On the Societal Values of Those With Artificial Bodies

Surrogates comes out on Friday, though I need to find some time to go see it. However pondering the world of Surrogates, where one gets to have an artificial body stand in for them.

The first idea which came to mind was the world of professional sports. It would be drastically different from today if it still existed. Today's professional sports are already plagued by bodies that are medically artificial, through the use of performance enhancing drugs, but when you replace that body with a robot, then you might as well give up any semblance that the sport is a display of natural human abilities. I'm sure extreme sports will become more popular, as the threat of dying has been removed (it might also loose it's appeal). But with professional sports, anyone and their mom with the proper amount of money can buy a body and their way into the league.

Which brings up a second point. Similar to the world of Gattaca, class structures will be built around who has the best surrogate. At first one could claim that the playing field would be leveled, but those with the proper means can create the best bodies that are allowable by technology. The rich would have the more desirable bodies and the poor would get the remainder.

And lastly, if we eschew physical human contact altogether, how on Earth are we to reproduce and raise our children. Sex would be completely safe and non-committal, and there would be no pregnancies. And even if children are borne, they have to grow, mentally, and primarily physically before that they could assume a surrogate body to stand in for them in the real world. The idea of pedagogy is a very complicated one and would need more time than I currently have to explore.

9 gets half that out of ten

If you do not want to be spoiled for the movie 9 yet do not read this post.

As a science fiction film, 9 fell flat. It was fun and all, but I, in my scientific humanism, atheism whatnot, got turned off at the mention of a Human soul.

Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers!


You have been warned:

The setting of this movie is your typical post robot induced apocalypse. It features prominently a barren waste land, devoid of life. From the various flash backs and what-nots in the story you learn that human made robots, created by a scientist who is voiced by Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin to J Robert Oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame, turned against humanity and destroyed all life using some gas.

The only reason cited in the movie for the robots' turn against humanity is that the machine brain was created from human intellect, but didn't possess a human soul. This is where I call frelnik. It's not souls I have a problem with. It's the objectification of it, literally as if it is a thing to be had, and that it's only applicable to Humans. As I understand it, the soul is a manifestation of the processes which make us people, similar to how the consciousness is a manifestation of the processes of the brain.

This sticks a bad taste in my mouth similar to racism. Whereas Black people are only suited to labor because they were born inferior, robots are only suited to the destruction of humanity because they lack the inherent goodness of Human beings. Mind you it is Humans which invented the whole war thing, and the mass killings of other Humans. In The Matrix when the robots subjugated Humans, it was because Humans repeatedly denied their status as people, and equal participants in the world. Other instances in movies where the robots destroy, it's because they've been provoked or that through some part of their programming was faulty compared to the ethics of humans, not from mere lack of a soul.

This movie seems irresponsible in theme, given the rich history of other robots in science fiction. It is not a movie that I'll be showing my kids.

And don't get me started on how the rain starts once parts of the scientist's soul escapes into the sky, and how that rain is full of green life despite the death of all living stuffs. Ugh..

A weïrd dream with a recurring segment

I've had this recurring dream lately, and it's pretty much The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. People are trying to kill me and replace me with a creepier less personable counterpart.

Last night's version was much more interesting. I was visiting my parents with Sums, my fiancée, in Minnesota and we went to go get the train tickets. We go to get our train tickets to go back home to Chicago the next day, and I some how wind up in the train, though I'm not ticketed for that ride. So I get off at the next stop, and ride a very long winding escalator through the station, waving to Sums at her desk at work, when I realize that I left my bag on the train. So, once I get to the bottom, I rush up to the top, get on the train and fail to find my bag before the doors close and I fall back asleep. I wake up barefoot in the barn from Resident Evil 4 where you torch the hangy evil man, near Lacrosse, Wisconsin, and take a step outside. Here I find that it's in 1800's reenactment mode, and I hurry to find some buses out of there. I sit next to a young girl on the bus and I find myself at her house. After taking a pee and looking at her weïrd shaped door, I decide that I need to get out of the house before her parents discover that I had been there alone with her, as to not get shot. (All in the while I've been trying to get to a place where my parents can pick me up)

This is when the body snatchers thing starts. I see her parents having a good time on the lawn mower, and make a dash in the other direction. Then I bump into a more bloody version of her father, and then it comes to me that the people I know and care about are being replaced by aliens. Copy-father sees me and starts running after me, and I bolt. He catches up and we tumble into a ditch.

Now the dream enters abstract mode, on the other side of the ditch, vertically, there's a red ball of shiny. Thinking that it's the infamous red matter of the new Star Trek movie, the copy-father has a speech bubble that says, oh, that's heavy. We then tumble into the ditch and fuse with the ball, which becomes a red and flesh colored swirl. The red part, which is also the copy-father, leaves goes into a Terry Gilliam-esque animation machine and comes out as a rather thin, short, saggy rectangle. Then the fleshy ball, me, goes through the machine, and comes out thick, organic, complex, long and rather mushroomy. Of course I identify the phallic imagery, and know that because I'm a real human, I'll make the better lover in bed. During the animated portion, scenes of really awesome freaks from the Jerry Springer Show are spliced in.

I've only identified the body-snatchers chase theme as a recurring element of the dream. I wonder however, if it means something.

Holy Frell! I've been Lax!

There are things that I enjoy so much which are, especially in their execution, utterly human; simply enough, we call them the Humanities. Some of the humanities are far more catholic, story telling, though we have no basis on what other non-human cultures have in their story-telling conventions. Others, like painting, are based in our biological perception of the world to the point that even other mammals might not be able to make a similar visual sense of the piece. Every one of the humanities are effected by the mere fact that we are humans, and in ways that are too profound to grasp.

I enjoy the humanities thoroughly, though I am fascinated on how they, and our modern visual culture, would be changed by regular contact with other technologically advanced peoples. Architecture would enlarge in all dimensions to allow the largest creature who enters the space comfort. Visual displays would have to assume a large range of colors to allow comprehension by all pigments in the eyes of those who gaze upon them.

Let us return to the architecture notion. The accessibility requirements would be astounding! Most humans are of a similar size and shape, and we can make pretty decent generalizations of what humans need. Once aliens with different anatomies get thrown in the fold, then things change drastically. Theaters might go the way of airplanes and have to charge per seat, or the larger creatures might have to sit in the back. Vehicles would have to be designed to a particular species' modes of manipulation. Eateries would have to serve portions of different sizes and macronutritive compositions. It seems that segregation might occur as an easy means of keeping conventions separate.

This potential segregation scares the hell out of me, as the segregation of human race scares me. With segregation comes hatred and crime, distrust, and inequality. I feel that it would be a great boon to us to integrate with our intellectually capable brethren, to allow their views on life to inform ours and to allow our view to inform theirs. We would both become greater peoples, and hopefully, a single people in this manner.