Thanks for the spoiler
Agents of Shield - Season 4
- Thread starter MarsWeeps
- Start date
Well, I put "real" in quotes to emphasize that it was an arbitrary use of the term — not to indicate that one is more real than the other (which may be true, as a separate argument), but just to indicate which version of the character we're talking about.
Christopher, my post wasn't arguing about their status as sentient beings with a right to live ... only what "live" means. Those of us outside the Framework are "real" by our own definition ( ... and since we're the ones making the observation, that's the only definition required for us). Those inside the Framework MAY be real depending on what definition you use. That's where the philosophers and the attorneys take over. But even if they are, the definitions of life and death for them are unlikely to be the same as ours. Not if "life" can be achieved by flipping a switch and "death" can be reversed by re-spawning. So far we've seen nothing to indicate otherwise.
I think that even if two iterations of a consciousness were identical to start with, they would develop into separate beings in different iterations. That's partly due to separate life experiences, but also due to the inherent dynamism of a neural network -- you can see my thoughts on the issue if you track down my story "Murder on the Cislunar Railroad" in the June 2016 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Uh, I'm not sure how that fits with what I wrote. I agree it sounds likely, though.
Which raises even more questions about whether it's in the "real" Fitz's nature to be a cold-blooded killer.
Which raises even more questions about whether it's in the "real" Fitz's nature to be a cold-blooded killer.
What I mean is that "re-spawning" wouldn't reverse death, i.e. wouldn't put the dead person back exactly as they were; rather, they'd still be dead, but they'd be replaced by a doppelganger of themselves, a different version of the same person. So their death would still be irreversible. Like, if Will Riker were killed, you couldn't just plug in Tom Riker to replace him. They started as the same person, but their different life experiences made them two different people.
Hmm, interesting possibility. Still, I suspect that if the show explains it at all, it'll just be that death = deletion and that re-spawning isn't possible. Obviously Simmons is an exception, but in her case they were able to re-download the source code. 
If your theory were correct, wouldn't that mean that the "emulation" of a living person who's jacked into the Framework might diverge differently every time? I realize that's not the same thing as a copied personality such as Agnes, but I'm not sure the Framework itself would view them any differently. It's all code.
That's what I meant by the "real" Fitz not normally having the capability to be a cold-blooded killer; he only became one because the inherent dynamism you refer to caused his simulation to develop that way. Whereas if Fitz were to unplug himself and then jack in again, his next iteration might display different traits.
If your theory were correct, wouldn't that mean that the "emulation" of a living person who's jacked into the Framework might diverge differently every time? I realize that's not the same thing as a copied personality such as Agnes, but I'm not sure the Framework itself would view them any differently. It's all code.
That's what I meant by the "real" Fitz not normally having the capability to be a cold-blooded killer; he only became one because the inherent dynamism you refer to caused his simulation to develop that way. Whereas if Fitz were to unplug himself and then jack in again, his next iteration might display different traits.
Hmm, interesting possibility. Still, I suspect that if the show explains it at all, it'll just be that death = deletion and that re-spawning isn't possible. Obviously Simmons is an exception, but in her case they were able to re-download the source code.
Simmons might not be an exception per se. It's quite possible that as things played out in the framework she was dead however Jemma and Daisy entered seperated to try and rescue the others the former picked up where her avatar left off.
I actually do believe that the "real" Fitz has the capability of being a cold-blooded killer... If Jemma's life were on the line. Aida has transferred Fitz's devotion to Jemma from Jemma to herself and Fitz will do anything at all to protect her.
And Aida choosing to hook up with Fitz didn't surprise me in the slightest. Even from the beginning, pre-Darkhold, I got the sense that Aida was soft for old "Leopold".
It's all about love. Sick, twisted and vaguely un-natural love to be certain, but when is it ever perfect?
And Aida choosing to hook up with Fitz didn't surprise me in the slightest. Even from the beginning, pre-Darkhold, I got the sense that Aida was soft for old "Leopold".
It's all about love. Sick, twisted and vaguely un-natural love to be certain, but when is it ever perfect?
Last edited:
2008. Same year as the first Iron Man movie.
Well, that's the year the movie came out, but the online references that I can find seem to date its events to either 2009 or 2010, presumably because of references in the later films.
The MCU, much like the comics MU and DCU, has become the victim of the dreaded sliding timescale, where you have to take the references to time with a grain of salt. 2010's Iron Man 2 supposedly takes place "Six Months Later" from 2008's Iron Man, and yet the movie's climactic events supposedly take place in the same week as the climactic events of 2008's The Incredible Hulk and 2011's Thor. And then, 2012'sThe Avengers supposedly takes place one year after 2010's Iron Man 2.
But then, you have Vision referring to the "eight years" since Tony Stark came out as Iron Man in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, which works in real time, but not in the timeline as presented in the movies.
Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...
Last edited:
Not if there was unbroken continuity. Then it was a migration of her consciousness, which would make Framework Agnes the same person as Meatworld Agnes.
Bullshit.
There is no thing called a consciousness that latches onto the new medium of the framework leaving the brain.
Her brain was reconstructed in the framework and synchronized at the Moment of upload.
A consciousness is not a tangible thing.
It's a product of the brain.
And even if you believe in a duality of mind/soul and body it would be a stretch to think that her soul now lives inside a computer simulation.
Framework Agnes is a copy.
The SHIELD agents in the framework are not copies. They are avatars interlinked with the original brains.
There is a difference.
I don't agree, since Agnes was alive when she was first put into the Framework. Her mind was uploaded into the Framework while her organic mind was still active and connected to it, and the upload has lived on after her biological death. So it's as much a direct continuation of her conscious mental existence as her physical body's "onboard" consciousness would've been if she'd lived.
And even if it were merely a separate copy, I'd agree there's a difference if the question is whether it's the same person -- but I don't think there's a difference if the question is whether it's a person, deserving of life and human rights. What we were told about the Framework before the break was that it used enough computing power (with help from the Darkhold) to be a complete and accurate simulation of the entire Earth, so detailed as to be utterly indistinguishable from physical reality. If that is true of the world, it must be true of the people as well. LMayD's Darkhold-boosted brain design was complex enough to be sentient, as was the Coulson LMD's. They were copies, but they were still self-aware, thinking, feeling people. It stands to reason that the same is true of the people within the Framework. So it could be argued that they're the equivalent of a transporter duplicate like Tom Riker -- not the same person, but no less a person because of it.
The "people" in the Framework do NOT exist. They are a simulation, albeit a very sophisticated one. They only exist in the computer(s) that run the Framework. They are not at all like Tom Riker. That was a person (accident) that lives in the real world. The Framework people do not.
Of course they exist. Computers exist as physical objects; the data within them exists as physical states within their circuits. (Otherwise how are we having this conversation?) Your own consciousness exists as an intangible emergent property of the electrochemical processes running in the organic computer called your brain. Their consciousnesses exist as intangible emergent properties of the electrical processes running in the inorganic computers that power the Framework. If they're not "real" because they're just data, then your mind isn't "real" either, because it's also just data. It's just running inside a different substrate, the brain of a living, mobile body rather than a CPU in a server farm. If a human brain were in a quadriplegic body and incapable of moving around and interacting physically with the world, would you say that person wasn't real?
And the physical reality of the world the consciousness interacts with is irrelevant to the question of the consciousness's own reality and sentience. Indeed, some scientists argue it's more probable than not that our universe is a computer simulation. (It's a statistical argument: If a sufficiently advanced supercomputer could model multiple entire universes, and a given universe can contain a vast number of supercomputers, then it follows that simulated universes would overwhelmingly outnumber physical universes, thus the odds are much greater that our universe is in the former category.) Even if you prefer a more conventional religious view of the universe's origin, it is still the creation of a conscious being, so how is a universe created by a god any less "artificial" than a universe created by a human?
Without a way to experimentally test such a hypothesis, and evidently there is no such way, that hypothesis is unscientific, regardless of how many scientists might argue for it. And I guess you missed my post, or are simply ignoring it, on how it's impossible for a supercomputer capable of modeling the real universe with perfect fidelity to even exist in our universe.
Similar threads
