Simon Funk’s “After Life”

Thursday, November 30, 2006

“After Life” is a very good novel on mind uploading by a new author to watch. It is valiable for free (online and PDF) and from lulu.com on hardcopy printed on request and shipped. As I do when I like a free ebook, I paid the author by buying the printed book - I received a couple of days ago and it is solid and of good quality.

The novel is delicious - Alex Harris lives in an impossibly simple fairy tale world and does not know how he got there. He was in the team that developed mind uploading technology, and the first human to undertake an experimental mind uploading procedure. Is he living in a simulation? He has dreams of what happened, or may have happened, to one or another downloaded version of him after the upload. Did consciousness transfer technology trigger a Singularity?

Excerpt:

I - we, the people I work with, study the brain. Right now we are working on something pretty neat, but also scary. We want to map a brain, functionally, down to the individual neuron. The trouble is, until now there’s been no way to do this without killing the brain’s owner.
But we’ve been able to do it - with a rat, and a cat. We don’t really know if it worked with the cat, but we are currently running a simulation of the rat’s brain and it appears to be exhibiting strikingly rat-like behavior. I.e. fucking amazing. Top secret…
I’ve been having nightmares about this for days. Because...I am going to have it done to me. Or maybe I already have.

Read it.

Simon Funk is a writer, software developer and AI expert.

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