Altered Carbon (Netflix)

Just started to watching this.

Very faithful to the book in some ways.

Quite a few changes in others.

Awesome, though.

Great so far.

Watched episodes 1 and 2. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not bad, but they overdo the nudity in a way that comes off as juvenile.

It's an OK show that might get better if I give it a few more episodes.

Well, got up to episode 4, it actually gets interesting in that last one, so I'll probably finish the season tomorrow morning.

Just started watching. Loved the little nod to Deus ex at the beginning - where he sees through the wall with the golden tinge

I've never read the book but feel I need to correct that error! Enjoying the way it presents the world - for all the technological advantages, people are still people and don't change all that much from a cultural standpoint.

Also, Jaeger is an ass.

edited 5th Feb '18 3:12:43 AM by JerekLaz

I checked the Wikipedia page to see whether I should watch it. It took my decision when I saw the words "James Purefoy".

I know he is unlikely to ever get a role as good as Mark Antony again, but I cling to that flimsy hope.

Oh, that's the same reason I picked up the show.

And you do get to see QUITE a lot of James Purfoy. I mean a LOT.

Man this show is so GOOD. Though Takeshi's attitude towards death and perma death seems a bit.. inconsistent.

And the Envoys being a mystical guerrilla force are a bit odd. But it fits with the world adaptation they've built. Also, I love Poe.

Here's my review!

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2018/02/altered-carbon-2018-review.html

A fair assessment. It's great fun, but for some reason has an underlying anti-transhuman vibe (With the resistance to immortality).

Ultimately I think the message could've been more nuanced - the resistance could have been about withholding the exclusivity of the sleeving. But overall I'm loving the tone, the characters, the approach.

Mind you, it's obviously not REALLY immortality since you can destroy a Sleeve and upload the memories from a server as well as double-sleeve.

It's Cloning Immortality.

The Diet Coke of Immortality.

:)

That wasn't touched on either.

edited 6th Feb '18 6:50:53 AM by CharlesPhipps

Mind you, it was a bit ridiculous when James had to explain why he was a middle aged man versus a young man.

We all wish we looked as good at that age.

It's the similar sort of thought that the Schlock Mercenary stories are going through - yes the "person" is immortal - the continuity of memory.... but the Consciousness, the continuity of that, that's in dispute.

From the Meth perspective, their attitude is that their future version is their "next of kin" it seems, so that's their version of "keeping it in the family"; but they've pushed it to jumping between bodies. Maybe they assume they will wake up in the new body and the new version doesn't think otherwise, despite being "spun up"; meanwhile, the older copy is dead, so can't complain.

And for wider society, it's only really looked at as keeping their loved ones alive, so they aren't thinking too deeply about it. The "new" person THIN Ks they're the original and has their memories, even of their own death... so that's what matters.

The Twins actually raise that question - having two versions of you at the same time is a clear invalidation of continuity of consciousness.

I also take it as another reminder humans are stupid.

You remember everything up to the point you're killed, so it's "You" so you don't think too hard about the fact you're a copy of a person's memories and clones.

Even if you, the person, is dead.

I do think the sudden shift with Takeshi's Sister, Rei, turning up and THEN revealing she was the MAN BEHIND THE MAN is a bit too sudden. I mean, we don't even know or get a chance to suspect the strange black man sleeve.

Beyond that, the transhumanist message is muddled as it seems that, for all her skill, Quellist wasn't actually much of an intellectual - periods of tyranny can be overcome and crumble in their own way. Their revolution would have been much better actually going after the soon-to-be immortals, not the structure of immortality itself.

I like the fact you can see the point of both sides, but I do wonder if there's some Writer on Board with the anti-immortality thing. Because death ISN'T a great equaliser - in fact it is the tool of people enforcing inequality; now, if Quellist had gone and developed a cheap and easy way to get people to be able to resleeve, continue on, or tried different ways to approach a singularity then I think it could've been different. But I think that the writers had this whole "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" and plays on that hard.

Ok, finished the season. It has some good ideas and interesting scenes, but they are buried in too much sex, violence, violent sex and sexualized violence. I hope that season 2 (if the show is renewed) turns that down a bit. Speaking of a hypothetical season 2, I think the best direction to go (supposing they don't stretch the whole search for Quellcrist's stack for a season) is starting a revolution against the system.

The anti-immortality thing was not from the books, as best as I remember them so almost certainly something the show writers brought to the table, yes.

Not particularly surprising, really - Deathism, the anti-immortality stance is soaked through our cultural canon to a terrifying degree.

I think it is fundamentally a cultural innovation which serves the purpose of getting people to not pursue pathways to eternity that have been proven to be futile - All the lives spent pursuing the fountain of youth through the jungles of south america or shuttered up in monasteries trying to make death go away by thinking the right thoughts at it really hard being fundamentally poorly spent, so we hammer the axiom that those grapes are sour into peoples heads very hard indeed to stop that tendency. A very useful lie, socially, as long as no actually fruitful path to eternity exists, but there is a problem.

It has become an un-examined axiom which will probably blow up in our collective faces the second our technological capabilities catch up with our imagination, because a whole lot of people will not be able to examine it even when it starts being the direct cause of tens of thousands of deaths per day.

edited 7th Feb '18 12:01:06 PM by Izeinsummer

Real immortality can't be found by cloning unless you're going full-immoral and doing brain transplants on clones. You need to find a way to keep the original body going, rather than just moving memories. And eventually you're going to run into issues with human brains because there's finite space for memory anyway. Plus, you know, we don't really record memories at all. We record summaries of them, which change every time we try to remember them as our current situation infects our memories of the past.

Truth be told, immortality itself ISN'T a worthwhile goal, even if we can achieve it. You aren't even the same person you were a year ago, or ten, or at birth. You've already lost your cells from then and grown new ones. I'm not saying the pursuit itself isn't worthwhile. It's the driving force behind a lot of medical breakthroughs. If we weren't pursuing longer lives, we wouldn't be bothering with curing diseases in the first place. Just saying immortality itself isn't a worthwhile thing to have.

Well in the show, there's two points:

1. It's not real immortality. It just looks like it. But this is debatable since Brain Uploading is something people genuinely hope will exist some day.

2. The show takes the stance death is required for humans not to become Always Chaotic Evil. The complete lack of consequence basically turned all of the Meths into The Caligula.

So it's like Altered Carbon adapted by a Neo-Catholic.

Mind you, I'm of the group of scientific thinkers who believe consciousness is a poorly understood concept and a lot of our present thoughts regarding it are dead wrong. This pisses off some materialists and attracts an endless number of idiots peddling snakeoil but I'm reminded of how Richard Penrose and Stuart Hammeroff speculated on quantum vibrations from outside the brain were generating consciousness, got slammed by every corner and used as an example of scientists outside their field—then we found quantum vibrations exactly where they speculated them to be.

edited 7th Feb '18 4:10:02 PM by CharlesPhipps

Brain Uploading is not immortality, You can't just upload someone's thoughts and call them the same person. Especially since a computer isn't a human brain and there'll be drastic changes to the personality just from not being hooked up to a biological body. That being said, it's not a worthless idea. If we abandon this stupid idea of it as immortality, there's merit to uploading a personality to a computer and watching how it functions. It could teach us more about ourselves, and it's possible enough of the original personality will remain that we can still benefit from the insight of a particular dead person.

There's also the threat of hacking, when you deal in brain uploading to a computer. The personality is just data, and can be corrupted or altered by someone with the right knowledge.

edited 7th Feb '18 4:56:15 PM by Journeyman

In my sci-fi series, Agent G, a guy talked about an idea of Brain Uploading as an intermediate step.

No, the organic guy would not be immortal.

But the subsequent COMPUTER guy would.

So you'd be helping your "son" achieve immortality.

Very far future stuff then. Modern computers last a decade if you take good care of them. C Ds and other storage media maybe the same. You could keep copying the files that make up the "son" but every time you do you get degradation. There's a good chance with modern tech the "son" won't even last as long as the father did. Hell, absolute certainty the "son" won't last long. Copying the file is still a copy, not the original. Still not immortal. With something as complex as a human personality, even a little degradation can alter things a long way.

Well, I brought up Sir Richard Penrose and he actually has an even more depressing view of the subject. He suggested that if his theory of consciousness is correct, then it's very likely consciousness is impossible with pure software and would exist solely as a function of quantum effects.

In other words, until we build a quantum computer that functions like a brain then it wouldn't be possible and would be functionally identical to a biological organism anyway.

Obviously that's not the case in Altered Carbon.

There is some good news on the Ragnarök Proofing front, though, as people have learned to store information on quartz so we really could create computers that could last a million years now. It's just we've gone in a circle from stone tablets to....stone tablets.

edited 7th Feb '18 7:36:50 PM by CharlesPhipps

The Bobiverse series of books go into this - every time Bob makes a copy he himself continues and the copy has all his memories, but they always diverge and certain personality traits are exaggerated in each iteration. And they require quantum computing scans AND destructive brain scans for upload - but they also comment on how, if you do do a full brain scan AND the brain has a dfect (Alzheimers, deterioration, some impairment) then that is replicated too - so you CAN be uploaded as a person perpetually degrading down with a degenerative brain disease.

AC does show society ignoring the whole consciousness attribute - as shown by the Zealot Lung who is pure evil.

The gratuity in the show is, I think, a result of the genre as much as anything - gritty noir, which always fetishises the femme fatale and the tragic woman victims. I hope we see an example of a benevolent Meth; I think there's an element of they become the Caligula WITHIN the society that the Protectorate is - and also as a result of their baseline personality - corporate executives are psychopathic anyway - chasing power, security and authority; Rei is seeking safety and control, even over her brother, to ensure she is never vulnerable again.

All these personality traits go up to eleven with immortality. Imagine if someone kind, or generous was able to last that long? The A.I.s are a mixed bunch as well. Overall, we just see Earth, see the two extremes in a society that has, actually, stagnated as a result of the power entrenching.

Basically, this is a better Ghost in the Shell that the Ghost in the Shell movie.

edited 8th Feb '18 2:12:23 AM by JerekLaz