OTU Only: Whither Death?

[mike wightman]

Another, and much better IMHO, film that deals with these issues is Never Let Me Go staring amongst others Kiera Knightly and Andrew Garfield. Very though provoking - worth a look on Wikipedia and definitely worth a watch if you can find it.

 

[vegas]

...I'd point out that enough people in the OTU reject your premise for "death insurance" to be a thing.

So whether or not you personally believe wafers and cloning offer immortality (and whether they actually do, or if they just "copy" you), there's canonical evidence that at least some people in Traveller do.

There is also canonical evidence that Emperors, the richest, most powerful people in Charted Space, die.

Every. Single. One.
(Save, perhaps, Strephon.)

Your OP asks, wither death? My answer is: everywhere. Because the technology described doesn't actually remove death. My torture thought experiment was supposed to demonstrate that. Most people understand that death isn't cheated this way.

Some people might not understand, or are so egotistical that they think a copy of them should be made for eternity, or are so fearful of death that they pursue this anyway. Such people are obviously in the minority (cf. Emperors list) and probably disdained.

That is my "constrained by canon" answer for making wafer tech make sense with OTU history.

PS - there are enough people in the real world for "cryogenics" to be a thing with bodies and heads frozen and preserved. That is not evidence that it works.

 

[Reban]

Ship of Theseus issue:

a soldier on a TL14 battlefield has half their brain destroyed, but advanced medical science stabilizes them and them the half a brain is regrown.

Are you still the same soldier, although lacking personality traits and memories?

Say a wafer back up was taken before the conflict and you can be resored to that point - are you still you?

Another battle, this time the original half of the brain is destroyed. You get your brain regrown again - you now have no original brain (by the way - did you know you don't have the brain tissue you were born with?) and yet full memories and personality are restored.

Are you still you?

How about the entire brain is destroyed but the rest of the body survives - the brain is regrown and again a backup implanted. Is it still you.

All great questions. Without going too deeply into philosophy I'd say the following:

Soldier with brain injury: same person but changed in the same way as anyone recovering from brain injury would be. Introduction of replacement brain material has no bearing, its similar to having a blood transfusion or skin graft.

Restored from a wafer: this is a bit like respawning in a computer game. You've restored an earlier version from before the snapshot that created the wafer was made. In this case you've lost some of your experiences. again the real world medical analogy is something like blanking out the memory of a traumatic experience. You're still you, but missing crucial experience from your life story.

The final one; new brain and reinstalled "software" is probably the most difficult case. If you had a transplant of any other organ you'd still be you. But the brain is considered differently because its considered the seat of "youness" or personality.

Now lets separate personality from the soul here, many cultures have considered the soul to be seated in the heart or exist in some whole of the person. Many consider the soul to be transferable and there are various ideas of how attached it is to the body. Besides all of which this starts to touch on religion and the prohibitions of COTI. So lets park that.

So before anyone can answer that final question, they have to decide if they accept a person, whom they know and recognize, as the same person even though they haven't lived continuously in that body.

The soldier may know no difference, except how other react to him or her.

 

[Ulsyus]

How can you operate in an OTU when this wafer technology and cloning have supposedly been around for a few centuries with nothing in any prior rule set having them, and then having to re-verse engineer all of this into the OTU? If Wafer technology has been around for 500 years before 1100 Imperial dating, why has not it totally changed the entire Imperium and how it operates? Why are not all of your major nobles and business leaders immortal by now? The Technology has been there for 500 YEARS. How the Imperium should look with this should be totally different from any prior version of the OTU.

Had you considered that there may be constant pressure from the younger to assume a leadership role? That even if a sophont could live for a very very long time that they may not at some point want to retire to a villa or orbital to take up a life as an aesthetic/unpublished ⌧-star/drug-fiend/student of the violin etc etc.

That's not to say that there'd be some corporate execs (mega or otherwise) who simply love the exercise of power, but someone will come along who loves it just as much, and then the games ensue.

Debating this can be interesting, as I almost always find your posts. But to make statements that are absolutes or definitive about something that is science fiction where the science is still fiction could be limiting.

I thought that the structure of a ruling family from T4's Pocket Empires was a pretty good primer on something like this.

 

[Ulsyus]

Are you still you?

Define "you".

 

[LeperColony]

Ship of Theseus issue:

a soldier on a TL14 battlefield has half their brain destroyed, but advanced medical science stabilizes them and them the half a brain is regrown.

Are you still the same soldier, although lacking personality traits and memories?

Say a wafer back up was taken before the conflict and you can be resored to that point - are you still you?

Another battle, this time the original half of the brain is destroyed. You get your brain regrown again - you now have no original brain (by the way - did you know you don't have the brain tissue you were born with?) and yet full memories and personality are restored.

Are you still you?

How about the entire brain is destroyed but the rest of the body survives - the brain is regrown and again a backup implanted. Is it still you.

Of course I don't have "the" answers to these questions, assuming in fact there even is such a thing. But I'm also actively avoiding philosophical discussion to prevent Pitting.

There is something to be said for the fact that, despite the availability of these technologies, there's no evidence that emperors use them. Of course, we actually don't know what happens to many of them, and it could be that the title passes along some kind of rule following the "original" lifespan.

But the most likely answer is that come restraint prevents its use among the highest echelons of society. And hence the entire point of my original posting of the topic.

What are these?

1. Technical: It's possible that continuous life over centuries is simply not possible (at least by 1100). Perhaps psychological issues creep up. Or there's some kind of degradation over time that eventually prevents transference.

2. Social/Cultural/Religious/Legal: It may also be the case that immortality is technically feasible, but rejected due to social, cultural, religious or legal restraints that are sufficiently powerful so that nobody at the top tries it.

We know these conventions are not universal, because "death insurance" does exist, and the Imperium is huge and heterogeneous, to say nothing of other interstellar regions.

But it could be that they are effective in curtailing any such attempt by the emperors and senior statesmen.

Although, we actually don't know that all the previous emperors have "died," just that the throne passed. Some of them could be milling about as emperors emeritus, but that seems unlikely. Especially since in some cases the throne passed violently, and one's usurper is unlikely to leave the legitimate ruler lounging around.

3. Personal: It may be that people who embark upon an attempt at immortality fail, for various reasons, and after a certain period of time, elect to "check out." So while there's no technical or legal restraint, people just don't live forever.

And of course this list is not exhaustive, there could very well be other reasons.

 

[mike wightman]

How about this.

You are a personality being run on a computer network.

You have a clone/synthetic body constructed and your personality is downloaded to it - but it remains in real time contact with the computer you.

The body goes off, does stuff that you would do but you can not directly control the body only 'remember' what it is up to.

From the construct's point of consciousness it awakens in a new body, with all the memories and personality of the computer version. It goes off adventuring. It does not want to die, it wants to continue its existence.

The body is killed.

The computer orders a new body. Or maybe it will try having two bodies running around this time... after all, even if they die I continue to order new bodies...

 

[Ulsyus]

Just a thought.
The original intent of MT was 'the real Strephon' was a clone or robot double.
This was retconned due to fan reaction and so by Survival Margin, actually a TNE supplement more than a MT supplement, Strephon is the real Strephon.

What if we retcon again to introduce the T5 wafer tech that didn't exist for the authors of MT or TNE - it has been there all along after all in the setting

The real Strephon is 'the real Strephon' because one of his body clones has had the prime personality imprinted - going against Imperial custom.

Imperial custom is for dead Emperors to be maintained as wafers, possibly being run in a VR set up so that the current Emperor can go and talk to them if need be.

Strephon is the first Emperor to have routinely made use of body doubles/clones, but care is taken to always sync the clones and keep them at least a sector apart. Imagine being the IISS crew tasked with transporting the Emperor's latest personality/memory downloads jumping into a system and learning of the assassination. Is there a termination clause for the Strephon clones? Does someone take it upon themselves to advance a clone as the prime Strephon (which one is the original anyway?).

A council of dead emperors, advisors to the living. Nice.

Do they provide advice, knowing of their own deaths? Do they understand the march of history that has gone on since their own times? Even if they were VRs, could they lose their marbles faced with what's gone on? Would they be force-taught/programmed all the history that has occurred since they were last summoned to for advice? Do they waive their rights to be considered sophonts themselves if confined solely to a wafer, or does the law not apply to those shadiest (ha!) of Imperial advisors?

As for whether Strephon was a clone or lookalike in the throne room, a rebuild clone in his new realm out by the Rift, an android built to cover for him until his clone could be completed, I'm sure any of that was possible and the truth was just lost in the chaos of the Rebellion. That there was an heir, that the heir was legally Stephon's heir, that was a practical reality. Realpolitik beats theory doesn't it?

 

[mike wightman]

Define "you".

That's easy, 'me'.

This is quite possibly the most interesting thread that has popped up in a long time...

 

[Ulsyus]

That's easy, 'me'.

Cute, sonny Jim, but it doesn't cut the mustard.

Is this were the fiction part starts to cause drift from an agreement about what should be cannon until MWM lays down the final decision?

I know you know I.M.Banks laid out the idea of what made who pretty clearly. Too, in a T5 Charted Space where machine intelligences are considered sophonts, that what make a who is a lot broader and covers a pretty diverse range of possibilities.

So T5 hands out all the options. I know people will cry "but it didn't exist in the copy of CT I bought in 1979, how can it be now?", doing their crying out on a board accessed via the world wide web which didn't exist when their copy of CT came out. Is that ironic?

Back to the point - retconning needs to occur in a living science fiction setting, unless the science is so vague that it might as well be fantasy. So as we understand more of the consequences of technology, tweaking with the setting needs some consideration, and that's just the hard science bits! Lord forbid someone want's to delve a little more into the development of Cherry's "Cyteen" (as I've done in my ATU) and the impact that has on the development of Humaniti!

So, are you willing to give a little more insight into how you define "you"?

 

[Nathan Brazil]

The OTU has two examples of upgraded wafer tech even before Agent or T5 came out. Perhaps Virus was more that what was originally written now.:smirk:

However, the Viral entity had underestimated the cunning and treachery of its figurehead. By one means or another, Lucan was able to create a Viral replica of his personality using techniques developed in ongoing research based on the Omicron project.....
Within a few years Lucan, realizing that his health was failing, found a way to make a direct personality upload not a replica of Lucan but the real Lucan, loaded into a computer to rule the Imperium forever. Assembling an army of robotic guardians to protect him against the kind of assault that he had carried out against his ally, Lucan made the transfer. He became the palace computer, the central brain of the whole Imperium. - 1248 Sourcebook 1: Out of the Darkness pg 61

The allied fleet paused for a few weeks to make repairs, then launched what was intended to be the final offensive against Anv!ull’lxux. The hope was that with the Viral prophet destroyed, perhaps the Gods of Thunder would turn to infighting or gain a more moderate leadership. . - 1248 Sourcebook 1: Out of the Darkness pg 74

 

[LeperColony]

Is 1248 canonical? For some reason I was under the impression that it wasn't (maybe just wishful thinking).

 

[vegas]

So, are you willing to give a little more insight into how you define "you"?

Philosophers have struggled with the metaphysical problem for millennia. There is no consensus on the matter, and we aren't going to come up with one on this board. The metaphysics of personal identity is vexing.

All great questions. Without going too deeply into philosophy I'd say the following:...

You have your answers. I have mine. Others have there own. Most people don't think about it. Getting a consensus or "right" answer won't happen here.

It is probably better to approach this topic as an author and explore the implications of one idea and see where it goes, rather than think we can rattle off answers like that. There are many puzzles around this topic.

 

[Reban]

That's easy, 'me'.

Funny, I would have said you = not me

Back to the point - retconning needs to occur in a living science fiction setting, unless the science is so vague that it might as well be fantasy. So as we understand more of the consequences of technology, tweaking with the setting needs some consideration, and that's just the hard science bits!

Agreed.

You have your answers. I have mine. Others have there own. Most people don't think about it. Getting a consensus or "right" answer won't happen here.

It is probably better to approach this topic as an author and explore the implications of one idea and see where it goes, rather than think we can rattle off answers like that. There are many puzzles around this topic.

Exactly, my answers may not sound right to you. Diversity of opinion is also something that will exist in the OTU. Asking the Library computer to show you philosophical opinions on personality transfers is likely one of the few things that will make a tiny holographic egg timer appear as the system slows.

There are far more capable authors than me:

“I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!”

 

[mike wightman]

Cute, sonny Jim, but it doesn't cut the mustard.

I know but I couldn't resist

Is this were the fiction part starts to cause drift from an agreement about what should be cannon until MWM lays down the final decision?

Every time a new Traveller rulebook, sourcebook or adventure is published the OTU changes - sometimes the changes are paradigm shifts and sometimes just he flap of butterfly wings...
yup, the unintended consequence of minor change can lead to chaos, while the tectonic paradigm shifts oddly enough often bring order.

T5 and AotI have done both - there is the paradigm shift of finally having a definitive guide to the OTU with all the changes, retcons, clarifications and contradictions - not to mention clashes with MgT 'canon', and there is also the subtle inclusion of new/old stuff that will have implications when we have had the chance to digest it and discuss it.
Wafer tech really is just scratching the surface of the new stuff in T5 and the OTU by corollary.

I know you know I.M.Banks laid out the idea of what made who pretty clearly. Too, in a T5 Charted Space where machine intelligences are considered sophonts, that what make a who is a lot broader and covers a pretty diverse range of possibilities.

Re-reading the early JTAS articles on robots - not he best of but the original articles - I can see elements of T5 content there. Synthetic organisms, machine intelligence, cyborgs, it is all mentioned in passing, but only the robots were fleshed out. DGP's LBB:8 Robots book is a pale imitation of what could have been from the intent of the original Robots article in JTAS(too hung up on the mechanical), T5 finally adds the detail.

So T5 hands out all the options. I know people will cry "but it didn't exist in the copy of CT I bought in 1979, how can it be now?", doing their crying out on a board accessed via the world wide web which didn't exist when their copy of CT came out. Is that ironic?

How many people still refuse to allow their TL15 ex-Navy characters to have smartwatches

Back to the point - retconning needs to occur in a living science fiction setting, unless the science is so vague that it might as well be fantasy. So as we understand more of the consequences of technology, tweaking with the setting needs some consideration, and that's just the hard science bits! Lord forbid someone want's to delve a little more into the development of Cherry's "Cyteen" (as I've done in my ATU) and the impact that has on the development of Humaniti!

I completely agree.

So, are you willing to give a little more insight into how you define "you"?

Ok, here goes.
I, me, the 'you' you refer to is my self awareness of consciousness. I know that when I die I will find out if there is an afterlife or I will just stop.
Any copy of me is not me since it is not a continuation of my consciousness, it is a copy that thinks it is continuation but it isn't.

As I have mentioned in another post the interesting issue arises if the original consciousness is completely digital (ok it is a copy of an original but you understand my point) and downloads into bodies that it is aware of but not in control of - it is not remotely controlling but is experiencing events. The computer entity continues its consciousness even after a thousand download body deaths, and that each of those bodies is an individual self aware consciousness.

 

[LeperColony]

Re-reading the early JTAS articles on robots - not he best of but the original articles - I can see elements of T5 content there. Synthetic organisms, machine intelligence, cyborgs, it is all mentioned in passing, but only the robots were fleshed out. DGP's LBB:8 Robots book is a pale imitation of what could have been from the intent of the original Robots article in JTAS(too hung up on the mechanical), T5 finally adds the detail.

Before starting this thread, I had re-read 101 Robots, and I was amused by the primitive nature of models.

At TL-15, the state of the art Telku can "danc(e) and play cards."

Traveller, like any other work of art, is a product of its times. But I do find it striking how pessimistic the various authors were when it came to robotics, AI, computer, cybernetics, medicine and gene manipulation.

 

[Tiikeri]

A council of dead emperors, advisors to the living. Nice.

That reminds vaguely of the fate of Alia Mu'ad Dib, enthralled to the sentient genetic memory of her grandfather, Baron Harkonnen.

 

[mike wightman]

When Star Trek Voyager first aired i remember thinking it would be nice to have something like their data pads - I never imagined such things would be possible in my lifetime at the time. There are three i-pads of different sizes in my house now...

The smartphone and tablet are now so common that people forget that only twenty years ago they were science fiction.

Pegging AI at TL16 in original CT is now glaringly silly - rename as AS (artificial sentience) and you could make a case. People are already talking to Alexa as if she were real - give it a few years and Alexa, Cortana and Siri will talk back and mimic emotions. Once a machine can learn, mimic emotions and hold a conversation an awful lot of people will consider them intelligent.

Advances in genetic engineering are still a way off thanks to the taboo we have with messing with stuff like that, but it will come.

 

[vegas]

Ok, here goes.
I, me, the 'you' you refer to is my self awareness of consciousness. I know that when I die I will find out if there is an afterlife or I will just stop.
Any copy of me is not me since it is not a continuation of my consciousness, it is a copy that thinks it is continuation but it isn't.

That seems a reasonable common sense description. A lot of people might start there. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. I am a thing that thinks.

The cogito was once a radical idea, but after 380-odd years, it is now accepted common sense in our culture. (It is useful to keep in mind that this was not always so, and people didn't always perceive themselves this way.) It probably doesn't really work as a definition of personal identity, its pervasiveness notwithstanding.

If what you are is an "awareness of a consciousness"[1], a thing that thinks, and that alone, how do you distinguish one consciousness from another? What is the principle of individuation? Why are there many people and not just one thing having all these thoughts?

You have asserted that there can be copies of you; how do you tell the difference between you and the copy if all you are is a consciousness? What would make something a copy and not you, if all you are is a thing that thinks? How does it fail to be a continuation of you? It continues in time, it is a thing that thinks,... why isn't it a continuation of you?

I don't expect you (or anyone else) to really answer these questions. I don't think they can be answered easily if at all.

EDIT and footnote [1] as written, your definition is circular, because you are equating "I" with "my self-awareness" and you really shouldn't have "my" or "self-" in your definition of "I" or you aren't defining anything. I tried to clean that up in my probing questions.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

Is 1248 canonical? For some reason I was under the impression that it wasn't (maybe just wishful thinking).

*sigh* OK, one more time.

The short answer is sort of.
The long answer is in a few other threads.
The in-between answer is that it still is, but because The Empress Wave got officially changed in AOTI and Mongoose's Zhodani book, overall 1248 is incompatible. Having said that, it has a LOT of history covering the years 1130-1248 which the wave cannot prevent like Lucan going Viral in the 1150's or Anv!ull’lxux circa 1190.

Which sort of backs up the previous responses about the OTU changing over time. OK I'm done derailing the thread. Back to talking about Death and her sweet caress:smirk: