I think it's a question people will have to consider. I myself would argue such a being, if thinking algorithms and the like were transferred from a living brain to a "cube", would be little more than a shadow of the original's self. An empty husk, but one that still imitates and would stand as a legacy of what that person was in life. As such people would often likely mistake "creation" for "creator" as so often happens. It's happened before, and it's not unreasonable for it to happen again. The question that comes to mind for me is: What if such a being KNEW it was just a shadow of the human they were gleaned from. What if they treated themselves as such an inferiority. As a "less real" presence than what came before them, they might have an attitude of humility. For all we know, ALEPH itself might take that stance as a being that however knowledgeable, however influential, and however capable, would still be a finite thing in a finite universe doomed to end one day. That is of course, the only sane outlook one could have about a finite world as ours if looked at from a Christian perspective. That said, this is speculation, and based on their lore so far, I doubt Corvus & co. are up to the task of pondering such things from that perspective yet. I certainly know the Ethics professor AdmiralJCJF wasn't when I even remotely implied it. He was still under the impression ethically driven and morally drivin behaviors would be synonymous.
I agree with this. The society of Infinity's major factions & most minor seems to treat the creation (resurrected Lhost) in the same manner as the original Human. Many do this because their religious leaders tell them it is the same person. For it is unto man once to die then the judgement. Not surprising that they don't read their Bibles which contradicts this ideal of continual resurrection. It would be the same person if the whole physical mind/brain was transferred into the Lhost not data or information of the man/woman's memories/personality. Otherwise it is just a creation that thinks and mimics the source of the data they were given. I never thought about that. A Lhost that knows they are a shadow or spiritless copy of a person and not the actual person in another body would be an interesting take on a story or character. One possibility is that (as you mentioned) the clone would be become humbled by this but another possibility is that the clone goes insane or becomes angry (perhaps both) at Human society at large. Then we got a dangerous being trying to bring down the system or cause as much suffering and chaos as they can.
In the Outrage Comic the ILLEGAL clone of former Hexa Operative Sniper Knauf, know as Jericho, is VERY aware that is a Clone (and a VERY ILLEGAL one to boot, liable to be "cancelled" by everyone of O12 and Govenrments) of a STILL living person going around. . . This, coupled with some EXTRA more Cybernetic enhancements and the HORRIBLE stuff that He had to do to be accepted by the Druze Society, has transformed Him into a deranged murderous psychopath with delusion of grandeur. . . So there is a Fluff precedent that the Cube Copy could go HORRIBLY bad. . . It is ALSO hinted in the Fluff of the two "Kerrigans" (Ko-Dali and Kiss of the "Bit & Kiss" duo) that the Sepsitor essentially rewrite PARTS of the Cube with a new "E.I. Friendly Mind-Seed" and this results in UNSTABLE kind of characters. . . In the R.P.G. the "Fork" (illegally / erroneously copied Cube of an extant person) is ALMOST encouraged to go and KILL the "Original" as if to "Assume" that identity. . . . . . . . So there are surely some hints that CUBES could become something truly dark and horrific. . . . .
Why would they be a shadow? Because the body has been replaced? But bodies are replaced constantly in natural processes. From the moment of birth to the moment of death, you are unlikely to have any of the same atoms in your body. The longest lasting material in your body is your tooth enamel. (C14 levels in tooth enamel, can be used to determine the year an individual's teeth formed.) This gets back to the philosophical issue of 'is there a soul?' I believe there is, but I don't think there is any physical part of the body you can point to and say, 'Yep, that is where the soul resides.' It is a mystery, and should be treated as such. I mean if the singularity hits, I am going to opt out of being digitized, partially because you should never be an early adopter of technology, too buggy, but also because it freaks me out. But at the same time I am not going to stand here and say definitively that it won't work. For the sake of the narrative, the societies of Infinity accept the premise of the soul transferring, if they think of it at all. It could be an interesting story, but it is really just built around a mental breakdown. It should be phrased " a Lhost that thinks they are a shadow or copy of a person and not the actual person." Because they ultimately cannot know. There is no soul mirror, or soul diagnostic if there was, the most likely would be Rene Descarte's "I think therefore I am." You need to get off your high horse. Your snark is not appreciated, and you greatly overestimate your own understanding.
From all those examples you mentioned I'd say so. A person can easily be replaced and the cube clone would have a metaphorical ax hanging over their head at all times to create incentives to remain obedient to their creators. And as long as the Lhost decides it will live as the memories in it's head dictate then in it's own mind it is "X" even though in reality its not. That is true. However, it is a reminder that "the truth is the truth even if no one believes it" & "a lie is a lie even if everybody believes it".
Pretty common argument in philosophy and science fiction. I suppose I'd interrogate your argument by asking: If the copy is an 'empty husk', then by extension you're suggesting there is something intrinsically special/unique to the original. Could you clarify what you think this might be, what makes it impossible to reproduce/transfer and why the absence of it makes the copy less than the original? I imagine that the human (and by extension, human-adjacent) psyche has defence mechanisms that would gloss over/patch this cognitive dissonance. If you pointed me at another version of me and said 'This is the real Musterkrux, you are a copy, a fake' (and provided proof that the other one was the original) I'm sure I'd freak out for a while before adopting some sort of weltenshauung that accommodates and protects my identify. Mayhaps, through experiential divergence I become my own unique entity. I suspect that a human mind (and, by extension, a copy of a human mind) would struggle to accept itself as unimportant/inferior to the original. I mean, some might and then, in turn, self-terminate but I feel like the ability of the human mind to warp perception, facts and identity in the name of self preservation means most 'self-recognising-copies' would find an excuse/argument for why they matter just as much as the original. I feel like that's just human psychology. The fact that all of the major religions of the setting have reconciled themselves with resurrection lends credit to my ramblings here. For Aleph's own exploration of its mortality, we note that the setting has explicitly referenced transcendance (including that by AI). Whether Aleph is aware of this or not is another question (the Human Sphere has at least one Digester, so there's a chance Aleph has put 2 and 2 together to make i). I'm sure that an AI of Aleph's scale/processing power has several sub-routine's exploring how best to optimise Aleph's (and heck, maybe even humanity's) existence. Some sub-routines might be operating under a predicate that all existence is finite, while others might be exploring what happens if Aleph can go post-physical and transcend.
And if Aleph (or humanity) can transcend, the EI will be very interested to “supervise” the process so that it can feed the data back to its own work for the Ur Rationalists.
I don't have any thing to quote from but I'd say yes since the Ajax lhost was originally an Achilles prototype. Maybe it'd take time to adjust to the differences of the new, unfamiliar body.
One of the interesting things will be to see if the EI/Ur Rationalists’ idea of snatching transcendence away from a race at the last minute could/would even work. They failed with the Artilect, so why would they be able to accurately detect it in a different race?
... the writing's better than Richard Morgan's too. Morgan's actual stories are terrific of course, and I'm sure many of us have enjoyed his science fiction series - I eagerly read them all. But he was always fighting a battle between storytelling, pornography and horror in the Altered Carbon series and every book had at least one strong contender for the various Worst Sex Scene in Fiction awards. And then he lost that battle - and his mind generally with the Hot Cock Sweaty Man Love Steel Remains fantasy stories, and I threw in the towel. I've no idea what the plot of the first book was, or if it even existed. I do wish someone would save him from himself.
... or this being might simply accept: "I am a duplicate, made in the image of the original, and that's not so bad, for I was made by humans in the likeness of a human for a purpose." - For that matter, then it wouldn't care if it met a doppelganger. One doesn't care about there being an original unless there IS something intrinsically important about the original, like a soul. PM me if you want more on this.
Either is quite legitimate. One could even write a story about both happening and the two post-humans ending up in conflict over just that question of what to do. It'd all depend on the worldview of each man such characters were mapped from I think. I suspect any post-human derived from someone with a post-modern or humanistic worldview would swiftly crack and go the latter direction.
@DeepThought Perhaps you are right. It would take a personality of strong character to prevent the Lhost from going batty. Regardless of the beliefs of the person who's memories they are given at "birth".
What do you mean by 'algorithms'? It should be theoretically possible to rebuild the neural network that forms our brain (or better: our whole nervous system). For us today this task is too complex, but this is the future, and they have that mysterious 'silk' that seems to be a major factor. So if you store/rebuildthe whole neural network, as it is implied, why do you think it would be just a 'shadow'? This sounds more like your personal definition of 'person' to me, then a real argument that the copy is somehow 'inferior' to the original. It is all just a question of the quality of the transfer process. Why do you blame it on the Cube? Why not on the horrible things that a being experiences? Even without a Cube, even today, experiencing horrible things can make you go nuts and change your personality drasically. Exactly. Or imagine monozygotic twins - which one is the original? Is there an original? So what makes this different from a perfectly copied mind/personality? At the time of the copying process they are 'the same', but from then on each one lives his/her own life, with no one being 'inferior'. Well for Descarte the soul interacted with the body/brain through the pineal gland. The 'cogito ergo sum' was just his proof that 'there is something that exists, because I can not deny that there is something that is doing something', but it did not proof that he was not just a brain in a vat. Just that there is something that cannot be denied. And that this proofs that there is something existing. (Like, that we are not just somebody elses dream.) In the RPG there are even rules conserning this matter: the lhost must 'fit' its bearer, otherwise problems might arise.
Maybe I read it wrong, or misunderstood some of the Manga phrasing, but it seemed to Me that Jericho is quite filled with Hateful Envy and Self-Loathing for His "Original". . . The Illegal Cube copy had been tampered by the Hexahedron, to obtain a "Better Knauf 2.0" amongst other things. . . My impression is tha Jericho is ONE of the EXTREMES that could reached when the Cube Technology is brought to its more outlandish developements. . . Also Knauf ripped off HIS OWN Cube because He claimed that made Him a "Less Stable Human Being". . . . . . . . Maybe it was because they were "Fringe Elements" brought to the MOST dreadful places and so went "Over the Edge"; on the other far side of the spectrum, maybe there are Space Rescue Specialists / Nanotech Hazmat Workers that face the risk of a grisly death for very Un-Selfish reason, and they are Resurrected without qualms and problems. . . . . . . . But for Me the Knauf / Jericho dichotomy has to be taken, in the Game Universe Background context, as a "Cautionary Tale" about how devastating could be Cube Technology when misused. . . . .!!!
Spoiler: Richard Morgan's writing style - R18 ... His lover's swelling pectorals dripped with the wild sweat of their relentless lovemaking. He bent his head to lick the droplets from his nipple. It tasted of chocolate; and autumn leaves; with a tang of salt ... <sounds of otherwise-enthusiastic readers screaming for mercy>
