Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Literature (Page 14 of 18)

Back-up Your Brain

6 February 2010 / / 4 Comments

(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 ability 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 6th 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.

'The Same River Twice, part V' by ruSSel hiGGs. Creative Commons License.

‘The Same River Twice, part V’ by ruSSel hiGGs. Creative Commons License.

Inside Time

7 December 2009 / / 0 Comments

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.
Continue reading

A True Born Englishman?

11 November 2009 / / 0 Comments

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‘.

Two Americas – Infinite Jest and The Wire

16 September 2009 / / 2 Comments

(This post contains mild spoilers).
A double loss – It has been a couple of weeks since I finished reading the brick-like Infinite Jest, which I was reading as part of the Infinite Summer project.  And now I’ve just finished watching the last ever episode of The Wire, the Great American Novel of TV shows.  I am now feeling the loss of two sets of characters.  I have been removed from Boston and Baltimore simultaneously.
The two pieces are obviously very different in style.  The Wire is brutal realism (if not totally real), whereas Infinite Jest is satire, fable, comedy, with a little magical realism thrown in.  At least, I think it is.
Nevertheless, the two have a fair few similarities.  The first is the theme of interconnectedness, which any piece of fin du millénaire art must include. Infinite Jest painstakingly introduces us to the back-stories of a dozen or more  minor characters, justifying the route that each addict takes to the door of the Ennet half-way house (the first, when Ken Erdeddy awaits the delivery of his dope, is one of my favourite sequences in the novel).  Meanwhile, The Wire presents hundreds of co-incidences and minor tragedies that culminate in all the best-laid plans going awry.  Many of these involve the bald and simple Herc, one of the low level officers in the Serious Crimes Unit, who is too stupid to realise the negative effect his indiscreetness has on the investigations of those around him.  Instead, he feels under-appreciated and hard-done-by, which makes him one of the most dislikable characters in the series.
A strong parallel is of course in the theme of drugs and addiction, which both Infinite Jest and The Wire have by the kilo.  At the end of series 4, street-junkie Bubbles (who tried and failed to get clean in earlier episodes) inadvertently causes the death of his young charge Sherrod, and tries in vain to hang himself.  When we meet him again in series 5 he is at NA meetings and on the road to redemption.  Sherrod’s death is clearly the “cliff” that David Foster Wallace describes so eloquently in Infinite Jest, the point-of-no return.  Bubbles fails to eliminate his own map for good.  He has hit the very rock bottom, which provides his motivation to get clean, however demeaning that might be.  Bubbles’ NA ‘sponsor’, the biker Walon, is a giant of a man, who doesn’t know big fancy words, but has the wisdom of one who has transcended his addiction.  He could be Infinite Jest’s Don Gately (if Don let his hair grow out).

Bubbles at an NA meeting (Series 5, The Wire)

Bubbles at an NA meeting (Series 5, The Wire)


I never had faith that Bubbles would survive.  Of all the characters we met in series 1, he was the least likely to make it through to the final credits intact.  I expected the writers to find a way for him to die senselessly and tragically (at the whim of some low-level dealer, perhaps?) that would shock the audience.  But Bubbles is a good character, with a sense of justice, and he deserves to beat his addiction, and the tribute of the newspaper article, late in series 5.
Bubbles success is a triumph of sincerity over cynicism, which is, as Matthew Baldwin has been arguing this week, a major theme in Infinite Jest.  In the book, the sincerity is for the most part internalised:  Hal Incandenza and Don Gately talking to themselves.  But Don’s AA meetings teach the value of openness with others (most hilariously, in Ken Erdeddy’s meeting with Big Tony on page 505).  Hal’s brother Mario, slightly warped both physically and mentally, is the embodiment of sincerity, while their Mother – “The Moms” – is ruined by her inability to communicate honestly with anyone else in her family.
Back in Baltimore, “high-functioning alcoholic” Jimmy McNulty is at his happiest when he is true to himself: twirling a baton out on the streets at the end of series 3, and celebrating with his ex-colleagues after finally, spectacularly crashing out of Baltimore PD.  And the little montage which closes The Wire, beginning and ending with Jimmy looking out over the city, shows us that those who have made a stand for something other than themselves, seem most happiest:  Gus Haynes, the Baltimore Sun‘s City Editor, is content at his desk; Bubbles finally gets to eat dinner with his sister; and Cedric Daniels is smiling in a cheap lawyer’s suit, having dumped his police career on a point of principle.  Meanwhile, poor Duquan, who waits until the final episode to tell his first lie, is seen shooting-up by the junk-yard fire; and ex-Kingpin Marlo, in a suit and trying to be something he is not, looks disorientated and confused on a street corner.  Tommy Carcetti wins the State House, but he seem troubled, his idealism in tatters, after a series of compromises made in the pursuit of power.
There are plenty of cynical characters in The Wire, and the power-bureaucracy it describes is depressing.  Nevertheless, the message that emerges is positive and noble.  None of the dramatic moments, in any of the five series, would be possible, if it wasn’t for the abundance of good characters – on both sides of the law – trying to do good things.  It is an uplifting, optimistic TV series, despite all the blood.
Sadly, I think the reverse is true of the country David Foster Wallace has created in Infinite Jest.  This is odd, because of the two, the book is a much funnier creation.  I don’t think that the America of The Wire and the America of Infinite Jest can be the same place (and this is not just because, in the book, the USA has annexed Canada and Mexico!)  While Foster Wallace is clearly a sincere and honest writer, the darkness in his America seems more malevolent.  The corruption is psychic, psychological.  It erodes the minds of the citizens like a cancer, and “The Entertainment” – a mysterious film that kills viewers – is just an manifestation of this.
The decline of Foster Wallce’s America is terminal.  This is not so in The Wire, where we have had a stolen glimpse of a better way.  Baltimore could be saved, perhaps.  Boston, I fear, is already lost.
MIT, Boston, 31 May '07. Photo by vincent-b

MIT, Boston, 31 May ’07. Photo by vincent-b

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