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Yonder
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Ployon said, "I saw something pretty interesting in what you did achieve--you know, the part where you destroyed your credibility. That's probably more interesting than your breaking the record."
Ployon ran through some calculations before continuing, "And at any rate, you're trying to answer the wrong question."
Archon said, "Am I missing the interesting question? The question of how to forge a link across the chasm between matter and spirit is--"
"Not nearly as interesting as the question of what it would mean to bridge that chasm."
Archon stopped, reeling at the implication. "I think it's time for me to make a story in a virtual world."
Ployon said, "Goodbye now. You've got some thinking to do."
Archon began to delve. What would the world be like if you added to it the ability for minds to connect with bodies, not simply as it had controlled his racing body, but really? What would it be like if the chasm could be bridged? It searched through speculative fiction, and read a story where minds could become bodies--which made for a very good story, but when it seriously tried to follow its philosophical assumptions, it realized that the philosophical assumptions were not the focus. It read and found several stories where the chasm could be bridged, and--
There was no chasm. Or would not be. And that meant not taking the real world and adding an ability to bridge a chasm, but a world where mind and matter were immanent. After rejecting a couple of possible worlds, Archon considered a world where there were only robots, and where each interfaced to the network as externally as to the physical world. Each mind was firmware burned into the robot's circuits, and for some still to be worked out reason it couldn't be transferred. Yes, this way... no. Archon got some distance into this possible world before a crawling doubt caught up to it. It hadn't made minds and bodies connect; it'd only done a first-rate job of covering up the chasm. Maybe organic goo held promise. A world made only of slime? No, wait, that was... and then it thought--
Archon dug recursively deeper and deeper, explored, explored. It seemed to be bumping into something. Its thoughts grew strange; it calculated for billions and even trillions of microseconds, encountered something stranger than--
Something happened.
How much time had passed?
Archon said, "Ployon! Where are you?"
Ployon said, "Enjoying trying to trace your thoughts. Not much success. I've disconnected now."
"Imagine a mind and a body, except that you don't have a mind and a body, but a mind-body unity, and it--"
"Which do you mean by 'it'? The mind or the body? You're being careless."
"Humor me. I'm not being careless. When I said, 'it', I meant both--"
"Both the mind and the body? As in 'they'?"
"Humor me. As in, 'it.' As in a unity that doesn't exist in our world."
"Um... then how do you refer to just the mind or just the body? If you don't distinguish them..."
"You can distinguish the mind and the body, but you can never separate them. And even though you can refer to just the mind or just the body, normally you would talk about the unity. It's not enough to usually talk about 'they;' you need to usually talk about 'it.'"
"How does it connect to the network?"
"There is a kind of network, but it can't genuinely connect to it."
"What does it do when its body is no longer serviceable."
"It doesn't--I haven't decided. But it can't jump into something else."
"So the mind simply functions on its own?"
"Ployon, you're bringing in cultural baggage. You're--"
"You're telling me this body is a prison! Next you're going to tell me that it can't even upgrade the body with better parts, and that the mind is like a real mind, only it's shut in on twenty sides. Are you describing a dystopia?"
"No. I'm describing what it means that the body is real to the mind, that it is not a mind that can use bodies but a mind-body unity. It can't experience any pleasure it can calculate, but its body can give it pleasure. It runs races, and not only does the mind control the body--or at least influence it; the body is real enough that the mind can't simply control it perfectly--but the body affects the mind. When I run a race, I am controlling the body, but I could be doing twenty other things as well and only have a token presence at the mind-body interface. It's very different; there is a very real sense in which the mind is running when the body is running a race.
"Let me guess. The mind is a little robot running around a racetrack hollowed out from the body's brain. And did you actually say, races, plural? Do they have nanotechnology that will bring a body back after its been run down? And would anyone actually want to race a body that had been patched that way?"
"No. I mean that because their bodies are part of them, they only hold races which they expect the racers to be able to live through."
"That's a strange fetish. Don't they ever have a real race?"
"They have real races, real in a way that you or I could never experience. When they run, they aren't simply manipulating something foreign to the psyche. They experience pleasures they only experience running."
"Are you saying they only allow them to experience certain pleasures while running?"
"No. They--"
"Then why don't they allow the pleasures at other times? That's a stranger fetish than--"
"Because they can't. Their bodies produce certain pleasures in their minds when they're running, and they don't generate these pleasures unless the body is active."
"That raises a number of problems. It sounds like you're saying the body has a second mind, because it would take a mind to choose to let the 'real' mind experience pleasure. It--"
Archon said, "You're slipping our chasm between the body and mind back in, and it's a chasm that doesn't exist. The body produces pleasure the mind can't produce by itself, and that is only one of a thousand things that makes the race more real than them for us. Think about the achievements you yourself made when you memorized the map of the galaxy. Even if that was a straightforward achievement, that's something you yourself did, not something you caused an external memory bank to do. Winning a race is as real for that mind-body as something it itself did as the memorization was for you. It's something it did, not simply something the mind caused the body to do. And if you want to make a causal diagram, don't draw something linear. In either direction. Make a reinforced web, like computing on a network."
Ployon said, "I still don't find it convincing."
Archon paused. "Ok, let's put that in the background. Let me approach that on a different scale. Time is more real. And no--this is not because they measure time more precisely. Their bodies are mortal, and this means that the community of mind-body unities is always changing, like a succession of liquids flowing through a pipe. And that means that it makes a difference where you are in time."
Archon continued. "I could say that their timeline is dynamic in a way that ours is not. There is a big change going on, a different liquid starting to flow through the pipe. It is the middle age, when a new order of society is being established and the old order is following away."
Ployon said, "So what's the old technology, and what's the new one?"
"It's deeper than that. Technological society is appearing. The old age is not an abandoned technology. It is organic life, and it is revealing itself as it is disintegrating."
"So cyborgs have--"
"There are no cyborgs, or very few."
"And let me guess. They're all cybernetic enhancements to originally biological things."
"It's beyond that. Cybernetic replacements are only used to remedy weak bodies."
"Wouldn't it be simpler to cull the--"
"The question of 'simpler' is irrelevant. Few of them even believe in culling their own kind. Most believe that it is--'inexpedient' isn't quite right--to destroy almost any body, and it's even more inadvisable to destroy one that is weak."
"In the whole network, why?"
"I'm still working that out. The easiest part to explain has to do with their being mind-body unities. When you do something to a body, you're not just doing it to that body. You're doing it to part of a pair that interpenetrates in the most intimate fashion. What you do to the body you do to the mind. It's not just forcibly causing a mind to jack out of a body; it's transferring the mind to a single processor and then severing the processor from the network."
"But who would... I can start to see how real their bodies would be to them, and I am starting to be amazed. What else is real to them?"
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