Daemul wrote...
Ieldra, your post has just reminded me of EDI's stupid definition of Transhuman in ME3. According to her, every inch of your body can be robotic but as long as your brain is organic you don't count as a Transhuman. Which writer in the Bioware team came up with that crap? It's like they were pushing an agenda.
Don't agree. Even transhumanists believe this. That we won't be truly transhuman until we are able to upload ourselves into a cybernetic/synthetic body/virtual space and stay there. Everything else is simply on the 'path' to transhumanism.
Shepard entering the Geth Consensus, for example, is very much the closest that any human in Mass Effect comes to outright transhuman state. It's still not enough though.
Only in Control and Synthesis does he become utterly transhuman. In Control, it is in the more conventional thought (thoughts in an artificial brain), and in Synthesis, it is in the more transcendant religion-ish/animism-ish mode of thought (a 'spirit' that inspires everyone thought networked connections). Matrix films also take the latter route at the end.
Your brain is what directs everything of your identification as human. You could even be in a friggin Dalek (to reference a fairly recent episode of Who), but as long as there's human organic brain functions (aka the limits and possibilities that organic minds contain), you can consider yourself a human, at least enough to maintain that level of existence and perspective.
As soon as cybernetics overcome the organic portion, you've lost your humanity, but also gained your transhuman state. For Mass Effect, Control turns Shepard into something 'more', but still guided by the record of what Shepard was. Synthesis removes the role of 'Shepard', but uses his mind (and like later series info indicates, his DNA as well) helps synthetics and organics come to what appears to be a level of understanding.
Of course, this is still subjective. To some people, we're already transhuman. I can imagine it all coming down to personal interpretation. By the time of ME3, perhaps most consider 'transhuman' to instead = 'moving past human brain qualities'. We no longer boost our brains or fix them, etc, but instead move past the human mind itself. As such, the restrictions and identifiers of 'human' no longer matter.
Synthesis does move past transhumanism and into a whole 'transorganic + transsynthetic' deal though. It's a larger princible of transcendence, and most people are not willing to 'jump' into such a thing without 'guidance' beforehand
. Control is more about the more grounded idea of transhumanism itself; that is, keeping aspects of who we are while altering ourselves into something more, instead of transforming into something almost entirely different and new (even with that being the ultimate goal of transhumanist philosophy).
Anyway, I'd say that the whole series just wants to present the questions in a gradual manner. Shepard of ME1, regardless of what either of us prefer, has a mindset that fits more gamers than otherwise. Kill dose robots.
Over time, we're given other perspectives, which we can listen to or reject... and if we listen to them, we can agree or disagree... and if we reject them, we can kill or spare the messengers. Even Indoctrination, taken from certain perspectives, can be thoughts as just the way that Reapers get certain agents to understand what problem they're dealing with. Even Huskification, if some theories are right, just transfers the organic mind to elsewhere, already set to be preserved in Reaper form/virtual world.
We just don't know enough info *yet*. We'll need another, more wide-in-moral-scope, character to help us know these things. For now, in 99%+ of the series, we have Shepard in whatever form, and Shepard IS more innately a Destroyer who would reject synthetics without our continuous player-choice intervention and plot guidance into chances to learn more about their realm.
My prediction is that the next game will investigate more. That the Control and Synthesis (especially Synthesis) options are a bit premature in ME3, but they also have a role to play and we're not going to be severely punished for making any of the choices, except maybe if they were Low EMS. Assuming sequel of some form.
I don't think Bioware has an anti-tech agenda, and I don't remotely think they're
against Synthesis. It's the Reapers themselves that are a problem, regardless of your choice at the end, and we have to make a decision on what we morally/virtually/literally want to do about them, their impact on the galaxy, and their past and possible future actions. That's something beyond Shepard's depth, but he has to do something, and he knows that. It's also something beyond most players' depth, but we're forced to do something (or turn off the game...), and we know that Bioware isn't significantly changing the scenario for us just because we were or are upset about it.
Modifié par SwobyJ, 28 décembre 2013 - 08:37 .
Retour en haut
