Selflessness: Thoughts on Eclipse Phase, Transhumanism, & Identity

I've been listening to a fair amount of live-play sessions of Eclipse Phase recently. For the record and the curious, this has all been courtesy of the Role-Playing Public Radio and Technical Difficulties podcasts. I like the exceptionally novel ideas that are inherent to EP -- the kind of plot complications and ethical dilemmas that you just don't find in any other RPG and that are part-and-parcel of a transhumanist setting, where the spectrum of sentience is really wide and physicalities are changed with the regularity of socks.

I enjoy the opportunities to listen in on groups playing this game, as I know I'll likely never do so myself. And this is fine -- there are lots of other RPGs I'd rather get to first anyway. Aside from matters of time vs. the fairly enormous queue of games that has already lined up in front of EP, a big hurdle for running/playing this game is the setting/universe and the built-in metaplot that goes with it.

By and large, I'm not someone who is averse to an in-depth setting or some metaplot. During the 1990's, I played Vampire: The Masquerade without batting an eye at it's extensive in-world lore. And, in running my own games, I can sometimes craft fairly "busy" campaign settings and narrative arcs, with multi-layer plot threads that interweave with one another. But, in spite of all this, I have to admit that Eclipse Phase seems to have a high barrier for entry, requesting that the GM and players have a decent awareness of both the wide array of technology that's in use (including lots of different morphs) and the detailed factions and locations within the setting. Again, to be clear: I like EP. But to play it fully and successfully, I think, requires an investment of ingesting and understanding a lot of setting material. Which I think might keep me from running it anytime soon. And which I definitely think would keep the players in my gaming group from wanting to play it. But I digress -- I actually didn't come here to critique the game itself, but to discuss a fundamental concept in the game (and in transhumanist thinking in general) that I can't come to terms with.

Something that I always struggle with when listening to thinkers who espouse a transhumanist future is their way of approaching personal identity (at least insofar as I think I understand what they're saying). As I understand it, one transhumanist belief is that, in the future, it's possible we'll each be able to carry around a digital copy of our mind on a kind of physically implanted hard drive (a "cortical stack" in EP terms). And, should our bodies become fatally injured, the stack would just be "re-sleeved" into a new body/morph and we'd continue on as usual. This is the aforementioned sticking point that I can't ever see myself moving beyond -- this idea of a continuous individual existence that can reach across changes in bodies.

Even if we could encode a person's mind onto a stack, I can only see that record as being a copy, something separate from the person themselves. I have a hard time imagining anyone being so casually confident in this view of the self that they would have no concerns about putting themselves in danger because "I can just get my stack re-sleeved later." As I see it, that person would die and a very exact copy of them (complete with their memories) would be starting up afterwards. In order for this to work and for anyone to actually feel OK about living like this, people would have to have a very different perspective on what the Self is.

And here is where I get uneasy. I start to think of this notion of the "personal brand," which has become pretty ubiquitous in recent years. This idea that there is a concept of the self that seems to float above and lie detached from the person that one actually is. A personal brand is something that operates at a remove from someone and, for some, could potentially supersede the Self as a person lives it. The Self that is projected beyond oneself, that could take precedence because it is the thing perceived by others and therefore is somehow more real. The Self that is farcast. The Self that is more human than human. I think about that trend...and it makes me pretty uncomfortable. Perhaps ego transfers wouldn't be such a frightening prospect for some if they concluded that they're already playing second string to their own public image. What's one more sleeve in service to the Brand?

Image credit: Mark Lloyd, "Eternal Singularity," via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]