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All that it took to destroy something, here, was to fail to keep track of it.
Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms – a result of information being processed in certain ways,
She wasn’t upset, or relieved – just calm. It always made her feel that way: burning bridges, driving people away. Simplifying her life.
Equanimity is death.”
Some part of him refused to acknowledge any danger – refused to accept that it could be this easy to die. Being paused wouldn’t kill him, wouldn’t harm him, wouldn’t have the slightest effect. What would kill him would be not being restarted. He’d be passively annihilated, ignored out of existence.
To tear out the entire tangled strand of his psyche – rendering half of his remaining memories incomprehensible – would be to leave himself a baffled stranger in his own life.
it was impossible to feel any real emotion while staring into a mirror.
The breeze picked up, cooling his skin. Peer had never felt so tranquil; so physically at ease, so mentally at peace. Losing Kate must have been traumatic, but he’d put that behind him. Once and forever. He continued his descent.
Not unless he redefined himself completely: edited his memories, rewrote his personality. Sculpted his mind into someone new. In other words: died. That was the choice. He had to live with what he was in its entirety, or create another person who’d inherit only part of what he’d been.
Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.
Order my life. I’m nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole.
Where was the line? Between self-transformation so great as to turn a longing for death into childlike wonder … and death itself, and the handing on of the joys and burdens he could no longer shoulder to someone new?
