Jack-in Jilly (Everybody Wants More)
INTERNET by *flyingdebris on deviantART
The image above just goes to show that one person’s idea of heaven is another person’s vision of hell. Many writers have speculated about a future in which brains happily connect directly to the web, bypassing the inconvenient body, but how possible is that really? And who would choose such an extreme transformation?
Besides, there’s more going on in that picture than just people logged-in via their brain stems. They’re in stasis – which is probably a good thing given how out of it they appear. But wouldn’t shutting down the body like that also turn off the brain, for the most part? And how long can that last before a restart becomes pointless or impossible?
Beyond that, shouldn’t we ask ourselves why this fantasy is so persistent in speculative fiction? What’s the attraction? And what are the more realistic alternatives to this dark and twisted trope?
If you’re a fan of the sub-genre, what’s the best cyber-punk you’ve seen? What makes it possible for to suspend disbelief? What’s the worst you’ve seen?
Best, so far I’d say Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell. Worst, I think I deleted the memory, seriously I can’t remember what it was called.
What made those two work for you? Was it the appeal of the concept? Or were there other attractions?
You’re quite right. The body and the mind cannot be separated without the brain losing, well, its mind. More here:
Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/ghost-shell-why-our-brains-will-never-live-matrix
The fantasy is persistent because it’s the equivalent of becoming godlike. I don’t like cyberpunk, because most of it is as self-consciously angsty and earthbound as a spoiled adolescent brat. However, I make a strong exception for Melissa Scott (Trouble and Her Friends, Dreamships, Dreaming Metal). Blade Runner is still the best cyberpunk film ever made, hands down. And I have a soft spot for the film version of Aeon Flux.
Not to mention the possibility of “living” forever. Anyways I’ve noted that many cyberpunk works portray the world as getting worse due to technology and the protagonists are rebels against the system. One of the reasons why I like Ghost in the Shell, the protagonists are police hunting down hackers and corrupt officials.
It’s weird that people think of their brains so differently than they think of the rest of their bodies. As if they are so different and unrelated that they can be isolated from each other without destroying the life. And even if the brain was somehow kept alive inside a computer (or jar, robot body, whatever), the process and the experience would certainly transform the mind into something unrecognizable as human.
Here I’m thinking back to our very first conversation, when we talked about how metamorphosis necessarily changes the drives of an organism. Even if it wasn’t impossible, the same should be true in brain-to-computer transformations, right?
But here’s a question: Scifi has cyberpunk, with its mind in the machine. Is there an analog in fantasy? Or is there only the sci-fantasy overlap we see so much of?
SF and F share several body/brain/mind tropes: telepathy; teleportation with magic wands or chambers; remote sensing; precognition (“visions”); elixirs of youth and immortality; mind migration to another frame, whether carbon or silicon. When you think of it, technobabble aside even the means are similar. Which in turn tells you something about bandwidth of those who insist that SF and F are totally distinct genres.
Steampunk skirts the border between SF and F and frequently features prosthetics, occasionally full-body prosthesis appear. The anime Fullmetal Alchemist has a protagonist with an “automail” arm and leg and another who is just a soul grafted to a suit of armor (how that armor became animated is unstated).
Futuristic anime is a perfect example of fantasy in SF clothing: there is no real science behind the façade. The tech pyrotechnics are tied to the demands of the plot and hence are as arbitrary and random as (lazy) magic. To their credit, anime directors (unlike their Hollywood counterparts) don’t make any claims to verisimilitude. They know and admit that the stuff is essentially addictive mind-zonking candy.