Author Topic: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?  (Read 2128 times)

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Offline silverspring

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #15 on: April 02, 2012, 03:32:01 AM »
Quote
On the other hand, if the host body and brain was exponentially intelligent, it would reach self-awareness and argue for control of the body. This is to say that all morphed bodies have the potential for individuality but because of the 2h limit this is never an issue.

This is an excellent point. I understood why Cassie had a problem with morphing humans, but I never understood her reluctance of morphing animals. However, if her thinking was meant to be along the lines of what you just said, I have to say, that's extremely perceptive.

Also your post made me think...if human consciousness is centered in the physical brain, and their physical brain is floating somewhere in Z-space with the rest of their bodies, it would give credence to Cassie's argument that they are in fact "controlling" a body and brain which does not belong to them. I guess the question becomes whether or not the instincts/will of the cloned being (sentient or otherwise) can be equated to consciousness...for example, when Cassie morphs Rachel, has a separate consciousness also been created, one which is silenced underneath Cassie's control of the body? Or is it simply a physical body/brain which is being animated by a separate life force (Cassie)?

What would've happened if Ax had been allergic to one of the humans' DNA (Jake, Cassie, Rachel, Marco) he acquired at the beginning of the series? Would the body he expelled be a fully-functioning being with thoughts and emotions of his/her own, or something more akin to a zombie?  :huh:
"I guess sometimes you have to choose between smart, sane, ruthlessness, and totally stupid, insane hope. You can't just pick one and stick with it, either. Each time it comes up, you have to try and make your best decision. Most of the time, I guess I have to go with being smart and sane. But I don't want to live in a world where people don't try the stupid, crazy, hopeful thing sometimes."

Offline Chad32

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #16 on: April 02, 2012, 08:13:07 AM »
The body would likely act as if it was a newborn, since that's basically what it would be. Except it has a fully functional body. You know how two year olds get frustrated because their bodies haven't caught up to where their brains are? This would kind of be a reverse of that. It would be zombie-like, I think.


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Offline Jetstream

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #17 on: April 02, 2012, 11:12:12 PM »
Except the morphed brain doesn't have a thought process of its own. At all. It is entirely under the control of the Human mind that created it in the first place.

The ONLY thing the Animorphs have to deal with are differences in brain structure, in particular the replacement of their hind and midbrains with that of critters, thus accounting for the inborn instincts they have to fight. Their forebrains maintained all personality and conscious thought. There is no other critter involved in morphing, and the entire argument involving any morality in morphing is fatuous. They're simply reconstructing their structure to be physically identical to that of a different critter than Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Offline Aftran261

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #18 on: April 03, 2012, 06:30:58 AM »
When someone morphs into an ant or something, its brain can't possibly be supporting their mind, so the mind is probably somewhere else and connected to the brain and controlling movement.
On this premise, if they morph something more intelligent, they'll still be controlling movement and so on. But since their mind isn't in the brain, what's all that brain doing?
Of course, all of the above will be void if morphing is designed to use as much of the brain as available for your thoughts and only put the leftovers somewhere else. Or if the premise is rubbish.



Offline DinosaurNothlit

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #19 on: April 03, 2012, 10:11:38 AM »
At that point of time, they had no real idea how morphing worked.  Without Ax there to make it somewhat understandable to them what happened (if he ever really could), morphing probably had more of a mystical quality rather than a scientific quality to them, and to Cassie in particular.  It is reasonable to assume that she could be worried that they would be stealing the animal's essence more than their DNA, and their temporary inability to control the morph in the beginning would probably reinforce that thought.  They are essentially creating animals to just bend them to their will, basically be their slaves.

Yeah, I can definitely see Cassie thinking that way.  And it is true that they didn't really 'get' the idea behind morphing at first, given how confused Jake was by Tobias being able to morph a healthy hawk from DNA from an injured one, or how long it took them in book 4 to realize that morphing would heal Marco's dolphin tail.  If they had really been thinking about morphing from a purely 'scientific' standpoint, both of those realizations ought to have been instantaneous.

  • On the other hand, if the host body and brain was exponentially intelligent, it would reach self-awareness and argue for control of the body. This is to say that all morphed bodies have the potential for individuality but because of the 2h limit this is never an issue.

The latter would definitely support the idea of killing a creature when you demorph. Really though it is completely arguable either way because it's fiction. It is more convenient for everyone to just think that morphs are yours to do what you want because it suits you but I don't think Cassie is wrong in her observation. It takes a very perceptive mind to notice this.

You could say that Tobias (as a nothlit) never has a problem with the hawk wanting to assert it's own will or he never notices the hawk's individuality. This is probably because he literally becomes the hawk living exactly how his hawk would live. Not to mention every remorph "resets" the morphs' minds. If the host was more intelligent (loosely described) sentient then it could be more significant, making the issue with morphing sentient beings more of an issue.

Interesting idea.  Actually, it occurs to me that the idea of exponential intelligence of morphs would actually explain a lot about Tobias.  As the series progressed, he became more and more hawklike, and less and less human, right?  What if that wasn't simply his human brain 'adjusting' to life as a hawk?  What if the hawk itself was learning how to be a hawk, and as it gained more awareness of its own condition, it was able to assume more and more control, so subtly that Tobias never even fully noticed what was going on?  It would make sense that the morph's developing mind would be pretty intricately linked to the human mind, so much so that even Tobias might not have fully known where one ended and the other began.

When someone morphs into an ant or something, its brain can't possibly be supporting their mind, so the mind is probably somewhere else and connected to the brain and controlling movement.
On this premise, if they morph something more intelligent, they'll still be controlling movement and so on. But since their mind isn't in the brain, what's all that brain doing?
Of course, all of the above will be void if morphing is designed to use as much of the brain as available for your thoughts and only put the leftovers somewhere else. Or if the premise is rubbish.

That is a really good question.  Wow, I can't believe that never occurred to me before, but you're right, the biological brain of the creature should in theory be a fully-functional mind of its own.  After all, what would be stopping it?  Unless whoever developed the morphing technology thought of that and built in some kind of mechanism specifically to repress the morph's intelligence.  Possible, but given the number of things they didn't think of (like why not make the technology only work on Andalites?), I'd be inclined to doubt it.

As for the idea of putting certain thoughts in the biological brain and leaving the 'extras' in z-space, I find that unlikely.  It seems like it would be much easier to put all of the morpher's mind into one place, since splitting it up could get complicated.  How would the morphing technology decide what parts of the mind should go where?

On the other hand, though . . . there was book #32, where Rachel morphs a starfish and gets her mind split in half when her physical brain is split.  How would that happen if the entire mind was in z-space?  Unless maybe there isn't just one link between the morph-mind and the z-space mind, but rather the entire brain is mapped out and each neuron of the morph is connected to a neuron in z-space.  Come to think of it, that would make some amount of sense anyway.  For example, when somebody in morph thinks about, say, lifting their arm, the specific region of the morphed brain for arm movement would have to light up, presumably when the same region of the morpher's brain in z-space gave the command.  So it makes sense that each region of the brain would have to be linked across z-space.

For another thing, think for a moment about how information in the brain is stored.  At least, in earth brains, I don't know if maybe alien brains work differently, but in any case for humans it's the physical links between the neurons that actually store the information.  You think about something, and that activates a specific neuron path within the brain, and that path gets reinforced so that it's more likely to be triggered again later.  Given this fact, it might almost be impossible to store any of a morpher's mind within the morph's brain at all.  An animal's brain would be physically different enough, that those neuron paths would be off, perhaps not by much in the case of great apes, but it still could be impossible to set up those connections exactly the same within the morphed brain as in the morpher's original brain.  And those slight changes would be enough to pretty drastically alter the informational content of a mind, with disastrous effects.

Offline RYTX

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #20 on: April 03, 2012, 11:54:09 AM »
But there isn't a one-one ratio of neurons between brains across species. Or even people. I'm willing to bet a trained painist has more neurons devoted to dexterity than a track star-how would that difference be mapped for morphs. And then there's new body parts. What part of your brain wills a spider to morph 6 of 8 legs. Like with the Dragonfly's dragon fly eye's w.o. it's visual cortex: it's gibberish, but in reality is entirely different than human processors. Plugging your brain into the back of it should still be nonsensical

More importantly I think is this talk of links. We're admitting that the thought process is chemical-how is it that your chemical mind is intangibly linking through real and zero space to control an object in another location. Brainwaves can't radiate through space like radio, they are confined to the physical vessel which is clearly removed. Can't be done.
And considering how Yeerks operate, it seems like there's some strong convergence on brain physio-anatomy
I need a physicist (again). Someone needs to draw out a credible morphing theory in depth

We have 2-3 examples I can think of where someone morphs a more intelligent being.
Tobias-> Ax where the Andalite mind somehow functions like any animal: basal instincts
Buffa-human where it shows capable of learning
Ant-human which does not and mentally overrides the morph.

So only one of those examples shows that the morph brain is active in an intelligent manner, but seems it is interacting with the morphers "mind" which gives credence to the argument that a morph does has some development of it's own
Something, something, oh crap I pissed everyone off again....

Offline DinosaurNothlit

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #21 on: April 03, 2012, 04:49:23 PM »
But there isn't a one-one ratio of neurons between brains across species. Or even people. I'm willing to bet a trained painist has more neurons devoted to dexterity than a track star-how would that difference be mapped for morphs. And then there's new body parts. What part of your brain wills a spider to morph 6 of 8 legs. Like with the Dragonfly's dragon fly eye's w.o. it's visual cortex: it's gibberish, but in reality is entirely different than human processors. Plugging your brain into the back of it should still be nonsensical

Yeah, that is a problem, but it's still a problem no matter how you slice it.  How can a human mind accommodate unfamiliar limbs, without any additional mental faculties?  The only answer I can come up with, is that the scientists behind the technology thought of that hurdle, and found some way of expanding the morpher's brain so that the morpher can comprehend the differing anatomy of the morph.

See, the thing is, there is no metaphysical 'mind' that exists somehow separately from the brain.  That information HAS to be encoded in some kind of physical medium, otherwise it cannot exist.  But perhaps you're right, and it doesn't stay biologically encoded via neurons.  Perhaps it gets digitized during a morph, or perhaps it's stored as some form of energy.  I don't know.  But in any case, my original point, that the morpher's mind has to be connected to all parts of the morph's brain, remains valid, since muscles of nearly all creatures have evolved to be moved by signals from neurons, and those signals would have to originate from the morph's brain at some point.

More importantly I think is this talk of links. We're admitting that the thought process is chemical-how is it that your chemical mind is intangibly linking through real and zero space to control an object in another location. Brainwaves can't radiate through space like radio, they are confined to the physical vessel which is clearly removed. Can't be done.
And considering how Yeerks operate, it seems like there's some strong convergence on brain physio-anatomy
I need a physicist (again). Someone needs to draw out a credible morphing theory in depth

Well, I think the confusion there is more because of the way z-space is described in most of the books, rather than implausibility issues.  Personally, I really liked the interpretation from book #45.  Basically, that z-space is actually 'zero-space,' or space that does not occupy space at all and thus can be connected to everywhere at once (of course, that interpretation conflicts rather sharply with the idea of space-ships having to fly through z-space to get from one place to another, but I'm willing to chalk that up to a KASU if it means that the concept of z-space itself makes more sense).

So, if you interpret z-space as sort of a dimensionless space connected to everywhere, then there would be no faraway, spooky-action-at-a-distance 'link' between the brains of the morpher and the morph at all.  Basically, they could in fact be touching, but since the morpher's brain would be removed from our dimension, it wouldn't need to be physically present in order to be touching the morph's brain.  Think of it like intersecting lines drawn on separate sheets of paper, as seen by a stick figure on one of the sheets.  He'd only see and be able to interact with the one line, even though the unseen line would still be touching the one that he could see.

Hmm, all this talk about morpher's neurons needing to be connected to the morph's neurons is sounding more and more like what Yeerks do.  I wonder if it was coincidence that the morphing technology was invented so soon after the Andalites discovered the Yeerks?
« Last Edit: April 03, 2012, 04:51:47 PM by DinosaurNothlit »

Offline Aftran261

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #22 on: April 04, 2012, 06:20:54 AM »
. . . so we might just conclude that one of Cassie's more ridiculous theories could be right and that the Andalites may have invented/made a major breakthrough in morphing by copying Yeerks?
. . . Holy, that last part would have looked bad for the Andalites if it got out, especially in the middle of the war to their allies.



Offline Noelle

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #23 on: April 04, 2012, 10:59:20 AM »
In a way, I think the whole z-space thing throws a whole wrench into 'lolcredible' morphing theory.  To me anyway, nothing about extra mass being extruded into z-space makes sense.

If in a tiny mass morph, you get dragged by a ship and wake up, then you die when your conscious mind is in your extruded z-space mass, then how does your body stay alive when your consciousness is elsewhere?  If it is in some sort of stasis/cryogenic state, then what was making them die in 18 when they got snapped to their body?  It could be argued that their body was actually not dying, but going back into a stasis, but the symptoms Ax described while being stuck in Z-space described suffocation rather than hypothermia.

Offline SkyMorpher

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Re: Could Demorphing be Considered Murder?
« Reply #24 on: April 05, 2012, 11:55:02 PM »
We can't say for sure there's no metaphysical aspect. Mostly because even scientists don't know all the mysteries of the mind There does have to be a physical way of storing memories, but I don't think it's right to just say for sure. That said, in the books it may well be that way, trying to think back over stuff that was indicated, so I'll grant that. And won't go any further with the other, because this isn't the forum for it.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2012, 11:56:42 PM by SkyMorpher »