Dollhouse/Caprica/BSG over-arching connection...

[Gompers]

I was watching Dollhouse on Netflix for the first time and instantly was pulled into the show. The concept of being able to to erase someone’s memories and upload new ones is fascinating. It really brings up the issue of what it means to be a human. I was discussing this issue with my professor in one of my classes after we talked about marketing and advertising to the public. Shows such as Caprica, Dollhouse, and BSG all require us to question what makes us human. Whether it is taking an avatar of a person that is essentially a replication of Zoe and placing it into a machine, trying to find where the line is between a human or Cylon in BSG, or uploading manufactured memories into a doll; all bring up the greater question of what separates us from these 'machines?" It is really just a thought-provoking topic. I guess am just throwing the topic out there for others to feed off of. And I also ran across an interview earlier today at io9.com, just to update the community. Loved to hear thoughts on the topic of what separates sentient machines and humans.

http://io9.com/5665334/eliza-dushku-on-what-dollhouse-taught-her-and-what-it-can-teach-us

[hansioux]

yup, Dollhouse had a great concept.

the time before these lines can be broken doesn’t feel that far away. perhaps that is why stories like these are so prevalent in recent scifi.

it certainly helps prepare us, or at least makes us think about what it all means.

[The_Operator]

yup, Dollhouse had a great concept.

the time before these lines can be broken doesn’t feel that far away. perhaps that is why stories like these are so prevalent in recent scifi.

it certainly helps prepare us, or at least makes us think about what it all means.

just in time for the robot/vamprie/zombie apocalypse

[Gompers]

yup, Dollhouse had a great concept.

the time before these lines can be broken doesn’t feel that far away. perhaps that is why stories like these are so prevalent in recent scifi.

it certainly helps prepare us, or at least makes us think about what it all means.

Exactly, I watched that PBS Frontline documentary, “The Persuaders,” and it talked about a corporation called Acxiom, which basically gathers a bunch of information on people ranging from their SS# to their electronic purchases. That right there is something that Zoe essentially did to make a copy of who she was in the V-World. It’s kinda funny that even in my Senior Seminar class I can bring up Caprica and Dollhouse as a relevant discussion topic. That is what I like about Sci-Fi in general. They seem to be one step ahead of the next big thing.

Here is that Acxiom link…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acxiom

[frakkintalos]

all bring up the greater question of what separates us from these 'machines?"

Welcome aboard, Gompers. This community is filled with threads about this wonderful and intriguing concept. This was the essential question posed by BSG. It leads to ‘Do we have a soul?’; ‘What is the human spirit and can it be emulated?’

[Fenatic]

The line from “The Social Network” really summed it up I think, when Sean says “We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re gonna live on the internet!”

Its sort of a simplistic way to look at it, but yeah. Dollhouse is the beginning, where we figure out how to digitize a brain basically. Once you have a digital copy of anything, it becomes really easy to edit, copy, re-write and share . (Think about digital music vs. a tape or record.) Even in the later parts of Dollhouse, they only scratched the surface of what that technology could do. Think about what would happen when everyone has access to the chair technology. Who wouldn’t download some extra data into their head. Imagine something like bit torren where instead of sharing multi-media you share people’s brains.

Caprica takes it one step further by putting the people in a virtual world, where “digital” people interact with living people. It also looks at what would happen when the “digital” mind gets placed into a non-human body.

I’d love to go on, but both those shows were canceled. :mad:

BSG is sort of the natural evolution of that, which is what happens when there is a race of people who are entirely digital. Death never really happens when the mind and body are completely separate.

[Starbuccaneer]

Shows such as Caprica, Dollhouse, and BSG all require us to question what makes us human. Whether it is taking an avatar of a person that is essentially a replication of Zoe and placing it into a machine, trying to find where the line is between a human or Cylon in BSG, or uploading manufactured memories into a doll; all bring up the greater question of what separates us from these 'machines?" It is really just a thought-provoking topic.

This was my favorite aspect of BSG, because it mined the questions really deeply and never really did anything more than give suggestions as to the answers.

In a universe in which we can take the existence of some sort of divinity as empirically true, is it possible for human-created life forms to be imbued with souls? If not, does that matter given that those human-created life forms can think and reason, feel emotion and physical sensation, invent religion, yearn for children, love and leave and kill and have hot, hot sex? Can they create their own value that is more than the sum of their parts and gives them inherent worth that we can recognize the same way we recognize inherent worth in ourselves?

BSG was a fantastic forum for exploring those questions because the skin jobs looked like us. Of course, human-created life forms are coming into existence all over the globe. It’s unlikely that the gasoline-producing alga and the fully synthetic bacteria have souls, but someday they might.