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Black Mirror S3E04 "San Junipero" discussion thread
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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 4 - San Junipero
In a seaside town in 1987, a shy young woman and an outgoing party girl strike up a powerful bond that seems to defy the laws of space and time.
Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.
You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!
If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:
- How does the title relate to the episode itself?
- Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
- Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?
It took crazily long before I realized it wasn't really set in the 80s. But those 80s were done aesthetically for sure. This is also quite a happy end episode, which is untypical for Black Mirror. I probably would have considered San Junipero "life" instead of just full biological death if that technology was real. Such a technology is very welcome for easing fear of death in some people. Of course it would be even much better to pick other, more contemporary locations: updates from the real would would be unloaded to those servers and reflect in the simulation, preventing biological death from stopping you seeing the future.
I can't decide between this or White Christmas among my favourite episodes.
But this was phenomenal. The only Black mirror episode I've rewatched. I usually never re-watch any shows.
Both the actors were brilliant. The music was brilliant. The cinematography was brilliant.
It's also among my favorites and I just realized it's one of the only ones I have rewatched as well. I have even gone out of my way to share it with friends. The acting is great and the plot is amazingly well done.
This is by far my favorite episode of Black Mirror. I have watched it at least a dozen times now as a result... which is funny considering the previous episode (Shut up and dance) was my absolute least favorite and I will never, ever watch it again because of how physically ill and emotionally devastated it left me feeling. This episode was the polar opposite for me and while sad, was still achingly beautiful and cathartic to me. It has its emotional twists and turns where tears are shed, but the concept of the show and its ending are just so stunningly beautiful and uplifting that it makes up for all the heartache.
San Junipero also genuinely makes me hopeful that one day humanity will be able to actually achieve a similar state of technological progress where even a person in a completely paralyzed state can explore a completely realistic virtual world, live out a life there as if they were not disabled and find the love of their life. The immortality aspect is just the icing on the cake, as far as I'm concerned.
Slightly off-topic, but one thing I rarely see discussed about this episode is the philosophical aspects of that "immortality" part of the episode. If you completely digitized your brain at the exact moment of your physical death, so there is continuity of self and no overlap, is that resulting digitized version still really "you", or are "you" dead and it's just a hollow simulacrum/clone living on in your stead? Does continuity of self even really matter since unconsciousness, something we all experience every night, could be considered loss of continuity of self and yet we don't generally consider sleep as "death"? I guess ultimately what this comes down to is if you believe there really is an "immortal soul" (essence of self outside of physical self) or not. And while I do not believe in the soul and think this sort of immortality would functionally and practically be the same as "real" life/immortality, I'm curious to hear what other people think about this. :)
If you've never played the game SOMA, you might check it out, or watch a Let's Play or something. It explores a lot of these kinds of themes. Which one of a digitized/bio pair is the "real" you, if it's "okay" to torment a digitized life for a cause if you reset them afterwards.
Some backstory in the game (this might be a bit spoilery) is that the earth is screwed, and every piles into a giant simulation to be fired deep into space. Lots of people, the second they get scanned to get in, immediately end their original lives to have that sense of continuity.
As far as "real" vs "fake" yous, every copy is going to be you. Essentially they're clones. Which "you" ends up in which body is essentially a coin flip.
In this case, one copy of you is stuck in the mortal body and dies, they lost the coin flip. The other copy of you lives on in a digital world.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about SOMA... thanks for reminding me of it! I watched some trailers back when it was first released and I think even saw a brief Let's Play of it (gamegrumps, maybe?). Added it to my Steam Wishlist.
In a similar (but not identical) vein, I am really hoping Detroit: Become Human comes to PC at some point. It's not about transferred consciousness, but AI sentience instead but still looks really good. I just don't want to have to buy a PS4 to play it. :(
I've thought about this quite a bit as well with this episode but mostly with the other episode that incorporate the 'cookies' that think they are alive and the same person but in reality the 'person' they are is either dead or living a completely separate life from the cookie. Like in White Christmas where cookies are first introduced where the slave cookie that controls the house of its host thinks it's the original host and goes through it's own existential crisis accepting that it is just code and no longer a person. We see similar behavior in the episode 'USS Calister' in season 4 but not as dramatically as in White Christmas.
So what I think is happening is the person is by all means dead when they become a 'local', the main characters of San Junipero are dead and gone but a coded version of them lives on in San Junipero and are sort of NPCs of the simulation while 'tourists' who visit San Junipero are real and merely taking a trip inside the simulation. The code version of them retains all memories and behaves the same but are not the original person.
What distinguishes copies/code versions from "original" people, in your mind? Is it the intent of their creation, or merely the loss of the physical body that makes them distinct to you? Do you believe there is some unquantifiable essence that is lost when consciousness is separated from a physical body that cannot be copied by mere brain imagery technology and simulation of that structure?
In my mind the only difference is that one is code and the other is a physical human being. They behave exactly the same but as separate entities.
In the case of Black Mirror I don't think it's anything beyond that, at least not yet. I don't think they've made any indication of a soul existing.
Yeah I totally understand the portrayal in Black Mirror, which was left ambiguous mostly for dramatic effect, IMO. I was just curious what your and other people's personal opinions were on the subject. I.E. If what was shown in Black Mirror about digital immortality was actually real, how would you personally feel about it and the digital "clones"?
It depends on how it's presented I guess. If it were made possible that I would live on but as a digital form that is a continuation of my own conciousness I'd be totally in favor of that. If it were presented in the way of black mirror where you are essentially donating your conciousness in a digital form that isn't a direct continuation of yourself I'd be interested but I don't think I would be as enthusiastic.
As far as how I'd feel about the digital clones that's another thing I've thought of quite a bit after Black Mirror. The subject of 'cookie rights' is something that would no doubt come into play and I'm hoping is a part if Black Mirror at some point. The morality of setting a cookie to experience millions of years over one real life weekend like in White Christmas is something I've yet to even wrap my head around.
Definitely my favorite episode, mainly because mind uploading and the implications of it are one of my favorite scifi topics. The unusual romance they used to present it was just icing on the cake. :)
Fun facts about mind uploading. Your average human brain translates to roughly 1.2 exabytes of data (that's 1.2 million terabytes per brain) - if you scan the entire brain in precise detail. That's assuming you can find a way to scan it all losslessly, which is no simple task though there's nothing in the physical laws of nature that says it can't be done. Basic rule - if nature can do it, we can simulate it, though the amount of processing power required could be astronomical, even impractical, for 'classical' computers at least.
By comparison, the genetic code for the human brain is a couple of megabytes, you could almost fit it on a floppy disc. The genetic code only tells you how to build the brain, though... and there are environmental factors in brain development, so if you could get the base code and somehow iterate it to the full brain of a person, it'd still be missing all of the changes in the brain caused by environmental factors over the person's lifetime, and therefore not a viable copy or basis for simulation.
Our current operating systems are a few gigabytes. Running a single program that is comprised of 1.2 million terabytes of data is utterly impossible even if you tasked every computer in the world to do it. Frankly, if we want to do something like that we're going to need to invent entirely new kinds of computers to do it. It's possible that massive volume of data could be simplified and compressed to something smaller and more manageable, but to do that you have to have complete understanding of how the mind works, or you risk compressing/eliminating vital portions of the system.
It's not likely we're ever going to have that level of understanding of how the brain works, because it's part of the P/NP complexity problem. The P/NP version of mind uploading is like saying that no mind, human or otherwise, can ever hope to understand the precise details of its own inner workings, because you have to be smarter than that mind can ever be to figure it out. We'd have to create a superintelligence that was far enough up the intelligence scale above us to understand our own operation - and that superintelligence could never hope to understand its own operation even though it could grasp ours. P/NP is overlooked in discussions of mind uploading and it presents a tough catch-22 problem.
So, best we can probably do is getting a perfect brain scan, developing an 'operating system' that can hook into the inputs and outputs exactly as well as the human body does, and also provide a perfect physical emulation of the brain's own inner mechanisms. This self-contained human mind 'node' could then be plugged into any digital simulation though the basic inputs and outputs of the senses. All of this sounds hard, but it's really a lot easier than cracking the brain's own code. You're looking at four billion years of spaghetti code per brain, and it's likely that they all have their own natural encryption/encoding/quirks, so cracking one doesn't mean you crack all of them.
If it's just a collection of wires and electricity (wet electrical meat) that's the easy version. If there are quantum phenomena involved in the way neurons operate and that phenomena is important to the system, it gets much, much more complicated simulating those quantum effects. It'd require orders of magnitude more processing power to run the simulation, as well as quantum computing because it's the only way to duplicate those effects in real time. That'd probably require specialized hardware much like the cookies they use in Black Mirror. The jury is still very much out on quantum phenomena in the brain, though the consensus in the neuroscience community is that there isn't any and if there were it wouldn't matter, because the brain operates electrically at far larger scales. They have no proof of this, though.
Brain scan resolution is tied to Moore's law, so it's doubling every year. We're only beginning to reach the point where we can take a real precise deep dive into how the brain regions operate, and we're a long way off from understanding how an individual neuron contributes to the overall system. The good news is, mother nature left us a lot of brains at every size and stage of development to study. A mosquito brain is the size of this period. We can surely crack that, and work our way up the chain with progressively larger and more complex brains. That trail of brain-crumbs is our best bet for figuring out how a brain works, and what a 'mind' or 'soul' really is, in the physical sense.
One other interesting point people seldom bring up when talking about mind uploading - quality of life. The early simulations are going to be hell, and far slower than real-time (days outside for seconds inside), and being a disembodied entity stuck to a socket in a datacenter is no way to live. Over time, though, as the tech improves, that changes. Eventually you'd have bodies better than the original, and be able to swap them like we change underwear now. The simulation would become faster than reality, possibly millions of years inside for mere days outside. You could just put your simulation to 'sleep' and wait away the years until the tech catches up with where you want to be.
Yeah, not only is there experiential changes that occur in the brain (neuronal pathways being strengthened, weakened, created or even broken) but also epigenetics to consider as well. Just because you have the map (genetic code) doesn't mean the final outcome will be the same.
I don't believe that to be the case at all and current breakthroughs in neuroscience, particularly in regards to neural mapping/imaging and computer-brain interfacing, seems to indicate it's a solvable problem. Not only that but there is also the possibility that a full neural image is not even necessary and the problem can be approached algorithmically. E.g. SPOILERS as shown in WestWorld S2
The mechanics we can understand - that's like understanding the wires in a computer system. As for the code itself - what every electrical signal represents, how they all interact, every detail of the information processing, the qualia of consciousness - not a chance in hell. Reducing a 'human' to a 'few simple lines of computer code' is not even science fiction, that's pure fantasy, and a very silly one. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. It's not going to come down to 'ten thousand lines of deceptively simple code' like in Westworld.
Honestly, that sort of an absolutist statement reminds me of those old fuddy-duddies during the beginnings of the age of computing that scoffed and said "this will never take off!", "there is no way they will get any smaller!", "there is no way a computer will be in every home!", etc. ;)
I see this statement trotted out a lot by people to justify simplifying complicated problems, as if all we ever need is that 'Einstein' moment to break through to understanding. It's a grossly unscientific sentiment and makes more of a mockery of the people using it than the people they quote when using it.
Deriving the first principles of a computational engine that has well over one hundred billion discrete processors and an order of magnitude more interconnecting nodes is not going to be easy, or simple. It's one of the hardest problems we're going to face in the computational space in the foreseeable future, and P/NP very strongly suggests it may be an intractable problem. Nature has had four billion years to stumble into mechanisms we haven't even discovered yet. We have a lot of catching up to do.
San Junipero is my favorite episode of Black Mirror next to White Christmas.
The concept is one of the best things I've seen in TV or movies and I've seen this episode many times and each time I spend hours just thinking about it and how I might behave in San Junipero. The story is amazing but I fell in live with the setting more than anything and I always just find myself wanting more and more of San Junipero. This could be a standalone TV show with literally endless possibilities as far as timelines go. Like Westworld but with no real humans and not only in the west.
The mental effects San Junipero has is also pretty crazy to think about. With the 'locals' who have been there and done it all so resort to a dark BDSM type club where they just try to feel something.
Possibly my favorite episode of TV ever, so easily a 5/5
I should probably give an update on the schedule for these threads: I’m going to try posting every Friday (Monday didn’t work out too well). This is the first rewatch on Tildes, so I figure it’s best to experiment now to get it right in the future. If anyone has feedback, feel free to let me know.
I’m currently undergoing a pretty big power outage in my city right now, so I haven’t been too active, but I am on ~ occasionally.
Oh, baby, do you know what that's worth? Oh, heaven is a place on Earth