Book Review: Mindscan

Robert J. Sawyer

2005

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

Mindscan is another of Sawyer’s forays into the gray area between life and artificial intelligence, and into unanswerable philosophical questions such as: what is consciousness? And how can you prove objectively whether someone or something has it? The book is a quick read, but it is not as fully formed or as well resolved as his earlier novel The Terminal Experiment, which dealt with similar topics.

In the prologue to Mindscan, our protagonist, Jake Sullivan, is a young man in his twenties. Jake is having an argument with his father when his father suddenly drops dead due to what turns out to be a congenital defect in the blood vessels in his brain. Jake then learns that he has the same condition that killed his father, and that, in all likelihood, it will kill him, too, at an early age. Jake is then forced to severely curtail his activities to try to prolong his life.

By the time Jake is in his forties, a private company called Immortex has developed a process by which they can port a complete copy of your brain—including memories, thoughts, and feelings—into an artificial, upgradable robotic body that is durable enough to last virtually forever.

In effect, the process splits you into two identical people: one in your original organic body and one in a new mechanical one. To avoid the potential legal hassles that could come from you having two instantiations of yourself, the artificial version stays on Earth and is given all of your legal rights, and the organic original is sent up to an all-inclusive luxury resort on the dark side of the moon, where it whiles away the rest of its natural life in isolated comfort.

Because of this, and because the whole package is very, very expensive, it is primarily done only by extremely wealthy older people who have at most a year or two to live. Jake is atypically young, but he is the heir of a vast Canadian brewery fortune so he has the money to do it. Frustrated by the way his life is circumscribed by his condition, he opts to get the procedure. Afterwards, we follow the story lines of both the original organic Jake and the new mechanical one.

The new mechanical version—the “Mindscan”—has a hard time adjusting at first. His mother, his dog, and the girl he likes are all creeped out by his new form and don’t accept him as the real Jake. Fortunately, he is eventually able to find acceptance and even love with his fellow Mindscans.

Soon after he starts dating his Mindscan girlfriend Karen, Karen’s original organic version dies. Her son then files suit to have her legally declared dead and her assets distributed to him, even though the mechanical copy of her is still alive. The whole thing then turns into a big legal civil rights battle over whether a mechanical body with a mind-scanned copy of a brain is actually the person it claims to be.

Mindscan Jake stays supportively at Karen’s side through the entire trial. As it drags on, though, he starts hearing voices in his head—specifically, his own voice—which makes him suspect nefarious doings at Immortex, including them possibly making additional copies of him with whom he is somehow mentally connected.

Meanwhile, Jake’s original body—the “shed skin”—wakes up pissed off when he realizes that he is the copy of the consciousness that is going to die. (What did he think was going to happen? Of course one of them has to be the original instantiation of his brain, stuck in his original body.) He goes to the moon to live out the remainder of his life, but he remains cranky and has a hard time settling into his new lunar environment.

And then matters are complicated when a doctor on Earth develops a cure for his brain condition. His corporate caretakers/jailers agree to let the doctor fly up to give him the cure, but afterwards they won’t let organic Jake leave the moon. Too many legal complications, for them and for him, they say.

Organic Jake’s anger builds until he eventually takes drastic action to force the issue. This inevitably results in the two Jakes meeting each other—with disastrous consequences.

This book's subject matter had good solid potential. Unfortunately, its execution was awkward and uninspiring.

• First and foremost, the legal battle over Karen’s personhood, which takes up a large portion of the book, is unconvincing. The defense reveals surprise information during cross-examination that the judge already knows about but the prosecution doesn’t, which doesn’t seem allowable. Objections are sustained and overruled at weird times for tenuous reasons. And the arguments used by both sides are primarily emotional and philosophical, and practically free of legal content.

• The Mindscans’ physical construction seems inconsistent. They can feel some things (touch, heat, wind) but not others (air pressure, pain, smell).

Wall-e

• It’s strange to me that everyone reacts so negatively to the Mindscans. Almost every organic human they come in contact with on Earth is at least uncomfortable with and often overtly hostile to them. I mean, this isn’t 1938; this is the mid-21st century. Is there really no one ready to accept a sentient robot? Has no one read any Asimov? Has no one heard of R2-D2? Data? Wall-E?

• The story takes place in a North America of the very near future, and the narrative jars badly when the author’s guesses about our current time are wrong. For one thing, in this book, Pat Buchanan is a former U.S. president, when I don’t think he will realistically ever try to run again. In the book, gay marriage is illegal across the U.S., when it looks very much like that tide is moving irrevocably in the opposite direction. And perhaps the saddest non-true historical-future fact in the book is that Christopher Reeve is alive and walking, a testament to advancement in the neurosciences.

• And, finally, the whole Immortex conspiracy business is wrapped up at the end very abruptly, almost as an afterthought. It turns out to be disappointingly unambitious without any real evil intent behind it, and it is quite dissatisfying.

As I said before, this book does raise big, interesting questions, such as: Can you prove an entity has consciousness? How about a mechanical entity? If an entity of any kind passes the Turing test, and no one can tell that it isn’t conscious and self-aware, is that the same thing as it being conscious and self-aware? Should we consider it to be legally alive?

                                               

These questions deserve a solid story line to explore them. As I was reading this book and feeling frustrated by its inadequacies, I remembered that just such a solid story line did exist—in the form of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man.” 

In that episode, a scientist wants to take the android Data apart and dissect his brain for research. Data naturally objects, and eventually the controversy leads to a trial in which Data essentially has to prove that he is a sentient being and therefore deserves not be dissected if he doesn’t want to be dissected. 

The episode is wonderfully done, and is a much better presentation of the issues than Mindscan. The Star Trek trial is much more focused than the Mindscan trial on figuring out appropriate criteria for sentience and the legal provability of self-awareness. And the episode's writers are good at exposing arguments that are either red herrings or are too undefined to use as legal proof.