back to article Self/Less: Crap science, eyebrow acting, and immortality for the 1%

Director Tarsem Singh has something of a fascination with technology and medicine. His first film, The Cell, posited using a virtual reality mind meld system and his latest, Self/Less, is all about swapping minds though the power of high tech. Daniel, a cancer-stricken New York property developer (Ben Kingsley), receives an …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. W Donelson

    Imagine being 10^10 years old....

    The only thing worse than dying is living forever.

    (But give me a thousand, please)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Imagine being 10^10 years old....

      Why is having the option to live 10 billion years a bad thing? I doubt you'd be forced to do it and prevented from ending your own life.

      Anyway, assuming it is accomplished by downloading your consciousness into a machine - whether permanently or as a way station before it is downloaded into a new body, you could take a "break" from the rat race for as long as you liked during that period. Sign up for a sublight ship traveling the universe and tell them to wake you when they've found some intelligent aliens or the ruins of a long lost advanced civilization.

  3. Hollerith 1

    Trailer gives you pretty much all the movie worth watching

    Watch the trailer, figure out almost at once that the body was more object trouvee than vat-grown, throw in wife, kiddie, moral doubts, and baddies finally exposed, and you can use the rest of the hour to watch something good.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Trailer gives you pretty much all the movie worth watching

      Could've guessed most of that from the TV advertisement, frankly. And the review (which I read in less time than it would have taken to watch the trailer) confirms it.

      I generally avoid these SF thriller films anyway. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: I'm more easily entertained by pop culture that relies on abusing subjects I know less about.

      SF novels are another story, since they have the opportunity to treat their subjects properly. Reading Stephenson's Anathem and Mieville's Embassytown at the moment (among other things - I'm usually in the middle of half a dozen or so books) and finding them quite satisfying.

  4. Yugguy

    It'll pass an idle 90 minutes

    Once it gets to netflix/sky movies.

  5. Fortycoats

    Freejack reloaded?

    Didn't Freejack have a similar plot, with the addition of a bit of time travel and Mick Jagger?

  6. The_Idiot

    And if you...

    ... replace 'mind swap' with 'body part replacement', there are (in my view) rather strong similarities to 'The Island' as well (including resurfacing memories).

  7. Andrew Moore

    I'm pretty sure...

    ...that this is going to be how Humans turns out too

  8. John Robson Silver badge

    The island...

    But without the random murder for transplant parts....

  9. Graham Marsden
    Flame

    "if Albright had managed to grow bodies in a lab...

    "... the Nobel Prize committee would have been beating down his door with honors and funding."

    Or fundamentalist religious nutters with torches and pitchforks...

  10. Irongut

    Professor Albright

    Are Dick, Harry, Sally and Tommy in the film too?

  11. Antidisestablishmentarianist

    Cold Souls

    Vaguely similar to the 2009 movie Cold Souls with Paul Giamatti?

  12. LaeMing
    Boffin

    The biggest problem with this kind of mind transfer (be it to machine or new body) from my perspective is that, ultimately, you are making a copy. From the copy's perspective looking back, it has all your memories and feels that it is you. But from your perspective looking forward, it is a copy: not actually you. You still die.

    Which sort of defeats the purpose for the individual. Unless you are so narcissistic that you can't believe the world can possibly go on in your absence!

    Obviously if we are copying someone's mind because the continuation of that mind has external value (someone with difficult-to-replace skills, for example), then it is a different matter, but for the individual being copied, not so much.

    (There are potential ways around this issue, but they are a bit too tedious and convoluted for this thread! - I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader ;-) )

    1. Jim84

      The Prestige

      @LeeMing - Aren't you a copy of yourself though? Have you ever been knocked out? If they could grow a copy of you, and the copy woke up and didn't see the original, it wouldn't know that it was a copy.

      This will probably never be possible, but it makes for some fun thought experiments. See the Christopher Nolan's film "The Prestige" for a good example of this in fiction.

      1. DropBear

        Re: The Prestige

        Not quite the exact same thing, but the same idea: "To be"

      2. LaeMing
        Happy

        Re: The Prestige

        @Jim85 - doesn't matter as from my perspective looking back I am the real thing, irrespective of whether I actuaily am. But looking forward the copy still isn't /this/ copy, which is all this particular itteration cares about.

    2. Mystic Megabyte
      Joke

      RIAA

      Would your copy have a tendency to go around stealing handbags?

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      it is a copy: not actually you. You still die

      That too is a theme that's been dealt with ad nauseum in speculative fiction for, well, pretty much as long as fiction has existed. Though it is occasionally still used effectively (and affectingly), particularly when it's not asked to carry much of the plot, as in Mieville's Kracken.

      Outside of speculative fiction, of course, it's been the subject of a good deal of philosophical debate, since any rigorous conception of the self has to engage with the issue of the continuity (whether posited as real or illusory) of the self. A Heraclitan might say that every instant of the self is a copy, and there can be no authentic self except as a chain of such copies; even having two or more copies at some moment wouldn't be qualitatively different.

  13. Peter Clarke 1

    Mix'n'Match

    Robocop (and others) for the flashbacks

    Dolls House (Joss Whedon TV) for the brain transfer

  14. tony2heads

    Immortality without eternal youth

    Over hundreds of years;

    languages change ( see 'Struldbrug' Gulliver's travels -they can't understand anything of current speech 200 years after they are born)

    technologies change rapidly; try explaining high tech to anyone over 90

    societal norms change;

    You may be able to get a younger body, but getting without getting a younger mind you would gradually become a stranger to everyone.

  15. Champ

    Imagine what Steve Jobs would have done with another 50 years on the planet

    That's the plot for a horror film, not SF, imo.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon