EVE General Discussion

…and yet, that's pretty much exactly what the Jovian tech does (to say nothing of whomever created the Sleepers…), which would explain why it costs roughly the BNP of a small country to do it.

The problem with calling it a copy is that there is no true original; it's all just simulacra at this point. The body is just meat — a storage place for the information needed to assemble and project the person. The only proper copying is when you have two equivalent simulacra activated at the same time, Broker-style.

To quote Transhuman Space: "I died once, but I'm better now."

From the very first instant our characters became pod pilots, they jumped way off into the deepend of what is considered "human." The traditional meme around which humanity is structured is that life ends. Nothing more than that. Eventually, all life ceases to continue.

Contrasting that are the pod pilots. Individuals who carry forward their memories, experiences, and personality through the very experience of death. Somewhere along the way I've read one story/tale in one of the Chronicles or books about how the pilot woke up from the terrible feeling of their pod burning away around them under the fire of their enemies. They shuddered, got up, and shook it off. Then they lamented no longer having the scar on their cheek that had worked so well picking up chicks in the bar.

The core of this is this: no human can ever have this experience. To cross beyond the finite bounds of mortality automatically takes you beyond the realm of mere humanity. It doesn't necessarily make you better, but it does take you away. Capsuleers are even identifiable from the very character of their skin; it has a youthful smoothness out of place with the apparent age of the body because it never aged those years. It was fast grown in a tube with a brain left empty until an infomorph (read: digitised mental engram) is imprinted on it.

Your mind is software. - Program it.

Your body is a shell. - Change it.

Death is a disease. - Cure it.

Welcome to transhumanity. Try not to let it go to your head.

You have two options:

Pure physics (i.e. materialism) - You die. Another meat machine starts up with exactly the same responses, but YOU are still dead.

Metaphysics - There is an abstract component. The mind (or soul?) exists beyond the brain. But the machine only copies the brain. So you die. Another meat machine with exactly the same responses starts up, but it has a mind/soul of its own, or none at all. Yours is gone.


(and yes, this holds true of Star Trek style teleportation too)

The method used doesn't matter. To my knowledge, none of the lore mentions the tech doing anything more than copying the physical brain.

Of course, you can choose not to view this as death. Isn't there that guy in the lore who has multiple copies of himself active at once? And it's in other sci-fi too, Stargate SG-1 and The Sixth Day come to mind, both of which feature people 'living on' through clones that are awake at the same time as the original.

But, when it comes down to it, when you die, you die. You just get the consolation that an exact copy of you carries on. It's like having your protege carry on your work.

New brain, new impulses. Not you.

Going by materialism, I am just the electrical activity in the circuity of my brain. Construct a new brain, even if it has exactly the same circuitry and exactly the same signals passing through it, it's still a seperate brain.

Or to put it another way: "I" cannot experience anything other than activity in my brain, all my experience is just impulses in the meat in my head. Obviously "I" cannot experience the impulses in another brain, whether identical or not. So that other brain can't be "me".

i think the arguings of the souled is kinda irrelavent here, what we need is an opinion form someone WITHOUT a soul!

any gingers willing to share?

"you" died in the last few minutes prior to becoming a pod pilot. All the implants and everything that we use to jack into the ships are grown into a clone (per some chronicle somewhere)... rather than implanted via surgical means, and your consciousness is transferred into that first clone you wake up in.

So, OP, you have been "dead" since YC 112 11.03 01:21 Eve Time. However, now that you're dead, you continue to live on in simulacra that are 100% genetically identical to the corpse you left behind in the process of becoming a capsuleer.

They tell you like two minutes into the game.

You original body has been euthanized.

From how the neural scan on pod breach is described the brain of the soon to be dead clone is destroyed, ergo the thinking processes that are controlling it are gone. They are dead, what is copied to the new clones is skills and memories. The individual behind the pod pilot clone number X is dead, but the legacy of the pod pilot lives on, with the exact same skills (if you update your clone) and memories of the previous to continue their work right where they left off.

But the individual from the previous pod is dead. If that was you, you'd be dead. It is not you in that new body. It's "you", defining you as memories and skills, but not you as in the consciousness that is trying to grasp the concepts of this thread right now.

Alright, you people want to get back to basics? Your not going far enough. ‘Cogito ergo sum’ my friends. ‘I drink there fore I am’ .. or something like that any way. No no, ‘I think’, that was it.

Ok hear is how it is. Descartes, who was not the greatest philosopher who ever lived, was much troubled by doubt, and asked himself, “if things I think I know sometimes turn out to be false, how can I be sure of anything?”.

To ascertain exactly what he could and could not be sure of he decided to doubt everything, and see where he could get from there. His first revelation was cogito ergo sum, which means I think therefore I am. This had to be true because If he didn’t exist he couldn’t be thinking about whether he existed or not. So what else could he be 100% certain of. Well he knew that whether the information he was receiving was true or not, he was receiving data, so whether he actually had eyes or not he knew he could see, irrespective of whether what he saw was real.

Unfortunately from that point on it is impossible to be certain of anything. Descartes was a bit of a nutcase and thought he could be certain of the real world because he possessed a notion of god, but his certainty of that would make any half decent epistemologist cry.

So that’s it folks, you cant be sure you even have a body so what dose it matter if your moving from one to the other? You can only be sure you exist as a thinking ‘thing’ any way?

Or maybe this is all just solipsistic nonsenses and you should ignore my big words and my ramblings.