like, and some system compiles a customised newspaper that is printed digitally and despatched to my door.  It would be the first step towards the dynamic electronic newspapers from science fiction – Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, which I just finished reading, includes such fantastic technology.

(And yes, The Printed Blog does have a blog).

Update

From 1981:

One of the presents in my stocking from Santa was The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I’ve long thought that his epics, The Baroque Cycle and especially Cryptonomicon address some of the fundamental issues of our age, especially the impact of technology on culture. This passage from The Diamond Age, published in the mid-1990s, seems prescient of our computer culture, our obsession with gagetry (“guilty, your honour”) and the vogue for cosmetic surgery. It also made me laugh:

You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud’s sound system lived in his eardrums. You toild even get telaesthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumoured that hackers for big companies had figured out a way to get through the dedenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time – even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who’d somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.

(Hat-tip to Roger M for the book recommendation).

The Last Dance by Sophie Khadr:

There is a shelved alcove in the living room. Neither of them has ventured near the top shelf in years; it is an unspoken rule between them. That is the urn’s place, its curves reminiscent of the way their daughter’s body might have flowered given the opportunity. At ten, Cassie had been lithe and boyish with the beginnings of small, olive-like breasts. She loved to dance. Charlie remembers how she danced with her mother, their laughter bouncing around the room trying to keep pace with their feet.

The rest may be found at Flashquake. It has a surprising ending.

Flash fiction seems perfect for the digital age, where we are consuming art and entertainment in new ways an in smaller chunks. A powerful, rounded thought in your coffee break. A bittersweet moment when you wait for the bus.

Adam Maxwell runs his own Flash Fiction lounge, with a playbill theme not unlike my envelopes. Read his essay on the difference between microfiction and flash fiction.

My recent efforts are, of course, available too. I may post another soon, you never know.

Well, the voting is over, and the winners have been announced. I refer of course to Britain’s Got Talent and I’d Do Anything, where the victors were revealed to much fanfare. Congratulations George and Jodie.

But the march of reality TV is relentless. I spotted this listing from The Times new TV listings magazine, Seer (I’ve linked there before):

TV Choice – Do You Hear The People Sing? (BBC1, 7.30pm)

Music maestro Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber launches a new talent quest, to discover a cast to feature in a remounting of the popular musical Les Miserables. Contestants of all ages will compete for the chance to play the various roles in the show, from child roles Gavroche and Cosette, to young lothario Marius and leading man Jean Valjean. Joining Lord Lloyd-Webber on the panel of judges will be Michael Ball and Bonnie Langford. Presebted by Tess Daly. This week: Bristol.

Elsewhere, Johann Hari says we should vote for the poet laureate.