Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Session 23

23) BRAIN SCRATCH is tricky to describe.  The show opens with a montage showing a variety of different takes on a single news story about a mysterious cult called “Scratch:  The Migrate to Electronics Movement.”  Actually, that’s not quite true:  the show opens with Spike watching TV and channel surfing, but we don’t get to learn that right away.  Rather, we see what he sees.  Fourth wall?  What fourth wall?  This includes the Scratch cult’s own indoctrination video, a serious news broadcast, and a schlocky Hard Copy style tabloid.  Each of these has its own appropriate music:  the cult gets shimmery new age wallpaper-muzak; the serious news broadcast gets one of those instantly identifiable newsroom fanfares (you know, the ones with a marimba in the background banging out morse code rhythms even though morse code hasn’t actually been used in newsrooms for decades).  The music for the tabloid news show is a little more interesting.  It kind of sounds like the soundtrack to a particularly trashy kind of 70s horror film:  I’m thinking of Zombi II here, although there are certainly other examples.  Beyond the actual news broadcasts, we also see a talk show or two, a commercial for a plot-critical video game system called the Brain Dream, a couple of other unrelated commercials, and, well, this.

What makes this even weirder is that this clip reuses the 70s horror music from the tabloid news broadcast, and that Alfalfa-looking kid shouts something like “And that’s why our network refuses to broadcast shows like the one you’re currently watching!”  This is not the fourth wall you are looking for.

I suppose I should mention that TV broadcasts of one kind or another are interrupting the main narrative of this episode CONSTANTLY.  In one of them, we learn that Big Shots – you remember Big Shots, right?  The bounty hunter hit parade show that, prior to this episode, one would have guessed was the only TV show that exists in the Bebopverse?  – yeah, we learn that here, three episodes out from the series finale of Cowboy Bebop, Big Shots has been cancelled due to poor ratings.  Fourth wall?  You keep saying that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

After their TV binge, the crew sits down to dinner, and Jet provides some helpful exposition.  Apparently, Scratch’s followers believe that they can leave their physical bodies behind by uploading their consciousnesses onto the internet.  The powers that be were content to let this slide as long as the ideology was just a theory, but recently the cult’s members have begun to put their beliefs into practice by committing mass suicide.  As a result, a hefty price has been put on the head of cult leader Londes.  Londes used to be a respectable neurobiologist before he had a mystical vision and broke with society, only to reappear as a shadowy counterculture figure half a century later.  This is a story beat we’ve seen before:  remember Bohemian Rhapsody?  Just like in that one, the crew decides to divide and conquer.  Spike tries interviewing cult members, Jet  manages to track down an old man who might have known the cult leader in his youth, and Ed works her magic with the internets.  Between the three of them, they manage to turn up precisely nothing — again, like Bohemian Rhapsody, and also to a degree like Jamming With Edward.  Meanwhile Faye (who is working alone, having once again snuck away from the BeBop sometime during the gap between episodes), has had a little more luck.  Her plan was to find Londes by actually enrolling in the cult. This leads her to a mysterious abandoned warehouse where she encounters something unexplained and nasty.

Then there’s a giant pyramid of TV screens, and suddenly they all burst to life, filling the air with static, and Faye’s vision begins to swim…  With the last of her energy, she puts in a distress call to Spike (which again is something we’ve seen before:  remember Ballad for Fallen Angels?).  Spike sets off to rescue her, tracing her signal from his Swordfish, while Jet and Ed try to duplicate Faye’s strategy by enrolling in the cult, just to see if they can track down the mysterious leader.  I mean, since it obviously worked out so well for her, right?

The cult’s uploading process turns out to use the aformentioned Brain Dream system, a nifty gizmo that you control directly with your brainwaves.  Think something like a Nintendo Wii crossed with a Scientology E-Meter.  The good news is that you can complete the process from the comfort of your own home!  The bad news is significantly worse.  The device can write brainwaves as well as reading them, and the cult’s website is more riddled with malware than a post-soviet warez server.  It almost brainwashes Jet, and would have too, were it not for the crew’s secret weapon:  Ein the wonderdog.

Before the virus can do serious harm, Ein, uh… takes steps to ensure that Jet snaps out of it.  And then, in a supremely well thought out plan, Ed and Jet hook Ein up to the computer, thinking that this way they can walk through the process without anyone getting hurt.

This is pretty dickish, if you really think about it in any kind of detail.  You know the device is going to turn your brain into soup, so you hook it up to your DOG? Would you send your dog into a minefield so that he’ll clear the way for you?  There are some circumstances where this kind of thing might be morally acceptable – in a very real sense, animal testing of medicine is exactly this save that the minefield is biotic rather than petrochemical – but you don’t do it to your pet on a whim unless you’re a rampaging dick.  That said, when watching the episode one isn’t really struck by the moral dubiousness, because the viewer already knows what Jet and Ed do not:  i.e. that Ein is a superintelligent computer genius.  As soon as they slap the headset on him, he hacks the system and gives them access to Londes’ files.  I love a couple of little details about this.  I love that Ein controls the computer with little neck twitches and subvocalized barks, for all the world like a dog that’s asleep and dreaming it’s chasing something.  I also love that because the plan was for Ed to take control of the hacking as soon as the program engages, and Jet has his eyes locked on the display, he never even realizes that Ein is responsible.  Most of all, I love the reaction we get here from Ed.

She’s interested.  Not shocked, not even quite surprised (although there’s a bit of that at first), but interested. This was not something that she was expecting, and she finds it fascinating… and her reaction to something that she finds fascinating is to quietly and almost smugly observe.  This is sooooo hackerish.  It’s also the calmest, most rational, and most intelligent expression that we’ve seen on her face in the entire series, which I think is deeply revealing of her character.  And it’s also kind of hilarious because a normal person’s reaction to watching a dog hack the internet would be to act like Radical Edward does in day to day life (screaming, flailing, handstands), but Radical Edward’s reaction is to start acting like a normal person.

Back to the plot.  Remember when I said that they uncovered the files on the leader?  Actually, they uncovered the absence of files on the leader.  The Londes identity turns out to be a shell, pure and simple.  (You know how I’ve been tracking the way that this show has been playing clever tricks with mystery and closure over the course of the past few episodes? Okay, well here’s the way it works this time:  they search and search through the signifying labyrinth, only to find a vacuum at the center. How freaking po-mo is that?) They do manage however to trace the account that created the website back to a hospice bed, where a thirteen year old with locked-in syndrome named Ronny Spangen has been using a brainwave controller hooked up to the internet to create the Londes persona and the whole Scratch movement.  Because he doesn’t have a body any more, he wants to create a world where no one else does either.  Which, I mean… we’re supposed to accept the boy as a tragic figure, and to an extent we do.  But that’s some straight-up supervillainy right there.  Whenever you come across plans of the form “Because I had to [X], the whole world should have to [X],” you want to be nodding and smiling, and frantically dialing 911 behind your back.  Jet handcuffs the kid — this is a pretty poignant image, right?

— and Ed disconnects his terminal from the internet.  This happens none too soon, because at the same time Spike is facing off against the wall of TVs that got Faye, and learning that his brilliant strategy of shooting bullets at the screens is no match for Londes’ nerve-hacking voodoo.  (You may remember this plot, or something like it, from such recent episodes of Cowboy Bebop as Pierrot le Fou.  Again, there’s no suggestion that Spike ever really learns, or particularly wants to learn, the true nature of the ass he’s trying to kick.)  Now, in one of my early posts I pointed out that Cowboy Bebop is full of awesome things that don’t make a lick of sense.  Londes’ Best-Buy™-Franchise-of-Death is one such.  What is the point of this place?  Is it literally a venus flytrap for bounty hunters, to keep them from finding out about Ronny?  It’s vaguely plausible that Londes would want to make something like that, kind of, but to have the corpses just be left lying there?  Look, I’ve seen <strike>a corpse or two in my day</strike> an episode of CSI or two in my day, and let me tell you:  corpses STINK.  Eventually, that alone would have brought in the Swat Team and toppled Londes’ whole little empire.  But again this is really a nitpick…  The show runners weren’t trying to think of a logical plan, they were trying to creep out the audience.  And speaking for myself, the image of a big room full of corpses that just went to sleep and never woke up again certainly got the job done.

That’s about all there is to the story.  Bebop has never felt much need to explain the falling action of its plots, but the ending to this one is particularly elliptical.  Faye wakes up to find Spike sitting next to her, and they share what passes for a tender moment, for those two.  Jet and Ed leave Londes – er, Ronny – handcuffed to his hospital bed.  Do they turn him in and get the bounty?  It was thirty eight million!  That should by all rights be huge for them!  But we never get to know.  Instead, the show ends with a montage of Londes’ face talking to us out of a variety of different TV screens.  This isn’t quite like the opening montage.  Where that one gave, like, fifty different takes on a single story, all shown on the same screen; this one shows one single broadcast of Londes’ talking head, with continuous audio, seen on a dozen different screens of various kinds, from various angles, and with varying degrees of static and distortion.  So did Londes get hooked up to the web again?  Or is what we’re just seeing Ronny’s dreamscape, in his own private internet heaven?  It’s far from clear.  But clarity is not what this is supposed to be about.  Rather, the end of the show gets its work done through imagery and mood.

Consider:  this is the way we’ve seen Londes through most of the show.

This is what we see when they unplug his modem.

So over the course of the episode he goes from a broadcast of a unified, speaking, apparently biological subject, to a fragmented pluralized talking head, to a complex wireframe model, to a simple wireframe model, to machine code, to nothing.  The VERY last image of him we see, at the very end of the show, is a super-extreme close up of the corner of his mouth, where all we can see really see are the individual luminescent flecks of a CRT television.  While this isn’t properly part of his disintegration in terms of the plot, it obviously plays into the same symbolic complex.

It hardly seems worth pointing out that internet connections don’t actually work that way, right?  If you unplug an ethernet cable, data transfer goes from normal to zero in no time flat.  Similarly, if I go out and shoot a chicken, it doesn’t devolve into an archaeopteryx, a trilobite, and a blue-green alga before dissolving into a random pile of protein.  It just dies.  That said, if you put that chicken sequence in a movie, you would probably be trying to communicate something to the audience, specifically, the not un-interesting idea that what we see as a chicken is not actually a chicken at all, but rather a blob of protein in the shape of a chicken.  So what’s being communicated here is that what we see as a CGI face is actually a string of machine code, and what we see as a television image is a collection of glowing dots.  (It’s interesting, though, that the middle steps of these transitions – while cool to look at, and probably necessary for getting the point across – are harder to accept philosophically. Television images ARE glowing dots.  Chickens ARE proteins.  But it’s hard to claim that the archaeopteryx inheres and persists in the chicken… and unless I’ve misunderstood something about the process, a rendered CGI image doesn’t typically contain the wireframe data that it was rendered from.)  In short, the sequence is supposed to show us what was hiding behind Londes all the time.

On the level of the plot, of course, we already know that:  it’s Ronny.  But here we’re dealing with imagery and symbolism. Which means that before we say what Londes’ disintegration means on those levels, we should consider what he meant on those levels BEFORE they blew him up.

If I pitched the story for Brain Scratch today, people would probably parse it as commentary on the internet.  Or even more specifically, Facebook.  It works for that pretty well – the idea of social isolates who only live in a cloud of electrons, the idea of video games stealing your life (hey there Farmville!), the ultimate punishment of being disconnected from all network communications… you wouldn’t have to rewrite it MUCH.  But you’d probably have to remove the episode’s almost incessant references to the idea of television as such.  Which I guess is a kind of longwinded way of saying that, yeah, Brain Scratch is deeply, deeply obsessed with television.  It begins and ends with shots of TV screens, and is punctuated with more of these throughout.  Londes’ lair consists entirely of giant piles of televisions.  And when Londes has his confrontation with Spike, he gives a typical supervillain monologue on how terrible TV is — how it rots people’s minds, and makes them confuse their dreams with reality.

One wonders very much where the writers were going with this.  Were they biting the hand that feeds them, as it were, and trying to convince their audience to turn off the TV and go outside?  On the one hand, Londes is insane.  Spike tells him as much before he starts blasting away.  So we might see the character as a stand-in for the Tipper Gores of the world, and the episode as a flipping-of-bird to the same.  On the other hand… Spike’s rebuttal isn’t particularly eloquent.  And the Brain Dream WAS going to fry Jet’s mind like an omelette.  And Spike’s big heroic effort in the confrontation DOES involve shooting up a whole bank of TV screens.  And Londes DOES get the last word before the credits. There’s also some other business in the episode about how the images that we consume can begin to shape our behavior, like this little gag from the early going where Spike watches Ed do this —

and responds by doing this —

which does not end well for anyone, as you can probably guess.  Actually there’s another moment from the opening montage that’s pretty critical to the viewing experience, although I couldn’t figure out an elegant way to work it in earlier on, which is that Spike and Jet first learn that Faye has joined the Scratch cult by seeing her interviewed on a TV documentary about the movement.  Now, at the time, they have no reason to suspect that she’s doing this as an undercover operation.  All they know is that they woke up one morning and she was gone.  They presumably think that one of their closest friends has joined a death cult.  But right before this, they were watching a talk show where an anonymous woman is sobbing frantically about her cult-member son, and the panel’s reaction is, well, this —

which is pretty much how Spike and Jet react to learning about Faye.  I might be reading too much into this… I mean, neither one of them are much for emotional displays, especially where Faye is concerned.  But it’s probably meant as a lesson about how the endless proliferation of media — shades of Teddy Bomber! — tends to result in a de-personalization of tragedy that can even dissociate us from the tragic events of our own lives.

So it’s a little hard to know whose side we’re supposed to be on.  But when we consider Londes’ disintegration, combined with the opening and closing montages… well, I think it probably indicates that it’s a mistake to accept the narratives that are presented to us by electronic media as discrete and self consistent messages.  They are, after all, just collections of glowing dots.  We have to be careful about granting them a status they don’t deserve.  Maybe the moral of the story isn’t even meant to be coherent?

Another thing to consider, of course, is that TV in Cowboy Bebop is already pretty well established by Speak Like a Child as an allegory for things like memory and storytelling.  THAT opens up a whole other can of worms that I’m almost hesitant to grapple with:  What is the relationship of storytelling, religion, and celebrity?  What is the relationship of memory, storytelling, and self-image?  Some of this is even brought up specifically in the episode, although again they put it in Londes’ mouth.  “God didn’t create man.  Man created god!  And now Television is the new religion!”  And the obvious resonance between the Scratch movement and Scientology only throws this into harsher relief.  (Londes, Ronny, L. Ron?)  Retrospectively, after having watched through to the end of the series, I can say that Cowboy Bebop eventually alights on the following proposition:  our lives are given meaning by the people we are close to.  (Not an astonishingly original message, I suppose, but one that I tend to agree with.)  Brain Scratch plays into this by giving lie to a couple of counterclaims, such as life gaining meaning through religion (false:  the scratch cultists are deluded), life gaining meaning through accomplishment (false:  Londes is fantastically successful by any standard, but his achievement is hollow and he’s a psychopath to boot), and life gaining meaning through pop culture.   Because remember, ALL of those voices out there in the sea of electrons, ALL of them, not just the crazy religious cultists, are nothing more than glowing dots on a screen.  And that applies to Cowboy Bebop too.  They’re pretty explicit about that last one:  remember, the last image of the whole episode is that extreme close-up on Londes’ pixelated (cathode rayated?) face.  Hey, thanks for the warning, TV show!  Maybe I’ll stop watching you now.

I kid, I kid.  Why would I go and do a thing like that?

I’m not done with Brain Scratch yet, though.  As an episode of Cowboy Bebop, I’d classify it as slightly middling. Still a joy to watch, but not one of the true greats.  There is however one thing that it does better than almost all of the other episodes, which is:  be science fiction.  This will take some explicating, I suppose.

Is Cowboy Bebop a science fiction show?

The answer to this question depends on your definition of science fiction.  In pragmatic, descriptivist terms, stories are sci-fi if they draw on the trappings of sci-fi, and under this rubric Cowboy Bebop obviously qualifies.  It’s got space travel, terraforming, cryonics, superhuman machine intelligence, laser guns, arbitrarily advanced levels of body modification, you name it.  There’s another popular definition, however, which holds that sci-fi is properly defined as speculative fiction:  it has to engage in a meaningful way with the consequences of a radical technological and/or sociological change to human society.  Works that don’t do this – and Star Wars is probably the quintessential offender – are sometimes accused of not being “true” scifi.

Just to continue this little digression, there’s a tendency to associate the literature-of-ideas stuff with “hard” scifi, and the “adventure stories… IN SPACE!!!” school with “soft” scifi.  But these ideas aren’t really the same.  Hard vs. soft just has to do with how plausible the fictional universe’s technology is under our current understanding of the laws of physics.  What I’m looking for here is a distinction between the literature of ideas and the literature of narrative.

The technology in Star Trek isn’t really any better worked out than the technology in Star Wars.  If anything, Trek might be worse:  at least Star Wars doesn’t allow time travel.   But Star Wars is not concerned with the rigorous working out of an idea.  Rather, it’s about telling an adventure story with mythic overtones.  The laser swords and spaceships are purely window dressing.  (Didn’t George Lucas actually use stock footage of WWI dogfights for the space battles in some of his test cuts?)  Star Trek, on the other hand, is very much an idea driven show, and therefore counts as speculative fiction:  it’s just that the ideas in question are always sociological or psychological.  You could quite easily write truly speculative fiction within the Star Wars universe without changing the franchise’s technological “hardness” at all.  For instance you could write military SF that tries to rigorously work out what kind of tactics the trade federation droids would have to apply in order to take down a Jedi.  Or you could write political SF about how Palpatine’s rivals in the galactic senate try to use arcane procedural rules to limit his power in the interval between his election to chancellorship and his dissolution of the legislature at the beginning of A New Hope. Or you could write socioeconomic SF that explains how Jabba the Hutt’s criminal enterprise fits into the broader society of Tatooine.   (“It ain’t like that.  See, the Hutt stay the Hutt.  Everthing stay who he is.  Except for the droids.  Now, if the droid make it all the way down to the other dude’s side, he get to be Twi’lek.  And like I said, the Twi’lek ain’t no bitch.”)  The point is to take some idea, any idea, as a starting place, and then work out the consequences in rigorous detail.  By the same token, it would be possible to write science fiction that is diamond-hard, but utterly unconcerned with working out the consequences of anything at all.  Like, do a version of Death of a Salesman where all the characters have robotic arms, and Biff has a big monologue in act II where he explains the technology behind their robotic arms.  Nobody HAS written Death of a Salesbot to the best of my knowledge, and there are some pretty obvious reasons why it wouldn’t tend to happen. But there’s no reason to discount the possibility.

Anyway, Cowboy Bebop.  In one of my earliest posts, I categorized this show’s approach to science as semi-hard.  In retrospect, I feel like semi-soft would be a better description.  Usually soft SF has lots and lots of technology:  replicators instead of microwaves, lasers instead of handguns, etc.  Bebop doesn’t do this, which is why I assumed what I assumed.  But as I run down the episodes in my head, there’s just too many things that are implausible, and perhaps not even meant to be plausible.  The genetically engineered virus that turns people into chimpanzees, the demonically preserved harmonica player, the incredible leftover seafood monster, the magical fortunetellers of one kind or another that pop up in various episodes…  But hardness and softness aside, it’s also pretty hard to make the case for Cowboy Bebop as a piece of speculative fiction, because hard or soft, the sci-fi elements don’t MATTER most of the time.  A virus that turns people into monkeys would actually have FASCINATING consequences – do the victims still have legal rights?  What happens to their property?  But as far as Cowboy Bebop is concerned, it might as well just be Ebola. Well, that’s not true:  the monkey thing matters because of the symbolic weight of a man transforming into a beast.  Similarly, it would be inaccurate to claim that the Red Eye drug in the first episode might as well be PCP.  It needs to give the dealer superhuman strength and speed because that makes for a good fight scene in a way that PCP never would.  But the broader consequences of a society in which all junkies have superhuman strength are never raised.  You could argue, kind of, that My Funny Valentine is about the consequences of cryonics… but as it turns out Faye’s amnesia is far more relevant than the idea that she’s been frozen and defrosted.  And certainly there’s no attempt to deal with it in a comprehensive or systematic way — she could have been in a coma for a week.  (Although this might not be entirely true — see below.)

Brain Scratch might not seem at first blush to be more spec-ficcish (spec-ficcan? spec-fickle?) than any other episode of the show.  A cult that advocates straight-up suicide would have worked almost as well as a cult that advocated “migrating to electronics,” right?  Except that it would lose its symbolic resonance with real-world humans that “live in electronics” by watching old TV shows and blogging about them on the internet all the time.  The current version also just happens to touch on one of my favorite classic science fiction devices, the idea of the “brain upload,” where we can achieve immortality by transferring our consciousness to some kind of electronic device.

Accounts of this technology tend to fall into two camps.  Either brain uploading obviously does work, and is awesome, or it obviously doesn’t work, and is horrifying.  William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive fall squarely into the latter camp.  Notable science fiction stories where brain uploading “works” are fewer and further between, although Ghost in the Shell might fit here — if so, it’s a lot less gung-ho about it than most.  Interestingly, though, there are some real-world futurists who think that brain uploading is the wave of the future.  Cowboy Bebop falls into the pessimistic camp, if only by implication.  No one ever spends any time speculating as to whether the Scratch cultists who seem to have committed suicide have actually achieved immortality, and even Londes turns out to be tragically bound to his physical form.  (Well, unless you interpret that speech at the end as evidence that he did manage to leave his body fully behind after all, which is kind of stretching it if you ask me.)  Now, how you feel about brain uploading depends on how you feel about a philosophical problem called the Persistence Question.  This is typically phrased something like as “How can we tell if a person existing at one time is numerically identical to a person existing at another time?” (Numerically identical, meaning “there is only one of it,” is different from qualitatively identical, meaning “it is exactly the same.”  We generally assume that people can change over time without becoming more than one person.)  Eric Olsen, writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy prefers “Under what possible circumstances is a person who exists at one time identical with something that exists at another time (whether or not it is a person then)?” arguing that the classic formulation begs the question of whether a person was ever a gamete, or ever will be a corpse.  There are a couple of classic answers.  For instance, you could claim that if person A and person B have the same body, they are the same person.  But this is a little hard to accept:  if you cut my arm off, or transplant my brain into a cadaver, do I stop being me?  You can also claim that identity is no more than a social consensus:  if other people recognize person B as person A, then they’re the same person.  But this fails the a whole bunch of common sense tests:  what if I lock myself in a closet where no one else can see me – do I stop being myself?  The most popular and intuitive answer is to appeal to psychological identity.  If a person at time A has a certain set of memories, and a person at future time B has all of those memories, then they’re the same person.  And this is how brain uploading seems notionally to be meant to work:  if you scan my brain and then toss it into a blender, and then load the data from that scan onto a toaster, the toaster will have all my memories, personality, etc.  For brain uploading to work as a method of achieving immortality, that toaster would then need to actually be me. And the psychological answer to the Persistence Question would seem to suggest that it would.

It might be obvious from the way that I phrased it that I have little sympathy for this point of view.  After all, what if we repeat that thought experiment WITHOUT the blender?  Scan my brain, load it onto a toaster, and let us both go on our merry ways?  I have no problem with the idea that both of us would be “people,” who should probably have nearly identical legal and moral rights.  But I’d like to think that I would still be me, and the toaster would still be a toaster.

Okay, one might argue, what if we do it slowly?  Look, if I reach into your brain with an electrode and burn out one neuron, you’re still you, right?  By the same token, if I supplement your existing brain with a single electronic neuron, you’re still you.  Same if we make it two neurons.  So what if we replace your whole brain, one neuron at a time, until finally it’s entirely mechanical?  You probably wouldn’t even notice it happening.  Then you’ll have a completely mechanical brain, which can leave your body and flit around the internet at ease, and still is obviously “you.”  This of course is similar to the famous Ship of Theseus and Sorites paradoxen.  How many parts of a ship can you replace before it becomes a different ship?  How many grains of sand can you take out of a heap before it stops being a heap?  My answer is that it doesn’t matter how fast or slow you do it.  When we argue about the ship and the heap, we’re really arguing about what something is called. Assuming that I am more than merely that-which-I-am-called, the slow transformation is really no different from the fast one. You’d wind up with something that thinks its me, and that people who know me would recognize as me. Nevertheless, I would be dead, and what was left would be a toaster only dreaming it’s a Jordan.  The hypothetical counterargument to my counterargument is a doozie, though, because this same process of killing and replacing cells is apparently happening in our cerebral cortex all the damn time, except that the new cells are biological rather than electronic.  Either the reasoning I gave above is flawed – and I don’t see how – or else my impression that I am the same person I was when I was ten, or even the same person that I was when I went to sleep last night, or even the same person that I was when I started typing this sentence, is not really correct.    The answer to the Persistence Question, in that case, is quite simply that we never can and never should consider two people at different times to be numerically identical:  that all that persists are memories and the illusion of identity, not identity itself.

And once we’ve followed the chain of reasoning around that far, we realize with a shock that this is something Cowboy Bebop has been about all — the damn — time!  In what sense can we claim that Faye Valentine is the same person that was cryogenically preserved after her unspecified accident all those years ago?  She DOESN’T have the same memories that she used to.  She doesn’t really have the same physical body anymore, or much of the same personality — that betamax tape proved that.  And at this point in the series, there are no other minds that recognize her as the same person (although that changes in the next episode, Hard Luck Woman).   By the same token, is the Gren who fought alongside Vicious on Titan the same person as the Gren who shows up playing sax in Jupiter Jazz?  They don’t have the same body, exactly.  Their goals and opinions are pretty radically different.  Does Radical Edward, who seems to spend most of her time in a permanent schizophrenic break, have any kind of moment-to-moment continuity of selfhood?  Is Spike the same guy that he was before his unspecified traumatic event?  Is Jet the same guy that he was before he lost his arm?  It might seem like all of these questions are confusing numerical identity (is there only one of it?) with qualitative identity (is it exactly the same?), but I would argue that one of the lessons of applying the Ship of Theseus to consciousness is that a sufficiently radical qualitative change constitutes a numerical change as well.  Looking at Wen, the harmonica player from Sympathy for the Devil, we could argue that here we have an  example of an identity which truly does persist.  Since he doesn’t age, we can assume (or argue, at least) that he’s immortal right down to the cellular level:  nothing of him that doth fade, period.  And as a result of this, he’s twisted and evil.  What are we to take from that?

That brings up another point about brain uploading.  It’s pretty common, in any kind of speculative fiction that deals with ANY kind of immortality, to suggest that seeking immortality corrupts, and achieving immortality corrupts absolutely.  (TV Tropes — damn the siren call of their cleverly alliterative titles! — calls this “Immortality Immorality.”)  Very often the corrupt and twisted half life offered by, for instance, something like brain uploading, is contrasted with the sane and healthy attitude of accepting and embracing death.  Cowboy Bebop does this too – check out this earlier post for the series’ take on the ars moriendi.  But if we’re willing to go down the persistence-of-identity rabbit hole for a minute, the ideology of the show as a whole suddenly gets a lot more coherent and broadly applicable.  Cowboy Bebop is about a whole bunch of things, but one of the themes it comes back to over and over again is how important it is to let go.  This is true for the way one approaches death:  it’s important to let go of life.  But it’s also true of how one approaches living.  One must let go of pride.  One must let go of money.  And perhaps one must be willing to let go of one’s own self image, because that previous self is no longer present in any meaningful way.  More on this next time, when we get to Hard Luck Woman, far and away my favorite Cowboy Bebop episode ever.  As for me, I’m going to let go of any pretense that I’ll deal with more than one episode per post, or that I’ll get through the end of the series by the end of the month.  I WILL keep the posts coming, though, and as quickly as I possibly can.  A huge thank you to everyone who has been prodding me to keep continue the series, by the way — I’m more touched than I can say that y’all care enough to complain.