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Speculation: None of this is real. There is no techno-goo-virus thing, and we are not a robot. We are, however, a simulation that's being bombarded with some pretty weird stimulus to try and figure out a treatment plan for our meat-bod, and this is just the way that our brain interprets it. Getting wounded means that the simulation nears a crash, and death means that we just reload, because we've measurably made progress towards a cure, but the simulator needs to try a different tactic for the next blocker.
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Feb 24, 2016 23:33
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Mindblast posted:I highly recommend watching this lp(or even playing the game!) with headphones. The sound design is straight up amazing in a way that cannot be fully experienced over standard speakers. Have to confirm this, sound design is something I do, and holy hell this game is immersive and leagues better than anything I've ever done. It really sucks you and makes you feel like you are in a place that is both growing and being crushed at the same time.
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Feb 24, 2016 23:39
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JossiRossi posted:Have to confirm this, sound design is something I do, and holy hell this game is immersive and leagues better than anything I've ever done. It really sucks you and makes you feel like you are in a place that is both growing and being crushed at the same time. Agreed, these developers mastered sound when they made this game. It's pretty amazing.
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Feb 25, 2016 04:01
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Also recommending the headphones. I've got a 7.1 surround headset and it makes these videos AMAZING.
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Feb 25, 2016 04:13
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  Simon makes a friend.
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Feb 26, 2016 21:16
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I am starting to like where this game seems to be going.
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Feb 26, 2016 22:09
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my dad posted:I am starting to like where this game seems to be going. Two brain scans, off to save the brain scan world.
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Feb 26, 2016 22:36
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Two brain scans, off to save the brain scan world. I'd like to know what the thread's view on brainscanning is, and whether continuing existence as one is any more or less meaningful than your original self.
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Feb 27, 2016 00:05
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Anticheese posted:I'd like to know what the thread's view on brainscanning is, and whether continuing existence as one is any more or less meaningful than your original self. To me, as I am, right now, it is not a valid continuation of myself - I'd see it more akin to having a child who shares all my traits and memories. If "I" were a copy of my current self, however, I would certainly consider that existence valid and worth living.
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Feb 27, 2016 00:09
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my dad posted:To me, as I am, right now, it is not a valid continuation of myself - I'd see it more akin to having a child who shares all my traits and memories. If "I" were a copy of my current self, however, I would certainly consider that existence valid and worth living. This guy knows what's up. Now I want everyone to go ahead and guess how nuanced the view of every single character in the game is. 
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Feb 27, 2016 00:45
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my dad posted:To me, as I am, right now, it is not a valid continuation of myself - I'd see it more akin to having a child who shares all my traits and memories. If "I" were a copy of my current self, however, I would certainly consider that existence valid and worth living. Perfect post/username synergy.  I basically agree. A copy would be a separate existence and a life with its own value, of course granted it would be in a body that can actually "run it", think and feel. The entire time Simon (2).exe has been sitting on some old HDD was just a fadeout, after all, he doesn't have any traumatic memories of being defragmented or whatever. This, in turn, makes me wonder about the copies that were used to test stimuli. They were just software, but while the tests were going on, they must've been as close to "conscious" as possible for them to actually work. I don't know if that actually makes the tests evil in any capacity, it's kind of hard to apply the same logic that works with unique lives to data that can be backed up and copied freely. 
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Feb 27, 2016 01:10
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Aithon posted:This, in turn, makes me wonder about the copies that were used to test stimuli. They were just software, but while the tests were going on, they must've been as close to "conscious" as possible for them to actually work. I don't know if that actually makes the tests evil in any capacity, it's kind of hard to apply the same logic that works with unique lives to data that can be backed up and copied freely. If the tests are just poking and prodding at simulated nerves and sections of the brain, I don't see anything unethical about them. Nothing unethical about copying or deleting it a billion times, either, as long as these conditions are met, it's just data, and is about as human as a fertilized egg cell. It might be capable of becoming a human being if given adequate stimuli and environment, and this aspect of it might be really important to someone, but on its own, it isn't one. Once you perform a full scale simulation of the scanned mind in a way that makes it capable of memory and learning (basically, if it's able to experience its simulated environment to a degree), it becomes something completely unique and self-aware, and you're effectively subjecting a non-consenting human being to imprisonment and invasive medical experiments. A very strange human being, but a human being none-the-less, with all that this entails. And, if you follow my ideas from the previous post, these are still unethical even if the "original" gave consent, because the human being stuck in your simulation to be experimented on is not the same person as the "original" human.
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Feb 27, 2016 01:31
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Anticheese posted:I'd like to know what the thread's view on brainscanning is, and whether continuing existence as one is any more or less meaningful than your original self. Exactly the same. When you copy a computer program, does it matter if you're running the original or not?
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Feb 27, 2016 01:41
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Oh man, the discussions in this thread are going to start getting really fun now.
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Feb 27, 2016 01:47
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Anticheese posted:I'd like to know what the thread's view on brainscanning is, and whether continuing existence as one is any more or less meaningful than your original self. Identity issues can begin to be resolved by first having a clear and consistent naming scheme. And now the game of "Identify the CORE loyalist"/"Spot the version control user" begins
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Feb 27, 2016 02:04
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So if you leave Amy "alive" in the station does the main character say/do anything different when you meet Catherinebot? Seems like the game just expects you to forget about her as the character is all despondent about not meeting a human when Amy was possibly more human than he is at this point.
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Feb 27, 2016 08:13
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I watched this last night after about 38 hours of insomnia. I couldn't perceive the difference between the game's effects an my own auditory and visual hallucinations (hearing faint murmurs in the background and perceiving things that are static as moving among other things.) Happily I actually fell asleep before I could decide if it was amazing or horrifying. Still, sleep deprivation might not be something you would be sad to leave behind but it makes me think about what other things we wouldn't be able to bring with us as scans. Even if you get all the senses, how many things like that is easily overlooked?
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Feb 27, 2016 09:59
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You could probably simulate any manner of mind alteration with great precision, really. It's more that you'd have to both want to do that and have a pretty good idea of how to do that in a controlled fashion without accidentally frying/impairing yourself (neither of which are really hard to overcome by this point since even today with common drugs we have a fairly decent idea of how they affect our brains). On a side note, I'm wondering how long it is until we have to/accidentally erase Helper Catherine.
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Feb 27, 2016 10:32
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Something I can't help but notice is that the cortex chip holding Catherine really bulks out the grip of the omnitool. Look at the thing, its ergonomics are shot. How are you supposed to get your hand around it? Yeah, this is kind of not in the same league as the nature of the self, but I already saw this game played through so joining in on the speculation would be unfair, whaddaya want.
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Feb 27, 2016 12:53
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I've seen it played through too, but I figure Anticheese's prompt is generalized enough that I could respond in a similarly general manner, independent of the specific events of SOMA itself. Come, let us hear your thoughts on the subject.
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Feb 27, 2016 13:44
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Well, since you asked... I think that the copied person is still just that: a person. Simon (2) is not Simon, because we haven't been told what happened to that Simon yet. And cloning plots like this aren't really new, but "scan your brain, upload it to something else" is a new twist on the whole "we've made a perfect clone of you in every way" thing. (That would also not be Simon. That would be a twin brother, although delayed. He would turn out like Simon, but he wouldn't be Simon, because he wouldn't be growing up in the same circumstances, and would have a different personality as a result.) So basically Simon (2) didn't ask for this, and he's getting a raw deal, but he's got a deal, which is something, at least. But that's the thing: Simon (2)'s lovely situation is, at least in my opinion, completely unrelated to the fact that he's Simon (2) and not Simon. Anybody would be having a lovely time if they were in this situation, and it wouldn't matter how they came to be what they are. If Simon were thrown in a cryogenic capsule and got here the slow way, Phillip J. Fry style, it would still be a raw deal and a lovely situation. If Simon (2) were compiled and set loose in a Toronto that hadn't been flattened by a comet a hundred years later, that would be disorienting and lead to some existential issues, but it wouldn't be so bad. Hell, if the station were at least not in the situation it is with the monsters, and everyone were just down here living out the twilight of humanity, that'd still be poo poo, but better than this. So I guess my answer to "does this have meaning" would be "who gives a poo poo, he's here now, that ship has sailed." Plus I've seen this same "copy of a person" thing in at least three different webcomics. The first was in Starfall, although it was touching on the very similar but not identical issue of AIs backing themselves up, which is closer to what Catherine was trying to do to the ark. The second was Whomp!, which was doing basically this, although it's a gag-a-day strip so it doesn't go into it beyond this one-off thing. And the third was Schlock Mercenary, with the character getting copied showing up here and the actual copy happening a couple of weeks worth of strips later here. This one goes into a lot more depth about what the copy is like, especially because the copy knows they're a copy...although the circumstances are very, very different.
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Feb 27, 2016 14:35
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A scan can't eat a pizza. Not really seeing the point of existing sans that.
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Feb 27, 2016 15:02
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Deceitful Penguin posted:A scan can't eat a pizza. Not really seeing the point of existing sans that. Just scan a pizza.
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Feb 27, 2016 15:06
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my dad posted:Just scan a pizza. Hell, if you can mess around to high enough fidelity with your neurons you can eat things you never ate while you were human. You could eat things that never existed on Earth! e: Of course none of that or even scanning a pizza applies because by the time they thought about uploading scans of people seriously the asteroid already ruined having food to scan and people who knew how to mess with copies of the scans really good. This is the crappiest future. Ignatius M. Meen fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Feb 27, 2016 |
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Feb 27, 2016 15:09
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my dad posted:Just scan a pizza. Why do you think they want to get to the ARK so desperately? That's where all the pizza scans are!
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Feb 27, 2016 22:59
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my dad posted:Just scan a pizza. Hah, I'd much rather talk about this sorta stuff than going into Humian epistemology regarding whether the illusions we believe in are real or star trek clone ethics. Humans are essentially sensory beings; we are a collage of data received through our senses. I therefore want to put forth the idea that a scan would never be able to be anything but a sad facsimile of a human unless they could hold a real pizza, in their real hands, feel the texture and warmth, see it and taste it, then regret having all those calories.
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Feb 28, 2016 09:16
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Would a scanned pizza taste exactly the same every time? What if it was slightly disappointing? These are questions that keep me awake at night.
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Feb 28, 2016 10:41
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Scanned five-star restaurant quality pizza would be pretty good for a long time I figure, long enough that by the time I got sick of it and all the other meals cooked/baked/etc as good as possible I'd have had the time to build a gustatory robot body. It beats a risk of food poisoning or being put off from pizza for a while by a country mile. Small, semi-random mutations applied to the current request of a scan pizza that match up with what might go slightly differently in real cooking every time could probably also extend how long those scans would stay satisfying. As for the senses, the data still has to be interpreted, and the specific forms of those interpretations have a paper trail in the form of memories, so I don't buy that we couldn't potentially spoof all of that sensory data with enough time and research. The real tricks are a) actually ensuring you've got people who know what all the parts of a pizza taste like, without which you have no or really different scan pizza and b) coming up with a computer definition of 'pizza' everyone agrees tastes good or better for hopefully long enough to get the tech needed for a gustatory robot body and the cookware to remake things from scratch (assuming you even can do that - with the game's future, even disappointing scan pizza is the only pizza you'll ever eat again shy of finding another planet that supports life).
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Feb 28, 2016 13:39
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Humans are essentially sensory beings; we are a collage of data received through our senses. I therefore want to put forth the idea that a scan would never be able to be anything but a sad facsimile of a human unless they could hold a real pizza, in their real hands, feel the texture and warmth, see it and taste it, then regret having all those calories. Imagine you could simulate the taste of pizza, its texture and warmth, its appearance. You could even make the simulated body of the user fatter if they pretend to eat too much of the pizza scan. Where is the difference?
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Feb 28, 2016 17:30
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Presumably the ARK would also contain scans of the ingredients so that you could be disappointed by your lack of virtual culinary skills just like in real life.
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Feb 28, 2016 18:12
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Gantolandon posted:Imagine you could simulate the taste of pizza, its texture and warmth, its appearance. You could even make the simulated body of the user fatter if they pretend to eat too much of the pizza scan. Where is the difference? Also, nothing we have seen has suggested they can scan things outside peoples heads. As far as we know, theyd only have the memory of pizza, which is a hella pale shadow indeed. If they can create and manipulate us to such a degree as to make us think we are eating pizza, we are so easily manipulated that our scanned minds might as well be open word docs. And then Id spend all my time being a simulated Kanye West eating the moon, but when our simulations become so removed from raelity, from humanity, whats the point? Why keep such a thing going?
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Feb 28, 2016 21:08
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Because it beats being dead? Try to tell me you'd rather be dead than a simulated Kanye West eating the moon until you get bored with a straight face.
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Feb 29, 2016 00:15
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:Because it beats being dead? Try to tell me you'd rather be dead than a simulated Kanye West eating the moon until you get bored with a straight face. Would I have the choice to turn myself off once I get bored with eating the moon?
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Feb 29, 2016 00:26
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citybeatnik posted:Would I have the choice to turn myself off once I get bored with eating the moon? If you're bored/tired of existence as anything you can imagine then there's not much point in prolonging things so yeah, you definitely should have the option to do that.
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Feb 29, 2016 00:34
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:If you're bored/tired of existence as anything you can imagine then there's not much point in prolonging things so yeah, you definitely should have the option to do that. This phrase immediately brought back to mind what Amy said, when she was hooked up by all that goo and poo poo to the pair of artificial lungs in Upsilon B. What if it wasn't your choice?
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Feb 29, 2016 01:08
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death .cab for qt posted:This phrase immediately brought back to mind what Amy said, when she was hooked up by all that goo and poo poo to the pair of artificial lungs in Upsilon B. Then if whatever controls that isn't abiding by your wishes whether to die or not, they're an rear end in a top hat. Even if they're an rear end in a top hat in denial with a purpose like Simon or a dumb computer program made by humans who didn't expect things to go so completely awry with "keep people alive through scans if their body dies". Aside from that I suspect it'd suck on a similar level to having a terminal illness today on the one end and being suicidally depressed on the other.
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Feb 29, 2016 01:16
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When was the Ark made? If anything all they have to taste is what they have on hand, Tang and Ramen.
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Feb 29, 2016 07:14
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If you like being yelled at by female voices arguing about philosophy of mind, The Swapper is a good game.
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Feb 29, 2016 11:48
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I think this game is all 13th Floor about it, like Simon is actually from the Ark and the technique they used in the Ark scanned him to a robot outside the ark, or a simulation in a simulation as the movie was.
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Feb 29, 2016 14:57
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I watched the first episode, said gently caress it and bought the game. Im playing behind pace, so I have no idea whats a head more than 5 minutes. No spoilers, no speculation, but a general question. Once this LP is done, or has reached an appropriate point, can a cemented timeline be posted? Exactly how long was Amy down there, when were her and Carl sent to Upsilon for the shut down? How long has its been since a living thing been in X space? Actual speculation: When Simon first wakes up, he is in a closed, locked room. How did he, or whatever, get inside? One thing that escaped me until I changed my gamma settings, is that there is a blood trail in that room, from a section of hosed up wall leading to the pilots chair. This is as if Simon, was placed against the wall, or was killed by that wall, I dont know I really have so many drat questions. Gaj fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Feb 29, 2016 |
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Feb 29, 2016 18:00
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