Neuromancer Discussion Questions & Issues
Dean Taciuch
George Mason University
Where does one's self exist?
Consider the situations of
- Dixie: a ROM construct. Essentially a recording of a personality
- Linda Lee: a RAM construct. Her personality is alive in the matrix. N/M doesn't know her thoughts. He can't keep her from running off into the water, for example.
- W/M: an AI who "owns" his thoughts, but not his "body"
- N/M: an AI " personality"
- Corto: as Case wonders, "where has he been?" while Armitage was in control.
- Armitage: What is his personality but a construct?
- Case: the "mind-body" interface he relies on in his rage comes from
his real body, not a construct. See 263: "his own darkness, pulse and
blood . . . behind his eyes and no other's"
AI as demonic. It is literally inhuman.
It isn't that W/M is unemotional. He is simply not human. An alien, an other. His motives will never be clear to us, though they do become clearer: he wants to transcend his hardwired limits. He wants to become.
N/M motives are less clear. Why does he try to stop W/M? Programming perhaps? Or as a personality, perhaps N/M simply wants to survive. He doesn't want to die.
W/M is the data structure, the planner. N/M is the personality. Marie-France had them both constructed and planned to merge TA with them as a symbiotic hive mind. Apparently the Turing police wouldn't allow that, and W/M and N/M were cut off.
Dualism:
Cartesian (or philosophical) dualism: the mind/body dualism (I think therefore
I am--so Wintermute is)
Gnostic (theological) dualism: The Fall into matter from a perfect spiritual
existence
Psychological dualism: "split personality" of W/M and N/M
Gibson has taken the several thousand year old traditional of mind-body dualism and recast it in terms of technology. While Case and the other humans still grapple with the mind-body split, the AI's also have a split, even though they have no body. The split is between intellect (W/M) and self or personality (N/M).
W/M has no "self" until he is joined with N/M.
(Im)mortality: Personality (self) is immortal, unlike the body.
Background
Part 1: Chiba City Blues
Part 2: The Shopping Expedition
Part 3: Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne
Part 4: The Straylight Run & Coda
Closing and Discussion
