} I'm surprised by Damien S.'s havng just found `Learning to be me'. Maybe
} it's because Greg is an Australian, and we all dote on him, but I'd
} supposed that the Egan jewel in the head mechanism was by now one of the
} standard tropes in the uploading biz. GGranted, Varley was doing this sort
I haven't read that much fiction with any uploading; most SF still
prefers to use FTL. (Much SF I consider analogous to a Victorian
telling stories of a chemical rocket propelled British Empire on Mars,
while overlooking Thomas Edison.) What I have seen has been of the
scanning variety. (Okay, or of the programming variety, as in Pohl's
Heechee books; someone actually writes a program which expresses a human
intelligence. Rrright.) But when I made my comment I was actually
thinking of what runs around the extropian web sites and mailing lists;
if people have been listing "stick a small neural net in your brain and
have it try to be you for 20 years" I've totally missed it.
Australia seems to be the world capital of hard extropian fiction: Greg
Egan, plus Vinge lets it be a world power in a couple of short stories
(although only because the North had nuked itself and the rest of the
South had burned its libraries in panic.) And you perhaps, although I
haven't read any of your books. Any basis for this in real life?
} [the CalTech chipped neuron URL was cool beyond belief... the fucking Spike
} really *is* on its way...]
16 neurons and two dimensions. Might end up on the shelf with the 10
qubit quantum computer in a coffee cup.
To link this with the cosmology thread, I'll note that old aliens in his
Heechee books apparently closed the universe. Pohl did not try
suggesting how.
-xx- GCU Mangyn of Chaos X-)
"Emily Postnews, Lower Beyond version:
'It's important to include an appropriately trimmed excerpt from the
message you're replying to, because the author may not have posted
it yet...'" -- Wim Lewis