I like movies like the Millennium Man, The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell because they toy with these questions. Blade Runner was, I think, one of the first movies to explicitly try to raise these ethical and religious questions.
Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible. When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself.
I discovered a label to use for the way I view consciousness and self and it is called “Bundle Theory”! For Western Society, a Scottish philosopher from the 1700s came up with the idea. This is the idea that there is phenomena and then there is the interpolation of phenomena by other phenomena with the ability to frame such phenomena as being differential due to the brain’s ability to retain memories. The observer creates the perception of the observed.
