Which Would You Choose? Synthetic or Cyborg?
President Duke argues that anyone who transferred into a synthetic body stopped being human the moment their original brain died. I've been thinking about this argument for years, and I still can't find a hole in it.
I've spent the last month working with a small group of dedicated readers on the alpha read of my next book, tentatively titled Maybe This One Will Sell. The team is only about 10 chapters in, but they've already given me incredible feedback, despite reading a second draft of a story that is so very far away from its final form. While some focus on the frequent nudity, the salty language, or the patchwork nature of the plot, others have asked bigger questions about the Vinestead Universe itself, from the divergence of the Vinestead timeline from our own to a larger debate about the future of immortality.
Specifically, are all forms of synthetic transcendence the same?
Here is the question I got from one reader:
There's this line: "Duke’s stance was that synnies weren’t actually people as defined in the Bible, therefore had no souls, and therefore had no right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness"
Then in the next paragraph, it says that his Dad believes the same since the news says it. But then the last line of that paragraph seems to contradict that:
"When it came to the next phase in human evolution, Dad and his attendant manifesto held that the future was cyborg in nature—essentially, keep the gray matter and replace everything else with machinery."
Maybe I'm misreading it? The last part just seemed to contradict the first part.
It's a great question that takes me all the way back to Xronixle days when I thought the coolest thing in the world would be to upload my mind to the internet and live forever as a digital ghost. With Perion Synthetics, I took that idea to the next stage, giving digital minds physical form. Por Vida closed the loop by showing how widespread "synthetic transcendence" had become, and that if you had enough money, you too could transfer your mind into a synthetic body and become immortal.
For anyone who has read that book, you'll know Por Vida actually destroyed that whole argument. I wrote about it in more detail in a fictionalized piece from an in-universe aggregator almost ten years ago.
Daniel Verastiqui
The piece has a great bit about the nature of consciousness and whether "copying" it constitutes "moving" it. Spoiler: it doesn't.
In the context of Book 9, President Duke is leaning on this principle to deny equal rights to humans who have transitioned into synthetic bodies, arguing that because their physical brains (and bodies) have died, they are no longer human.
And I... don't really know how to argue against that claim.
It's one of the reasons I would put off copying my mind into a computer until the very last second. Because... what if I didn't wake up in that shiny new chrome body? What if I'm the version of Daniel who simply passes on?
Which brings us to the second part of the question: would believing the future is cyborg contradict the idea that synthetics aren't real people?
I guess it depends on what you mean by cyborgs and synthetics. In this case, since these are my books, it depends on what I mean.
To put it simply:
- A synthetic is purely mechanical. Think Data from Star Trek, Bishop from Aliens, or in the Vinestead Universe: Roberta, Sepideh Ahmadi, and the survivors from Hybrid Mechanics.
- A cyborg is a combination of mechanics and organic material. That balance can range from "brain in a tin can body" to "heavily augmented but mostly human body." Think RoboCop from RoboCop, Molly Millions from Neuromancer, and if you don't forget the arc reactor in his chest, Tony Stark from Iron Man.
Robocop-level cyborgs aren't something I've touched on in the Vinestead Universe very much. Brigham Plaza explored some of the augmented, body modification world, but those people are still very much human. Cynthia Mesquina and Gordon King would look tame by comparison in Cyberpunk 2077's Night City.
And yet, it's something I've been thinking about behind the scenes for a long time. Vise Manor was the last time I gave the tech any attention, and I think it's because I've kinda fallen out of love with it. I used to think it was a giant middle finger to mother nature, but now, like the people who inhabit the Vinestead Universe, I'm beginning to see it for what it is: a lie.
Though I don't go in much for the spiritual stuff, I'd bet on there being something special about the brain, something the emerged through evolution, that contains what we would call consciousness or the soul.
Therefore, true immortality would be the preservation not only of the mind but also of the environment the mind inhabits. To give it a fancier name, we might also call it continuity of consciousness.
When Hector (the "Dad" character from Book 9) says the future is cyborg, he's talking specifically about continuity of consciousness. A brain removed from its organic body and put into a mechanical body still houses a human mind. A brain copied bit-by-bit into a computer would not be the same thing. Again, it's a move (cyborg) versus a copy (synthetic).
I'm not foolish enough to even try to explain how mind-copying tech might actually work in an alternate reality, but let's say it does. The downside would be the previous argument—a version of you dies on the operating table during the copy. After that initial gamble, I suppose the major problems are just parts and power.
The cyborg route, however, is far more interesting, mostly because of work that is already being done in that field. While Elon is turning Grok into your information-scraping, subservient girlfriend, researchers at Yale have been trying to reanimate pig brains. Okay, not really, but I liked the "brain in a vat" visual, and it brings me to the bigger problem: if you become a cyborg to achieve immortality, you have to keep your brain alive for a long time.
To make matters worse, Google's been telling me for the last hour that you can't just take a brain out of the body and remove it from its other organs and it just work. And even though that AI can't count the number of r's in strawberry, I have to give it the benefit of the doubt that we can't just yank out brains and throw them in a tank like in John Saul's Shadows, though I really wish we could.
What I do know for sure is that when I first imagined the 2040s (when Book 9 takes place), I saw it as a war between synthetics and organics. Now that I'm finally here, writing this story, I think there is a third player—cyborgs who have a foot in both worlds. Makes you wonder whose side they will be on "when the revolution come."
All that to say Hector's love of cyborgs and hatred of synthetics isn't a contradiction. It's him seeing the truth of the situation. And if the rest of us want to keep up, we need to be aware of that distinction too.
But if you're talking about it in the context of my books, then the author needs to do a better job of making that distinction.
So... which would you choose? Let me know in the comments; maybe you'll show up as a famous synthetic or cyborg in my next book.
