Reddit reviews Kiln People (The Kiln Books)

The only two I haven't seen listed already are:

• Gun, With Occasional Music - Jonathan Lethem
  
  
• Kiln People - David Brin

David Brin wrote a great novel that explores this somewhat called Kiln People. It's a fun and pretty easy read, and directly deals with those questions! It's a murder mystery involving temporary human avatars made from a kind of recyclable slurry that people upload consciousness to.

So, it was a fun book, but I found more than a few aspects of it to be a bit unbelievable and aggravating.

• All of what follows is something that you will learn about the setting in the opening chapter or two, and while it is background material that is absolutely relevant to the plot, is not itself about any of the characters or events of the book... so I don't think that it is spoiler material. Still, I've enclosed it in spoiler blocks just to be safe.
  
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  [Spoiler](/s "The nominal concept of the setting is that everybody alive has a high capacity digital storage device embedded in the base of their skull/neck that keeps track of everything they do/say/learn/experience. As such humans are basically software... you can put any consciousness in any body. Bodies can be grown, or confiscated, or traded. Any event that kills a person but doesn't destroy the storage device doesn't kill the person permanently... he/she just downloads into a new body... possibly one that was a clone of the old body, or possibly an upgrade or downgrade depending upon finances. In fact, there is no need to even go back into a body as one can run one's consciousness entirely inside a virtual environment... and at a much faster rate than a human brain would support. This is not a concept in the background... the story revolves around this idea. ")
  
  [Spoiler](/s "If you find that to be a believable idea, then you'll love the book. I don't. I think that too much of how we think is intrinsic to the mechanism of how our brains work. You couldn't put a genius mind into the body of mentally disabled person... you'd end up with a mentally disabled person with vague memories of being a genius. Personally, I don't think it could work even in less extreme cases than that: I strongly suspect that information and meaning as it is experienced in a human is encoded symbolically into neurons in a way that is utterly different and incompatible with the way similar or even identical information is encoded into the neurons of any other human... that is the way any individual thinks is essentially encrypted relative to the way any other individual thinks... and that this is a property that is physically encoded in the shape and genetics of individual neurons in the brain such that it could never be separated from the brain. (This is consistent with what we know about how brains work from fMRI studies... when you look at a picture, or do a task such as multiplication, the same general regions of the brain light up for you as anyone else, but the pattern of activation isn't exactly the same... ever). ")
  
  [Spoiler](/s "But lets say we choose to ignore the fact that the premise is more than a little incompatible with what we know of neurobiology. The premise is also self contradictory in ways that are annoyingly implausible but convenient for the plot. Without getting into spoilers, Altered Carbon takes place in a society that has the ability to copy and digitize the consciousness of a human, create functional independent AIs, run simulations of humans so realistic that the simulations don't know that they are simulations or that the environment that they are in is simulated, move such software-human-identities between bodies, and yet still treats human consciousness as a black box! You want to extract a particular fact from a stored mind? You have to actually boot that mind up into a body or software simulated environment, and ASK IT with language! I mean, if the author wants to explore the consequences of human identity as software that's great, but GO ALL THE WAY! Extracting information from a stored consciousness, given all the other things this civilization can do, should be child's play... as simple as typing in search terms in a search engine... the fact that the consciousness is not running should only make it easier. ")
  
  [Spoiler](/s "All in all, a fun light reading, but not as intriguing as it could have been. In many ways, Kiln People by Brin explored much the same subject matter, and did so in a more intellectually rigorous manner. Oddly, the fact that the mind-copying technology is much less believable in Brin's book (and analogue rather than digital in nature) makes the over all story much more believable because it lets the story focus more upon the metaphysical, social, and moral implications.")

Qotd: What kind of clone? Like in Kiln People? if it was like that, I'd say, do my photo editing that I'm behind on, another to do all the flyer hanging I need to get done (and travel for), and a 3rd to tackle my to-do lists. My original self will stay here and pet cats.


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OK I tried to do a spoiler alert with formatting but I am not with it enough to do so at this hour.

So - try out Kiln People for size.

www.amazon.com/Kiln-People-Books-David-Brin/dp/0765342618/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=kiln+people&qid=1572919327&s=books&sr=1-1

• edit - sorry for all the edits.

Don't know why someone downvoted you...

Kiln People is a fantastic book. Great sci-fi with an interesting premise.