I lost 60 pounds BEFORE this pain developed. Not all illnesses go back to my weight. It's especially ridiculous when I have several disorders which could easily result in joint and foot pain (psoriasis and celiac's disease).

Oh, man, I hear that! My sister went in for a cold (a COLD!) and her doctor told her losing weight would help. Uh, wuh? Skinny people don't get colds? Wow, that's good to know. Because I've seen some thin-ass drippers in my day, but it's good to know Dr. Prejudice has cured the common cold with Weight Watchers. Wait till the Journal of Medicine hears.

Agreed. Hate the meta implications, love the actual story-line.

It was very wrong of this show to kill off all the female characters. It was wrong, and it was an easy "let's get all the boys together as a team / united in sorrow," which is lazy. But . . .

I really adore Illyria. I find her way more interesting than Fred. I can't stand characters who are cutesy, folksy, ditzy in the way Fred was. She was better in this season than any other, but still, Illyria is more badass by the power of 10. And I find it interesting how all the other characters react to her.

So, I think the solution is that next time we should start with more than two female characters. That way, when one of them becomes Illyria (the rest having NOT died of mystic pregnancies), there are plenty more female characters to go around. Win win.

I agree with everybody that scapegoating Gunn is weak sauce. Do we really believe that W&H baddies wouldn't have found another way around customs? Puh-lease. He did wrong, and there are horrible consequences to his act. But he didn't "kill Fred" nor did he "let her die." Weak.

No, I'm Eric Hert -- icon is the same though :)

Mreeb, are you mreeb on NaNo too?

The personalities are basically copies of the psychological states of actual people

I disagree. They aren't just copies of psychological states of actual people, they are also memories and impulses, desires and self control. And we are all mix-and-match to some extent. How is gaining that mixing and matching from life experiences and heard stories so different from having them uploaded if it FEELS the same to the person "experiencing" it both ways?

which are normally stored on a clunky hard drives

So what? Why are you preferring our wet matter hard drive brains to tech-created hard drives? When Apple creates the first iBrain computer that is implanted in your brain and sends signals directly through brain waves -- instead of through your eyes -- and includes a memory feature, will people who have an iBrain implanted be less human to you because some of their memory will be stored on a (probably not so) clunky hard-drive?

That's not a person (i.e., a self-aware agent).

What evidence from the show are you basing this on? Jenny certainly seemed like a self-aware agent. The fact that she didn't know where some of her deepest impulses came from is no different from the way the rest of humanity stumbles around living our lives. Hypothetical: does the fact that you don't realize that you're immediately attracted to that guy you met because you're conditioned to do so because he reminds you of your father mean that you aren't a self-aware agent? How is your conditioning different from her conditioning? You both have an impulse that you don't know the root cause of, which may be too compelling to resist. Why is your learned conditioning more valid than hers?

In support of the above, consider the scenario in which the same personality is imprinted onto two Actives (e.g., suppose both Echo and Sierra get the Jenny imprint). Obviously they're not one and the same person, because there's two of them

Why not? I don't accept your premise that the existence of two Jenny's means neither of them is a real person. If some version of parallel universes turns out to be true, then there are multiple Deinonychus' out there. And though their worlds may be different, in infinite parallel universes certain worlds will only have minor differences, and the Deinonychus of those worlds may thus have an identical experience leading to two Deinonychus. If travel across parallel universes became possible, it would not make those Deinonychus' any less "real people" that they then met.

We can certainly posit other Sci Fi scenarios where people meet themselves: time travel, cloning, transporter accidents, etc. What about any of those scenarios make them less people?

By the way, this is so FUN! I love this show for creating debates on personhood.

I responded to both you and szark in a response to szark. Oops.

Ah, but the fact that this is a medical necessity that requires LEGAL protection just highlights the fact that it often feels like a violation to the patient. That's part of what's so terrifying about such medical procedures; you go in, they put you under, and you lose all ability to control the situation. The consent forms are protection for the doctors from being sued in court, they do NOT philosophically describe whether the patient has been violated by something the doctor does while they're under, or whether they FEEL violated. You can't say, "well you consented beforehand," if such consent is a philosophical impossibility (even if it is a practical and legal necessity).

We won't morally blame the doctor in that scenario (actually, we will if we disagree with the solo decision he makes if it ends badly), but only because there really isn't any other option. And when the patient wakes up, the doctor won't say (except in court), "hey, it's cool, you consented to whatever I felt was necessary in there, so I had your in advance approval," what he'll say is, "there was no choice, we had to do 'x,' it was a medical necessity." But that isn't an argument for "in advance consent" that's argument for medical necessity being JUSTIFICATION to override somebody else's LACK of consent. All the piece of paper you signed beforehand does it make it harder for you to sue the doctor when he exercises that prerogative.

Just realized I half responded to your post and half to sab39, since your hypothetical assumed the doctor did only the procedure they discussed. I would still say that we only allow that because there is no practical way to get around that consent gap. We justify it, but the fact that we require that legally binding piece of paper says a lot about the fact that people DO want to remove consent, and feel violated when they can't under those circumstances.

Also, "legal consent" is different from consent. At one time, the reality in this country was that juries and courts considered dressing in short skirts to be "legal" consent to sex. Obviously even when that was the case, we could disagree that such a thing was actual consent.

Yay Fajen! Join us [said in zombie voice]. You're DEFINITELY not too late. It's only the first day, you aren't even behind on your word count yet.

Registration is super-easy. Just jump on nanowrimo.org, choose a username and password, and you're set. It's all very pain-free. If you come on-board, let me know and I'll add you as a writing buddy.

Oh man, I love urban fiction. Please, write me some decent urban fiction. You're doing the world a favor.

I once had a long argument with a friend about whether it was possible to consent to having sex (while you were conscious) to be performed after you were knocked out. To give the most benign, sexless, example: a couple is trying to conceive. The wife will be ovulating in the morning, but takes sleeping pills that knock her out past when her husband will be going to work. She tells the husband, "go ahead and have sex with me before you go while I'm asleep, I don't want to miss this ovulation cycle."

Putting aside the squickyness of that request (and the weirdness of her husband's ability to become aroused enough to to actually complete while his wife lays there as though dead -- not judging the kink, but it is kink -- I hear couples talk about this as though it's vanilla to have sex with the equivalent of a dead body), does her consent while she's conscious continue to the time when the act is actually performed (when she is no longer capable of removing consent). My friend said "absolutely yes." I said, "er, that makes me really uncomfortable. Maybe she changed her mind while asleep. Maybe he's hurting her now. But she no longer has any ability to tell him 'no, stop.'" We argued about it for awhile. I think the same thing applies to the dolls. Even if it was described to you in exacting detail exactly what they were going to do to you once you became a doll (and they actually held to what they described without risking your life/mental health in any additional ways) I still think it's a practical impossibility to consent in advance to prostitution where you will no longer be "available" to protest if you change your mind. Because that's the thing about consent, you can remove it after it's given.

Additional thought on personhood / consent -- I think that the created personalities imprinted on the dolls qualify as "people." They have memories, free will (conditioned free will, but that's true for all of us), personality, emotions. By all the standards by which we examine personhood (except on the issue of whether they were born or created as AI) they qualify for personhood. Thus, I think it's totally valid to say that Jenny was not raped, but Echo and Caroline were raped -- and that Jenny's experience is as valid as Echo's or Caroline's experience.

Another question, is it murder to erase the active if you have a backup of the created person on hard-disk? If it wasn't your body to begin with, do you have any rights to continued existence in that body, or do you only have a right to continued existence in some form? Is Topher a mass-murderer?