From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Mar 03 2003 - 06:00:03 MST
By coincidence, I finished this book during the weekend (so I had
to avoid reading this and Damien's posts until today).
I found it one of the best descriptions of a trans/posthuman
lifestyle I have encountered, a good complement to Walter John
William's _Aristoi_ and the works of Greg Egan. To me the best
aspect of the novel was the thought that had gone into customs
and signs, not just the big setting: how politeness
works in VR, how mass-minds express how much of them are
attending to a person, how status can be demonstrated when you
can look like anything you want and so on. That is important
stuff, since it makes the setting come alive far more than
likely extrapolations of uploading technology - and it is the
kind of ideas that many people find absent in transhumanism, and
hence deduce that we all are inhuman.
The style is flowery and somewhat redolent of 19th century
writing. Which seems to fit; the Silver-Gray Mansion reality
style does have a distinctly Victorian flair (some people
organise themselves into virtual cultures centered around certain
AIs and cultural assumptions, not unlike different schools of
art; the main character subscribes to the Silver-Gray style). I
wonder what it is that attracts people to neo-Victorianism? Is
that the archetypal culture for anglosaxon writers that want to
create something different but recognizable?
On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 03:46:15PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
>
> What we see in the novel is the working-out of this principle as applied
> to a world in which alterations to the mind and its perceptions can
> be achieved almost without limit. In fact this is to some extent a
> "travelogue" novel, meaning one whose interest flows from the setting and
> scenery more than the plot. But in this case, the tour is of mentality
> rather than of physical space.
It is interesting to track where Phaeton's body actually goes
physically through the novel; he is moving almost exclusively
vertically. It really shows how geography usually matters almost
nothing (and the shock of unmediated reality when you are used to
live in super-augmented reality).
> Add to this the capability of individuals to alter their brains,
> their motivations and perceptions, as easily as we change our clothes.
> It's a tremendous power, but extremely dangerous. A single rash act
> can put you on the path to mental self-destruction; and there can be
> no intervention, nothing stronger than verbal persuasion is allowed
> to try to rescue someone who has made such a mistake. We see several
> cases where good, strong people have destroyed themselves in this way.
> The ultimate freedom is the freedom to be wrong.
This is IMHO the main point of the book. Phaeton is a
strong-willed hero type (or was the swami right in that he was an
typical villain? Note how Phaeton's true past might be an elegant
form of self-reference), the kind of ultra-individualist on a
quest we have seen in _Atlas Shrugged_ or _The Prisoner_. And
while admirable, he (like the other heros) is also inhuman in his
stubborness. In a way, he uses his freedom to be wrong to sustain
his freedom to do what he considers right - but that sense of
being right, how can he even be sure of it?
Of course, the literary style and general thrust of the novel
probably won't lead to a conclusion where Phaeton's mission
actually was just a case of megalomania brought on by some clever
cognitive hacking, but the possibility seems open. And that
really makes the story fascinating: in a world where minds can be
edited almost arbitrarily, how can you distinguish truth from
falsehood? No wonder that Phaeton is a bit unstable.
> Wright's characters describe history in terms of eras called Mental
> Structures. They are presently in the Seventh Mental Structure, aka
> the Golden Oecumene ("golden age"). Here is my reconstruction of the
> earlier eras and their defining events:
That fits well with my impression (I didn't take notes, but
mentally tried to form the timeline).
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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