In Memory of the Immortal
There’s a reasonable chance that, in the future, space will be teeming with beings which can be traced back to Earth. Be they humans terraforming new worlds or digital people living years per day, there’s a reasonable chance that most of the Earth-originating experience that will ever be, is yet to be. Ahead of us, not behind us.
That’s odd, as it would imply that current individual experience is unlikely. Perhaps the current defining experience, that of timidly bathing on the shore of the cosmic sea, is a popular pastime among minds that can convincingly delight themselves in any experience they may wish. Studying the ancients, experiencing being us, experiencing the infancy of civilization before even its interplanetary adolescence, let alone its interstellar adulthood.
But then, if there is to be an experience that can be feasibly lived before a convincing sensorium, it is exactly that of experiencing the mundane messiness of a society still kneeling to death and suffering. For a hefty portion of the experiences in which a mind might be coherently immersed, regardless of targeting one flavor of pleasure or another, they would not cohere with the specific setting of us ancients. The parochial circumstances of not interacting with superhuman minds on a regular basis, the provincialism of bickering over fractions of the pale blue dot.
In some sense, the contents of contemporary experience reinforce its authenticity, despite the circumstances being unlikely on the face of it. Contemporary experience seems rare in the large scheme of things, it seems scarce. And through scarcity, it seems precious. An exotic species of experience, its rarity contributing to its value.
This is generally the view I held going into Greg Egan’s Border Guards, an exploration of the classic dilemma of whether being aware of the spectre of suffering is a necessary condition for experiencing satisfaction. This, but in a city constructed by manipulating gravity in a vacuum and inhabited by thousand-year-olds playing a cross between soccer and the Fourier transform, of course.
Beyond the original world-building, Egan challenges readers to wrestle with two implications of mind upload: the impossibility of death in a world of mind backups replicated across space, and the impossibility of suffering in a world of being able to dial down sensations from within. Sure, we’re seeing the same tropes in plenty of his works, and in plenty of the works of his contemporaries, yet to avoid spoiling it, it is a succinct, precise counterpoint to the argument from scarcity.
It might indeed be the case that contemporary experience is like an ancient, exotic species, deriving value from its historical rarity. Yet compared to what may be, it is also, on some level, poisonous. Dark, perhaps. Either way, ambivalent. Some dart frog.