"Learning to Be Me" is a masterpiece, one of the best short stories ever written. Not only is the phenomenology brilliant, but the literary skill is so good that, even though you suspect what's coming all throughout the tale, he still manages to shock you in the denouement.
You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.
It's the other side of passing the Turing test. Assuming that the machine passes, what's next?
What's next is a lot of people are fooled. Is it me or the machine that replaced me? Is it grandma, transmigrated into machineland afterlife, or is it just a fake? Does the fake get to vote and own property?
Worst possible scenario : Everybody is fooled. Everybody gets brainscraped. Everybody goes to immortal AI heaven. But actually nobody did. I won't give away what story goes with that spoiler (not Egan).
Your comment made me reminisce, I read the story a few years ago and its one of my favorite short stories by him. Such a simple concept. One beautiful piece of sci-fi horror.
> You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.
In my interpretation, Egan is trying to say that _this is already the case_.
I understood the story as a description of epiphenomenalism, only layered with sci fi concepts to make it more straightforward to digest.
Loved this one. If interested in similar scifi short story bundles I can recommend Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” and “Stories of your Life and Others”. One of these was the basis for the “Arrival” movie.
I just reread this after seeing it on the shelves of a coffee shop bookstore I frequent.
I remember originally reading this sitting on the floor of a library while on a solo trip through England as a teenager ... I spent the rest of the summer reading everything by Greg Egan I could find. He's my favorite author and I can honestly say I think his books have had more influence on the way I think than any other author.
Re-reading axiomatic after all these years brings with it a surge of memories from the younger me. It's awesome to have this kind of talisman that provides a powerful connection to the states of mind of my youth and the things I thought as I grappled with these ideas, so many really for the first time. There is very little literature that goes so far and deep into the experience and philosophy of thought as Greg Egan.
Amazing that this was written in the early 90s -- and still has a better sense of life with recent and upcoming technology that most stories written much more recently ...
“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked.
“Evolution.”
“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.”
Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?”
“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking.
“With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”
Reading Permutation City changed the way I think, and I’ve been loving working my way through everything Greg Egan. It’s almost as if its a new literary genre - Computer Science Fiction.
I was on this exact same journey, so our taste must be similar. Love his stuff.
Just in case our taste is VERY similar, I have really enjoyed every book I've read so far except the middle book in the Orthogonal series.
The first was great, third was back in form. I would recommend, if you are reading the second one, and start to wonder why you should press through, just skip to the third one.
I'm not really qualified to make any judgements about the overall quality of it, but it's moreso the tone of it that I am talking about. I wonder if he was going through something when he wrote that one or something.
This collection of short stories was my first introduction to Egan, and my first real experience with hard sci-fi. Egan’s stories don’t have the best story lines or character development, but they are uniquely realistic and based in science in a way that is hard to find in other sci-fi authors (Stross and Watts come close).
Thank you for sharing it — I highly recommend this collection, and Egan’s many other books, to anyone that is working in tech or just interested in how the future of computing, AI, AR, biology, spacetime travel, and humanity may pan out.
I read Egan’s “Diaspora” a while ago after a recommendation on HN.
I can really recommend it if you’re interested in far-future SciFi with quite novel concepts. The start is a bit slow and the end a bit too weird, but the middle is the most impactful SciFi I’ve read in years.
The Netflix show "Altered Carbon" adopted this concept from this book perhaps. In the show the bodies were disposable, consciousness/memories all lived in a jewel like object fit into spine in the neck. Physical damage to bodies done in violence was referred as 'organic damage'. Rich people could live forever using grown bodies, while the jewels of poor were moved to an archive.
You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.