The broken window that is American politics helped shed a light on the One-China policy for me. At first, I thought it was just some protest in Congress; until I saw photos of the average American storming the palace, legs on the table, flag-waving at all. That was when I realised this is not even just the proverbial, ungrateful Chinese grandchild who is not enthusiastically tomb-sweeping during the Qingming Festival, this is the equivalent of something that is downright unthinkable, almost akin to literally pissing on an ancestor’s grave. I may not subscribe to life after death, and I do think that nothing is entirely sacred and beyond question (religion included), and I still know that this is just one of those things that you don’t do because it strikes at the root of one’s core identity? The elder generation and I may interpret respect for authority and what it means to be who we are — to be Chinese — very differently, we may express our identity very differently, and yet it’s unthinkable to deny our own truths. To consciously reject our own narrative of what we hold dear. Then and there I saw why America has completely lost any claim to assert “moral” authority over the rest of the world. Guantanamo Bay did not do it. Forays in the Middle East did not do it. Trump’s office did not do it. Government shutdowns did not do it. These very images of the average American treating the symbols of power with profanity did it. In all entirety.
That realisation helped me see why the Chinese insistence on the One-China policy makes so much sense now, and why they would go to such lengths to defend it. It was one of those things that I was starting to wonder about, in a series of thoughts inspired by the “censorship” of Yu Yan on some Chinese channels in an act of time-traveling justice but that’s another story…
The fact of the matter is that, just as freedom and liberty are unwaveringly, unquestioned values of Western liberal democracies, certain things are fundamental tenets of the PRC Chinese experience. To claim that any one set of value is somehow superior to another when these are all matters of subjectiveness is in itself authoritarian, dictatorial and paternalistic — to return all these terms that gets thrown at the rest of the world a lot back to its source. :) I don’t think I buy into the universality of individual human rights entirely, though this is not to say that I do not believe that we are all borne equal.
I think of communities and collectives sooner than I think of atomistic, individual agents when it comes to what it means to be Chinese, or Asian, on a much broader sense. Perhaps this is due to stories fed by media or books I’ve read. But I think that, this sense that an individual never escapes entirely from the cultural and social forces that we are influenced by and that we ourselves shape is a trope that recurs in the literature and stories that dominate the Chinese imagination. One visual that comes to mind entirely is Sun Wukong — a monkey borne out of rocks who tried to wreck havoc in the Heavenly Palace but could not escape the palms of the Buddha. Started as a revolutionary, ended up in the bureaucracy. Pretty classic as Chinese tales go. There may be a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes but I suspect that a quantitative analysis of the Chinese corpus will see communities and collectives dominating the narrative.
Without these entanglements we are nothing. To be human is to be part of a social experience. Even monks and terrorists share a common language with their respective tribes. Without these shared experiences, we are but a body of living cells and a bunch of walking code. It’s these ties that define one particular instance, though we are all of the same class. Every one is unique because of our individual histories, though of course the nature of consciousness is still being understood. At some point in Cyberpunk, you are presented with a choice that asks you to choose your consciousness for ending the game.
MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD
You are presented with two choices: do you go into cyberspace and exist forever? Or do you return to your human body and live out the remaining 6 months? Or even, do you become Johny instead of V?
Frustration was my initial reaction because it feels like all the bullets and pain were for nothing. To exist as consciousness in cyberspace forever feels like it would no longer be the V that I knew through the game; 6 months is too short; to hand over the body to Johny would also be to stop existing as V. Yet, I don’t think there ever was, is, or will be one, fixed, unchanging self. Just as you do not step into the same river twice, in a world of chaos, we are different from one moment to the next.
We are all in flux. The moment V woke up in that junkyard, that is a different person than she was when she first landed in Night City. If the self is but an illusion, then maybe it’s not so bad that V continues to exist in cyberspace after all. My frustration with the purported discontinuity of V is built with a false assumption to begin with, from a logical point of view. But still, emotionally, I feel like my idea of a bearable ending is the only one in which Judy’s happy.
But why do human beings have these emotions and memories which seem to serve no meaningful purpose from the perspective of the universe? What gave us this laughable habit of thought, to wonder about the nature of existence, of consciousness, what purpose does it serve for evolution to have a creature exist in the world with meta-cognition? For now, I am inclined to lean towards this being an accidental by-product. Just as g happens to equal 9.8 in this particular instance of possible universes, maybe consciousness is an emergent property borne by accident. Or perhaps it does serve some utilitarian purpose for evolution. That this particular species can remember things and make plans. This laughable habit of thought to ponder our existence in the universe being a price we pay. I’m not sure whether one ought to be relieved or feel like it’s the abyss staring back at you with such a conclusion. Or maybe these two things are not mutually exclusive.
Although the self is not entirely fixed, everything always changes and we are not all that different from dust in the grand scheme of things, our existence is unique because of the memories we’ve accumulated, the possible futures we could have and these present moments that we will never have again. So if a leave falls in the forest and no one hears it, it might as well not exist. Lucky for us, the social nature of our existence helps to make us unique. I think it is for these reasons and entanglements that make us unique instances that it’s still better for V to live out the little time left with friends and family than to exist forever in cyberspace. These are the things that make us human even if they are completely by accident. So that is the one good ending, having reasoned through these things. It is so not because I just think that Judy is pretty and that whatever makes her happier would be the better ending. XD
I used to think that if a human being falls in love with an a.i., I would consider that emotion to be real, given that it’s just chemicals rushing through the body: adrenaline, dopamines and oxytocin, take your poison. Now I think it’s more like that Greek story about Narcissus — the feeling is real and imaginary at the same time, real given the circulation of chemicals involved, imaginary because it’s really us falling in love with our imagination. It would be a different story if the a.i. is a conscious agent though. And even if a.i. can be a unique, conscious agent, an instance of a runtime in the machine sense is so different from the time-scale of being a human instance that I don’t think a true a.i.-human romance can ever exist.
So in summary Cyberpunk is a crappy piece of technology but Judy is awesome. I can see myself caring and spending on virtual idols the same way I do on Yu Yan now, if they’re as awesome as Judy. And I can accept that this is just me paying the price for having feelings. Feelings that these digital bits and bytes are able to invoke almost as well as actual persons nonetheless. Oh just look at how far humanity has came in 2021!
