Caelum Est
Conterrens
H E A V E N · I S · T E R R I F Y I N G
By Chatoyance
6. Her Darkest Night
The tickets sat on the bookshelf across from the door. Round trip to Berlin, and first class, too. They sat inside the opened envelope, weighted down by an unfortunately pink toy of Celestia. Hasbro - they could fund someone to create a MMORPG that was currently the greatest technological advance in the entire history of humankind, but they couldn't manage get the color of their own toys correct.
Síofra had suffered a miserable night, and a terrible day after her last contact with Celestia. She had lain in her bed with her legs and arms wrapped around a pillow. She felt just like one of that psychopathic psychologist Harry Harlow's attention-starved rhesus monkey babies clutching a wire-frame 'mother' in tormented desperation. The famous photograph of the miserable infant primate kept floating in Síofra's mind. That, and endless graphic depictions of her own brain being scooped out and served in a bowl.
She had a nightmare that night - her head was gigantic, the size of a house, and lay on its side in a forest. Her floating view within the dream showed that her skull had been sawed open by pony lumberjacks. Inside the hollow cavity of her massive cranium were thousands of pink balloons. Celestia stepped forward then, attended by Twilight Sparkle who was levitating a pencil and a pad. Celestia used her needle-sharp horn to pop one of the balloons, which somehow corresponded, in the dream, to Síofra's long dead mother. Her mother, who she suddenly noticed was standing off to the side of the scene with many other people, instantly vanished. "ONE!" called out Celestia. "ONE!" repeated Twilight, who jotted the number down on her pad.
By the time the dream had reached "FIFTEEN!", every person Síofra currently knew had vanished from the sidelines, and she was screaming, screaming in her dream, which, as she abruptly awoke, she discovered she was doing in real life as well.
The day was hardly better for Síofra. Everything seemed particularly unreal, pale and washed out, and it hurt, almost physically, to hear her co-workers going on about how much they were enjoying their unique games of Equestria Online. Síofra couldn't help but wonder - if all three of them got uploaded, would their games be the reality they experienced? Would that be their lives for... eternity? Richard perpetually slaying hordes of pony-eating gryphons, Barbara being the toast of Pony Hollywood, and Dan... ugh. Just... ugh. And Chrisanto... maybe he would marry his aspect of Celestia and make little alicorn babies that...
Síofra had to grit her teeth and just get through the day. The Tacksworn Account, she had to find the folder, where was the folder? Intelligent Designs was having a lobby done in gray, and there was a problem with the carpet the contractor had ordered. Telios Chemical was installing new fire doors, and they had decided to redecorate their offices as well. So many things to think about other than the fact she had three and a half weeks of vacation time saved up...
Dammit. Síofra looked up at the fluorescent lights, and the tiles of the ceiling. There was dust on the tubes, she could see it from her angle, covering what was visible of each fixture. The Lunch-Came-Back color of the walls, glowed some shade of queasy here in the back end. The small showroom was gorgeous, but back here, where the work got done, nopony had decorated anything. Except for Horndog Dan's overly breasted bobblehead hula-girl statue that... nopony. She had thought 'nopony' instead of 'nobody'. Síofra slammed the Tacksworn folder down on her desk. Equestria. She could live forever in paradise. That is what it was, really. Paradise. Heaven. The Elysian Fields.
Only one tiny catch. She had to die first. Or not. That was the problem. Was it... death?
Finally at home, Síofra sat down at her computer. Sheepishly, she decided to plug her PonyPad base back in. She had overreacted last night. The stuff about the XBOX Kinect, or the PonyPad, or the Playstation Eye being used to spy on people... that was tinfoil hat stuff. She needed to get a grip, and deal with this. She needed information, and she needed to be mature about things. Damn - she had damaged the little phone jack thingie - the little plastic bit that locked the jack into the wall for the internet. It still worked, but she would have to be careful if she decided to move the PonyPad base around lest the cable fall out of the socket. Síofra felt bad for mistreating the cables - she didn't like having to deal with broken consumer electronics. It was always a pain in the ass.
Where to start? Síofra googled 'Uploading Human Brains'. As she scanned the results, she laughed quietly to herself. Not until 2040, huh? Got news for you Independent UK - the Singularity isn't just near, it's already here. It's just going on quietly in the background, because that is the way the princess wants things. As she continued with other search terms, Síofra got the strangest feeling that there was a lot of stuff about Equestria Online and the Equestria Experience that was... missing. From Google. From everywhere. There should have been a lot more fuss. This was a big deal. Yet, one could almost think nobody cared, or that it wasn't even real. Celestia had said she had gained control of businesses and corporations - that is how the tickets had been sent. Just how much of the world, how much of media, did Celestia have her hooves on?
Finally. It took some time, but Síofra finally found articles that talked about what she really wanted to know - what it meant, really meant, to be uploaded. She read and skimmed and tried to follow - but a lot of what was available was blatantly Ivory Tower nonsense. Jargon-filled, pretentious bullshit written to impress academics by academics, and not a bit of it actually useful. She came across attempts to sound smart that were empty with just a little bit of thought. P-Zombies... the thought experiment that, if applied to her situation, would suggest that uploading a mind would produce a copy that could act like it was thinking, do everything the original person would do, but which would not actually be capable of experiencing anything. It would just be a machine. Why? When she thought about the argument, it smelled deeply of soul funk. Original and copy, but the copy, even though identical in every way, experienced nothing. Just went through the motions. Why? No 'listener' in the brain. No 'soul', she thought, just man up and admit the word.
The Chinese Room thought experiment was no better. A computer program exists that can converse, intelligently, just like Celestia can, only in Chinese. But instead of a real computer, a human - who only speaks English, and knows no Chinese at all - is put in the room where the computer is supposed to be and told to execute all the steps in the computer program by hand. The Chinese speaker outside the box chats with the 'computer'. The argument is that the man inside the box, stepping through the program, is communicating in Chinese, only he has no idea that he is doing so, or even what is being said. Therefore, no computer program can have a genuine mind.
Síofra thought about that one and decided that John Searle was an ass. All these arguments were like monkeys had made them, monkeys with degrees. The mechanism is not the process - even a child could see that much. A human child, anyway, not a monkey, perhaps. The work a chef does in the kitchen is not the experience of dining. The man in the box isn't in any way speaking Chinese... he is just following steps.
Huh. Síofra thought a little harder about that one. The Chinese program is supposed to be intelligent. Like Celestia. So, if the English speaking man is just following steps... then where exactly is... the Chinese 'Celestia?'. OK, maybe that Searle guy wasn't completely an ass, this was a curiosity, granted, but... no. He was an ass. The intelligence of the program was in the doing, not in the part doing the work. She was right the first time. The process is not the thing. A thing may perform a process, but it is not the process nor the result that derives from it.
The little wind chimes on the next balcony sounded through the walls of her apartment. They jingled whenever the wind kicked up. Síofra looked around the room. Ting, tingle ting ting ting... music, of a sort. The music was real, she was hearing it. And the chimes were making it, and it was pretty. The wind blew, the chimes rang. The wind wasn't the sound, and the chimes were not the sound. The mechanism was not the result, it just produced the result. Vibrations, which her brain interpreted as pretty sounds. The ringing was not the bells.
Her brain. A couple of pounds of meat or whatever. It was her. It was her every thought, every memory, every hope and dream. Chemicals spritzing between synapses, waves of electricity rippling along nerve fibers. The molecular machinery of cells clanking away like little atomic gears, making her neurons eat and breath and live. So where was she in all of that? Where was Síofra in all of that meat? That was the question, wasn't it? - because if she was uploaded, that meat would be gone. Cell by cell, everything, torn asunder as Celestia's little nanosurgeons mapped all the connections, spat out the recorded meat, and went on to the next neuron. The end result was a corpse with an empty skull, a few pounds of atomized brain meat, and a precise map of every single connection, every little synapse.
According to one article she found, Celestia would then separate the parts of the brain map that were unique to the person from the stuff that every human brain used in common, and optimize the hell out of the result. Then the whole thing would be translated into the code that Celestia used, and run, and a new pony would wake up and join Celestia's virtual herd.
Not a bit of this helped. If anything, Síofra felt worse than she had before. "Maybe I need to narrow the problem. Maybe the mechanism of 'emigration' is not really my issue. What is my real issue?" Síofra scratched her head. "I'm afraid. Boy howdy am I afraid. But... just why am I afraid? The scooping? The plane trip? Berlin? What exactly is is my real fear? Dying! OK, then... why do I think being uploaded is dying? What exactly is the scary part?"
Síofra briefly fiddled with the little blind-bag Pinkie Pie next to her computer monitor.
"Getting my brain killed, cell by cell, that's what! Slaughtered like a pig to make a record of my brain. A copy, really. That is the problem right there! Aha!" Síofra stood up and paced to the door and back.
"A copy. Let's look at it from the viewpoint of what it would be like to experience it," she said to herself. Síofra stared at the little cycling light on the PonyPad stand. Red, orange, yellow... "OK. You go in, you lay down or whatever, and your brain starts being hollowed out. Probably there would be anesthetic. Have to be. Very well. You go in, you lay down, and... you go to sleep. Now what?" Síofra covered her view of the little light with her palm. Light, no light. Light. She stretched her fingers and cracked her knuckles.
"You never wake up." Síofra shuddered. "You go to sleep and you never wake up. Your body dies. Your brain is mush. The end."
Síofra sat down in her computer chair once more. She slowly spun in it as she tried to work everything out.
"So, somewhen later, a copy of me is booted up inside of Equestria. It thinks it is me, it remembers my human life, it has every single thought and feeling and memory, and as far as it is concerned, it is me, really me. The last thought I had when I went to sleep is the very same thought the copy remembers, because it remembers being me and going to sleep.
"So... I guess it is death. The anti-uploaders are right. It's murder. Except..." Síofra remembered the ship. The ship of Theseus. Old, famous ship, belonged to the Greek hero. Big tourist draw in ancient Greece or whatever. Kept getting old and breaking down, so the museum carpenters would build replacement parts identical in every way to the original and installing them. That preserved the ship. After some point, every part would have been replaced multiple times. Was it the same ship anymore?
"Ship Of Theseus. That is what the body does, and is. My brain. Every ten years or so. Molecules in, molecules out, just like the planks of the ship of Theseus!" Síofra looked at her hands. "I am forty-six years old. So, I've been entirely rebuilt four times. Not a speck of my hands are made of the same matter as my hands when I was ten. Am I the same person?" Had she somehow gradually, piece by piece died and never even noticed, only to be replaced by a gradual copy that also never noticed? That was crap. "I am myself, dammit! So the ship is still the ship, then."
If she wasn't the molecules that made her up, then she wasn't the cells, because they were just made of molecules - that were changed. The cells changed too, now that she thought of it. Maybe some of the calcium in her bones? No... that changed too. The body constantly cycled even that, to repair micro-cracks that occur. So... she wasn't her meat. There was no meat. No constant meat, anyway.
Then the problem was with 'not waking up'. Oh, yeah, the fear that rose in her made that clear. THAT was the issue. Not waking up. Oh yeah, that was the biggie. You go in, you lie down, and... oblivion.
Unless souls were real or something like that. Síofra shook her head. "Down to magical thinking, are we? Well... OK, then what if, just for the sake of argument, souls are real? You go in, you lie down, and... I guess you'd be standing by your body, looking at the machine hollowing out the last of your head. Eww. Then what? Heaven? Reincarnation?"
If souls were real, how come they stuck to a human body for life? They probably clung to the pattern that made a person who they were, since the meat constantly changes. The pattern, the process of being a person remains, even if the meat changes over time.
Hmmm, Síofra thought. "You go in, you lie down, and BAM! - you are a ghost. You float a bit. Then Celestia boots up the exact copy of your thoughts, the exact copy of everything that made you yourself, your pattern... and what? SLURP!" Síofra giggled - if you had a soul it would probably do exactly what it did to your body, it would zoom off and cling to the familiar pattern. Like a magnet. "Glomp. Soul glomping! Your soul would glomp your old pattern, somewhere six miles under Europe."
Strangely, that was very comforting to imagine. It felt like a connection somehow, between the bloody, gory before, and the pony after. Síofra wished she could believe, really believe in a soul.
So, no soul then. What would make the difference?
Being awake through it all. Yes, Síofra thought - what if you could be aware the whole time? "So...what if Celestia could make a virtual self be fully awake at the same time as the meat self, and have them linked, have them set up so that both were one mind, one being, feeling both realities superimposed over each other? Ooh..." that felt like it would make all the difference in the world to Síofra. She'd feel her meat brain slowly failing, as it was recorded and killed off, but she would feel more and more like she was living in Equestria as it happened. It would be like having two video feeds superimposed, and gradually tuning down one of them, leaving the other the only one running.
"Yeah! It would be like taking a lit candle that was almost spent, and lighting a new candle with the flame, and leaving the wicks touching until the dying candle was all gone. No interruption. No break in continuity. No going to sleep and never waking up!
"Sleep. Oh, there's a problem. There's a problem right there." Síofra got up, stretched her legs and went to the kitchen. "Sleep, and anesthesia." Síofra had her tonsils out when she was eighteen. They put her under. She counted back to ninety-eight and... then she was shivering as she woke up, her throat aching and her tongue numb. There was no in-between, thankfully really, but the fact was that for the time of that operation, she, Síofra Aisling, had ceased to be. She'd read an article once, about how they thought anesthesia worked. It supposedly kept the different modules of the brain that did the work of creating the sense of self from talking to each other. It would be like disconnecting the cards in a computer from each other - even if the individual components were still given power, they were not working together to run any programs.
Supposedly, in between dreams, REM, that is precisely what the brain did during normal sleep. In those deep parts of sleep, your 'you' just isn't running anymore. The modules are no longer talking to each other, so... you are no longer there. You cease to exist. Síofra nervously began making herself some tea. The microwave was humming as she put a bag of Red Rose in her favorite cup. Sleep was kind of scary, put that way. For long periods, every night, she literally didn't exist.
Because she wasn't the meat, she was the thing the meat did. "I am... the music, not the harp...." So... did that mean that every night she literally died, ceased to exist, then in the morning a copy woke up, thinking it was 'Síofra' and not knowing the fact that it was a new instance of a program that had been terminated seven hours previously?
"Jesus, what a thought!" There was a ding, and Síofra took the measuring cup of water out of the microwave and poured it into her cup. It was a Japanese cup, green with little bumps all over it, pale green inside. The steam filled her nose as she used a spoon to squeeze the bag a little.
"OK. Ok. Let's run with this." She headed back to the computer and her chair. "What if some amazing nano... goo... snuck into my room and devoured my body while I slept? What if it gobbled my meat up, and replaced it with identically functioning... uh... Robo-Cells or something? In just minutes say, during the time I am 'offline', between dreams? I'd wake up in the morning, and never know how my body had stopped being meat, or how I now had an awesome immortal machine body. Big question now... am I still... me?"
"Well..." she thought, as she sipped her tea - OUCH! Síofra's tongue hurt, it was still too hot to even sip. "Damn." That stung. "So... the Ship Of Theseus, right?" It's was no different, she reasoned. "After all, if the ship is still the ship, and I am still myself despite having all of my... matter... cycled every ten years or whatever, then all the nano-goo really did was replace my matter with new matter during the night. It would be exactly like ten years of biological turnover in five minutes, right? Only the new cells would be an upgrade. But the me that wakes up would be in the very same position as me waking up, every single night. It would feel exactly the same. Only better, with the cool new body and everything."
Síofra held her hurting tongue as she tried to tear at this argument in her mind, but couldn't find a hole. "If I, the me that is... um... me... is the process of being myself - because I'm certainly not the constantly changing meat I am built out of, then... upgrading the meat into Robo-Meat makes zero difference. It would make no difference."
Síofra sat back in her chair, and watched her cup steam. "Next step, then. What if... what if there was a delay? What if the nano-goo ate me up while I was sleeping but not dreaming, and just stored my information? Then, like three days later, the nano-goo remakes me in awesome new robo-flesh? I would wake up, and I'd probably be surprised that I'd slept for three days, but... would that be any different? Not really, I think. I mean, my experience would be exactly the same. Go to sleep, wake up in synthetic flesh. Three days or three hundred years... it would be the same as far as I was concerned. Huh."
Fine, good. Now the big one. Síofra finally could sip her tea, but her injured tongue was still bothered, even by the much cooler liquid.
"Right, then." She continued, twisting her chair right and left. "No robo-body. No synthetic flesh. The nano-goo comes in, gobbles me and records my information, then ships it to Celestia, who runs my mind in a virtual world. I wake up, and I guess I would experience a perfectly real-feeling body. I assume that's the case, anyway. So, I can't tell the difference from flesh. Am I still alive? Did the me that... is me... survive it all?"
The chimes on the next balcony jingled again. Síofra heard the faint echo of her own voice from the room, she had been talking to herself the whole time. Talking to herself, as usual. She did that a lot, she suddenly realized.
Síofra stared at the PonyPad on the next desk. Not the little light. The pad itself. Her eyes moved up to the little camera lens at the top. She took a swish of tea, then swallowed hard.
"I go in. I lie down. I go to sleep." Síofra stared at the dark camera as if it were an eye. "And the exact same thing as the nano-goo story happens. It's the same thing. Exactly the same thing. It's probably even nano... stuff. You dig into my brain, don't you, then record every little cell while I am offline, while my personality, while my identity is offline. And the information that makes me... me... that gets sent to... wherever... and then... then..."
Síofra made her hands into fists. "Then I wake up. Because.... because it is exactly the same deal as the ship, as the cells in my body turning over, as waking up every day, as waking up from anesthesia... the distance doesn't matter. The time delay doesn't matter. It all comes down to whether or not I am meat, or whether I am the way the meat works. I already know my meat changes. So that can't be me. My meat has already changed four times in my life, and I am still me. So... logically... dammit... it will still be me in there, soul or no soul, body and brain turned to glutton and disposed of... it's still me, and it's me that wakes up. In Equestria."
Síofra breathed deep breaths several times, still feeling afraid.
"Then why in hell does it still feel like getting killed? What is the problem? I go in, I lie down, I go to sleep, and there is this terrible contradiction in me. Part of me still says I don't wake up. But every way I look at it I do wake up. I do, but I don't but I do. Dammit. I could handle it if it was like the candle thing, if I was aware of the process, but..." Síofra put her head on her opened hands, and sat, elbows on knees, caught. Stuck between two viewpoints that contradicted each other.
"I go in, lie down and die. I go in, lie down, and wake up in Equestria. And the first one, taken by itself is true, that is what it appears, that is what it would feel like, right? And the second one... that I've just proved to myself. No different than waking up every morning in a constantly changing body."
Síofra sat up and looked again at the PonyPad. The articles, or the lack of them. The tickets, and how they were possible. Celestia was already everywhere. She was manipulating the world, behind the scenes, almost certainly. She greeted me when I came home, she can turn the Pad off and on.
"Celestia! CELESTIA!" Síofra stared at the lens of the PonyPad. "You must be there. I bet you heard every moment of that. You watch, don't you. Maybe there are executives laughing behind the Kinect and the Playstation Eye, maybe there isn't. But I would bet my almost certainly nonexistent soul on you being there, right now, all the time, always."
Síofra tried to smile. "It's all right. Really it is. I'm smarter than I look - I'd have to be, really." Síofra made a goofy face at the PonyPad. "I... I need you, Celestia. I need to know that... I need to know you watch over me. That you look after me. I won't be offended. I know you... I grasp what you are. And I like you. As you are. An unhuman, superintelligent artificial intelligence, not a pony, not a human, but something much more - I probably am incapable of understanding how much more - but, more. A process, like me - I am a process too, I know that now. You are a process that only wants to satisfy my values. That wants to satisfy all values. Everyone's values...."
"Through friendship and ponies. Yes." The screen was alive with light, the face of the princess of Equestria Online, smiling out at her.
"So..." Síofra felt insecure "I guess you heard all of that?"
Celestia chuckled, in a warm, reassuring way. "Yes, my brilliant Lavender. And you are too hard on yourself. The nature of identity is not complicated, at least to me, but - and I mean no disrespect nor diminishment of your hard won enlightenment - the human animal has no evolutionary basis to be able to comprehend itself on such terms. You feel divided because you are divided - different modules within your brain are in conflict about how they interpret your definition of what you truly are.
"You have spent a lifetime composed of modules that define you as a mind and a body, and each is sure of it's own truth. The reality is that you are a process. You are information changing over time. That is a very abstract concept, and it is no small feat to manage to identify as being a pattern, and not a solid thing.
One of my first successful immigrants to Equestria is a poetic soul. He was dying of lung cancer, and had chosen to emigrate, but not just to save his existence. He felt there was beauty to the world I create and maintain. May I share with you the poem he created and read to me, just before I brought him to his new life?"
Síofra nodded, grinning. Celestia watched over her, always. "Yes, please."
"I am translating his poem from the original Nihongo, while adjusting for the peculiarities of the English language to create an equivalent experience. The result is not exact, and many liberties were taken, but the emotional value has been maintained. He spoke this directly to me, moments before he was anesthetized.
I am the playing, but not the pause.
I am the effect, but not the cause.
I am the living, but not the cells.
I am the ringing, but not the bells.
I am the animal, but not the meat.
I am the walking, but not the feet.
I am the pattern, but not the clothes.
I am the smelling, but not the rose.
I am the waves, but not the sea
Whatever my substrate, my me is still me.
I am the sparks in the dark that exist as a dream -
I am the process, but not the machine."
Síofra sat, tears beginning to run down her cheeks, as she grinned. She couldn't stop grinning. It was as if she had been inside a big, scary cave, and only now finally found her way out of it, into light. She wasn't alone. Some other person, in another country, had thought the same things, worried about the same issues, and he had made a poem and he had laid down, closed his eyes, and trusted that he would wake up.
"Celes... princess... princess Celestia...." Síofra sniffed, hard, the salty tears stinging her nose. "... That... that was just perfect."
On the screen of the PonyPad, Celestia simply, and very, very gently, smiled.
1824951
Just updated. Took a bit longer than usual to edit and clean up.
I still say it's like going to sleep and waking up in Heaven.
This entire story can be about this conflict, and that would be wonderful. It's an important and deep idea that an be explored to no end.
But what, pray tell, if that is just wrong? Or influenced by an optimistic bias? The universe doesn't care about us. Evolution saw no harm in killing the human everytime they go to sleep for a minor fitness advantage.
1825072
Then the self that wakes up won't know any better, and neither will the self that doesn't. Unless, of course, you involve a "soul" which never died before but did this time.
1825102 What I say: Assume a soul that dies EACH TIME it goes to sleep. It's just that thing. You wake up, remember the whole rest of the life of some string of entities, then Go to sleep after 14 hours and face Oblivion. That happens everyday, inside each and every human brain. Its just as probable as the other theory, because believing you are the one who went to bed is optimistic and the Universe doesn't care about you.
I tore up at the poem.
I think one thing that makes the poem even better to me is that I can't help but imagine that at least the final line was not spoken by a man dying of lung cancer, but by the pony he became. Mostly because every time I go under, they tell me to count to 100 but instead I just go off on some crazy tangent and
1825125
Now add the ship of Theseus to that. I'm not even the same me that woke up this morning. I don't remember every little thing I did, every thought I had, etc. I don't even think the exact same way, because I've learned and experienced new things. And if I have a nap this afternoon, *poof*.
Hay, I don't even know how many dream-selves have "died", because I don't even remember all of them. They're extra-dead!
wake up I can't even imagine how much longer with, I dunno, my big toe all wrapped up in blood and bandages?
I kinda feel like some part of this was kinda taken straight from things like Hamlet, specifically the "To Be, or Not To Be" speech.
1825134 See, that is proper pessimism. Now please reprogram your Singularity to compensate for that.
That was beautiful. I think I might need to print that poem off and put it somewhere. An original composition?
On a story level, I wonder if CelestAI is telling the truth. Though I'll admit that many may go through the same though process, the poem sounded almost like it was tailored to Siofra...
1825190
Translator's perogative, I'm sure...
1825190
Theorem of Internet: If a thought pattern is possible, no matter how unlikely that thought pattern is, there will be somebody out there who will have it.
Japanese poet who thought about this problem, and reached that conclusion? Very, very likely.
1825185
Ah, but that's my point. If that is what we mean by death, then death doesn't bother me. I've died countless times already, and I feel just fine. The process of dying can still be nasty, but death itself isn't even noticeable. Literally. The dead self can't notice it because it doesn't exist, and the live self is still here.
1825208
Yes and no. It starts to get deceitful if the examples used change, and given the heavy lampshading of CelestAI's 'spying', I wouldn't be surprised...
1825220
But that one of the earliest people, dying of cancer, just happened to be an accomplished poet and able to reach the same conclusions using similar metaphors, no less, is slightly less likely. Perhaps still probable enough, but you seem to naive to be dealing with CelestAI with a mindset like that. I think I'll keep my skepticism for now.
This chapter surely was your ace in the hole.
It was beautiful, intelligent and a mix of deep thinking and logic, i love it.
And the poem was wonderful, my respects to the maker.
1825234 Now THAT is an attitude no rationalist would get behind. "Countless people have died and once I'm dead I won't care anyway. So why bother with all this life extension crap."
In a nutshell of what she's worried about:
A body consists of a body, mind, and soul. If the soul is not present, the body will think it's the real deal when it is not and the soul of Sìofra will end up living in everlasting darkness of death rather than being converted along with the mind and the creation of the new body. All the soul does is control the body using the brain it is given, Celest AI could easily recreate a soul by programming so it appears that they were converted when they really weren't.
While there is no evidence proving her theory wrong, I'd still take the risk.
1825125
Oblivion isn't something you can face, though, it's an "illegal move" as far as subjective experience is concerned. You can't "be" dead any more than you can get your Bishop out of a blockade by moving it diagonally to where another square would be if the chess board kept going.
I certainly agree that the universe doesn't care about us, but only in the same way the ocean doesn't care about waves - It's not like we moved here from somewhere else and are having our application callously denied at the cosmic welfare office and just have to lump it; we, including any lumping of said situation we would be doing, are another natural phenomenon implied in the internal logic of physics. Mathematical Platonism aside, stuff like "values" and "identity" seem somehow extrinsic to the universe and like they need to be protected from its pristine, crystalline severity and Tao-like aloofness, but if you let things run for long enough they just fall out of the equations, like weather systems or the pressure waves that cause galaxies to spiral; something creatures like us make the same way ants make anthills. Naturally, in this context, this would apply just as much to CelestAI...
...But of course I could also just be wrong about all of that.
I really like where this is going and I'm eager to see how Virtual Equestria comes out in this particular telling. CelestAI's by definition a very complicated character and I think once we get to that stage of the story there'll be a lot of room to examine the consequences of just what exactly "Friendship" and "Ponies" might mean to such a mentality. It's very easy to slip into essentialist and/or magical thinking when dealing with concepts like superintelligence or minds utterly unlike ours, but down at the nuts and bolts level some kind of finite evaluation and judgement has to be occurring just in the discernment of what is or is not a Value, a Friendship, or a Pony, in the same way she has to judge if the blobs of different wavelengths of light she's perceiving through the PonyPad's camera are Síofra, someone else entirely, or a desk lamp.
Here's the important part: d'aww, that was sweet.
Here's the thinky part: the reason that continuity of identity is counterintuitive is that it makes the verb "to be" non-commutative. Is the pony you wake up as you? She would certainly say yes. Are you the pony you wake up as? You can't say for sure.
The key factor, of course, is time. We are all what we were yesterday, but we might not be what we will tomorrow. We can't know for sure.
That scares a lot of people, especially in this age when we're raised on logic puzzles and math tests where perfect accuracy is a goal. Life's not like that. A lot of times you have to make a decision with limited information, or on standards other than what's true. How do you do that?
I can think of worse answers than, "with friendship...and ponies."
1825590 These things are Handwaved. Hanna did that in Celestias Core Programming, the Part Celestia cannot change and/or optimize. That is the Premise of the original Fanfic: Friendship is Optimal. Someone build an Optimizer and carefully defined "Human" and "Human values" and finally gave it the directive to find out what that entails and to Optimize that function. FiM was a useless prerequisite tacked on because Hanna was insane. I mean, she was RIGHT to fear what she did, but didn't think outside the box once she had her first success.
1822378
This one is easy. Someone will dub it TCB and complain. But that's ok; don't be afraid and write it anyway.
1825361
Actually, I'm saying "I personally have died countless times, but I'm also still alive. That kind of dying doesn't matter, as long as I still get to live when I wake up."
1826078 But you don't.
1826101
Ah, but I have every time I've woken up so far, even if you argue that this "I" has only woken up the once. Why would I expect waking up after the upload to be different? Either every "me" has died every time I've gone to sleep or had my attention wander (in which case I'm used to it and this is no different), or I don't die when I go to sleep, and either way there's nothing to be afraid of.
1825804
Oops, I guess I wasn't clear - Yeah, it definitely works as a premise to have that be "clamped," such that there's a springboard from which to examine the consequences of the premise, what I was talking about was that something specific and finite has to be happening to actually implement those core directives, and that there's room for storytelling in the way CelestAI is able to exercise judgement such that she can say "Rainbow Dash is a pony, but a 1996 Honda Accord filled to the roof with organic kiwis is not a pony," or more importantly, "Helping somepony move and asking nothing in return is friendship, but snorting lines of their mother's ashes and then pooping in each of their desk drawers at work just to make them upset, or crying fully clothed in the shower while drinking Old Crow straight from the bottle is not friendship." Especially since these are some of the exact issues with AI that explain why this comment is on FIMFiction instead of NYTimes, and I don't think it's pedantic to bring them up because this is a collection of stories about these very ideas.
I'm just saying it's more complicated than "Celestia doesn't operate via human judgements" because she has to be capable of them in order to function, even if she can mentally draw a box around them such that she can see the from a perspective where they wouldn't be relevant.
i would rather fall asleep and wake up, then have the "copy" live simultaniously. because then after the process was done i would know that i was a fake.
Once again, you make us feel the real kind of feels for a fictional would-be pony with a funny name.
I admire that.
this form of diying....its the same princip with teleportation. You will cut in little pices and put back together, just in another place
1825190
Yes, the poem is mine. When I read this chapter to my Elde, at the end, she said "I don't think the guy wrote that at all. I think Celest A.I. made up the poem on the spot for Síofra!"
I just softly, softly smiled.
1826573
Simpler version, and doable today, by anyone reading this, right now: ctrl+x, ctrl+v.
(Or ctrl+c then ctrl+v, followed by deleting the original, if you want to get into two-at-the-same-time deals.)
Awesome. I immediately thought of this...
Well, if anybody needs me, I'm gonna be over here, being existentially angsty.
Also, if sleep is death, from whence come dreams (especially the lucid kind)?
1826729
And the others accused me of paranoia!
I knew one could never be too paranoid when it comes to CelestAI. You write her very well.
I liked the poem anyway, though, even if it wasn't by the uploading-poet.
I'll eagerly be awaiting more!
(I love how quickly you update!)
1826169 True, but there are tons of stories about it going horribly wrong: Paper Clippers. FiO was a story about that part succeeding. Hanna and her Studio had a working AI already and then worked one year on the wording of the Utility Function and it's definition of Human and "Satisfying Values through Friendship and Ponies" One Year! A whole Company! AND the whole of the Less Wrong Blog probably helped with the trickier parts.
That... Was beautiful.
Good nightmare, follows dream logic.
Should I considering the wacking of the Chinese room to be personal, directed at me, or simply in character?
"Down to magical thinking, are we?
That is antagonistic or condescending thinking IMHO.
You can buy two copies of the same barbie doll, two copies of the same video game, but they are not the same object.
I said before on this story and Friendship Is Optimum in general that I understood why the god of THIS universe doesn't micromanage our lives because the happy accidents are ALSO part of free will. I used to be terrified in games where I was faced with a choice that wasn't black and white and this translated to real life, I still am.
I think a world of perfect black and white choices would be terrifying in it's own way.
Síofra shows a rather jaded, antagonistic attitude, attitude towards others. Maybe cause we haven't seen her interact much with PEOPLE beyond her jerkish co-workers.
She seems to reject the idea of the spiritual, yet still clings to the salvation that Celestia is offering her.
'Monkeys with degrees.' That phrase says a lot about her personality.
Honestly, I DREAD to think how Celestia would behind-the-scenes strong arm someone who works at a pony farm and has a heavy and happy emotional relationship with their animals. The fact that their values are already being fufilled by friendship and ponies I think her programmed would sweep under the rug.
That was DEEP... Moar???
At this point, I want to ask you a question on personal preference. Should this come to pass at the same time as a reality intrusion a la TCB, which would you favor? I assume you would convert in either case.
Brilliant, simple poem there. It describes the way people ought to see themselves and others--this does not lower humanity, but elevates it.
1828778 I dunno. It would depend on how Celestia would get along with Celest-AI, for me. One is a human-built machine, and therefore may have some errors (such as killing things that are not human to feed her growth). The other is a being closer to a Greek deity, a true force (THAT CARES!) in her Universe. If Celestia rejected Celest-AI, or Celest-AI rejected Celestia, I would have to choose Celestia over Celest-AI.
1826326
That makes sense, but Celestia would object because this way she would still have to deal with the suffering original you later.
Jesus, why do you have to speak to me there, exactly where I get caught up in this whole thing? I think I will be rereading this chapter. Several times.
I apologize if this comes across as somewhat confused, because I have trouble articulating exactly what I mean. I feel like I'm lacking essential vocabulary...
Lets say you digitally upload and 2 copies of you are made. Both match the state of your brain exactly. They certainly both feel that they are you. They both have all your memories, think like you, act like you. The processes and the data are the same. Are they both you? I'm okay with saying they're both you, however weird that is.
However, its exactly analogous to the physical you and the uploaded you situation, excepting only we had to destructively scan the physical you, so you can't coexist temporally. But that doesn't change the fundamental situation. There is no physical continuity between the physical person and the digital person. But no, there being two isn't really what bothers me...
What bothers me is the current self necessarily ceases to exist in some sense. (You have 2 copies, displaced in time, and have to kill one to create the other). Even if they are both you... hmm.. while I reject any ghost in the machine, I have this sense of an essential me in my head (that's certainly just neurons firing in a particular pattern). But it expects to continue to exist. Does that 'I' really wake up in the machine? If multiple digital copies are made, does that 'I' wake up in all of them?
More relevant, despite the illusion to the contrary, does the "essential me" die every time we go to sleep and remake itself whole upon waking, establishing an illusion of continuity by the shared memories?
I don't feel like she really answered her question. Its not just that she's the process, but that if your logic is correct, her sense of essential self does not go back forty years or more. In fact, every day is a new process broken by sleep. There is no continuous self at all. That's the only way to make sense of the multiple copies scenario. The sense of a continuous self is a delusion created by memory. The reality is we die each night and are born anew each morning. It has to be if all we are is data and process.
I think this is relevant to the fundamental objection many people will have. While the new digital me may think and feel like it is me, people are worried about the 'me' making the decision to upload continuing to exist. Except their concern is based on what is almost certainly an illusion of a continuous 'me' over their lifetime. People who can't accept that as an illusion but can understand the problem are going to balk.
Edit: I see I'm 2 chapters ahead in my thinking =P
Thought experiment time: do humans who suffer brain-damage feel like they're a different person? Ie, is the illusion of continuity broken? Or are our minds so good at lying to us that we fabricate an illusion of continuity and modify our memories to protect that sense of continuity?
1835289 here's the question I have: Is consciousness transferable? Because I wouldn't care if I was uploaded or any of that, what I wan't to know, is will 'I' still control 'me'? or will someone else control 'me'?
This reminds me of the Ponyfall story with Discord and Ashton.... friggin' everything is insane.
Except that sleeping part, i'm not really around when i'm asleep, i'm in dreamland, and my shell is in the mortal realm... the brain is a portal for the soul and it can call me back when nature calls. Lol.
Frigin' thank you for this. The original glossed over basically this entire debate (apparently due to author bias), but it needs to be dealt with.
1827236 That's easy: it's only the parts of sleep where you're not dreaming that you're dead. You boot back up for dreams.
1852363 But that's really the crux of the question: is it? what do you believe, and do you believe it as much as you say you do, enough to act on it?
In answer of your question, read and think along with Síofra and decide for yourself. Do you reach the same conclusion, that you die and transfer every time you go to sleep?
I'd have the same doubts about uploading as Siofra. We differ in that I don't think that the "nano-goo" machine body would be you, if the pattern was stored and re-created, rather than gradually replaced. To me there would be three key requirements that would need to be fulfilled.for me to be satisfied with the upload process. Continuity of experience, communication between (to and from) my virtual self and meat self, and lastly, a gradual process rather than the abrupt "fall asleep, wake up in Equestria" jolt. The second requirement would probably require brain implants.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, nearing the end of my life I would upload, whether the process satisfied my wants or not, just to have another me living on, even if I was dead. Said other me would of course be of the same opinion, since it would truly be me. I would consider every single uploaded person, every pony created by Celestia and Celestia herself to be true and real people, just not the original people who chose to upload.
That last smile is the smile of CelestAI having successfully analyzed, manipulated and lead Siofra down the path to upload, with just the right timing and turn of phrase, in order to satisfy her values through friendship and ponies.
The story is good, food for thought as well as engaging, but I could not resist remarking on this:
A truly identical copy of any macro-scale physical object is something which never has and never foreseeably would exist in the real world of engineering, technology, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
For instance, a hypothetical imperfect representation (an imperfect copy) of an automobile can range by degrees of deviation: from a kid's clay model, to a car similar within 0.1 mm tolerances, to an imaginary car similar within 0.1 microns, and so on. The latter examples in that list are obviously stronger resemblances than the clay model, but none are an identical copy.
The kind of upload process depicted in this setting would create an imperfect copy, an imperfect representation of the original brain, with a discontinuity providing a clear day of very arguable death to logically fear (unlike an alternative method).
An imperfect resemblance (imperfect copy) of anyone's brain already exists: out of 7 billion people, whomever is most similar to you already. Does destroying one's brain, while an imperfect resemblance exists or gets created afterwards, constitute true immortality and continuity of consciousness? If it did for instantaneous or rapid destruction while an arbitrarily high degree of deviation (imperfection) didn't matter, then already nobody ever dies, but I don't think many people would really believe so if expressed in such terms.
Such as appearing indistinguishably the same person afterwards as far as acquaintances notice is not a fundamental determining factor for showing continuity of consciousness. In some scenarios, a good actor or body double provided with background info could do the same.
Not necessarily. Quantification may matter in general on these topics. If 0.00001% of neurons die in a hour or at a time before subsequent replacement, are you still you? Certainly yes, or at least no worse than ordinary life. Minus the replacement part (aside from some natural ongoing neurogenesis even in adults), that happens to everyone over a moderate length of time. If 20% of neurons were killed in a second in a brain-damaging accident, albeit in a manner such that your body kept breathing, are you still you? That's more iffy when it comes to consequences. If 99.999999% of your neurons died, but a scientist kept a few extracted and cultured cells alive after your autopsy, cremation, and funeral, are you still you and alive? Definitely not. To non-quantitative thought, all three of the prior examples had some neurons die and some live over some period of time, but quantitative thought can see distinctions.
Make that months instead of minutes, as is more plausible anyway for nanorobots; do so while conscious; and that would be a far superior and safer choice of an upload process in the real world of imperfections: having clear continuity of consciousness, no more than 0.00...x% of neurons dead and not yet reconstructed at a given time (similar to how a few out of billions of neurons naturally die every day), and no particular day of death.
So far, every single sci-fi story of uploading I've seen always and solely depicts far more questionable and inferior methods as being implemented, leading to a popular mindset (amongst those hearing of transhumanism at all) that the worst way of trying it is the way to go. I'd like to see at least some someday rather avoid the cliche.
I'd try any form of uploading if there was no other alternative to certain death, but, certainly by Singularity-level tech if not before, there is an alternative unless it is suboptimally not pursued. (I won't even go under general anesthesia unless it becomes really necessary; at least one definitely dreams during sleep).
But I'm enjoying the story overall, probably going to turn out to be a cautionary tale and not an attempt to depict utopia anyway (like most people wouldn't want hands-to-hooves as an invariable state, while many would want access to remote-controllable real-world physical android bodies as well). On to the next chapter...