The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [182]
“The real threat facing all intelligent, self-aware individuals is not robotization but the inexorable erasure of the legacy of the past. The strategies favored by my opponents in this contest have paid less attention to what they call the Miller Effect than to robotization because they know perfectly well that avoidance of robotization necessitates the acceptance of the Miller Effect.
“From the vantage point of the latest New Era it is easy enough to forget that the horrific aspect of the process Morgan Miller discovered at the end of the twentieth century was its rapidity. It rejuvenated a dog’s brain in a matter of weeks, and its human equivalent would have done the same to a human brain within a year. We should remember, though, that a similar process is working inexorably in the brain of every posthuman being who has received any kind of longevity treatment; it is merely working more gradually.
“The fact that all emortality treatments embrace a drastically slowed Miller Effect is, of course, offset by the fact that new memories can be laid down while old ones are eroded, maintaining an illusion of continuity. Every emortal posthuman will tell you that he or she retains some memories of early childhood, and that although such memories fade as time goes by they never entirely disappear — which is supposed to prove that the Miller Effect has been robbed of its power to eliminate individuality. Actually, it proves no such thing.
“Organic memory is a far more treacherous instrument than posthumans are prepared to admit. Even mortals, in the days when their average lifespan was far less than their potential lifespan, were victims of the Miller Effect to a far greater extent than they knew. Most, if not all, of what you mistake for distant memories are in fact memories of previous remembrance.
“You, Adam Zimmerman, presumably believe that you can remember the exact moment when you decided to cheat mortality. You probably believe that you remember exactly what prompted the thought, how you responded to the prompt, where you were, who else was there, and what you said to them. You are quite wrong. The particular organic changes made to your brain in that moment have been overwritten a dozen or a hundred times since then.
“What you actually remember is earlier recapitulations within a chain of recapitulations that extends with ever-increasing uncertainty and vagueness into an almost all-encompassing oblivion.
“You are still connected to the man you were then by virtue of the fact that every version of yourself that has awoken from sleep since the day you were born has rehearsed earlier versions in order to shape and constitute his ever-renewable personality, but you are not that man. Every molecule of every cell in your body has been replaced between a dozen and a thousand times, and that includes the organic substratum of your mind, your memories, and your personality. You cannot and do not remember your nine-year-old self; what you remember is a blurred impression of a middle-aged man who remembers a blurred impression of a younger man who remembers a blurred impression of an even younger man…and so on.
“You are neither immune to the Miller Effect nor untroubled by it, Adam Zimmerman. Nor is Davida Berenike Columella, nor Alice Fleury. The kinds of emortality they possess may have increased the strength and size of the individual links in the chain of remembrance, but the chain remains, and the further it stretches the more it forsakes, economizes, and reconstructs. If you wish to preserve the Adam Zimmerman who took that bold leap into the unknown by having himself frozen down in 2035, you cannot do so by any organic process. You can, however, do it by means of robotization. Robotization is the only process that offers you the possibility of securing the neural connections presently comprising the substratum of your personality forever.”
Now the hard sell, I thought. But it doesn’t stand a chance.
“I will