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Greg Egan's Mastodon profile is https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF He's fairly active there and likes to post math problems.
by loudmax 3y ago
Greg Egan's Mastodon profile is https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF He's fairly active there and likes to post math problems.
I liked Permutation City, but Diaspora really blew me away. Every time you begin to get your mind around some radical new concept, Egan throws adds another fold that makes you reconsider everything you think you knew.
- prepend 3y agoI think Diaspora has the best description of a valid digital identity. But I still kept thinking I’d never trust my existence to the polis/state keeping my private key private. In Diaspora if someone steals your private cert then they become you or are at least indistinguishable to everyone else from you. I’ve never seen a super solid way to prevent this when everyone and everything is digital.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoI thought asking similar lines with Altered Carbon: If you can switch physical bodies, then how can you prove you're you? Do you have to memorise a GUID? What if you forget it? What is someone else knows yours? If there's no physical link, how is it provable?
- prepend 3y agoThey skipped this in Altered Carbon and it was just a “rule.” Memorizing a GUID wouldn’t work because someone could read it from your memory. Stephenson did this well, I think, in Dodge with the PURDAH as it was an AI trained on every characteristic of an individual through their life so it was impossible to fake. Still hand waving, but logically consistent hand waving for an id that spans consciousness transferring from biology to digital.