So far this is a standard future. At first glance Westerhaven looks a lot like Iain Banks's Culture. In that and similar SF universes, humanity has eliminated senescence except as a personal choice, and permanent death too is voluntary. Uploading technologies, genetics, nanotech etc. are the enablers of this future. Its aim is the immortality of the individual consciousness, sometimes achieved at the expense of transfering that consciousness into a non-biological medium.

This is a likely future. It's also an extremely modern future. --And if you've been reading my stuff lately you'll know that I use the word 'modern' as a pejorative, similar to "Oh, he's so medieval!"

When I say that the immortality of consciousness is a modern idea, I mean that it preserves the essential alienation of modernism. This vision of immortality identifies the person with the subjective 'I', which by necessity exists in opposition to everything else. There's me, and then there's the rest of the world; the subject versus the object, if you will. Science fiction pushes this dichotomy until it becomes almost a parody: 'I' becomes only some vaguely-defined principle of consciouness which is separable from the body (soul, anybody?) and in fact separating the 'I' from the body becomes not only reasonable, but inevitable. Martin Luther's 'Brother Ass' is left in the dust as we ascend on wings of data into the rapture of the nerds.

The logic of this process leads us inexorably to devalue the material world--indeed everything other than consciousness--or, to put it another way, perpetuates and infinitely intensifies the traditional loathing of the physical that we've inherited from our Sky-Father religions. A horror of the body; a loathing of matter that's not been transformed into 'smart matter' by nanotech; a hatred of the vast silence of the cosmos; a terror of losing one's carefully nurtured identity--these are the sensibilities that the merely immortal will inherit.

If your aim is to preserve your consciousness forever and at all costs, eventually you will come to perceive the entire universe as your enemy, for it exists in permanent opposition to your 'I' and is eternally trying to destroy it. You, or the universe: one has to go.

Livia Kodaly does not live in a modern future. People of all ages die in Westerhaven all the time. Nonetheless, she considers herself to have access to a real immortality, partly because she has a different view of who and what 'she' is. Livia's 'I' is radically extended into the environment around her by her implant technology, the tech locks, and inscape. Her identity is smeared across time and space by a suite of technologies and a philosophy of identity that tells her that she is her accomplishments in the world. Her consciousness is one of the precious things she's accomplished, but she knows she has had many effects on the world unconsciously. Her agents--the 'anima' who represent and pretend to be her--are just as much a part of her as her own thoughts. This is because they act in and have influence on the real world. Those parts of her that are 'out of sight' are no less real than the parts within her consciousness.

Livia's view of herself contrasts the bad faith of the modernist version of the Self--specifically, the modern Self's suspicion that the real world doesn't actually exist. Livia knows that she is real to other people and that her actions are real to them--even actions taken on her behalf by her agents. Just as words of support written in a letter to a friend become an objective part of the world that is also a part of you, her agents partake in the identities of both her Self and the world. What is important is the Livia that lives in the world; her accomplishments are Livia Kodaly. Livia's consciousness is a particularly precious and privileged accomplishment, but it is not the only one she can lay claim to.

Scientifically, Livia's idea of the Self dovetails with the extended mind concept championed by Andy Clark and others. It's far from being vague or mystical. It is her acceptance of the fact that her consciousness is integrated into, and a function of, her environment, that gives Livia a different and new vision of what immortality means. It's not just 'living on through your works' though that's how I've characterized it so far; it also involves Metzinger's idea of 'being no one'--the idea that the separation between Self and World is a neurological accomplishment rather than an objective fact. Westerhaven's implant and inscape technologies allow Livia to partially lift the veil and look behind the cognitive sleight-of-hand that makes her consciousness seem separate from the objective world. The result is a kind and degree of self-knowledge that we moderns can't even imagine (I know we can't, because there is no literature out there describing it.) This one-two punch of a different philosophy of the Self and new enabling technologies gives Livia an experience of immortality that doesn't crudely equate to perpetuation of consciousness, but also does not preserve the I/world split. Nor is it mystical, but utterly concrete.

MILD SPOILER FOLLOWS

By the end of Lady of Mazes it is no longer clear whether Livia's consciousness is still alive. That which Livia considered her Self still exists, however, and may be temporally immortal.

This idea is neither an attempt to define our way out of using technology to achieve physical immortality--because that also exists in Westerhaven--nor is it an attempt to revive some older religion's notion of immortality in a new disguise. As Brian Cantwell Smith says, "No direction leads out of the world." In Westerhaven, technology and philosophy make clear what that fact means. That is all, and that is all that Livia needs.

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