INTERACTION

Last week I read Jason Sanford's novelette 'Mirrorblink.' It is a story of ideas, not of organic beings. This must be stressed, since 'Mirrorblink' is so dense with connected ideas that an important, surprising, point might be missed. To avoid spoilers, all I shall say is that it's about information. Need it be physically embodied? If not, what differentiates it from physical entities, living or otherwise? Can it come in more than one form, even without embodiment? Can different forms of information be so different that information would seem to be split into bodily (e.g. organic) and non-embodied types, or into some sort of mixture of both? Can any of these forms change, let us say deteriorate, over time, such that one sort of informational entity's tasks must somehow compete with informational entities in other states of growth or decay? Finally, can moral notions such as sacrifice and crime be applied to information in one state by information in another state, or by 'the same' information at one time to 'itself' at a different time? I cannot be certain, but Mr Sanford's main theme might well be the sense or nonsense of applying moral concepts and goals to anything that differs radically from us, here and now; in the limit perhaps, to every pair of conscious beings here and now, whatever composition they might have in the natural world.

Deep stuff George and Jason.