Alien: Earth show on FX on Hulu

[Battlehymn Republic]

First two episodes are out. The look and sound seem very faithful to the original film. There's also a Blade Runner-esque exploration into alternate forms of humanity. I like that, I like how it's trying to do an Alien film that can have other sci-fi ideas going on. And in a franchise that's all about a xeno with many morphs, why can't human beings do likewise?

[NecronLord]

I had an extra-immersive Alien Earth experience.

Started watching it yesterday, realised I'd accidentally taken some prescription medication twice and had to stop and go to the ER. They decided I needed to be in observation until 4am so I got to spend 5 hours listening to someone having a mental health crisis while being gently escorted by two police officers.

More immersively someone in the bed two bays down was complaining loudly about something inside him which he was convinced was getting out and which was probably due to drunkennes, but I did make a plan as to who I was pushing into the xenomorph's path just in case.

Having then crashed out 'til 1pm today I got onto finishing it.

Overall I think the first two episodes are "watchable" will need to see more to know if I would upgrade to "recommend" to any but Alien die-hards.

[Battlehymn Republic]

The show has revived the chestnut about Star Trek transporters killing people. Found a long attempt to argue how they might not be.
Spoiler

I want to add to the discussion about copying consciousness, since this has come up in AE. Let’s start with the problem, the Star Trek Teleporter Consciousness Copy problem. Which is that, the Beam Me Up teleporters in Star Trek will, apparently, simply copy you, atom by atom, from one place to another. This is not moving you, this is copying you.

Which seems fine, until you think about what your consciousness is, how it comes into being, and what happens when your neurons are copied wholesale from one place to another. Our assumption is that your consciousness, you, is some sort of phenomenon emerging from the complex interactions of neurons in your brain. If you replicate and copy the neurons, and the impulses which stimulate the neurons, you haven’t moved the consciousness, you’ve created a new consciousness, identical, but separate from the original.

This would seem to mean the original Captain Kirk was killed the first time he was transported.

But this is not necessarily the case.

Let’s consider, in the simplest terms, what consciousness is, and how you could, perhaps, move it with a teleporter.

Your brain is a big meat bag full of cells called neurons, a bunch of weird chemicals, glial cells, blood, and probably a bunch of other shit which I know very little about. As far as I can tell, it’s like a big bag of electrified spaghetti, and somehow oxygen goes in, and consciousness comes out.

Neurons are cells which receive and transmit an impulse between each other. They have dendrites, which typically receive the impulse, and axons, which typically transmit the impulse. Neurons often have many inputs connected to their dendrites, and one output, connected to another neuron’s dendrites. I imagine our bag of spaghetti would look like a plant with many roots growing wildly from its core.

I’ve noticed that people who start to get into how consciousness comes out of the spaghetti bag start talking about crazy shit, like quantum mechanics, or the very nature of knowledge, perception, experience, and all that junk. I’m going to just ignore all that, because it’s complicated, I don’t understand it, and it scares me. And I’m going to say this: All of these impulses traveling through the shape of these neural connections, reentering the network, integrating stimuli from neural impulses from your eyes and nerve endings, firing up different parts of the brain which function to process visual, or auditory stimuli, or connect and associate what is stimulating you right now with memories which have been imprinted into the network in the past – that is what gives rise to your consciousness.

It is not the neurons, though they give it shape, it is the sparks, or the impulses traveling along the neurons, which give shape to memory, to the reactions to current stimuli, and all these peculiar things that add up to you, as a sentient being.

Next, we have our tools. A teleporter, a wormhole generator, and a virtual neuron. The teleporter can copy atoms from one place to another. The wormhole allows us to connect two disparate places in the universe. And the virtual neuron is a prosthetic neuron, which does exactly what a regular neuron does – receive and transmit impulses – but can be itself computerized, or might exist physically and be made of synthetic materials. But you hook this bad boy up in the network, and it works the exact same way the original neuron did, the other neurons can’t tell the difference.

Since we have wormhole technology, actually, we’ve solved the problem. We don’t need to kill Captain Kirk, we’ll just open a Kirk-shaped hole in the universe and move his whole horny ass from one place to another.

Well, that’s fine, but actually I think moving someone’s consciousness is still more interesting, so let’s just say that our wormholes are extremely limited in their function. They are very small, and can only do things like transmit the impulse of a neuron one time before they collapse and we have to regenerate them.

Alright you spaghetti-bags, here’s where the magic happens. We’re going to replace one neuron with a virtual neuron using our teleporter and our wormholes. We aim the teleporter at one of Kirk’s neurons, which is busy collaborating with the rest of his neural net on how to get into some alien pants, and zap. The neuron is removed, just one! But don’t worry, we carefully hook up our wormholes to the dendrites and axon of the removed neuron, and now the impulses that would have gone through the removed neurons are being transmitted to our virtual neuron instead. The impulses in the meat-Kirk neural net are none the wiser, and the virtual neuron works exactly the same way our removed neuron would have. We’ll leave Kirk’s thoughts themselves a mystery, for our sakes, and continue the procedure.

We remove the next neuron, keeping the impulses travelling through the structure of Kirk’s brain intact. The next neuron is hooked up to the next virtual neuron. And so on. We have now copied a third of Kirk’s brain, the impulses which form his consciousness are traveling through the meat-Kirk neural net, and then connecting through these incredible wormholes to the virtual-Kirk neural network that is running on the ship’s computers, or even a synthetic brain. Impulses representing visual information travel along his optic nerve bundle, and travel along his real meat neurons until they reach the wormholes that transmit those impulses into the structures of virtual neurons running on the ship’s computer, which then process that information in the virtual-Kirk neural net, and transmit impulses back into his real meat brain, preserving the chain of impulses that make up Kirk’s consciousness.

Kirk’s consciousness is not being copied, it is being moved. The original impulses that eventually bloom into this emergent phenomenon of consciousness are not diverted from the path, they remain integrated in the original process which represents Kirk’s original, conscious self.

Now we complete the process, capturing the impulses themselves, like fireflies in a jar. The fact that, during this process, these impulses exist in multiple places in space at the same time hardly matters – after all, why should a neuron care if the stimulation it receives comes through a wormhole, or a normal neural impulse? If the impulse is functionally the same, it is the same to that neuron, and it is the same to the process as a whole.

We could copy him while we are doing this, too. We could add new organs to his brain, split his personality in weird ways, make many Kirks who are disconnected from the process, but let’s set aside these horrors from now.

I believe it is conceivable to move someone’s original consciousness through a teleporter in this manner.

Let’s go back to the Alien universe. In this setting we don’t have Kirks (which I will consider a mercy, given his treatment of aliens in his universe), teleporters, or wormholes – or if such things exist, humans on Earth probably don’t have access to them.

But I believe we can contrive some way to functionally move a consciousness given the sorts of tools, and the tone that makes up the worldbuilding in Alien. In principle, I think the only thing that really matters is preserving the same integrated chain of impulses as they travel along a neural net. It doesn’t matter if the impulse is actually caused by an adjacent neuron, or by an artificial stimulus running in a separate network.

I think we would use things like magnetic field controlled monowire probes, and other nanomachine things, that could carefully be inserted into the subject’s brain, and be manipulated to carry the impulses from the real neurons to our virtual neurons. Again, one by one, these neurons are replaced by artificial neurons, while we preserve the process of impulses itself, keeping the impulses integrated into the original process, and lifting it into the new host body.

The story in AE may actually come to different conclusions, but I think it is at least conceivable that someone’s consciousness could be copied.

[bilateralrope]

The show has revived the chestnut about Star Trek transporters killing people.

From what I've seen of that transporter argument, when you dive deep enough into the arguments of both sides you're left with one side saying that the person is still alive because the person who went into the transporter is identical to the person who comes out. While the other side points to some part of the process and says that it killed them. I'm not sure if I could say that either side is objectively correct.

But when I try to think about how one could treat the person who has been transported, trying to treat the person who came out of the transport as anyone other than the person who went in gets uncomfortable very quickly. Especially when you get into the legal aspects of their identity, including property ownership, contracts and criminal activity. It gets worse when you can't be sure if someone was transported.

So I'm on the side of saying that transporters don't kill, and I'm not sure any society with them would be able to maintain the "transporters kill" position.

[Battlehymn Republic]

I think the actual conceit is the introduction of this "virtual neuron" mechanism that could theoretically preserve the "impulses which form his consciousness" as they're being squeezed through a wormhole. The thing is, that depends on 1) consciousness really simply being a gestalt of neural impulses, and 2) that could be accurately simulated with prosthetics, but it's a neat enough idea.

Going back to A:E, I'm skeptical that
Spoiler

Prodigy is doing anything as fancy as that with their mind uploading thing, but it would be neat if they were. We're certainly told that their computers are capable of simulating human personalities, and can be tweaked to simulate the effects of hormones, so there's that.

Just saw one of the comments in the Reddit thread mention neural energy, which is stored in transporter pattern buffers. Has the entire ASVS bashing of Trek transporters been based on overlooking this detail developed by the lore? lol

[bilateralrope]

That long attempt to justify it assumes facts that are contradicted by what we see on-screen. Things like "Since we have wormhole technology, actually, we’ve solved the problem. We don’t need to kill Captain Kirk, we’ll just open a Kirk-shaped hole in the universe and move his whole horny ass from one place to another." When Star Trek transporters are usually described as taking a person apart and reassembling them elsewhere. Though I have seen other sci-fi that does use a wormhole based teleport, not a dematerialization based one.

In the end, what matters is to me is the end result. While the people saying that transporters/uploading kills the subject point to some part of the process that they say kills them, ignoring what comes out the other end.

If you want me to go into detail on why I think a society with transporter/upload use will be unable to maintain the belief that they are deadly, let me know and I'll start another thread about it. I'll be mainly focused on transporters.

[Broomstick]

I recall two interesting treatments of the transporter technology

One is in the novel Kraken by China Miéville. The transporter thing is but one detail among so many other weird things in the novel, although ultimately very important. In that universe the teleporter technology does, in fact, kill the person and create a new identical person at the other end. The inventor of the technology winds up severely haunted by all the former versions of himself he killed. They are very not happy with him.

Another was a series of books whose titles and author I can't remember at the moment where interstellar travel involves scanning a person to get a complete data set on them then transmitting that data to another star system. An identical copy walks out of the receiver light years away and the originals goes about his business as if nothing had happened. There can be multiple transmissions, resulting in identical copies all light years apart. This can also be done in the other direction. At one point a protagonist is transmitted back to Earth and goes in search of the original, friends, and family. This totally creeps out everyone because it turns out the original died years before in a scuba accident.

[bilateralrope]

Transporter duplicates are always going to complicate things.

Now, back to the series, I'm wondering if the opening text will turn out to be a lie.
Spoiler

Specifically, the race for immortality part.

I expect that we can all see how uploading can be seen as immortality. Though that is limited a bit by hybrids requiring the minds of children. At least, for the current version.

Cyborgs leave the question of "What happens when the humans brain dies ?"
If everything can be replaced without memory loss, this could be a route to immortality. If not, it won't be. Oh and the cyborg we have seen leaves me thinking that his personality was altered at some point.

Then there are the synths. AIs in robot bodies. I'm not seeing how anyone would see this as human immortality.

But I could see this as a race for a labor force that's useful when humans are less desirable. Either due to physical limitations or because humans think for themselves too much for a megacorps liking.


From what I can recall about other Alien titles, the synths are the only ones present later in the timeline. Though the people running the megacorps might want hybrids for themselves if the process can be made to work on adults