Can a fictional being become self-aware equal to human self-awareness?

[ZooLife]

Can a fictional being/ character self-discover that its identity is as a fictional being/ character?

Would this change any thing for the character or is that simply what is 'written' into that fictional being/ character and as such, changes nothing.

Would a self-aware fictional being/ character be an accurate description of humans in general?

Would question like this arising from a fictional being/ character be like a transcendence of a fictional being/ character into another dimension and/ or enlightenment? And if so, would this change nothing of it's essence (it is what it is)? The greatest change it could strive for, becoming real, is beyond its grasp. Destiny sealed at the moment of manifestation.

More then that, I wonder if anyone and particularly anyone that may read this post, have these sort of thoughts.

Either way, they shall be thoughts shared......

(Thanks for reading)

[Orph]

"Star Trek the Next Generation" did an episode pretty much based on this very subject. So at the very least, the idea has been by pondered by others as well. You are not alone. :wave:

[sigma6]

"Star Trek the Next Generation" did an episode pretty much based on this very subject. So at the very least, the idea has been by pondered by others as well. You are not alone. :wave:


A dream within a dream? a fiction within a fiction? Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man

The key is consciousness, and the study and answer will lie in quantum physics (or mechanics) ... The concept can be looked at from a different perspective in Eastern Philosophy...

Nassim Haramein comes to mind. The Black Whole (this is a variation of that...)
mFTMiVs4VhY

i.e. you existing and thinking about this problem is part of the answer...

[araucaria]

This is a very popular idea in art and literature dating all the way back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, the tale of a sculptor who fell in love with a statue and eventually married her.
http://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/myth-of-pygmalion-and-galatea/

Then of course you have Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, a wooden puppet carved by Geppetto which eventually turns into a real-life little boy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio

In his very last, unfinished novel The Sense of the Past, Henry James brings an element of time-travel to the subject, describing an American historian so full of his subject that, on inheriting a house in London, discovers a portrait that turns out to be of himself ninety years previously. The young man comes to life and steps out of the picture, and the two change places. The novel is in a sense the story of how the picture came to be painted, and is therefore a meditation not only on how art can come to life but on how art is produced ‘from life’, as they say. In other words, one might say, the relationship between creative art and the creation generally as a creative process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_the_Past

You may also want to include here various explorations of the theme of Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Tale of Mr Jekyll and Dr Hyde, the monster is internalized as the murderous nocturnal dark side of the scientist. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/jekyll/summary.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde

H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau comes into this category, with experiments on hybridizing animals. Some would say that ‘Doc Tomorrow’ has himself turned from a fictional character into a real-life Doc Today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Doctor_Moreau

Also in this vein is a story by Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, in which a man falls in love with a holographic image and contrives to record himself into the film as her beloved, thereby at once ending his life and immortalizing his image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel
There have been various screen adaptations of this novella; I can recommend this one by David Lamelas: http://lux.org.uk/collection/works/invention-dr-morel
See also these posts of mine:
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?56913-What-controls-the-hologram&p=647898&viewfull=1#post647898
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=823747&viewfull=1#post823747

[Wookie]

I do not think that fiction has many or any impossibilities.

Peaceful Journeys Wookie

[Violet]

I bet Asimov was thinking about similar things when he wrote i-Robot.

In my current book I've discovered that at least two of my fictional characters have materialised along the way (subconsciously though, it may be the other way around). And in the course of the story different characters question their be-ing. None of this has changed either essence from as far as I can materially witness, though in terms of enlightenment, things change.

Sometimes - this may be imagination - I have the impression that the characters are creating their own course and I am just a writer of events. If that is true, then yes, these fictional beings have a form of awareness. Human, I can't say. Is that important? That the awareness is human? Can we as humans if not experience, understand other forms of awareness?

[araucaria]

I bet Asimov was thinking about similar things when he wrote i-Robot.

Yes, I forgot about Asimov. He certainly was thinking about similar things in the sequels to the Foundation trilogy - the founder of psychohistory Hari Seldon is married to a robot.

[meat suit]

what are we to start with??
any individual or system that is autonomous within an environment,
such as a human, a dog, a lawn mower, a laptop etc. could be used by a soul as a platform to incarnate into....

so, if a fictional character had an apparatus such as a bio/robotic body on a planet or a data body in an information based system like the internet or a computer to move within , then yes... its only a matter of time that it will happen.

I dont see a character that is fixed in a book or painting or film having that option since he couldnt move

[Sunny-side-up]

A lot of debates/info that crops up here in the pages of Avalon often suggests just that of us:
Are we natural or fictional, or at least what where we at our begging/making?
Is our mind/identity our own or a control program, are we an I/a us/Collective or a one temporarily fragmented?

I often see myself as a part disconnected from the whole, other days/moments I see myself nearer a collective whole!
sometimes I feel in reality other times I've no idea what reality is, even if it and me are real at all 0.0

So directly I cant answer any of your questions/pondering's either way.
We are in wondrous days that are going to get more wondrous very soon, maybe we will know at least one thing about so-called reality soon, just any one thing for sure would be a step in the right direction ha! hehe

[ZooLife]

Wonderful thoughts and references posted here. Thank you one and all. I find it significantly helpful to read about, what I think is interesting subject matter, from a multitude of perspectives.

An example is from sigma6's post with the video from Nassim Haramein. In a sense I thought he was making a case for connecting the spiritual with the physical. From a geometry perspective I have found this approach helpful and engaging.

I think it also touches on the question of fundamentals. Is reality fundamentally all there is represented by likes of a unified field and then 'appears' to be dualistic when something is created/ manifested. Are these manifestation like road signs/ symbols that point to the unified field but are not themselves the unified field? Are these signs like the illusion of water in a desert?

Is the greatest lesson to learn is one of not confusing the physical for the spiritual and the spiritual for the physical? Signs (formulated in the mind or manifested externally) of the spiritual, no matter how pure or complex, are not spirit.

It is like one is manifested simultaneously with an environment (tail) which initiates a polarity and the chasing of ones tail ensues. If one was to catch the tail, would one discover one were neither? In this analogy, 'one' is consciousness and the 'tail' is signs. Consciousness is searching/ chasing for signs of its eternal existence? Does consciousness seek proof that it is real and does not simply dissipate upon physical death?

(Note: I wrote these thoughts on the fly and they may be viewed as disjointed but I find use in that as well so maybe it was not a waste of your time to read for some?)


Is THOUGHT the first sign/ sine of the unified field/ Unity?

[joeecho]

A proposed first level construct is thought followed by or in conjunction with empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is a construct of a construct, another onion layer.

The chair you sit on is constructed from a construct (thought) possibly from the memory (thought) of once sitting on a log or rock before there was chairs. Where did thought come from? Invariably from another construct. The rabbit hole (construct) runs well into infinity (another construct). The writer of such a construct could very well be a construct as well and so forth.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTQSbjecLg#t=147

When one believes it has made sense of a senseless world it does a disservice to the storyline. The storyline will never make complete sense because there will always be more that can be written.

The construct of this post could very well have been from you if the perspective it was written from was from 'here'.

Actually it was written by 'you' but that is a different (yet the same) story.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW8TlrYhBxk

[donk]

The movie The Thirteenth Floor did a neat job exploring that idea:

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTQ1NzEwNjM0OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNTI4MDk5._V1_SX67_CR0,0,67,98_AL_.jpg

It occured to me that shows two paths, one that seems to be a sort of psychopathic solipsisists wet dream, where we have this weird fascination with creating--which kind of assumes a sort of "controling"--other/new forms of life, the other an empathetic curious "parental" view trying to take responsibility and loving their creation.

Both assume a "higher" order being than the ones we think of as a "tulpa". (http://www.tulpa.com/explain/alexandra.html)In that movie, they even call themselves "users".

[Carmody]

I bet Asimov was thinking about similar things when he wrote i-Robot.

Yes, I forgot about Asimov. He certainly was thinking about similar things in the sequels to the Foundation trilogy - the founder of psychohistory Hari Seldon is married to a robot.

2Duj2oZIC8U

ixjnq_noOQ8

Tulpa (http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Tulpa)

Tulpas, also known as thoughtforms are frequently used in ceremonial or chaos magick.

A tulpa is the given name to anything formed through the meditation (focusing) of an idea. The theory is that if you meditate hard enough on an idea, it will materialize. Tibetan monks practice this often, and teach it as part of their learning. Tulpa do not have to be live-creatures but can also be inanimate objects, animals, furniture, or creatures. There is a theory that the entire universe was made through tulpa meditation.

A tulpa is hard to define, as anything could possibly be a tulpa. While the idea is still being focused on, the object or creature may change & morph into different forms as the idea itself changes. Tulpa can only be destroyed by eliminating the thought (if the tulpa is not yet formed properly), or the diluting the concentration of the thought, then destroying the object or creature.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa

Indian Buddhism

One early Buddhist text, the Samaññaphala Sutta lists the ability to create a “mind-made body” (manomāyakāya) as one of the "fruits of the contemplative life". Commentarial texts such as the Patisambhidamagga and the Visuddhimagga state that this mind-made body is how Gautama Buddha and arhats are able to travel into heavenly realms using the continuum of the mindstream (bodhi) and it is also used to explain the multiplication miracle of the Buddha as illustrated in the Divyavadana, in which the Buddha multiplied his emanation body ("nirmita") into countless other bodies which filled the sky. A Buddha or other realized being is able to project many such "nirmitas" simultaneously in an infinite variety of forms, in different realms simultaneously.[7]

The Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu defined nirmita as a siddhi or psychic power (Pali: iddhi, Skt: ṛddhi) developed through Buddhist discipline, concentrative discipline and wisdom (samadhi) in his seminal work on Buddhist philosophy, the Abhidharmakośa. Asanga's Bodhisattvabhūmi defines nirmāṇa as a magical illusion and “basically, something without a basis”.[8] The Madhyamaka school of philosophy sees all reality as empty of essence, all reality is seen as a form of nirmita or magical illusion.
Tibetan Buddhism

Tulpa is a spiritual discipline and teachings concept in Tibetan Buddhism and Bon. The term “thoughtform” is used as early as 1927 in Evans-Wentz' translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. John Myrdhin Reynolds in a note to his English translation of the life story of Garab Dorje defines a tulpa as “an emanation or a manifestation.”[1]

As the Tibetan use of the tulpa concept is described in the book Magical Use of Thoughtforms, the student was expected to come to the understanding that the tulpa was just a hallucination. While they were told that the tulpa was a genuine deity, "The pupil who accepted this was deemed a failure – and set off to spend the rest of his life in an uncomfortable hallucination."[9]

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The biblical records, IIRC, flat out state that both God and Lucifer (each separately stated) cannot exist unless man believes in them. That they require humanity's belief, in order to 'be'.

hint for humanity: Stop munching your own backside. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDW6vkuqGLg)