Clearly in the new Robocop remake, they're pushing for a new direction where Murphy survives his injuries and becomes a cyborg. In the original film though, Murphy is declared dead and is basically scrapped for parts.
Is Murphy actually resurrected as a cyborg, or is a Swamp Thing situation, where the robot simply believes himself to be Murphy?
Posted Feb 8, 2014, 4:24 PM UTC
What is the difference? Believing he is someone is the same thing as being someone, from his point of view.
For other people, the definition of what is "him" may vary. If someone was defining him by his physical appearance, then he is not himself any more for this person. On the other hand, if someone was defining him by his memories and/or personality, he is still himself.
In a sense, but my question essentially was "Is Alex Murphy dead, and there is now a robot running around with his face who believes it is Murphy?"
Also, how does Robocop sustain his organic parts? Cyborg from DC comics routinely has to soak his organic parts in a protein/nutrient bath, but Robocop is essentially just a brain so I don't know if that applies to him.
They discuss this a little in the movie. When they first reveal him they talk about and show a nutrient paste which he has to ingest on a regular basis to keep his organic parts alive. The distribution system is part machine(processing, pumping, and possibly synthetic blood) and part organic(circulatory system and normal nutrient distribution).
There is an episdoe of stargate sg1 and star trek voyager where this happens to the team and crew. The copies acknowledge they are copies in the end, but follow thier feelings. Those are still real to them. They go about doing the same thing the real ones are doing.
How would robocop know to do things if he wasn't at least in part still Murphy. On one of his first outings to the police building he twirls his pistol.
I will take the minority position here and say I believe Robocop is more or less acting in memory of Murphy rather than actually being Murphy, but the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Imagine a person suffering from amnesia rediscovering their old life after years of forging a new one. Perhaps they understand their former persona, relate, and celebrate it, but are no longer that person entirely. This is how I see Robocop. The system uses Murphy's brain for its processing power, hidden deep inside is a memory that has been wiped but the system is able to recover it and learn more about its past self, incorporating more and more of these attributes.
Its still murphys original brain and cerebral cortex, so ala the hard problem of consciouseness we can assume (because we are not solipsists) that he is still capable of experiencing "qualia" duch as sound and color in a way that is unique to humans ( we can see from his perspective that it isn't for instance simply black and white with a cpu telling him which wave lengths correspond to which colors)
Its a brain damaged murphy with robot limbs.
The brain is damaged but intact. Murphy never died, he's only had his brain put into a new body. While the system can affect his dopamine levels and provide new instructions to his artificial body, he is in every way that counts exactly the same person.
He's Murphy, he's not been 100% replaced only about 95% replaced. So he's technically still Murphy.
Since in fact we are just brains that believe ourselves to be us. What's the difference, and what's the matter?
Robocop is actually two different entities. The robot components and the organic Murphy. At the beginning of the movie the robot entity was the dominant personality, running the body, driven by programming. Rarely did the Murphy entity show up. At the end of the movie we have the Murphy personality in control.
Part of why the robot personality was in control was because the organic Murphy components were still in shock and adapting to their new circumstances. They wired the brain to the body, but the brain still had to build the connections required to integrate with the body. The reality is once the brain was good to go the robot personality couldn't do much other than lock Robocop's limbs. The rest, thinking, planning, ethics and morals came from the Murphy personality.
edit: I'm probably wrong if you count any movie after the first one
Yes. The organic brain containing the life experiences and reflexes of the police officer Alex Murphy is enclosed by the robocop exosuit. The directive programming in the suit is capable of managing/directing his behavior, but it cannot modify it except by direct action. They used an existing police officer as the basis for the robocop system because all of the conditioning and knowledge is not something that could be programmed into a computer. For example, when Robocop tried to arrest Dick Jones for murder, his legal knowledge and police experience led him to that conclusion, but all the computer component in him could do is recognize that he was breaking the directive to not act against OCP executives and try and shut him down.
In Robocop II when they poured all those stupid directives into the computer to try and make him adhere more to their own desires for his behavior he went totally wonky until he managed to clear them out and then he was all Murphy again.
An interesting aspect of this dynamic is how Murphy isn't even certain about his identity. Even after he begins to regain his memories, Robocop refers to Murphy in 3rd person.