Mind Storage Device

D

Donosauro

New Member
Joined
Aug 17, 2023
Messages
4
In a number of science fiction novels I’ve read, there have been mind-recording devices, which recorded mental experience. The concept is common enough for a common name to have arisen, much like the term “ansible” for faster-than-light communication. I haven’t been able to remember the name, though I have come up with a few terms that approximately capture the idea, and that I hoped might serve as search terms: soul catchers; immortality chips; digital immortality; mind recording.

Multiple sessions with Google and ChatGPT have failed to help much.

Does anyone know the name?

Even better, does anyone know any of the books that featured the devices?
 
I just started a new read by A.W. Wang that delves into this area. Book is called "Ten Sigma". Basically, the govt finds people with serious physical disabilities, of advanced age or about to pass and offers them a chance to do something different. Which includes removing their consciousness (or soul) and storing it in a vitual reality for for some nefarious purpose.

Only a little bit into it, so I can't really tell you much about it.
 
Thanks, looks like an interesting book, and certainly in the same general area of mind manipulation. My library doesn’t have it yet, but I’ll watch for it.

The devices I remember were implants, or possibly mounted on the outside of the body on the head or the spine.

When a person with one of the devices was killed — say in an accident — they could be given a new body, and their new brain could then be loaded with the copy of the person's mind from their mind recorder, restoring them to life.

That is, they could be if their mind recorder had not been destroyed or very badly damaged by whatever killed their wearer. In that case, the person was said to have suffered "true death."That was a plot device in one of the books, where a person seemed to have been killed in a way to assure that their mind recorder had been destroyed.

I’m moderately sure I read these books in the early 2000s, and that they were fairly new.

Thanks, again, for your help!
 
Thanks, that’s an excellent resource!

I’ve read a number of the books and it looks like I have many of them on hand. At a glance, a few look promising, from what little I remember from reading them. Time to pull them off the shelves and read them again!
 
I haven’t finished going through the list of books in the Wikipedia page on mind uploading that Raule provided the link to, but the summary there for this series seems most like what I faintly remember: “[Everyone] has a ‘cortical stack’ implanted at the base of their skull, soon after being born. The device then records all your memories and experiences in real-time. The stack can be ‘resleeved’ in another body, be it a clone or otherwise.”

I was pretty sure I had read Altered Carbon, but reading the first couple pages of an online preview of it, just now, has left me doubting that. Still, (re-)reading Altered Carbon seems like the obvious next step.

Thanks for the help!
 
That concept sounds really interesting, especially the idea of mind recorders and “true death.” It reminds me of several sci-fi stories that explore digital consciousness, backups of the human mind, and the ethics of transferring identity to new bodies. A lot of early-2000s science fiction played with similar themes, mixing cybernetics, neural implants, and memory storage as core plot devices.

It’s fascinating how these stories imagine advanced technology interacting directly with the brain. In a way, it parallels how modern hardware already handles intensive computational tasks. When experimenting with graphics or simulation-heavy environments (which many sci-fi inspired games and visualizations use), it’s sometimes helpful to test your GPU now, to see how well your system handles demanding workloads.

Hopefully someone here recognizes the exact series you’re thinking of, it definitely sounds like something from the cyberpunk or transhumanist side of sci-fi.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Sponsors


We try to keep the forum as free of ads as possible, please consider supporting SFFWorld on Patreon


Your ad here.
Back
Top