A Robot God?

Maybe I'm not far off the mark with this theory after all. Will be interesting to find out! 

I'm glad you bumped this thread, you certainly could be on to something! Following my theory I hated yesterday, I think we're getting closer to what's actually going on with the Engineers and Humanity. Engineers are not beings created by the divine, but grown in a lab like David and other synthetics. It would make so much sense!

Oh man Necronom4, this topic just sparked an idea... creating a topic about it. It builds off your theory as well as the one I proposed.

Just want to apologise to those members who were confused about what I was trying to get across with this topic. I didn't do a very good job of explaining what I was getting at, so I'm sorry for that.

It would have been a lot more simple and made more sense if I would have just stuck to what I originally imagined. 

The best way to explain what I meant is as follows:

A race of beings much like us, somewhere else in the universe, created artificial life. Those androids eventually took over as the dominant force in that civilization (maybe the race that created them became extinct.)

Those artificial life forms then went on to create another race (the engineers/elders maybe.)

Then, the elders/engineers create mankind on planet Earth.

Mankind eventually becomes technologically minded and creates artificial intelligence.

Mankind eventually becomes extinct, or maybe there's some sort of Terminator type scenario.

David8's and Ash's descendants then create another race of organic life and the cycle starts all over again.

That is how I originally wanted to explain it. It really doesn't matter now anyway. It was just something I had on my mind at the time and it was good fun to have a discussion about it, even if it did become frustrating trying to explain what I meant lol.

Just wanted to clarify that, like when you make a spelling mistake and you feel the need to correct it.    

Sorry Chris, I spent such a long time writing that last post that I missed your reply. Thanks man! Really looking forward to reading it!

Thank you for bumping the original discussion. If you believe in a "mind over matter" world rather than "a matter over mind" world then the notion that the creator is involved in the supreme act of artistic creativity and that we are living inside that creative act then how we view the creator, a sentient machine, or a sentient being is almost unimportant. The mechanism by which we have been created is so extra ordinary and we see only a fragment of that truth that whether we recognise it as, a machine, or not a machine, is almost irrelevant.

I am sure in Ridley's mythos the notions of creators and seeding creative gardner's and destructive interfering destroyers and mankind's "later"growing relationship with them is less about is this a machine or is this a sentient being and more about how either reacts within the great creative endeavour that we have come into. At its heart the mythos dividing lines are about Creator/Creation their relationships and how they respond to each other (forbidden fruit etc etc), the deep moral and philosophical questions of those interrelationships rather than he is a machine or not. Define machine in terms of "God". 

What makes David interesting as a f…… robot, he is narrator, observer and tester he is also for the film makers ironically highly relatable. He has seen mankind and its foibles and has now seen the destroyers and their foibles and without a moral compass he is establishing what he is capable of within this paradigm. One thing he has is genuine felt curiosity, rather like a small child, its written over so many of his reactions, he wants to see what happens if you take element A and mix it with element B from an amoral perspective. If he is restrained, by Weyland, by Shaw, he probably sees that as a puzzle to resolve rather than a barrier.

So for me the morality of the story is where the distinctions are drawn, not this guys a robot this guys for real. They are all part of creation and if we believe in a mind over matter world the mind that created all would look much more like a powerful computer than anything else.   

A slight sub text of all this is we have moved into the notion that the engineers are potentially machines rather    than sentient biological beings. How do they procreate. Well given the elders, they were viewed as growing old in Prometheus. The reason for cutting the Elders from the opening scene does not seem to have been about denying there are elders, but more about artistic decisions in communicating a more general mystery.

Also taken together whether the Engineers are asexual or not, that does not necessarily mean they are robots. We meet the Engineer through a head it has DNA, David meets a whole one in cryo-staysis, he has a pulse, he  will later act as a host, its in the mural, and MR T sees him as suitable for incubation. He shows emotion in reaction Peter and David and behaves with a sentient's reactions I see Engineers as delegated powers with great responsibility who had a schism and destroyed themselves leaving behind matters which mankind would have to chew over. The ones above them include an extra ordinary mind and could be defined as a computer for us to understand their awe filled power and creativity.       

Thank you Michelle for that very well written reply.

What a twist in the whole Alien saga it would be if, not only we, but also the characters of the story became aware that they were in the presence of gods in the making and they had been all along. They had a hand in creating their own demise.