"Greg Egan - Closer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

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Closer


Greg Egan


Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.
("Intimacy," I once told Sian, after we'd made love, "is the only cure for
solipsism." She laughed and said, "Don't get too ambitious, Michael. So far, it
hasn't even cured me of masturbation.")
True solipsism, though, was never my problem. From the very first time I
considered the question, I accepted that there could be no way of proving the
reality of an external world, let alone the existence of other minds - but I
also accepted that taking both on faith was the only practical way of dealing
with everyday life.
The question which obsessed me was this: Assuming that other people existed,
how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience being? Could I
ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another person - any more
than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect?
If not, I was alone.
I desperately wanted to believe that other people were somehow knowable, but it
wasn't something I could bring myself to take for granted. I knew there could be
no absolute proof, but I wanted to be persuaded, I needed to be compelled.
No literature, no poetry, no drama, however personally resonant I found it,
could ever quite convince me that I'd glimpsed the author's soul. Language had
evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to
describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment, grief - all were
defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and observable actions.
When an image or metaphor rang true for me, it proved only that I shared with
the author a set of definitions, a culturally sanctioned list of word
associations. After all, many publishers used computer programs - highly
specialised, but unsophisticated algorithms, without the remotest possibility of
self-awareness - to routinely produce both literature, and literary criticism,
indistinguishable from the human product. Not just formularised garbage, either;
on several occasions, I'd been deeply affected by works which I'd later
discovered had been cranked out by unthinking software. This didn't prove that
human literature communicated nothing of the author's inner life, but it
certainly made clear how much room there was for doubt.
Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when, at the age of
eighteen, the time came for me to "switch." My organic brain was removed and
discarded, and control of my body handed over to my "jewel" - the Ndoli Device,
a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to
imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons. I had no qualms, not
because I was at all convinced that the jewel and the brain experienced
consciousness identically, but because, from an early age, I'd identified myself
solely with the jewel. My brain was a kind of bootstrap device, nothing more,
and to mourn its loss would have been as absurd as mourning my emergence from
some primitive stage of embryological neural development. Switching was simply