Explain, in your own words, what Pneumaborgs and Ghosts are.

"Digital Cyborgs

So, this is where we have to have somewhat uncomfortable conversations about consciousness and dip our toes into weirdness that even in 2585 still isn’t fully understood and which even most experts treat kinda like magic.

Pneumaborgs
Imagine you’re a normal human being. Your brain is entirely organic. “You”, as in your consciousness, is essentially an emergent process of transmissions between the neurons in your brain, and between the brain and the rest of your body, but “greater than the sum of its parts”, at once borne from this flesh, yet greater than it. You’d think we’d understand what the “mind” or “self” or, dare I say, “soul” even is. And yet, after we’ve replaced every single neuron in the brain with circuits, assuming it’s done correctly, “you” will persist. There’s something about “you” that, with care, can withstand everything. Even emancipation from flesh. The next step beyond the noganic, would theoretically be to move beyond physicality and into the digital frontier.


This is where terms like “pneumatic cyborg” or “pneumaborg” come in, “pneuma” being the Greek word for “spirit”, in contrast to somatic (“body”) cyborgs. In contrast to ghosts (we’ll talk about them later), a pneumaborg is a digitized, post-biological continuity of both intelligence and consciousness past the physical threshold. But there’s a little more to it than that. It’s not so much that a noganic can simply plug his or her brain into a computer and have their soul swim inside. There’s a format issue. The mind living within a fully-converted noganic brain isn’t just a ghost with a physical form and CoC. A ghost is a digital copy of a human mind, a computer program in essence, while a noganic’s mind is very much an emergent process of physical hardware generating it, basically like an organic brain - in fact, it is continuing and sustaining a process begun in the original organic format. A noganic’s mind isn’t like Skyrim digitally downloaded onto a Steam Deck, or even a cartridge full of Pokémon Gold inserted into a Gameboy Color. It’s more like how a game of Frogger might be bound to an old 1990s Frogger LCD handheld console - the device is entirely built around this one application. Sure, it’s a computer program, but you can’t very easily download it onto another device.


That said, converting your soul from analog to digital isn’t as difficult as converting from flesh to digital. Done correctly, there will be no interruption in consciousness, and you will in fact become a being of self-referential code, and it will be “you”, the current “you”, not a copy fully convinced that it’s “you”. In essence, this is what a pneumatic cyborg is.

Pneumaborgs are relatively common in places like Saturn’s moon, Titan, where the right specialists can be found, usually in facilities that double as both hospitals and religious temples. Whereas ghosts prefer to live in bespoke virtual realities, pneumaborgs prefer to remain bound to their cybernetic bodies, and only rarely venture beyond them, though like ghosts, they refuse to transfer wirelessly, for fear of losing coherency. It is actually not required that one become a noganic before they become a pneumaborg, but it’s also not very common for pneumaborg to have organic bodies, and fully-prosthetic brains are in fact required.
Ghosts

Ghosts? Uploads? What are these digitized persons, exactly? And how do they fit in the continuity of cyborgkind? And why are they different from those pneumatic cyborgs I mentioned earlier? And didn’t we already cover this sort of thing with the pneumaborgs earlier even though they’re referenced repeatedly? What gives? Who are you? Where am I? I want my money back, dammit!

Simply put, ghosts are copies of human minds. Yes, copies. This is because there is currently no reliable means of non-destructively uploading an organic human consciousness directly into a digital format. You’d think that it would be as easy as simply reading brain waves or plugging your brain into a computer and having it get struck by lightning or something, but in reality, organic brains have to be frozen solid, sliced up into millions of molecule-thin slides and then those slides are individually scanned with painstaking precision. 

So, you die, and on the other side, a digital carbon-copy of your mind comes into existence, with all your personality traits and memories (allegedly, even including some you had forgotten), fully convinced it’s still you. You can tell them that they’re not the same entity as the person they were made from, and it most likely won’t convince them, not when they personally perceive continuity between the physical state they used to be and the physical state they are now. 

This isn’t helped by the presence of a strong selection bias: people who know that ghosts aren’t a true continuity of one’s existence, almost never end up becoming ghosts, while people who do believe in the survival of the soul and the experience of the self beyond the uploading process, enthusiastically become ghosts, and when copies of their mind are created, those copies retain this belief, and credulously accept their ambiguously-inaccurate perception of consciousness continuity.

All this is why many ghosts insist upon being cyborgs, as opposed to AI - they are once-organic minds and souls interfacing with technology, no different from noganics or pneumaborgs (who do have continuity of consciousness). They’re actually not the same, but, shrug, good luck convincing them.


But while pneumaborgs and ghosts aren’t the same, they’re both digital lifeforms, and they share almost everything in common except continuity of being. The upsides of becoming a digital lifeform include effective eternal life, since ghosts (and pneumaborgs) appear to be mostly immune to the memory-folding that claims the lives of every AI eventually, which is argued by some to be proof that ghosts do in fact have “souls” that sustain them indefinitely, the same as pneumaborgs. But there’s definitely lots of downsides.

In reality, uploaded minds are copies, convinced that they are a continuity of consciousness when they’re actually not. Further, the fantasy of becoming an immortal digital lifeform able to traverse cyberspace without limits turned out to be a bit of a let-down, too. Almost all uploads prefer to stay in a single machine (usually a big personalized virchworld), because transferring between systems, especially wirelessly, has a very high risk of permanently damaging one’s code, and if done enough times, will lead to an upload fracturing into mentally-ill malware that haunt digital networks, known as “wraiths”. Oh, also, while you are in fact immortal as an upload, you can still be paused, deleted, hacked, edited, copied (not advised, this is a good way to produce wraiths) and shared on Pirate Bay, antivirus software will try and most likely succeed in killing you automatically if you’re on the wrong machine, and in many places, for the same reason as noganics, you don’t retain much if any property rights because your “previous existence” is not legally recognized due to you being a copy. Additionally, while copying ghosts isn’t the best idea, multiple ghosts can be made from the same brain, as long as the aforementioned frozen brain slices are available for scan. You shouldn’t create more than one, however, because two identical copies from the same brain will almost invariably come into conflict over who is the “real” original, will view the other as an imposter, and may try to kill each other, and it is for this reason that the slides tend to be destroyed after uploading.

Generally-speaking, ghosts will prefer to live in places where there is abundant cold, cheap energy and lots of technical support, which is why there are so many on Titan, where uploading is a retirement perk for those with a high social credit score and the laws are hyper-accepting of immortal digital souls as people. Here, millions of ghosts (including such high-profile figures as John McAfee, Howard Hughes and Walt Disney) live on the hazy ice-moon’s famous pyramid and obelisk-shaped supercomputers, half-submerged in lakes and seas of subzero liquid methane, living in expansive virchworlds, and occasionally berating their flesh-and-blood descendents at ancestral shrines for not visiting them often enough."