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Like most sci-fi : it's not about the technology of tomorrow. It is almost always about a metaphor for today. It's about the creepy boss in your office today, using their power to letch on their staff. It's about our own news propaganda today viewing refugees as inhuman. It's about running away from your family fears, just pick up the phone when your mom calls idiot. It's about homophobia and older generations experience, wishing they could have avoided the trauma and lived free as now. It's about the lengths our media will go to identify and abuse designated awful people to feel righteous, or the lengths we will go to hide a secret to avoid that torture, and how that is torture itself. It's about loss and letting someones memories fade and remembering who they actually were, not the fantasy of who they presented. It's about letting go of long lost relationship and not dwelling on the pain. Autobiographically 15 million merits is more about Charlie Brooker himself, churning away at jobs in media, gaining fame from media criticism, till selling his criticism is absorbed by the very industry itself. The scifi trappings are just to fill in the gaps. It's not future tech capturing the soul, but more, the difference between the people we present as today, the people we really are now, and at most a warning about what people would do if you were no longer considered fully human, which is pretty common both socially, economically, and internationally in our existing society. We don't need the tech.
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Jun 7, 2023 13:06
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No Luck Needed posted:well that might be the point of the argument. You cannot upload your soul, so whatever digital recreation of your mental pathways is a separate from your physical soul. Any digital recreation of a person is it's own thing. Souls don't exist, but if they did, how can you claim they can't be uploaded? If souls were real why would you assume it couldn't be uploaded or baked into cookies? It's a magic ghost internet cookie for your life, don't see why it couldn't be sent to a server if it can exist in the human body, a big wet bio server.
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Jun 7, 2023 16:12
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I never understood the argument, in sci fi settings like Black Mirror, where you'd have a character want to make a digital copy of their consciousness so they could 'live forever'. You don't get to do that. You die, the copy goes on with their eternal life. How does that benefit you in the here and now? Honest question; can someone tell me about a sci-fi story/show/movie where the original consciousness of the person is legitimately moved or transported to or kept alive in something? Maybe that did happen in Black Mirror and I'm forgetting about it. The closest I can get off the top of my head is Mr House from Fallout NV, and even that wasn't quite it; his body was still (barely) alive.
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Jun 7, 2023 16:51
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Honest question; can someone tell me about a sci-fi story/show/movie where the original consciousness of the person is legitimately moved or transported to or kept alive in something? Maybe that did happen in Black Mirror and I'm forgetting about it. It did, a couple times -- San Junipero immediately comes to mind, as does Black Museum where they transfer the conciousness of the death row guy to the museum and the comatose wife to the monkey (although that one *also* has copies in it so it's a little muddled) White Christmas and Callister were just copies though
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Jun 7, 2023 16:59
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Honest question; can someone tell me about a sci-fi story/show/movie where the original consciousness of the person is legitimately moved or transported to or kept alive in something? Maybe that did happen in Black Mirror and I'm forgetting about it. I wanna say Altered Carbon but it's been a while and I could be wrong.
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Jun 7, 2023 17:53
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I never understood the argument, in sci fi settings like Black Mirror, where you'd have a character want to make a digital copy of their consciousness so they could 'live forever'. I guess ideally you'd want to transfer that consciousness and end yourself in the process so that when you boot up in the computer, it's like you went to the transfer machine and then popped into the desktop. For the present you, you shed a corpse and can go do whatever digi immortal things you want now. If the original you stays alive then it's more like making clones. I'd still make a few clones, I know me and we'd work together well to make stuff that's too much for me to do alone or the other hundred things I want to be making even when I'm making something else already. These copies also wouldn't have to do the three annoying things we hate doing every day, work/eat/sleep. My copies should probably try to kill me before I get jealous and try to delete them and take all the credit for our art.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:03
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FireWorksWell posted:I wanna say Altered Carbon but it's been a while and I could be wrong. I don't remember Altered Carbon that well either, but isn't the point there that a person's mind is in those disc things? Somehow. Rupert Buttermilk posted:Honest question; can someone tell me about a sci-fi story/show/movie where the original consciousness of the person is legitimately moved or transported to or kept alive in something? Maybe that did happen in Black Mirror and I'm forgetting about it. This is stretching "in something" a little, but in Clarke's 2001 series of books the ancient aliens or whatever seemingly transfer several consciousnesses into the fabric of spacetime or whatever the techno-babble around it was. But this is just the Star Trek transporter argument all over again; would you ever step into one? Is it an execution machine with a funny side-function, or a transportation device?
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Jun 7, 2023 18:04
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ninjahedgehog posted:It did, a couple times -- San Junipero immediately comes to mind, as does Black Museum where they transfer the conciousness of the death row guy to the museum and the comatose wife to the monkey (although that one *also* has copies in it so it's a little muddled) I think the company behind the San Junipero thing were big fat liars about what was really being done.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:06
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Rappaport posted:I don't remember Altered Carbon that well either, but isn't the point there that a person's mind is in those disc things? Somehow. Don't Start Trek transporters literally transfer your consciousness in the data stream or something? Not that that's realistic, but canonically it's not destroying you and making a copy. Would step into one.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:10
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El Jeffe posted:Don't Start Trek transporters literally transfer your consciousness in the data stream or something? Not that that's realistic, but canonically it's not destroying you and making a copy. Would step into one. But what about Riker 2: Riker harder?
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Jun 7, 2023 18:12
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Rappaport posted:But what about Riker 2: Riker harder? Oh poo poo good point
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Jun 7, 2023 18:13
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Its space magic but basically the idea is that you have consciousness as a data stream and matter stream as another so if you get data stream the system can try to replace the missing parts of the matter stream. Or then that "fortunately it didn't live long" from ST:TMP happens. Transporter duplicates are "the data stream got reflected" mumblemumblemumble "and now we have the same person in the both ends". But yes, the general idea is that the person coming out from transporter in the other end is the same person built from the same materials and what the traveler experiences is standing in a bright bubble for a while.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:27
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Der Kyhe posted:Its space magic but basically the idea is that you have consciousness as a data stream and matter stream as another so if you get data stream the system can try to replace the missing parts of the matter stream. Or then that "fortunately it didn't live long" from ST:TMP happens. Yeah, it's space magic and by definition non-sensical, but if two Rikers can come out of the other end of the magic tube, it's not clear what happened to OG Riker. With Stargate, we at least see people partially existing on both sides of the worm hole, so it seems more plausible that it's just one person going through a magic tube, bing bong. Of course they contradict this in the episode where Teal'c gets stuck in the gate crystals  But to wrap this back around to the Black Mirror computer minds stuff, I sort of agree with Rupert that it'd be a copy of a person now existing in the (magic) computer. That said, I would at least feel sympathy to a digital copy of myself, and that's enough (for me!) to find all those episodes' premises truly and well hosed up.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:33
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Rappaport posted:I don't remember Altered Carbon that well either, but isn't the point there that a person's mind is in those disc things? Somehow. Yeah, the stacks store your conciousness, and you can beam your mind across the planet (or to another planet, in the books there's FTL communication, but not FTL transport) or restore yourself from a backup if you're horribly rich, and everybody just kind of breezes past the cloning/continuinity of concioussness issue. The books just aren't concerned with that, they're about the mutability of flesh, not the mutability of the soul.
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Jun 7, 2023 18:44
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Rappaport posted:I don't remember Altered Carbon that well either, but isn't the point there that a person's mind is in those disc things? Somehow. In Altered Carbon those stacks are more like backups in that if you die it can be implanted in a new (or borrowed) body, but if your stack is destroyed, that's it, you're dead. Moving to a new body which isn't a clone of your old one (which only the 1% can afford) can cause instability as it might have urges your consciousness doesn't (eg nicotine addiction). The 0.1% however, also have off site backups where every day their stack is backed up to a satellite, and as well as multiple clones around the world/galaxy. The protagonist Takeshi Kovacs is a former Protectorate special forces troop, and they undergo special training to quickly adapt to new bodies, which allows their consciousness to be needle cast (basically FTL information communication) to a ready body on another world - useful for such things as quickly putting down rebellions. e;fb
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Jun 7, 2023 18:47
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The game SOMA also tackles this question.
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Jun 7, 2023 19:22
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No Luck Needed posted:well that might be the point of the argument. You cannot upload your soul, so whatever digital recreation of your mental pathways is a separate from your physical soul. Any digital recreation of a person is it's own thing. It exists to be a metaphor for how politics are, by and large, a constant, never-ending series of "which people do we count as people." It's about how we treat each other when we don't think the other person is a person. Which is a lovely story when said person actually is not a person. So in the show, they usually very much are. Rupert Buttermilk posted:I never understood the argument, in sci fi settings like Black Mirror, where you'd have a character want to make a digital copy of their consciousness so they could 'live forever'.
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Jun 7, 2023 23:31
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I never understood the argument, in sci fi settings like Black Mirror, where you'd have a character want to make a digital copy of their consciousness so they could 'live forever'. Picard does it. Avatar is probably the most obvious, and it's in the name (and it has backups too).
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Jun 7, 2023 23:48
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I never understood the argument, in sci fi settings like Black Mirror, where you'd have a character want to make a digital copy of their consciousness so they could 'live forever'. I think this is what happens at the end of CHAPPiE, but I may be remembering wrong. The scientist that made Chappie is about to die, and then Chappie figures out a way to transfer his consciousness into another robot body and the scene is filmed as the guy going to sleep and then waking up in the new robot body. We don't go into the specifics of if the actual person is dead, but he seems to remember that he was dying/dead
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Jun 7, 2023 23:50
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I think in the Amazon show "Upload" there was an afterlife you can buy your way into. It's been a while, but I recall that you would only be able to transfer your conscience permanently by dying but you could also visit it by being unconscious (which is how people were able to visit their loved ones in heaven). So that kind of assumes its actually your singular consciousness and not a digital copy, but I don't believe the show ever delved too much into that. There was also a minor plotline where they were working on technology to put a conscience back into a different live body as well in the show (so people could live forever, basically). I only saw Season 1 so I don't know if it ever happened.
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Jun 8, 2023 01:05
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Transfer is when you die before your new consciousness is created, cloning is if you die after or don't die at all. Duh.
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Jun 8, 2023 01:28
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Superrodan posted:I think in the Amazon show "Upload" there was an afterlife you can buy your way into. It's been a while, but I recall that you would only be able to transfer your conscience permanently by dying but you could also visit it by being unconscious (which is how people were able to visit their loved ones in heaven). It worked by dying people going to the facility and it would scan their brain and then vaporize their head so it was a transition from being alive to being in the afterlife simulation. The people visiting was through a viewing screen or through VR goggles and VR suits. They also were working on bringing dead people back into the real world by growing bodies and then implanting the person's consciousness into the cloned body, but it ended poorly for the first guy that tried it.
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Jun 8, 2023 02:42
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Arguing about whether brain uploading or transporters "works" is stupid. It's trying to outsmart the show in a way that's totally incompatible with actually engaging with the ideas and emotions of the narrative.
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Jun 8, 2023 18:13
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The premise of the show is considering the hosed up implications of
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Jun 8, 2023 20:34
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Does tiktok access my brain to upload it to the cloud? Is tiktok torturing a clone of me in the cloud to find out what tiktoks I would like best?
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Jun 8, 2023 21:02
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Arguably tiktok doesn't need the clone 
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Jun 8, 2023 21:05
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DoctorWhat posted:Arguing about whether brain uploading or transporters "works" is stupid. It's trying to outsmart the show in a way that's totally incompatible with actually engaging with the ideas and emotions of the narrative. There are more dings than there are great analyses. That's just smart person math.
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Jun 9, 2023 01:37
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Superrodan posted:…the Amazon show "Upload"… The actual functionality of the tech is kind of silly on purpose, though. It isn’t really about transporter problem semantics, it’s a satire about capitalism. The main question the show actually engages with is, “why does this simulation that should be post-scarcity have artificial scarcity?” Digital afterlife is presented as a trivial and accessible technology, that’s priced as a luxury item because the IP is controlled by corporations; everything from virtual environments to clothes to food are monetized. It’s more of a condemnation of for-profit healthcare in that sense. The central plot is that the protagonist was murdered IRL and his digital memory altered because he’d developed an open source digital afterlife designed to be affordable and accessible to all.
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Jun 9, 2023 01:56
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Rewatched Crocodile on a laugh. I can sort of see what they're going for here, with the ironic moral of the piece. The mind reading technology is meant to help catch criminals, but it just encourages Andrea Riseborough to go on a particularly brutal killing spree, and in the end the only reason she's caught because she's somehow not brutal enough. It's basically a black comedy. Unfortunately there aren't an awful lot of jokes, and the pacing is a bit slack besides. Feel like it would have been a much stronger episode if they managed to shave most of the prologue off, for instance, and we just started after the time jump.
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Jun 9, 2023 13:06
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zenguitarman posted:The game SOMA also tackles this question. This, to me, is the gold standard of the kind of conscious-transferring horror, it really stuck with me after playing it.
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Jun 11, 2023 10:19
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It shouldn't, but it triggers something unsolvable in my lizard brain every time there's a crossover reference to another episode and that world's incompatible. This first episode is the most Black Mirror episode plot that's ever existed. Lady turns on Netflix: what's showing? It's HER! Edit: oh my god Selma Hyack. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Jun 15, 2023 |
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Jun 15, 2023 09:46
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Black Mirror is about the self. It's the one theme running through isn't it ? Like your identity as who you think you are vs your identity as perceived as others - and how much of each side you will sacrafice to improve the other.. Also your self as a stream of consciousness. No you is the same from moment to the next, but we all feel a continuation of thoughts and self, we remain ourselves despite constantly changing. And if ourselves or others can manipulate all those things what self are we? I'm think i am saying that San Junipero actually has a sad ending, an infinite span of consciousness makes our choices of who we spend our hours with meaningless, and our entities as self's only matter for the meaningful interaction they have in the world.
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Jun 15, 2023 10:59
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Good post yeah maybe. I like to think it's about trying to articulate our relationship with tools.
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Jun 15, 2023 11:09
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Open Source Idiom posted:This first episode is the most Black Mirror episode plot that's ever existed. Yeah they went so far with the premise, totally out there but in a really good way
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Jun 15, 2023 11:57
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I don't know what that first episode was. If you told me it was written by ChatGPT I would totally believe it. Second episode was much better.
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Jun 15, 2023 11:59
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s06e02 last ten minutes of the episode i couldn't help but raise my hands and whisperyell "but at what cost! but at what COOOSSSSTTTTTT!!!!!!!"
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Jun 15, 2023 12:42
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Rarity posted:Yeah they went so far with the premise, totally out there but in a really good way I loved the ending. I felt it subconsciously through the whole show but never twigged to the situation until it was revealed by Michael Cera
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Jun 15, 2023 12:44
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Episode Two was a very long episode of Inside No 9.
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Jun 15, 2023 12:53
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Loch Henry was very good but didn't really feel that Black Mirrory. Strong episode of television though
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Jun 15, 2023 13:02
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I genuinely liked how Loch Henry works by distracting you from its classic twist by having you wait for the WHAT IF PHONES part that never comes. It's pretty meta.
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Jun 15, 2023 13:06
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