They have no souls

So tonight was a bit of a disappointment. Went to the local bookstore Pages for all Ages with Zelle and Strutz, and I think I'm going to have to stop giving them what little business I can with my budget. Simply put, they've decided that the shelf space of section of books I would care to read is better used housing romance novels and manga. This is a disappointment, as I've always had fond memories of this store from when I was growing up.

After that we went to go see The Island. Because I will spoil some things I'm going to attmpt to put this behind a cut.


First of all, the movie was fantastically done. The music was good and appropriate, the visuals were awesome, and the acting was solid. And I couldn't have hated it more.

Allow me to expound on this.

Simply put, there are two places this movie fails: science and philosophy. Regarding the science, there's just no basis for a lot of the shit they came up with. There is absolutely no reason to say that a tissue cultured outside of a human body and "lacking human experience" will fail if transplanted, short of the normal chance of rejection inherant in any transplant. Now, what causes tissues to be rejected? The fact that the body knows when something isn't what should be there. If something is identical genetically (and really, if you're cloning something the genes will be the same, you just might wind up with a phenotypal difference)to what it's being put into, then there is no chance for rejection. Also, stem cells. We already know that undifferentiated stem cells can be introduced into a human system from which they did not come without any serious ramifications to the organism.

Now, to shed some light on the title of this post. They go the entire movie without ever bringing up the idea that a difference exists between a "natural" human and a clone of someone. This blew my mind. The entire movie was simply a prolonged period of this story forcing me to examine (because they sure as hell didn't) what, if any, intrinsic differences there are between human beings, and clones of human beings. I was pondering these thing because, as stated, the movie completely failed to touch on these ideas, except that there had been a law passed at some point forbidding the raising of "self-aware" clones for medical purposes. To its credit, there was also (due to lack of this discussion) a lack of exploration of what made a natural born human different from a clone (and again another avenue to explore, what makes a clone different from a test-tube baby?) in a metaphysical sense. That is, until the last five minutes of the movie, when the main antagonist say something to the effect of "You don't matter, you don't even have a soul."

And this is where I'm deeply disturbed by the lack of exploration on the part of the movie. What is the difference between a clone and a "natural" human? I can think of no good reason, that does not fall upon using superstion and fear of the unknown that there is one. Hell, where does that leave, as mentioned before, the people who are created through artificial incemincation? Again, I see nothing special about the creation of a human being inside a body that is absent when done outside of a body, save that there is a persistant belief in our culture that because we're as we are, that we're special. And I'm just disgusted, because there is no difference, yet we're looking to manufacture one. This will become an ethical question we'll have to deal with in my lifetime, and thinking that made the motives of the antagonist much more chilling. The when you're killing people because someone else paid you to keep a backup copy of their organs, that's a good deal more intrigueing then someone doing the same because they "don't have a soul" and thus aren't really human.

I'm rambling and I'm sure that my point is getting muddled up in the vitrol I've got towards whoever wrote this script. If you wish to engange me in conversation regarding this, feel free to do so. I know I will be dwelling on these issues for several days.