From: Ben Goertzel (ben@webmind.com)
Date: Mon Dec 11 2000 - 14:36:53 MST
hi,
> They aren't *supposed* to be AIs. They're supposed to be uploaded humans,
> or rather, their descendants.
>
> The only actual refugee of the flesh, I believe, is Orlando. The only
> actual AI is probably the Contingency Handler.
I got the impression that Yatima was supposed to be an actual AI -- or at
least
a synthesized quasi-human -- not an uploaded human...
Anyway, my guess is that uploaded humans will deviate a lot further from
current human
psychology than is depicted in this novel...
> All the characters are utterly human. Not "watered-down", I didn't get
> that impression; but neither of transhuman intelligence, nor departing
> significantly from the human cognitive architecture. There are people
> alive in today's world who are less human than Yatima, Inoshiro, or
> Blanca.
Sure. My taste in literature runs to Dostoevsky, Phil Dick, Kobo Abe, and
so forth,
so I admittedly have a weakness for the extreme perverse and complex cases
of human
psychology...
>
> Of course, Greg Egan, the author, is a human himself. And it's quite
> possible that if he'd made the protagonists just a little less human,
> there wouldn't have been any story.
Well sure. Our notion of "story" is very tied to our human-ness!
> That's what I mean by "less human, no story". If Inoshiro had simply
> dealt with the fear and loathing in one form or another, it would have
> eliminated yet another emotional-tension source in the plot, already
> fairly skimpy due to what little nonhumanity the characters did have...
I guess what I'm suspecting is that there will be new kinds of tensions
emerging,
different from what we consider "emotional" now... but also different from
the
peculiar coolness of the Diasporans...
>
> Of course, this makes it kind of ironic that you called Inoshiro a "he".
> Ve's neutral.
"He" is neutral in standard english... I don't mind "ve" but it doesn't come
naturally...
> The Soft Ones weren't Asimov's worst aliens, but I wouldn't rate them as
> being Alien aliens in the tradition of, say, Jack Vance and the
> Chasch/Wankh/Dirdir/Pnume, or even Niven and Pournelle's Moties. In fact,
> I'd rate the Soft Ones as being considerably more human than the
> Diasporans.
More emotional but less human, in my view...
Anyway, it's a really good book, I recommended it to a bunch of friends!
But I'm looking forward
to another book that explores posthuman psychology with more subtlety...
ben
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