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[Aria Jenneth]

I feel like a broken record here but, "Hello there: I play that it matters. There's not necessarily a lot you can do about it, given that our reason-for-being involves this sacrifice, but it can lead to some fascinating mental gymnastics, internal inconsistencies and social consequences."

I'm really not trying to poke any holes in your RP, Matariki, or even to say that repeated cloning doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that most capsuleers act like it doesn't matter, and that these actions likely demonstrate what they appear to demonstrate: a casual attitude towards death and cloning.  Aria certainly has a long history of insisting that it matters a very great deal; she's spent most of her career persuaded that she's essentially a ghost rather than a "real person."

If I understand Silas' argument correctly, it's that capsuleers would take the discontinuity associated with "soft cloning" seriously enough to regard "death with a backup" as true death, and would therefore not use it in any great numbers. I am attempting to rebut that presumption by pointing to capsuleer attitudes towards cloning in practice.

That is all.

I'm not sure that you and I disagree in any way; Aria certainly regards the practice of rapid travel via podding as unsettling, even though she's used it herself once or twice.

[lallara zhuul]

I had this theory about justifying capsuleer cloning in the Amarrian religion through the medieval concept of the trinity of a person.

A person consists of a soul, spirit and the body.

The soul is you, the free will, the divine spark, creativity, consciousness if you will.
Spirit is the link between the soul and the body.
The whole thing is pretty much like scales, when the body is weak then the 'soul' or the divine is strong and vice versa.
Only problem is that you can only affect the body directly, leading to ascetism as a way to get more in contact with the divine.

Anyhoos, when a person dies, the soul begins its journey to heaven.

It is just an abominable fact that the Abominations have created cloning, where they create a body and a pseudo-spirit that can trap the soul from going to its Righteous Reward.

Which is a Bad Thing.

Since the Amarrians have the concept of the weight of Sin, that they must do penance to reach the pearly gates with their family.
Also they have the concept of the weight of Sin within the bloodline/family, where all your actions affect the weight of Sin within your whole family, alive or dead.

Cloning and death severs that link.

Which does give an individual greater freedom in reaching Heaven, but also it gives that individual less leeway when it comes to doing Sins.

Personally I believe that when EVE was put together the concept of consciousness was taken into account and perhaps even the spiritual ramifications of it. If a dozen clones of a person would be activated at the same time, eleven of them would be lacking in some way.

It is one of the reasons why there is so few Jove.

Get a genius and make a thousand copies of him, or in the case of Sleepers make a million digital copies of him and advance in technology in leaps and bounds.

But it does not seem to work that way.

Therefore there is a soul, or a spark of consciousness that actually makes the real Slim Shady stand out in a crowd of clones.

[lallara zhuul]

Smother the capsuleers with luxury and technology that is only accessible to the highest tiers of the society.

Make them uncorruptible by giving them so much that getting more would be meaningless.
(Been re-reading Gravity Dreams by L.E.Modesitt Jr.)

This might be a good approach-- if it ever, ever worked. Every study I'm aware of on the subject of the reactions of the wealthy and powerful to the prospect of further wealth and power has suggested that the reaction is to desire more no matter how much is already held. It doesn't matter that it's meaningless: your base of comparison isn't what's meaningful; it's what your peers have. If you have no peers, your base of comparison becomes not what is meaningful or what others have, but what you have already.

Human greed is functionally self-intensifying and bottomless.

Which kind of baffles me.

In New Eden there are civilizations that have developed far beyond of what we have and still they are as unplanned, reactive and random as our own. Even the Jove/Sleepers are run by the most base of human instincts.

Which leads me to another conclusion about the actual level of technology within New Eden.

All the factions are more or less scavenger cultures, all T2 is something that is derivative of old tech from other (older) cultures.
T3 even more so.

I would suggest the thought (that is in line with the WH40k universe) that nobody actually knows what makes the technology work, they just know how to use it.

Which would explain the pretty much the insane mistakes constantly made when trying to make new technologies by the different factions.

Cloning tech, the cultures of the different factions were not prepared for it, legally or spiritually.
Capsule tech, same thing, I'm not sure if anyone in the empires knows how the pod works, they just use it.
Drone AI, rogue drones, need I say more.
FTL communications, linked to the gates, some little chick hacks a little thing and then deadspace beacons everywhere.
W-space...

The list just goes on and on.

The constant state of baffled surprise by just about everyone in New Eden on any event happening anywhere in the cluster would indicate that the mental powers of the denizens are more along the lines of the infinite monkeys bashing typewriters to create the works of Shakespeare than actions of more advanced human beings than what we have in our time.

Perhaps it is just the fact that CCP does not have the capability to portray New Eden as anything else, perhaps it is the fact that New Eden is nothing more.

[Kybernetes Moros]

That's not a far cry from how I was playing it towards the end of my subscription.

The underlying scientific knowledge of New Eden, sure, it's worlds apart from anything we know now, but one of the themes that I quite like in EVE is the impact of technology on societies. Cloning and drone AI definitely seem to me to have strong elements of blundering on into the future without any excessive caution or forethought, and I thought from very shortly after I began to RP that while, yes, people in New Eden can use the capsule, it's not even close to understood -- hence the lack of development on the actual design since its inception.

Likewise for T3, I'd say; in fact, I seem to recall Dropbear-as-Tukoss confirming that at some point during the early stages of Arek'jaalan, but that might be my memory playing silly buggers. Regardless, a similar idea: it's blackboxing taken to new levels. "Put x in, get y out, and who cares how it does it?".

I wouldn't say that these are necessarily bad themes in the setting.

[lallara zhuul]

We're straying a little bit, but..

If the understanding is incomplete, then pretty much all the stuff that is derivative from other sci-fi settings is incompatible.
Nanotech, infomorphs, miniaturized tech, custom cyberware, genetech, anything that would require a genuinely advanced civilization to develop it.

It may be that the cultures in New Eden have gone beyond the development curve of a society where specialists are so far removed from the actual understanding of the principles of things that the actual understanding has disappeared.

At least the collapse of the EVE gate caused such an event to happen to the Amarr, and they are the foremost supplier of the best cybernetics in the cluster.(The Scriptures held the information on how to build warp gates but not necessarily the understanding of the principles behind the technology, same may go for most Amarrian tech...)

[Lyn Farel]

I don't think many capsuleers would be interested in 'soft clone' backups, as there is no transfer of consciousness. You die, and someone else with your memories wakes up.  It's still death.

I think this is a subject that I covered very briefly with Lyn on the IGS at some point, but the discussion did not really went into that direction so I did not go further with that. This is a theme that I have had a lot of convoluted thought over the years, since I read novels like the Takeshi Kovacs saga or Hamilton's books (The Commonwealth saga, etc). I always wondered if it was really the same person after his or her death. Since he/she died, that must just be a copy of him/her, so someone else very close to oneself but not the same ? It just sounded right to me that way, but I somehow realized that I was totally biased by our current vision of the unity of life. The unity of a person. We have a very binary conception of what constitues a person defined by something that can still not be cheated : death. It is so ingrained in our minds that we can simply not think otherwise easily.

I am no scientist, and I merely try to remain rational. So I do not really know if what I think now on the matter is the correct answer. But I eventually ended up to wonder if I was not just mistaken. That my views were colored and based on false premises (our binary conception of life). So I tried to take it differently instead. I do think that what constitutes a person is not that different from software. After all, it is mostly about a brain pattern with neuronal synapses in different states. I think the key is that everything is continuous. You can take yourself at t=0 and at t=+1s and it will not be the same person. Of course both of these snapshots will be mostly the same person, but mostly only, because things will have happened in the interval that will make the person at t=+1 different from the former. The bigger the interval is, the bigger the difference will be.

With this snapshot analogy in mind, it starts to get interesting when instead of changing the timeline (taking 2 different times), you choose to copy/paste someone in the exact same state. You will agree that if the process is flawless, at t=0 both will be the same. So both will be you (or you will be the 10 persons if you clone yourself 10 times). But this state starts to be false as soon as you leave t=0, because every copy of you will start to live differently (because of different locations in space, a matter of context mostly). For all these copies that starts to be different persons, they still consider that the person they all come from before the cloning process, is them. Though here comes the logical fallacy because if that person they all come from (subject A) is them all, then A = B1 = B2 = B3, etc. Which goes against what was said above that they all start to get different the moment they leave t=0.

That way, I think that we are not the same person scientifically speaking at t=0 and at t=n, but in the common definition that people give to someone - what defines a person - it is actually about the continuous sum of all of the previous snapshots, the sum of all the "t" that constitute a life. When cloning comes into consideration, it just means that like software you can copy/paste a snapshot at t=n, and therefore create branches all coming from the same model, but starting to evolve as individual entities. With this in mind, the continuous state of being of someone is more or less irrelevant. I think it is just something that our minds can not completely comprehend because everything in us shouts the contrary.

If you awake a century after the cloning process or the second after does not change anything. Your new body is constituted of different molecules and matter. Your mind is exactly the same. It is like you have been completely "freezed" for a certain amount of time. With soft cloning, well, you will have memory losses. It is where the cloning stops being "you at t=0 dies and you at t=0 is cloned in another body" to become "you at t=0 dies and you at t=-n is cloned in another body". So, it is not you anymore, but it is still you, because you are the sum of all of your moments in time. It would be more disturbing if you could clone in you at t=+n, where you will actually clone into someone else, which is of course impossible. What I mean is that a part of you at t=+1 is also you at t=0, but you at t=0 is not you at t=+1. In math everything is relative. I believe it is the same in most things.

I am pretty sure my view on these things is totally weird, but well, I elaborated it myself and Im no expert on the subject. vOv

[lallara zhuul]

Wouldn't then a non-instantaneous scan of a person give false information then?

Like a photograph with a longer shutter time (or whatever you call it.)

Snapshot gives you an accurate picture, a shot with a lengthier shutter time makes the whole thing muddled.

[Lyn Farel]

Yep, in the theory. :p

Though if it is a matter of millisecond or even less, I am pretty sure that in practice it starts to get more or less neglectible, especially when you start to approach or even exceed the speed of execution of every single operation in the brain itself ?

[Kybernetes Moros]

We're straying a little bit, but..

If the understanding is incomplete, then pretty much all the stuff that is derivative from other sci-fi settings is incompatible.
Nanotech, infomorphs, miniaturized tech, custom cyberware, genetech, anything that would require a genuinely advanced civilization to develop it.

This might be better split into a new thread, but I'd disagree that all of it need be incompatible. Certain elements -- T3 and the capsule, both more stumbled across than developed by New Eden -- aren't well understood in the slightest; that doesn't mean that they're incapable of developing complex technology and so on.

[Bastian Valoron]

Wouldn't then a non-instantaneous scan of a person give false information then?

Like a photograph with a longer shutter time (or whatever you call it.)

Snapshot gives you an accurate picture, a shot with a lengthier shutter time makes the whole thing muddled.

I've been thinking that the soft scan might be more like a Moravec procedure: the template brain would be conditioned slowly to mimic the same responses as the original has with the same stimuli. The more time you spend refining the template, the more accurate the correspondence becomes and the less information is lost during the final stage of the mind transfer.

By contrast, in the instantaneous, panicked mind transfer a snapshot would be projected on a different kind of brain template which is optimized for speed but not so much for quality or accuracy. Some data, like learned skills or personality traits, might actually get lost in the process.

[Aria Jenneth]

As of yet, I do not remember anything in canon to suggest that having more than one copy of a person active at a time results in one being damaged in some way; that would be going to a level of metaphysics that CCP has thus far steered well clear of. I do think there are other solid reasons for not using soft cloning to "create more of yourself," though.

(1) It's just damned awkward. Working out the legal, ethical, and social niceties is just a pain.

(2) Whether or not it actually causes degradation, there are always people who will firmly believe that it does. This can result in all kinds of headaches most societies just don't need, from protests to terrorist acts.

(3) Identity issues are bad enough among capsuleers as it is, m'kay? Having five copies of a single capsuleer just plain fail to cope with each other's existence and decide to go all "Highlander" ("There can be only one!") on each other is another headache nobody needs. Even short of that, knowledge of additional "yous" running around could result in some psychological crises that might give even the Nation pause. Remember that even jump cloning requires capsuleers to take a skillsoft course on "Infomorph Psychology," or, "How not to go crazy while body-swapping." Considering the daily behavior of most capsuleers, it's unclear how well this training actually works.

(4) The Jove probably tried it, and are in a good position to warn against it. "Oh, by the way, never do this. You'll never figure out who was supposed to inherit the silverware." I doubt it has anything to do with the Jovian disease, however; my understanding is that the disease is the result of having lost control of their genome for a couple of generations-- badly enough that they can't figure out how to undo the damage. Always keep backups of your records when meddling in God's domain.

(5) For the reasons above, and others, it's probably extremely illegal. The cloning companies just plain won't do it, even in pirate territory, so forget it. The odds of instability and disaster are just too high.

Just a few thoughts.

[Morwen Lagann]

(5) For the reasons above, and others, it's probably extremely illegal. The cloning companies just plain won't do it, even in pirate territory, so forget it. The odds of instability and disaster are just too high.

No "probably" about it. It is extremely illegal.

[...] two copies of a singular individual somewhere in EVE, a crime of the highest magnitude which goes against almost every law conceived regarding the cloning technology.

[Aria Jenneth]

No "probably" about it. It is extremely illegal.

[...] two copies of a singular individual somewhere in EVE, a crime of the highest magnitude which goes against almost every law conceived regarding the cloning technology.

Yipes. Well, that answers a few questions.

[Lyn Farel]

Ah, now I remember where I read that. Has been a damn long time since then.