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I would hesitate, not because of a great belief in free will, but because I’m a very introverted, shy person. If it was a voluntary connection, or even a full-on change of form and nature, I’d probably go for it, but total emotional linkage will still being me would be terrifying and disturbing.
Being human and being an individual are not entirely the same thing. There’s certainly a cliché about valuing humanity as an ideal, of seeing it as something essential, but any transformation brings about a degree of re-evalutation of one’s identity, which may or may not rest on an idea of oneself as human (for a given value of “human”). The choice between death and another state of continued existence (which, for some, is believed to be contained in death already) puts the question to a subject under duress. But some transformations can spell death for the subject who will undergo them, whether they know it or not, because of the discontinuity between one state and the next. And there are always social pressures influencing the desirability of a certain state or transformation. I mean, people in real life can and do kill themselves for their ideals, or for their failure to correspond to society’s expectations as they have internalised them. There are also doctrines and circumstances that teach people to negate their sense of self, in order to escape suffering, attain peace, to serve others, or to survive.
I’d personally go for some physical changes before some consciousness-altering ones, although I would not discard my body to get uploaded into a computer, because the mind originates in the body and a complete loss of it would certainly be consciousness-altering as well, in unpredictable ways. I would not embrace all forms of radical transformation equally. But my choices are informed by my circumstances and beliefs.
And there is also the matter of choice: it’s one thing to have the choice to undergo a great transformation, and it’s another to have to undergo it whether one wants to or not.
Also: I can think of a few counterexamples offhand. Octavia Butler (outside of the Xenogenesis novels) did something, in “Bloodchild”, I think? And there’s Tiptree’s Up the Walls of the World, and [spoiler] in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the vampire groupies in several texts (the episode “Lie to Me” on Buffy, for instance).
If there was any way I could become a Time Lady and traipse around the universe with my own TARDIS I would not hesitate! Or becoming a space vampire. That would be fun.
I think my only hesitation to change being human would be any forced computer modifications to my mind. I could deal with a mechanical arm or heart or anything like that, but I wouldn’t want to mess around with something that precious to me.
Ide Cyan: And Decker + Lieutenant Ilia + V’ger from Star Trek! I think their merge is a pointer to what is going on with gender and the “hive mind” or group consciousness idea in SF.
[...] *Liz Henry over at Feminist SF – The Blog! asks: Why are characters in SF so reluctant to Undergo The Great Change or quaff the vial of super-spice o… [...]
More often than not I end up annoyed at characters who hesitate to “quaff the vial of super-spice” because I would totally give in and do it, as long as their weren’t major side/aftereffects. I think I would become part cyborg or a vampire or werewolf or alien/hybrid with little resistance but I’d have to think long and hard on the nanoconscious one.
I value my individuality and my autonomy a lot so I don’t know how I’d feel about having to give either of those up. I’m more okay with bodily upgrades and alterations to my physical form instead of alterations to my way of thinking. A lot would depend on knowing the exact specifications of the change but I wouldn’t really have any qualms about not being “human” anymore.
Trust, and competence, are the issues: is there any reason to think that this promised upgrade is going to work as advertised? Particularly if it is nonreversible.
–Yes, I work (and have for many years now) with computers of various sorts. No, no upgrade has ever worked without destroying something critical to operate. The concept, if not the word, “kludge” is crucial to production setups running to deadlines. “Why do you NEED to be able to output PostScript fonts?” – infamously, from the Quark pay-per-minute tech support, after one upgrade; to which I replied, with then uncustomary boldness, “do you even KNOW what your product is used for in the real world?”)
(You want me to trust my existence to some unknown piece of hard-and-software, Mr. Sales-Alien? Got any MagicBeans™ to sell me, too?)
I also have quite a few current and former family members and friends with a variety of serious medical conditions; trusting experimental medicine is not something I would do given a viable alternative – not after a doctor’s cluelesness re what a prescription’s occasional side effects and why it shouldn’t be given to children, required one sibling to have eye surgery…for just ONE frex.)
Failure rates, backwards-compatibility issues – no, I wouldn’t pick up the bottle that said “Drink Me” either! This isn’t a video game where you can get extra lives, after all.
I was just posing this question to some friends last week–would you upload your consciousness/memories/mind to a robotic body if you could? I seemed to be the only one who would do it immediately and without qualms. Imagine the immortality! The potential upgrades in memory and processing capacity! The ability to be sent to Mars and be solar powered. That’s too much for me to pass up.
Would I drink any sort of magic potion? No. I’ve made mistakes with that in the past. (Conversation with friend after trying to clear sinuses with a salt-and-baking-soda solution: “Ow.” “So you’d be willing to snort just about any remedy you found on the internet?” “Um…no, I’ve learned my lesson now.”) But I’m not averse to exploration, and…well, there are things I’d give up sex for, and being a superpowered robot is apparently one of them. I’m with ya there.
In the abstract, I think a lot of potential upgrades sound like a great idea. For instance, I think it would be awesome to graft a computer to my brain so that it could do the things computers are good at (memory storage, certain types of calculations), while my brain could do the things it’s good at, and the whole would act seamlessly.
When I think of real-world parallels, however, somehow the idea of modification becomes a little more scary. While Lasik surgery is generally safe, I’m still nervous about it given anecdotal evidence of some failures. And I have no interest in plastic surgery, Botox injections, etc, although I would certainly take advantage of medical technology such as hip replacements if needed when I’m older. So really, the gain would have to be pretty compelling, and the risks minimal (or outweighed by a huge advantage, like not dying or not suffering chronic pain) for me to happily jump on board the upgrade train.
All of which I realize misses your question, which I presume assumes magical, never-fail technology that works exactly as advertised. And sure, I think computer enhancements, super-healing nanobots, replacements eyes that see more of the light spectrum and the like sound great. I’m not sure I’d give up my body, however, as it’s inextricably a part of me. And I’m even less sure about personality modification. Sure it might be tempting to try and get rid of some of my flaws, but how can I be sure that the person I’d subsequently become would abide by the limits on further changes set by the person I am at the start?
Hell, I didn’t even get a cell phone until 2003. If I can’t talk to my friends after they have the new doodad and decide over the course of a few years of observation that the benefits to me outweigh the drawbacks, it’s “come dine with the lion the tracks only lead in”.
Liz: could you elaborate on what you think is going on with gender and the “hive mind” or group consciousness idea in SF?
Various other examples I can think of:
Relating to Katran’s comment …there was an episode of The Collector, “The Roboticist” (written by a woman, Barbara Covington) where the client-of-the-week had sold her soul to create a perfect robotic body into which to upload herself. Which (spoilers!) she succeeded in doing, only to become trapped, helpless and immobile in that body, forever. The Devil found it quite amusing that she had created her own hell. (It was a chilling ending to one of the early episodes of this show that really grabbed my attention.)
Another horrific example: David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly, wherein the Brundlefly wanted to merge with Geena Davis’s character in order to *regain* some of his humanity.
And Cronenberg’s later, more ambiguous film eXistenZ presented both proponents and opponents of body-modification/group consciousness possibilities: characters who enthusiastically plugged into living virtual reality games connected to their spines, characters who were terrified of the idea of getting bioport implants, and, taking the concept further, showing the game pods themselves as animal-like and susceptible to disease.
James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” is also an example of a story about a woman who desperately wishes to inhabit the artificial body that she controls via a remote link, because her original, physical self is thoroughly socially rejected and unloved.
What would you do? Would you worry about remaining human? Or would you welcome your weird Oankali mate or hand your brain over to the featureless oblate sphere as you lie dying of blaster fire or melt yourself into a vat of glowing omniscient goo? Would it depend on whether the choice was death or merging?
No. There is such a thing as a fate worse than death. Being kept alive – conscious and aware, however you define “life” – in a state of perpetual paralysis, unable to move voluntarily, unable to communicate, perhaps even unable to feel – that would be a fate far worse than dying.
What other people have said upthread (especially Bellatrys) about “What if something goes *wrong*?” I’m not the early-adopter kind of person, especially when “what if something goes wrong” can be worse than just killing you.
I doubt, for example, if I’d ever have Lasik surgery to fix my shortsightedness. I would never swap my current ability to see poorly without glasses (and almost normally with glasses) for the chance, however small, of blindness.
What if (as happened with my father last year) the choice was the risk of total blindness but a high chance of improved vision, versus years of being so partially sighted that I was unable to read even with my glasses? Then I’d go for the operation – the risk of blindness would have become acceptable to me because the only alternative was worse.
This was what I thought made the Xenogenesis trilogy so convincing – and why I could believe the various choices made by the humans in the novels. If the Oankali came to the Earth as it now is, and offered “trade” to any human who wanted to go with them – to become a part of the Oankali species – I don’t know that I would take that choice. (Not least, that I don’t want to have children! But also, they’re not a society that values writers or storytellers – too individualistic a pastime.) But given the options open to the humans at the time Xenogenesis opens, I don’t know what I’d choose.
I think you could argue that the Tiptree short story “A Momentary Taste of Being” is another counter-example; most of the crew fulfills the ultimate purpose of humanity, but the narrative stays with the POV of the one who opts to stay an individual. To use Tiptree’s metaphor, he’s the sperm who keeps swimming. (You can count me as one more who would worry about her humanity & individuality. RIght or wrong, I really like my flaws.)
This group consciousness/immortality/new & improved you sounds similar to some religious ideas of the afterlife. I can imagine believers who would say no because they would prefer death and their own version of Paradise. Given the risk of technological failure, it seems to require the same faith. (Although most believers aren’t in a hurry to get there.)
I was all up with the Oankali until it was revealed that one of the side effects of mating with them was that you lost your desire/ability to be physically intimate (even non-sexual touching) with your other mates. At that point I was like, “NO TOUCHING? OMG hello my version of hell!” For some reason that, more than anything else in the books, really made me upset.
Regardless of whether or not you personally want to do this, humanity as a whole is getting there. Slowly but surely we are replacing ourselves with our technology. This whole question will be moot somewhere along the line. The question each of us has to answer each day is what new technologies do we choose for ourselves. Lasik surgery is a good case in point. Lots of people do it, a lot of people don’t want to do it. Hip replacement is another one. I don’t know anyone who has opted not to, but I suppose there are those that would. Uploading your brain to a new substrate? That’s so monumentally different (and not available yet, if ever, I might add) that I doubt the numbers that would be for it would be high right now. But if it becomes available, ten we’ll see. And of course, that’s the one that’s most interesting. That’s the one that will tell us what humanity really is. Is it the body or is it the mind?
Go as your Zen Therapist.
Now I understand what (amongst other things) ticked me off about Shinji in Evangelion. He rejects being made one with the rest of humanity in a harmonious pile of goo? Because he’s got daddy issues? AND he has to drag Asuka with him? Sheesh. Get over yerself, boy. ^_^