Closet Sci-Fi Geek

If you woke up tomorrow with a different set of memories, would you still be you?

A while back I watched A Scanner Darkly. While this is a good enough film (and yet another cinematic adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel), it’s certainly not the best film I’ve seen about fractured identities and perspectives that are warped by drugs or technology. Total Recall has much more fun with the

topic. Based on “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick, it raises the fundamental question - do memories define character? If your memories tell you that you are a gun-slinging, ass-kicking spy; does that make you a gun-slinging, ass-kicking spy? Bladerunner (based on Philip K Dick’s, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) takes a more meditative approach to the topic. Is the film-noiresque hero, Deckard, real or not? Is he a human or is he a replicant who has forgotten that he is artificial. The random selection of antique photos on Deckard’s piano gives us a clue. Are they a record of Deckard’s past or are they a badly constructed history; a collation of tenuously linked memories. Then there’s the unicorn dream he keeps having. Again, is this his subconscious at work or another memory, implanted by Tyrell Corporation? Similarly, if you can hide memories, can you hide a personality? Take Talia Winters from Babylon 5. One minute she is a mild mannered telepath, minding her own business as best she can, the next minute her ’sleeper’ personality has been activated and she’s a cold-blooded killer. Ditto with The Long Kiss Goodnight. Amiable housewife becomes professional killer. There are many many many other examples. But just one question really. If you woke up tomorrow with a completely different set of memories, would you still be you?

Gaia Online…Yet Another Online Time Suck

Since I do work as an Internet Consultant, I can sometimes justify my time spent on online communities as time keeping in touch with the field I work in. (Ummm…yeah.) Tonight I’ve been puttering around Gaia Online, which is an online community that offers elements of role playing. Everyone on the site gets an avatar, which you can dress up and house in your own custom house (if you can find a vacancy, that is).

Like many online MMORPGs, Gaia Online has its own currency, which you can use to buy new clothes and goodies for your character. You can earn coins by playing games, by referring members (woo hoo, I’ll get 50 gold coins on each sign up, so I can buy me a new hat…yippee skippity), and by otherwise not having a real life.

The site appears to be partially built upon an expanded version of the phpBB bulletin board system, which somewhat surprises me. They’ve mixed that in somehow with a lot of Flash, so this conglomeration all works to create an avatar version of MySpace complete with custom profile pages, online journals (or blogs), and forums. It’s all a bit cutesy, but charming in its own way.

Some online games are available…nothing too exciting so far, but you can play online blackjack and earn some tickets for more virtual goodies. But as we’ve seen, people will often pay real money to get their hands on some virtual cash when they get addicted to these universes.

I am waiting for the day, sometime in the future, when virtual reality really becomes a reality, and all these virtual goodies will actually feel real. I can see an entire generation being lost to virtual worlds. Which is fine by me, there’s too much traffic anyway.

Stephen Hawking’s New Theory

Could the universe-as-we-know-it just be one of a zillion possibilities that ended up manifesting? Quantum strangeness abounds in Stephen Hawking’s new theory of how the universe began.