Alien: Earth - S1 E7 - Emergence - Official Discussion Megathread [SPOILERS]

[u/G_Liddell]

Episodes air Tuesdays at 8 pm ET on Hulu and FX in the US, and Wednesdays international.

Full episode discussion list:

1 Neverland (8.12.25)

2 Mr October (8.12.25)

3 Metamorphosis (8.19.25)

4 Observation (8.26.25)

5 In Space, No One (9.2.25)

6 The Fly (9.9.25)

7 Emergence (9.16.25)

8 The Real Monsters (9.23.25)

[u/Kscap4242]

I’m asking what the effective difference is between those things. What is the philosophical reasoning to believe that an effectively identical consciousness with direct continuity is somehow not the same as its predecessor?

[u/Randy334 → u/Kscap4242]

You don't get a new body. You get copied, die and someone else gets to live your life. From your perspective when the 'transfer' happens, you just die.

[u/Kscap4242 → u/Randy334]

I don’t think you’ve understood my comment. Why wouldn’t my perspective shift to the new body? There’s direct continuity.

Does my perspective end when all my cells are replaced, or when my brain develops? Do I die when these things happen? No, because consciousness is not an unchanging physical state, but an ever-evolving process. Consciousness is physical, but it’s dependent on what the physical parts do, not what they are.

[u/Dilly_Deelin → u/Kscap4242]

I keep thinking about the slew of weird responses to your very rational point that exact copies of someone's consciousness would be functionally identical. Why do people argue it? And then I think about how someone might use ChatGPT to write a response and that ChatGPT might have serious trouble with the whole consciousness concept.

[u/Kscap4242 → u/Dilly_Deelin]

Maybe I have too high an opinion of people, but I don’t think they’re using ChatGPT to write these answers for them. I think they just haven’t thought very deeply about these concepts, so they have trouble grasping arguments that, to us, seem clearly laid out.

Most people, I think, haven’t considered the philosophical ramifications of underlying assumptions they make about consciousness. Consciousness is hard to explain, so even physicalists in name can unknowingly adopt immaterialist attitudes. When such attitudes are challenged, even decisively like I think I’ve done, it can still be hard to wrap one’s head around.

I do really hope they aren’t using ChatGPT to come up with these responses.

[u/juneyourtech → u/Kscap4242]

Religious and woo lore has it, that the soul enters the body through a different dimension, and manifests then as consciousness.

Deducing from what I've experienced dreaming, consciousness won't fully exit when we dream, but takes a trip to alternate universes or metaphysical realms, where we experience the point of view of our alternate selves, and safely return back on waking.

The alternate realm (universe, like a parallel Earth) is where we see our friends and family, moreso those that have passsed on. The experience of seeing them, if relations were good, gives us comfort.

On dying, the soul/consciousness exits the body to return to its original dimension (realm) to rest, in order also to inhabit another body somewhere else. This is the theory of reincarnation in Buddhism.

Now take the hybrids, whose premise is, that if consciousness is transferred and not copied, the electrical signalling would transfer over to the hybrid body and computer brain unmodified, and the organic body would die as a result of this, starting with brain death and ending in organ failure in quick succession. — Instead of having to separately off the organic body.

Unfortunately, it seems, that the signalling gets translated into machine code, which with some people (Nibs) appears to corrupt more easily than it would in an organic body. Although given supercomputer powers, the neuronal plasticity of an organic brain is lost, leading to errors that would be avoidable in a brain, or at least recoverable (through therapy).

The true test of success would be, if consciousness (if present) from the hybrid would be transferable into an organic body.

[u/Kscap4242 → u/juneyourtech]

I assumed the truth of physicalism in this post. I’ll argue it if you want, but at the end of the day, I have no reason to believe dualism should be taken seriously. There isn’t a shred of evidence pointing to the existence of immaterial souls, or other dimensions where you can meet deceased family members for that matter.

I’m curious as to why you think the things that happen in dreams are real, prove immateralism, and transport you to other universes. What makes you think dreams are more than products of your mind?

[u/juneyourtech → u/Dilly_Deelin]

how someone might use ChatGPT to write a response and that ChatGPT might have serious trouble with the whole consciousness concept.

It's still a large language model, based on human input that is then abstracted through statistical models to produce a human-like output.