2. at least in Axiomatic there's a consistent trend of men in relationships with women who are, to my mind, bizarrely cold and unempathetic, and i just have no idea what's going on here or what point he's trying to make. i wonder if greg was going through something 😬
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3. greg egan does this cool thing i've seen few other authors do (only borges and ted chiang?) of taking some very abstract idea from mathematics or physics and managing to make it the basis of a story with real dramatic tension. i would love to learn how to do this
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after all i know a lot of very abstract ideas from mathematics and physics and it would be nice to finally get some use out of them 😛
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4a. several of his near-future stories feature teenagers getting radical body modifications in this very cyberpunk way; as a prediction i don't think this panned out at all. not a single new form of body modification has become popular in my lifetime that i can think of
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(not counting gender transition stuff which i think doesn't really fall under this umbrella; greg egan is imagining like tattoos-and-piercings++ for young punks to stick it to old squares and i just haven't seen anything like that personally. afaict ppl just want to look sexy)
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4b. related to 4a, many of the body modifications come from significant tech advances especially in biotech, and i also don't think anything like that has panned out. greg egan imagined tech able to do stuff like control the levels of neurotransmitters in your brain in real time
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in a few stories (e.g. the titular Axiomatic) greg egan imagines tech able to infiltrate your brain and force you to believe some particular thing, e.g. that some religion is true. i actually suspect there will be deep reasons why something like this couldn't possibly work
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(to go into greg-egan-mc mode, i think the structure of beliefs is holographic; your beliefs reflect and are reflected by the sum totality of the experiences that make you you, everything depends on everything else, they can't just be arbitrarily modified in isolation
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so i think we'll find that we won't be able to do much better than the equivalent of installing a voice in your mind constantly trying to hypnotize you into believing something or other, which will have effects but not as powerful as what greg imagines, i think)
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Are you making this prediction without a time attached? If so, I admire your courage.
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well okay, in the limit of sufficiently good technology there are weirder and more terrible possibilities. if you can upload and run human minds in arbitrary simulated environments then you can cause them to have arbitrary experiences...
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If you can get at their innards then you can do a lot more than that, though understanding the neural net would be a tough ask. Maybe make random changes to the brain, looking for a brain that is a closer fit to different religion, otherwise the same person and repeat.