Wouldn’t there be a strong counter-pressure to force the value of organs down? If it’s in every individual’s interest to keep the separation between reputation value and parts value greater than zero, then decreasing parts value accomplishes that goal.

I guess the problem is that low parts value is a strong interest only for those already near the bottom of the economy, whereas those closer to the top are either disinterested or actively against the idea.

I CAN HAZ KITTUNBRANES?

1) At the start, Pam is working with (well, trying to collect taxes from) a company that proposes to upload kittens. They are making weapons systems that are going to be kitten-guided, or something? (Very Cordwainer Smith Mother Hitten’s Littul Kittens, perhaps.)

2) Manfred says ‘uploading kittens is a bad idea’. (This I took to be like the gun over the mantle, sure to go off by Act 3.)

3) Pam is leaving de-brained kittens on Manfred doorstep. Suggests that Pam is somehow fairly intimately involved in this kitten project, if she has easy access to the medical waste.

4) Pam is messing with/upgrading Aineko in ways that Manfred does not know, so that she can keep control over Manfred (even while Manfred is upgrading Aineko in other ways.) So I sort of put the two together, although they obviously don’t have to go together: if you are a person involved in uploading kittens and secretly upgrading artificial cats, wouldn’t you maybe be slipping real kitten to the cats on the side?

Admittedly, it’s a bit unclear why real kitten minds would facilitate controlling Manfred. But it just seemed too much a coincidence that she was involved in two distinct cat improvement/upload projects. Had to be a connection.

5) Now I’m getting foggy about events in the text. Aineko suggests that as a cat, he/she was particularly talented at cracking the puzzle about what the hell is going on out there. She knew what they were going to find before their little diamond coke can ship got to the node. This is an example of cat minds being better at solving certain problems than human minds and (I guess I didn’t really connect the dots here) somehow Aineko was on her way to being a strong A.I. courtesy of these special kitten-problem-solving skills. David Hobby says the tools are ‘easily available by the middle of the book’. I’m not sure about that. I take it Aineko is supposed to becoming a strong A.I. surprisingly early.

Well, anyway. Apologies for false plot-spoilers, Charles, and thanks for your highly entertaining novel.

So what I mused about was why more humans weren’t also evolving as far. What I came up with was that they couldn’t, not without giving up their continuity of selfhood, their “humanity”. But maybe cats are different, and more able to smoothly evolve to godhood. So the ancient Egyptians were onto something. : )

Clue 2 I missed entirely. Damn.

Here’s the big spoiler for “Accelerando” …

Clue #1: you will note that in every chapter the cat changes sex, or body. (At one point, in “Elector”, it’s an entire city.) In fact, the cat is not a cat; it’s fairly clearly a transcendentally smart AI that uses a cat avatar as a sock-puppet for AI-human interactions.

Clue #2: in the finale, there is some explanation of how strong AI relates to human-level intelligence in terms of theory of mind. Aineko’s theory of mind is strong enough to encapsulate a complete simulation of a human identity, memories and all, and to run simulations against it.

Arguably, the whole book is Aineko’s autobiography, and the human characters at the end are Aineko’s recollection of its creators—warped by its own self-serving and self-selected preference for describing its origins—cut free with a life of their own.

Aineko is the viewpoint character for the novel. And the background is far grimmer than is apparent at first reading (what, 98% of the human species extinct? Solar system dismantled for spare parts?).

Sorry about the plot spoilers but here goes: aren’t they uploading kittens, just as they uploaded lobsters? And isn’t, by strong hint, the improvements in a certain artificial cat – one that started out very primitive, to be sure – due to some product of the cat upload project? We don’t hear about it, but isn’t is clear that Pam must be somehow turning uploaded kittens into a more sophisticated housepet?

I may be wrong about this because I actually listened to chapter 1 of Accelerando as an audiobook, “Lobsters”, long before I read the novel that continues it. So maybe my memory of chapter 1 is slipping, because I kinda just picked up with chapter 2 when I sat down to read.

But, one truly pedantic point: there are no uploaded cats in Accelerando. Dead cats and artificial cats, yes. Uploaded ones, no. (And said artificial cat predates the uploading of anything.)

Ow. And Ha. But mostly Ow.

But, to fund all this, every citizen is legally redefined as the asset bit of an asset-backed security. That is, every citizen is required by law to issue bonds (Bowie Bonds of a sort), backed by their own persons. The economy is then floated on the ensuing frenzy of derivative trading in individual reputational assets. There are elaborate Kantian-Gilderian financial philosophies to justify this, reconstruing the Categorical Imperative as an expression of collateralized debt obligation to all of humanity. The Kingdom of Ends as maximally efficient market mechanism.

How much do we have to pay you to write this novel? I’ll take up the collection; other CT commentators with me?

The main point of Hegel, so far as I can tell, is that without Hegel – to make Kierkegaard’s Hegel jokes funny – Kierkegaard’s jokes wouldn’t be funny. Indeed, they wouldn’t be jokes at all.

This was Dante’s problem, after all. He didn’t get it that comedy is supposed to be funny, so part three of his space opera is frackin boring

John, you’re one of my very favorite very strange people, and you’re very strange in ways I can totally admire and appreciate, but the fact remains: your mind works in very strange ways.