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SuperMechagodzilla posted:CHAPPIE Been a while since I watched it, but doesn't Chappie just treat the digitized consciousness as immortality without exploring the idea of backups as being separate instances of the same mental pattern? I mean good movie either way but I don't recall it dwelling much on the philosophy in its premise. For the guy asking for movie recommendations, Mamuro Oshii's two Ghost in the Shell movies talks about these issues directly. The Prestige does a little bit. There was a computer game called SOMA whose entire premise revolves around the question. Mister Speaker posted:Am I imagining things again, or did Cameron say something around the release of the first film that further sequels will explore entirely different moons of the gas giant Polyphemus, or was it just other regions on Pandora? Apparently there are 14 of them that are habitable; how the Na'vi spread across them if we do explore them is going to be the subject of a lot of scrutiny. Yes, originally he was going to do Lucas-style single-biome worlds and said Avatar 2 would take place on an ocean moon. He later decided Pandora would just be more Earth-like with many biomes and kept the action there.
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Dec 30, 2022 00:58
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Bar Patron posted:I have a question, [...]what's to stop [the recoms] from doing exactly what they did later on in the movie, going to the villages and interrogating/burning them and their houses in order to get info on where they are? Movies been out for a couple weeks, I don't think spoilering is necessary anymore so no biggie  When Spider is first captured, they try to forcefully extract the location of Jake and the Omaticaya war parties who are camped out somewhere in the Hallelujah mountains. When that doesn't work, Quaritch 2 changes up their plan and asks Spider to instead come ride along with them during their searches otherwise he has to hand him back over to the RDA for more mind torture. Cut to a few scenes later, and Quaritch has a line where he mentions "Jake's gone into hiding" and lays out updated mission parameters to further entrench himself and his recom unit into Pandora by going "full" native with the help of Spider as a guide/translator. Part of the reason they do this is so that after the entire recom unit become bonded with Ikran, they can just fly up to the Hallelujah mountains without getting swarmed by an asslad of unbonded banshees lol. The next time we see the recom unit is when Quaritch 2 and Spider are having a small father/son moment over a language lesson. So to answer your question: there was nothing to stop them, but when we see the recom unit flying around on their newly bonded ikran, they were presumably on their way to the Halleluja mountains to start their searches. But before they get there, Norm's rogue gunship trips a long range radar/sensor near the island chains where Jake had decided to hole up and that changes up the recom unit's trajectory. teagone fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 01:04
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Mister Speaker posted:Am I imagining things again, or did Cameron say something around the release of the first film that further sequels will explore entirely different moons of the gas giant Polyphemus, or was it just other regions on Pandora? Apparently there are 14 of them that are habitable; how the Na'vi spread across them if we do explore them is going to be the subject of a lot of scrutiny. He absolutely said that movies after 2 would go to the other moons, but I don't know if that is still the case
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Dec 30, 2022 01:22
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Bugblatter posted:Been a while since I watched it, but doesn't Chappie just treat the digitized consciousness as immortality without exploring the idea of backups as being separate instances of the same mental pattern? I mean good movie either way but I don't recall it dwelling much on the philosophy in its premise. Thanks yeah I was asking about movie recs. I have seen those but it’s been a while and could do a ghost in the shell 1/2 rewatch. Never played SOMA though. Chappie is one I should give another try. I didn’t connect it to much years ago and kind of forgot it.
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Dec 30, 2022 01:31
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Cameron can explore these themes of consciousness and the soul in Battle Angel Alita 2
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Dec 30, 2022 03:50
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grieving for Gandalf posted:Cameron can explore these themes of consciousness and the soul in Battle Angel Alita 2  
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Dec 30, 2022 03:58
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I saw the movie for a second time today, this time in a Dolby cinema, instead of the IMAX laser i saw it the first time in, and technically I don't know that I could tell them apart really. Maybe the Dolby was a little brighter, or i could just be imagining that. The biggest difference ended up being IMAX has way better glasses, and Dolby has way better seats. It looked fantastic though and I enjoyed it more the second time maybe because, as silly as it is, I could "relax" more and not be on edge wondering if someone was going to cark it, so I could just sit back and be absorbed by it more. On a second viewing I paid more attention to the music too, and while its still pretty meh, I did notice this time at least one part of the score I really liked that wasn't just a reference to the first film's score, the coming of the human ships. Its actually a pretty intimidating and creepy bit of music for that part, and probably the standout original bit of score for Avatar 2.
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Dec 30, 2022 04:16
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's actually pretty easy to know, because souls aren't "transferable" through any kind of objective process. Quarritch 2's relationship to Spidey is that of an uncle - or, at least, most analogous to that. To say that the twin brother shares the same soul would be a religious belief. Quarritch 2 is Quarritch (with a blue body) in just the same way he would be if they surgically transplanted his brain into a different body, unless you believe there's something special about the particular atoms that made up Quarritch 1.0's brain. Probably--in asking this question it's hard to avoid ending up at dualism (which feels pretty loving implausible) or some kind of hardcore physicalism, which doesn't really answer the question. In other words, I'm saying that you're right that Eywa murdered Jake 1.0, but because it instantly reproduced a perfect copy there's no murder, retroactively. The only way to avoid this conclusion, I think, is to claim that there are some facts about consciousness that aren't reducible to material properties--ie some kind of dualism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/ porfiria fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 04:46
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Actually if you killed me it'd be murder regardless of how many twins or triplets I had. Really, the best thing to do would be to not make a clone, since he'd seek to prosecute the one who killed his sibling.
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Dec 30, 2022 06:05
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So since I'm late to some of the discussions, have we talked about how Kiri is Eywa doing right by Grace? I watched Avatar the night before I saw TWoW to remind myself of certain points, such as when Grace "dies" and she tells Jake that Eywa is real. I guess they're going to explore it more in part 3 but every time they focused on Kiri I was thinking "either you're the Na'vi version of Jesus Christ, or you are Grace but reincarnated as a Na'vi"
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Dec 30, 2022 06:08
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Not sure quite how spiritual they're going to go but I could see it being her soul is split in half, one part in Kiri and one part bound to the hivemind of Pandora.
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Dec 30, 2022 06:18
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porfiria posted:Quarritch 2 is Quarritch (with a blue body) in just the same way he would be if they surgically transplanted his brain into a different body, unless you believe there's something special about the particular atoms that made up Quarritch 1.0's brain. There is something rather special: Quarritch 1 lived through the last act of Avatar 1, and then died. The atoms in his brain were consumed by microorganisms. Quarritch 2 is an entirely separate entity. “Soul” is a social construct. It’s what lets us say that houses can be haunted by the souls of the dead, for example. There’s no actual mechanism whereby a person’s brainwaves are transferred to a house, and the house would not ‘become’ that person even if that are the case. You would only have a copy, stored in a house somehow. Jake Sully and Jakesully only appear to be the same person because Jake Sully is dead and cannot contest the issue. The gap between his death and the birth of his clone is simply smaller. Bugblatter posted:Been a while since I watched it, but doesn't Chappie just treat the digitized consciousness as immortality without exploring the idea of backups as being separate instances of the same mental pattern? It’s initially presented that way, but with the final twist being that it was just an illusion, as the characters were actually birthing clones the whole time. Oblivion is another really good movie on this topic.
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Dec 30, 2022 06:51
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I just finished the "Tsu'tey's Path" graphic novel earlier (I'm probably the only one ITT who is/has read any Avatar comics lol); it's a neat story from 2019 that fills in character moments for Tsu'tey and fleshes him out a bit more during the events of the first film. Related to current identity/consciousness chat, one thing that stood out early on in the comic was this particular panel: Because it immediately reminded me of the RDA requesting that Quaritch and several other marines make "backups" of themselves before the big battle at the end of the first movie, in the event that they die so they can imprint their memories, personality, etc., into a recom, or maybe even a clone of their human selves. Spoilering this in case anyone here eventually wants to read the graphic novel or hasn't seen the extended collector's edition of the first film, but there's a moment where Tsu'tey communes with the Tree of Voices and Sylwanin comes to greet him -- Sylwanin was Neytiri's older sister and was Tsu'tey's original betrothed/the next Omaticaya tsahik before she was killed by RDA mercenaries. Sylwanin interestingly doesn't remember anything about her death or anything that has followed, despite being "uploaded" into Eywa, so similar to recom Quaritch's mental state at the start of TWOW, but different in that it seems like her spirit has just been chilling with Eywa post-death, so I'm not sure if that entity can be called a copy or backup considering what Grace spoke of upon her own death (Eywa is real, and she's with her). After Tsu'tey dies, we see his spirit manifest and reunite with Sylwanin within Eywa. It's an interesting thought to consider that the process Jake went through to transfer his consciousness into his avatar body by the power of Eywa is different in that he's not a copy, where in contrast the backup imprinting process the humans have developed can only produces a copy of an individual and is more of an affront to nature. teagone fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 07:32
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There is something rather special: Quarritch 1 lived through the last act of Avatar 1, and then died. The atoms in his brain were consumed by microorganisms. Quarritch 2 is an entirely separate entity. Fair enough on the last act of Avatar 1, but it's not really any different than if Quarrritch hit his head and lost his memory of those events. Because the soul does not literally exist, there is no coherent difference between copies of Quarrrritch. You might say they have clearly distinct subjective experiences in distinct physical locations (like the Two Jakes would have if the first one didn't die), but, again going by a physicalist understanding of the universe, that's no more meaningful than you being in two distinct places with different memories from one day to the next. It's worth asking what you mean when you say the original has died and the clone has taken its place. Is the original in heaven now? But there is no soul. The subjective experience of the original has ceased? But what is subjective experience? If it's nothing more than the epiphenomenon of neural functions, then replicating it replicates the person. It's true that this argument taken to its end makes us seriously wonder if the self can be said to exist in the way that we normally think of it, but them's the breaks. Again, I think it's either this or dualism (or I guess some kind of panpsychist view, but that has its own issues). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k porfiria fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 07:35
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Oh yeah I had forgotten about Oblivion as another movie about copies. Avatar universe isn’t clear if it has a soul or ghost or whatever. They never use such terms, but it does seem some aspect of Navi are absorbed back into the spirit trees. These could just be memories which then brings it back to Quaritch being recreated.
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Dec 30, 2022 08:10
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We're really getting into territory here where strict scientific definitions fail, because there is no way that we currently know of to transfer, duplicate or back up an entire consciousness, so we're pretty much just arguing about definitions let alone theory and practice thereof. For my money - I'm a fairly strict materialist - there is a distinction between an original and a copy because while the copy may be a perfectly duplicated pattern, it's a pattern duplicated in other matter and energy. If the answer to the question of how many instances of that consciousness there could be simultaneously is greater than one, it's a copy. There is no continuity. From the point of view of the copy it seems like there is continuity because its experiences pick up from the point where the copy was made. Internally it will feel to the copy that it has continuity with the original. However, the question is does this count as immortality and from the point of view of the original - no, it does not. The original only maintained continuity as a conscious entity up until the point it ceased, and then it is gone from the universe. Exceptions to this are entirely dependent on the methodology we want to posit for creating or transferring the old consciousness to the new substrate it's going to be running on. It would be possible, for instance, to imagine a destructive method of reading the old one where individual synaptic connections or patterns of memory were sequentially replicated, so that the old consciousness would be slowly degrading in the original and slowly growing in the new copy. It would even be possible to describe how this was being done in a way that the experiential consciousness was running across both substrates during this process, thereby strictly maintaining that continuity. The "Ship of Theseus" method of consciousness transfer, if you like. And it's plausible that this is how Ey'wa might do things, meaning that Jake Sully could arguably be the same, original individual simply moved between bodies. Most slightly more realistic ways that we could come up with to describe copying a consciousness into a new body would not do this, though. They would be a duplicate. Possibly an exact one, but not the same. This would be like taking exact measurements of every component of the Ship of Theseus, acquiring exact matches and creating a new ship alongside the old one. No-one would argue that this was the "same ship". The old one might be destroyed, kept in a museum or left in service. But the new ship, while identical in every respect, could be employed entirely differently.
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Dec 30, 2022 08:56
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You say it's just a clone who thinks they're the same person? I say that's true, and it's true of everyone everywhere always, from one instant of time to the next.
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Dec 30, 2022 09:09
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I'm reminded of an Outer Limits episode I have vague memories of as a kid, where some rich old dude, got an artificial brain put in his body due to some health condition, the way you would an artificial heart, or joint replacement, and his son or someone was bringing legal action to have him declared dead and take control of the company or whatever because he didn't consider him the same person anymore. I think by the end someone destroyed his body too, but he had backed himself up on a computer and him worried it would become even murkier legaly if it should still be considered him... or something. My memories of it are pretty vague, but enough that it stuck with me all these years.
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Dec 30, 2022 10:04
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porfiria posted:You say it's just a clone who thinks they're the same person? I say that's true, and it's true of everyone everywhere always, from one instant of time to the next. absolute sophistry
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Dec 30, 2022 10:32
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porfiria posted:You say it's just a clone who thinks they're the same person? I say that's true, and it's true of everyone everywhere always, from one instant of time to the next. Meaninglessness nonsense, and easily countered by the gun experiment.
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Dec 30, 2022 11:39
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Second season of altered carbon dealt with copies as well with the main character's copy being assigned to hunt him down, then later persuaded to join his side
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Dec 30, 2022 12:00
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porfiria posted:Quarritch 2 is Quarritch (with a blue body) in just the same way he would be if they surgically transplanted his brain into a different body, unless you believe there's something special about the particular atoms that made up Quarritch 1.0's brain.
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Dec 30, 2022 14:28
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Saw this movie last night. The obviously gorgeous visuals weren’t able to make up for the poor pacing and dialogue, to me. Definitely not the worst movie I’ve seen this year (that would be Amsterdam). But there’s an unresolved mystery that I would love to get people ITT’s take on: why does Lo’ak speak with a standard American accent, while Neteyam has a vaguely Latin American accent, even though they were raised in presumably the same linguistic environment?
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Dec 30, 2022 14:59
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smug n stuff posted:Saw this movie last night. The obviously gorgeous visuals weren’t able to make up for the poor pacing and dialogue, to me. Definitely not the worst movie I’ve seen this year (that would be Amsterdam). You thought that was an American accent?
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Dec 30, 2022 15:51
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Vir posted:I think our soul/psyche is very embodied in a physical body, as a phenomenon that is expressed in a living body. Even with all the technology in the world, it probably can't be "downloaded" into a different brain or run in a computer. Avatar deals with this by taking your DNA and using it to create a new body which is only compatible with you - or your identical twin. That brings you closer to something which is a true copy of the person, rather than just a clone. What is still missing is all the environmental factors which have affected the body, from trivial things like scars, to more serious ones like possible chemical additions. If a person is addicted to painkillers and smoking, his avatar is probably going to keep his mental addictions, but what about the chemical ones? As for the broader concept of body and mind and how inseparable they may be, I think most of the important stuff is up top and the biological functionality outside the brain is simple enough to be, lack of better terms, emulated or simulated without the host brain thinking any differently. SCheeseman fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Dec 30, 2022 17:49
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SadisTech posted:It would even be possible to describe how this was being done in a way that the experiential consciousness was running across both substrates during this process, thereby strictly maintaining that continuity. This reminds me of John Scalzi's Old Man's War series. When characters transfer bodies, there is a moment during the process where they experience consciousness in both bodies simultaneously before the old body is shut off. I always thought this was a clever way of sidestepping the debate over whether a new body is truly the same person or just a clone. Preserving experiential continuity is the key for me. I saw a second showing of the movie last night, this time in HFR, and I'm firmly in anti-variable framerate camp. It felt like playing a game that was constantly switching between realtime and an FMV. It was a jarring transition every single time. Having said that, I was also the only one in my group of 5 that even noticed HFR, let alone the transitions between framerates.
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Dec 30, 2022 17:56
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This whole discussion on the soul is super interesting to me. It definitely doesn't feel like to me Eywa just offed Jake then implanted new memories into the Avatar. For those on the more material side of things, would every time Jake "jacked in" to the Avatar in the first movie be considered dying and rebirthing each time? Why couldn't Eywa's transfer be a more permanent version of that? Not trying to say you're wrong, just interested in hearing theories by people who can articulate things better than myself.
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Dec 30, 2022 18:09
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The REAL Goobusters posted:You thought that was an American accent? Yes? But regardless of what specific accent either of them is, I think it’s pretty clear Lo’ak and Neteyam speak differently, and I’m curious why. I swear this isn’t just a like oh isn’t this a silly movie thing—it seems like it was a deliberate choice, and I can’t figure out what the thinking was behind it.
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Dec 30, 2022 18:25
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I don’t know a single American that sounds like Lo’ak does in the movie that’s why I asked. If anything Kiri and Tuk had more of American accent imo
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Dec 30, 2022 18:28
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If it wasn’t a deliberate choice, he might have been mirroring the dialect of the people he was hanging out with in New Zealand? This can happen subconsciously.Simulation883 posted:For those on the more material side of things, would every time Jake "jacked in" to the Avatar in the first movie be considered dying and rebirthing each time?
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Dec 30, 2022 18:44
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I felt like Lo'ak or one of the kids should have had a human name from Jake to represent his side of things. Like maybe call one of the kids 'Tommy' or something that Jake might do.
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Dec 30, 2022 18:51
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Simulation883 posted:For those on the more material side of things, would every time Jake "jacked in" to the Avatar in the first movie be considered dying and rebirthing each time? Why couldn't Eywa's transfer be a more permanent version of that? In Avatar 1, the avatar-bodies are drones piloted remotely via Space Wifi. Jake Sully was basically just playing a videogame. Jakesully, as a contrast, is a copy of Jake uploaded into the videogame.
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Dec 30, 2022 20:01
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Took my wife to finally see the film yesterday. It was funny because she absolutely loving hated it. She thought the visuals were cool but basically hated everything about the characters and story and didn't find a single character likable.
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Dec 30, 2022 20:16
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Surely she doesn’t hate the whales
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Dec 30, 2022 22:53
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Jakesully, as a contrast, is a copy of Jake uploaded into the videogame. I think it's more like Tron, actually. Jake himself was transferred into the videogame, not a copy, like Sam Flynn going into the computer world and Quorra able to be transferred out. Mordiceius posted:Took my wife to finally see the film yesterday. It was funny because she absolutely loving hated it. She thought the visuals were cool but basically hated everything about the characters and story and didn't find a single character likable. How could anyone not like Payakan? Time for you to get a new wife I guess.
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Dec 30, 2022 22:59
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Simulation883 posted:This whole discussion on the soul is super interesting to me. It definitely doesn't feel like to me Eywa just offed Jake then implanted new memories into the Avatar. For those on the more material side of things, would every time Jake "jacked in" to the Avatar in the first movie be considered dying and rebirthing each time? Why couldn't Eywa's transfer be a more permanent version of that? Jake’s final transfer at the end of avatar 1 does appear to be more of death and rebirth. They take his mask off so that body will choke on pandora air and get swallowed up by the tree tentacles.
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Dec 30, 2022 23:00
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Vir posted:If it wasn’t a deliberate choice, he might have been mirroring the dialect of the people he was hanging out with in New Zealand? This can happen subconsciously. I recall that when Jake woke up as a Navi in the first, it showed the same light effect to when he jacked in as a human. Which was a purposeful choice. Going off memory here, someone else can confirm or deny.
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Dec 31, 2022 01:25
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Darko posted:I recall that when Jake woke up as a Navi in the first, it showed the same light effect to when he jacked in as a human. Which was a purposeful choice. Yep, the same 'tunnel' vision effect . I might be wrong but I think Grace also sees it right before she dies. Speaking of the avatar tech, a tangent but are we gonna talk about the intense holographic CT-scan torture machine they put Spider in? Was it just to extract information, or was it actually a torture device? He was screaming a lot. EDIT: VVV Oh wow, you're right. I thought I was conflating the scene with Jake's rebirth which made more sense in my head. That's actually kind of telling, that the same 'tunnel' effect was used for Grace's death. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 01:30
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Darko posted:I recall that when Jake woke up as a Navi in the first, it showed the same light effect to when he jacked in as a human. Which was a purposeful choice. It showed the "jack in" light effect when Grace died and went to Eywa. If you're talking about Jake waking up at the end of the first film, they don't show it; it just goes from Neytiri removing human Jake's mask and kissing his eyes, to her then going over to Jake's avatar body and him waking up.
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Dec 31, 2022 01:33
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teagone posted:I think it's more like Tron, actually. Jake himself was transferred into the videogame, not a copy, like Sam Flynn going into the computer world and Quorra able to be transferred out. I have bad news for you!
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Dec 31, 2022 01:59
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