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Patreon Early Access: Greg Egan’s Diaspora

🕑 Added 2025-06-25 00:27:03 +0000 UTC

Comments

Charles Lee Thorp

Howdy Quinn! this was timely for me. I recently started this book but had given up halfway through. You're spot on that its a little hard to read, but this video gave me a chance to reflect on the ideas, which are indeed pretty spectacular. There are a few passages that stuck with me in particular, that I think really illustrate the diversity of consciousness & identity Egan imagines. The first is when Yatima attends the art exhibition - she is hesitant because to experience something is to be changed - something that is true for us humans, though we like to pretend its not the case, but for Citizens, they can come out the other side of an experience as profoundly changed. Later Inoshiro, in despair, commits a form of intellectual self-mutilation by internalizing a extreme & irreversible set of ideas that allows him to no longer care about anything. Anyway, I think the inclusion of the art exhibition scene might be a great addition to the parts of the video where you talk about how time is experienced differently by artificial minds, as it connects back to identity.