Yea there's a game I've been looking into lately called SOMA, it's a horror game made and published by Frictional Games studios. I'm mentioning it here because I feel that it has relevance to our classroom discussion about objective reality. The story follows a guy from Toronto named Simon who has his brain/consciousness (this is the "suspension of disbelief" part) scanned and copied by a doctor to try and help treat a recently inflicted brain injury due to a car crash. You sit in the chair, put on a helmet, and wake up in a totally different place and time. It's dark, creaky, creepy, and neither you nor Simon has any idea of what's happened. A few things are clear: one, you're far in the future (evident by the sophisticated technology in the rooms around you) and two, you're underwater somewhere and for some reason. You walk around, eventually finding a companion named Catherine who speaks to you through what is essentially a radio with added benefits, and then come upon the realization that you are somehow a robot. This shift is pretty sudden, with Simon looking down at his hands, blinking, and when he opens his eyes his hands are mechanical. Now, I took about an hour of exposition to get to this; the reason this game has relevance to our discussion is because a major subject this game asks us to question is "what does it mean to be human?" It's a pretty pertinent question too, given that not only are YOU a robot, but basically every "person" you come across in the game are all ALSO robots, only they don't know it. The scenes in which you get to interact with those robot people hit me in a weird way. Their half-lucid perceptions of reality actually reminded me of interactions I had with residents of Covenant Nursing Home with Alzheimer's Disease a few summers ago while I worked there for about a week. The similarities lying in that sometimes they believe they're in a totally different place than they actually are, and sometimes they think they're in a different physical state, or a different period of time. Sometimes they're even violent. Simon and Catherine are different in that they both understand their state of being and are not inhibited to experiencing and re-experiencing one place, time, and situation. They are, ostensibly, humans. Then we come back to the understanding that they are literally, physically, not human. This is where the question really hits different; how can Simon be a robot, and we can still consider him to be human? Or, "what does it really mean to be human?" Either way, the game's story is incredibly well written and the gameplay itself is pretty scary. I'd recommend looking into it, or watching a video like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4tbbcWqDyY&t=1904s which gives an in depth analysis of the game and its themes, if anyone is interested.
thanks for coming to my ted-talk
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This seems like an interesting game, Elliot. In response to your question, I think what makes someone human is their brain, as it is the central organ of the human nervous system. It controls most of the activities of our body and is solely responsible for making decisions for us. Moreso, it determines our consciousness. Thus, I feel that Simon and the other characters in this game are still human, even though they have robot bodies. They think and act like humans, as they have a brain, but are subject to executing their tasks through the medium of a robot's body.
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