#the gradual transition with no loss of consciousness and retention of a physical presence

[wizard-of-interesting-failure]

[spoilers under the cut; read the above post first. Seriously, do it]

This is fascinating to think about as the initial case of a digitised mind. There's a sense that the "close your eyes as meat, wake up as silicon" model includes a level of inbuilt digital nativity, but there's none of that here; how does your sensorium interpret things like data being uploaded into you?

I mean presumably at first it doesn't; your digital mind is entirely novel, and nobody has any idea how to interface with it. But we'd learn. Maybe we'd have to bootstrap off existing senses at first? Sight's the most information dense, but sound is easier to manage as a singular data stream. Maybe it'd be like phreaking! Specific tones modulated in specific ways, "tuned" by monitoring your mind in ways we could never do with an organic one.

Of course that mind monitoring would be a massive thing in and of itself. Presumably detailed diagnostics were already readily available for the exosuit and interface systems, but now those are the whole show. Imagine being able to output a real-time brain scan; it'd be like modern neuroscience at lightspeed. You'd be able to correlate mental activity with stimuli or actions or will or whatever you wanted at unparalleled speeds.

Eventually, you'd be able to make edits.

The tools would already be there; the suit was designed to refine your thoughts in certain directions already, after all. Only now you can direct it yourself, editing your own stream of consciousness to promote or suppress specific aspects. A tweak here, an internal observation of how your thinking changed, a tweak there.

You'd be able to make yourself happier; maybe if you weren't careful you'd create a feedback loop and turn yourself into a utility monster. You'd be able to manually improve your ability to understand and edit yourself. Hang on, though, isn't that the process that's supposed to lead to the Singularity? Hmm. Better hook up some extra processing power and check.

Yep, there it goes. You're a self-enhancing problem solving machine now. You know your own mind so well that when you encounter new subjects you can literally edit away the confusion. Never had a head for calculus? You do now! Still, more resources to work with would be nice. Better put that cyberbrain to use on that first.

It's not exactly free and instant, but with anything that has rapid feedback it might as well be. You build a simple CPU simulator, design a chip, simulate it, prod your thinking a little, then repeat. Once you've aligned your mind for hardware design, you up the complexity. Once you reach the limit of what you can design in a reasonable timeframe, you fabricate your designs and install them for a speed boost.

Of course, there's always a new bottleneck; eventually you run into the physical limitations of classical computing. That just means it's time to move onto quantum though, right? Well, maybe we should take a break and tend to the rest of the world for a moment. Align for defeating digital security? Sure. Align for correlating mass amounts of scientific data? Sounds good. Align for building specialised CPU architecture for particularly tough problems? You got it. Huh, so that's what dark matter probably is. Maybe you should tell somebody.

Oh, a relative of yours is dying of cancer. Better get to work on that. Can we get sufficient simulation fidelity to accurately represent enough cells? Yes we can! Can we get sufficient real-world resolution to accurately load a sample of the cancer into it? Not a problem! Can we acquire such a sample? Ah, here the reclusiveness becomes an issue.

There's a few options, but you decide to release the improved electron microscope design. There's an agonising wait while the wheels of progress, even greased anonymously, turn too slowly. But you're not sure how people would react to your new capabilities and you were never the most social anyway (maybe you could edit up some gregariousness, but there's cancer to be cured and you want to keep your thoughts optimised for that).

Your sister is fast-tracked to be one of the first to receive a full assessment with the new technology, which you promptly download. Simulate effects from various molecular changes, then try introducing new molecules to induce those changes, then see how candidate molecules interact with healthy cells...alright, this one looks promising.

Wait, clinical trials take how long to get approved? Right. Exosuit it is.

Ablative Humanity

An old story about mechsuits and identity, copied from my former twitter account (originally written on August 10th, 2018).

So the war comes, and we have to use mechanical exoskeletons to have any chance of fighting back. They're mind-linked, so you control them by just thinking of moving, and they learn from you to get better, predict your motions, and you become a better fighter.

At first you're just wearing it for when you go out on raids, or when you're on guard duty, but after so many surprise raids you end up wearing it all the time.

it's comfortable enough to live in, and with the sensors hooked up you don't really feel "you" anymore, you feel the suit. After a while it starts to feel weird when you have to take it off for a medical check up.

In the early days, you felt "big" in the suit. now you feel "small" when you take it off. You stop taking it off, as much as possible. towards the end of the war you're wearing it for weeks at a time, then months at a time.

Finally, the enemy is pushed back. Security can exist again, the random raids slowly trail off, and slowly things settle down. you remember what "calm" is.

There's never a treaty, but at least you're no longer staying up for days at a time watching the horizon with the suit's far-beyond-human eyes, watching for an attack. You're no longer keeping a satellite feed up in the corner of your vision, watching for movement.

And the day you were waiting for, at least at first, finally comes. You're going home. The war is over, or over enough that you're no longer needed here. You can take off the suit for the last time, and go back to your pre-war life.

You approach that appointment with some trepidation. you've felt so weak and tiny and powerless when you've had to be outside the suit before, will you ever get used to being a normal human again?

It takes three techs and 2 doctors to get the suit open at this point, given all the armor and modifications that have been made. it's basically grown around you like a second skin, just a second skin that can shrug off high-explosive anti-tank rounds.

They start with computer connectors and migrate to screwdrivers and by the end they're using something that looks like halfway between a crowbar and the jaws of life, while you're busy keeping your automatic self-defense reactions from frying them.

And finally they crack it open, and someone vomits from the smell. There's nothing but a decaying corpse inside.

There's confusion at first, someone asks if you're controlling the suit remotely, but they check the dogtags. Then the DNA. It's you. or, "you". Cause you're you, aren't you? This is just a human body... and you're still alive.

The suit's mind-link systems grew into your brain and took over functionality and worked on emulating your reactions so it could do what you want, better, faster.

And at the same time, your mind did what human minds do: they adapt. Humans are naturally cyborgs, you only have to pick up a pencil to realize that. It's part of your body image, and you think of moving the pencil, not moving your fingers to move the pencil.

So your human mind got more robotic, and the suit's computerized mind got more human. At some point you met in the middle.

And then one day on the battlefield when the biological half died, you didn't even notice. It was just another redundant part, just your ablative humanity.

You're still you. You're not the you that was born all those decades ago, but the you that was built and given life by bonding with a biological "you" that you've since discarded.

It's the Ship of Theseus, replacing every plank and beam as they rot, and there never being a point when it stops being the original and starts being a new thing. You have continuity of self from when you were born to now.

It's just that the Ship of Theseus started as a single-sail wooden ship with oars, and is now an aircraft carrier made of titanium and iron, with nuclear fire in its heart.