Human JPEGs

Dan Meliza · 23 Apr 2002, 17:26 · from urth-v0204.mbox · original

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From: "Dan Meliza" <meliza at ocf.berkeley.edu>
Subject: RE: (urth) Human JPEGs
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 10:26:22 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0204-773 at digest.urth.net>
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The other possibility, I suppose, is that the gods upload (download,
whatever) fragments of themselves into people and animals which can later be
recombined into a full personality.  In fact, fragments of holograms display
the same image as the full hologram but at a lower fidelity.  So any
intelligence can serve as a substrate for personality transfer but in
proportion to the size of the brain.  What we see in Oreb is actually the
interference pattern between Scylla and Oreb proper expressed in the limited
vocabulary of a two-bite bird.  As Nutria points out this is a fine metaphor
for human interaction, a tidy attack on modernism's atomic individual; and
it goes a long ways toward explaining why Scylla's personality is more or
less admirable depending on who she's occupying.

never one to capitalize after a colon,
dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Nigel Price [mailto:nigel.a.price at virgin.net]
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 5:39 PM
To: urth at urth.net
Subject: (urth) Human JPEGs

Having failed to learn my lesson, I have to confess that I too, like Dan,
have been whimsically speculating to myself whether, in the Whorl, the
copies of personalities which are transferred between windows and people and
windows and night choughs might not in fact be radically compressed in some
way, or use some sort of wonderfully super-advanced lossy algorithm which
gives such an accurate approximation of a personality that you really don't
miss the bits that aren't there. In other words, Scylla didn't unload a
"bitmap" of herself into Oreb, it was more a sort of "human JPEG".

Only speaking metaphorically of course.

Nigel

--=20

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