Can you be you without a stable body or memory?

When the question of what it means to be human in an increasingly protean society comes up, the discussion almost always involves the body and memory and their place in constituting the self. And the novel Glasshouse (by British novelist Charles Stross) is interesting if only for the way it handles these issues. It takes place in the 25th century, where nanotech and biotech have advanced so far that there are “A-gates” that can assemble everything, and “T-Gates” that can transport you everywhere. People can live forever as long as they “back up” their consciousness so that it can be re-embodied if they are killed. And so you can become any kind of being you want: you can take on an “orthohuman” body of a traditional male or female, or a “xenohuman” body of other types (say, with four arms). You can also become a tank, made specifically for war—which we find out is one of the embodiments of our protagonist, Robin/Reeve. We start out with Robin, whose memory has been selectively erased, and we quickly discover that this seems to happen a lot in this world, where identity theft is taken more seriously than anything else. But I’m still left asking, what does constitute your identity in such a world? The only answer in this world is your neural map with its memories. But if those memories can be deleted, or altered, how can you ever count on your memories being accurate? I ask these questions because in the future that Stross creates, it seems to be a good thing to be so protean. Although he does not ring the liberty bell as often as some transhumanists sympathizers might, this world is nonetheless consistently contrasted with the “dark ages” of today’s time. The human interest of the story (I think) depends upon our believing that there is a “real” Robin, with a certain personality, a certain sense of humor, certain ways of looking at the world, and so on. But the question still remains for me: is it cheating even to give him those things, if the world in which he lives those things are up for grabs by anyone in power? The world of the future, as Stross sees it, is not utopian; it endures war after war, faction after faction trying to take over, the most powerful of these doing so by infecting the A gates (or T gates, can’t remember) with a virus called Curious Yellow, which basically creates a kind of chaos in what it touches. So can people truly survive that with any sense of themselves at all?

Another interesting thing about the novel is the role of love. As in many novels whose interest lies primarily with the tech and the plot, the definition of love is underdeveloped. Not to give anything away, there is a kind of happy ending love relationship here, but I find it only partly believable, and the ironic thing about it is that I do not think it could have developed at all if the two people (Robin/Reeve and you will see) were not stuck in the glasshouse experiment that is the novel’s plot device. The experiment is for the people to live in the “dark ages” and not be able to change their bodies or back themselves up and so on. So I find myself asking: is it possible to truly love if your memories can be erased, and have been erased, and you can’t know which you is here? Is it an act of loving self sacrifice to blow yourself up to save your lover, if you had backed yourself up before you did it? That I do not know. The meaning of acts of self-sacrifice seem to me, at least, to be on a sliding scale anyway. People in the western world today do not sacrifice much when they do sacrifice things for loved ones. Maybe this is just the next inevitable level.

By the way, I loved the novel--it was a lot of fun to read!

Need help with the bigger picture?

If you are looking for an accurate, readable, and useful summary of intellectual history as it pertains to the modern era, I have the book for you. Albert Borgmann's Crossing the Postmodern Divide provides all that and more. The "more" is his own critique of postmodernism's thin offerings in response to the crisis of modernism. He is especially interested in our individualized culture and in how our public celebrations are impoverished thereby. An enjoyable read.