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Tiggum posted:There's only a difference if there's a soul (and then the answer depends on what actually happens to the soul). see, i'm basically taking "yes, something vaguely along the lines of a soul exists" as given. i don't think we know what it is, and we might never figure it out before we go extinct, but... to put it bluntly, nothing we've actually mapped accounts for truly arbitrary judgments. like, for example, i was in my pantry a second ago because i'm baked and had the munchies. there was a big-rear end bag of barbecue Lays and a big-rear end bag of cool ranch Doritos next to each other. there's not really any rational reason to pick one over the other or anything that i could attribute to brain chemistry (beyond the simple fact that i was hungry and craved something carb-y), and yet i grabbed the bag of Doritos instead of segfaulting and having smoke come out of my ears like some kind of ultra-exaggerated version of Chidi from The Good Place. there's clearly something that accounts for the human ability to do this, some sort of connective thought-glue that pieces all our different senses and inputs into the whole we perceive and generates coherent output even when there wouldn't be enough input for a machine to understand. i sort of feel like the key question of transhumanism is whether we'll ever figure out what in the hell that is, and whether we'll be able to do anything with it. if the answer to either of those questions is "no," then the whole enterprise is... not a great use of time and money.
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Feb 12, 2018 07:58
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General Battuta posted:My personal take — and one I think is more or less objectively correct — is that You, your consciousness, isn't a big unitary nugget of Me-ness that's either all there or all gone. It's a live state built from your memories, your senses, your physical and mental characteristics. At every moment that state's changing. If your brain state is rolled back two weeks and started again, it's a different you...but you're always becoming a different you anyway. The information loss isn't enormous compared to the sum total of your experiences. You could almost view it as an extremely lovely 'new memory': your brain was updated (by a bullet) in such a way as to remove a lot of information. In this view it's not much different from day to day life, where you might get blasted through the head with a steel rod or get Alzheimers but still be 'you'. I love this sort of stuff and I really wish that the show went into it deeper. Just from the book and the series, I'd argue that you die the minute you lose your sleeve simply because the show makes a big deal about the body having such an impact on your mind. Like yeah people might come to love neo Nazi abuela as the original but she's come back with all the faults and quirks that her new sleeve has. Even with his magical envoy powers, Kovacs still has his nicotine addiction and the muscle memory of Ryker. It's not something that he can just shake and Me-Prime isn't going to remain be Me-Prime in Me-Backup if Me-Backup gets dumped into the sleeve of a hardcore drug addict or incapacitated elderly person. Memories are important but biology plays a pretty big deal in shaping who you are too.
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Feb 12, 2018 08:14
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pile of brown posted:In Trek doesn't the physical process of scanning for transport destroy the original? Or am I thinking of something else? I remember reading that due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle it's necessary to cease all living function to accurately map body/mind. Thats Trek... and nerds still debate it since there are stories that contradict each other in the same series and other trek series. Hammerstein posted:Isn't there a Star Trek episode where a technician with transporter-phobia actually experiences the transport as an uninterrupted stream of consciousness ? Not sure if that's canon though. Reginald Barclay. Hes run through the transporter filters for a longer time to remove stuff that attached to his body.
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Feb 12, 2018 09:21
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From the top of the last page I was thinking pleasepleaseplease don’t talk about Star Trek and the transporter, then I woke up and here we are.
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Feb 12, 2018 09:25
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idk if we're still spoilering for this since it's well past the Netflix thread rules, but just to be safe: I'm sure a lot of it is my severe Dichen Lachman bias, but I liked Reileen a lot, I thought she was pretty well done and consistent with how hosed her life must have been. Her being a bit contradictory just worked well with how insane she must have been. I also found her incredibly sympathetic while realizing she was completely irredeemable, which I imagine was what they were going for with her and if that's the case, it worked on me. She is terrible and yet I felt terrible for her. Also I just assumed her probably incredible wealth was disperse between the few different Meths she was living as, and that she herself kept p much to the shadows w/r/t her clone sleeve. So her needing Bancroft to get Tak off ice, rather than doing it herself, also made perfect sense to him. Bancroft alone is probably far more rich and influential than any one of her sleeves are, but the wealth of all her sleeves combined is prob way more than his. Also it could just be as simple as him holding more sway politically than any of her sleeves did, rather than a money thing. I loved this show a lot, and other than the full flashback episode (which still had things I liked a lot, tho mostly interactions with Rei and Tak) I enjoyed p much every moment of it. I don't think the final episodes fell apart as much as some people here seem to, but I also felt a weird undercurrent of camp (which helped w/ some much needed levity, which I think was balanced well here) from episode 1 so it getting kind of batshit in the final two episodes didn't feel out of place to me, and all the details the show itself provided added up for me. I think the cast was overall great, the main players and a handful of the side ones especially, and the writing, while schlocky, remained consistent in its tone and in keeping track of the relevant pieces it was laying in the early episodes. I especially appreciated how characters with little 'personal' screen time felt well rounded enough for me to see deeper into w/e conflict they were having. Prescott and the police chief are my prime examples here. Not a lot to work with, but the show uses that time to provide relevant stuff like Prescott's ambitions and her apprehension toward going all the way with them, or the chief's close relationship with Ortega and her family. This is one of Netflix's better (and the most consistent, for me, other than Stranger Things S1 prob) original outings, imo, and I like that a cool Greek lady is the showrunner and I look forward to w/e adventure she takes me on next year. I'm looking forward to reading the book, figure I'll do the first and hold off on 2 and 3 until we know if the second season plans on adapting w/e still works from those. oh also lol at how many Canadian actors are in this. It's probably extra noticable for me b/c I see them in stuff other than the SyFy/CW fare they're constantly appearing in due to being filmed in this fine city I call home.
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Feb 12, 2018 09:51
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esperterra posted:I also felt a weird undercurrent of camp (which helped w/ some much needed levity, which I think was balanced well here) from episode 1 Oh yeah, I think it's absolutely there. I'm only three episodes in and there's a bunch. Pretty much everything with the hotel, particularly the poker game, the repeated shots of that woman falling into water, Joel Kinnaman's zero effort performance when pretending to be someone's mother, the spoooky children's story and the bit with the guy who's been resleeved into a snake all spring to mind.
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Feb 12, 2018 10:10
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Maybe it's just me, but I like my cyberpunk to be trashy pulp so this show fired on all cylinders for me.
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Feb 12, 2018 10:12
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Edit: Actually, that raises another big gaping plot hole; Why is Kovacs in storage at all when he's supposed to be part of a terrorist movement against the Protectorate in the series? They RD'd Sarah on general principle to look big and dangerous, yet the actual last Envoy gets Storage because...? They had orders to not real death Kovacs so as to prevent him becoming a martyr. Which was admittedly a fairly weak explanation, making an example by showing CTAC could even take out an Envoy would have made more propaganda sense. Or something, the reasoning was kind of weak, especially since Siro was running point and wants nothing more than to kill Kovacs. Sarah was killed not on principle, but to hurt Kovacs because Siro is an rear end in a top hat and he wasn't allowed to kill Kovacs.
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Feb 12, 2018 10:36
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Gyges posted:They had orders to not real death Kovacs so as to prevent him becoming a martyr. Which was admittedly a fairly weak explanation, making an example by showing CTAC could even take out an Envoy would have made more propaganda sense. Or something, the reasoning was kind of weak, especially since Siro was running point and wants nothing more than to kill Kovacs. It just doesn't fly because literally every other Envoy is dead. Including, most importantly, goddamn Quellcrist Falconer herself. Kovacs was a mop-up job, nothing more, especially considering they killed his sleeve. There is zero reason not to blow his stack out and call it a day, because the Protectorate doesn't go in for subtlety when they crush insubordination.
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Feb 12, 2018 10:43
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esperterra posted:Maybe it's just me, but I like my cyberpunk to be trashy pulp so this show fired on all cylinders for me. This: I need more noir in my life. Although the cast was astoundingly pretty, for noir. I thought that Kovacs had good chemistry with both Ortega and Rei fwiw, to the extent that I do wonder if it was originally scripted for Rei to be a jealous lover not a jealous sister .
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Feb 12, 2018 11:19
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Tiggum posted:
A charitable explanation would be that Reileen doesn't have quite enough pull, but Bancroft does. Probably more accurately, it's because all of her pre-episode 8 actions are consistent with book Reileen, who has no personal attachment to Kovacs whatsoever and whose entire goal is getting Bancroft to punt the bill.
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Feb 12, 2018 11:35
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Neddy Seagoon posted:It just doesn't fly because literally every other Envoy is dead. The real reason is, “so there’s plot,” but I could accept it as a general protocol thing. Killing a sleeve and pulling their stack seems pretty low effort, and you can’t interrogate the dead. Takeshi was important and knew stuff, so leaving the option open to spin him up seems valid. And what’s the cost? A shoebox in a closet somewhere? This show is good and cool. I hope it gets renewed, but apparently it’s expensive as poo poo so who knows.
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Feb 12, 2018 11:36
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Hammerstein posted:But sleep is a well researched field and you just "know" that in the morning you are the same person that you were in the evening. Also you dream sometimes. Having a company sell you immortality by stating that in a worst case scenario a copy of yourself will become active seems to be a rather exotic interpretation. The answer is, there is no real one. There is no meaningful difference. You both have equal claim on your identity because you are exactly identical up to that moment. The same as you don't know now that you haven't been replaced with an identical copy at any point in your life. It's unlikely, I'll grant you, but if it had happened then there'd be no way to tell. Unless there's a soul, of course. Then the one with the soul is the original and the other one is the remorseless killer who's going to murder the real one and take over their life. Hammerstein posted:This is what irks me about the whole concept of stacks and backups. Let's say your whole body and stack get destroyed - fade to black - a bit later a fresh clone of yourself wakes up in some lab. LORD OF BOOTY posted:see, i'm basically taking "yes, something vaguely along the lines of a soul exists" as given. i don't think we know what it is, and we might never figure it out before we go extinct, but... to put it bluntly, nothing we've actually mapped accounts for truly arbitrary judgments. But if souls do exist and there is a technology to transfer minds between bodies that opens up a lot more questions. Like, we can find out what a soul does. Because if you duplicate someone but they still only have one soul, that must have some effect. Does the soul split? Does it stay in one and leave the other one without? Of course, it might duplicate, but then that possibility's got implications of its own. That means we can duplicate souls. What is a soul? What can we do with it? Do other animals have souls? What properties do they have?
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Feb 12, 2018 12:09
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Hammerstein posted:This is what irks me about the whole concept of stacks and backups. Let's say your whole body and stack get destroyed - fade to black - a bit later a fresh clone of yourself wakes up in some lab. But the backup you is still you, just as much as if 48 hours ago I passed out cold and was whisked away to wherever the clone body was stored instead of continuing on to do whatever got my stack blown up. Or, even, just needlecast into a different sleeve. Remember, people do that too. Are they the same people? If "I" go into storage for a few minutes and am needlecast into a new sleeve somewhere else, why is that still "me" but a backup isn't? Or is it even? Basically, I have no idea why you're saying that a clone who perceives himself as the original, and who everyone recognizes as the original, isn't the same as the original as of the forking point.
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Feb 12, 2018 12:13
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Xealot posted:The real reason is, “so there’s plot,” but I could accept it as a general protocol thing. Killing a sleeve and pulling their stack seems pretty low effort, and you can’t interrogate the dead. Takeshi was important and knew stuff, so leaving the option open to spin him up seems valid. And what’s the cost? A shoebox in a closet somewhere? It's more because "that's what happens in the book's prologue". The Protectorate can definitively prove the others are dead at Stronghold just by the bodycount, the Uprising's glorious leader is dead, and if they really wanted to interrogate him he'd be spun up in VR immediately and vigorously interrogated until, not if, he talked. There is no reason to keep him in the series. It works in the book because he's "only" getting busted for pulling a corporate heist. Dead by Harlan's World commandos, placed in Storage for his sentence. Nice and neat; choice of work for Laurens or go back into Storage for the next 117 years and change to complete his sentence. The problem with a second season is the best parts are the plot beats derived from the book. Going off the leash completely does not fill me with hope for quality considering how many supernatural investigator show cliches they tried to pad the show with. Oh no, Ortega's dad was a cop and died in the line of duty. Like literally every other female lead who is a police officer  . Not to mention needing to tear her arm off and graft a super-strong cybernetic one in its place just to "let" her get into fight scenes. The ones Kovacs was already enduring by his sleeve's basic fitness. Or that Immortality Is Evil, only the elite can benefit from it. And the mid-tier corporate jockeys buying new sleeves. And the people surviving in a new sleeve provided by the government after being murdered. And the average citizens mortaging a sleeve like car/house payments as something for their future. But, but, aside from that it's clearly EEEEVIIILLL!Or Quellcrist being the usual deified super-mentor. The book version of her is just a completely pragmatic person sick of getting poo poo on by her world's oppressive government and getting people to do something about it. Not to rally behind her as a political figure, but to encourage everyone to wage their own little personal insurrections. If they happen to do it at the same time, as a group, all the better; quote:"The personal, as everyone’s so loving fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, gently caress them. Make it personal." If anyone called her a princess, she'd probably have shot them on general principle. As for the Meths in general... the series take is just really really dumb with no thought put in beyond "THEY ARE ABOVE THE PEASANT FOLK". They want them to be completely above regular folk because they have money and immortality... except the kind of money a sleeve goes for can be had by any corporate bigwig. Have you seen the kind of money middle/upper-management types throw around now on cosmetic surgery, or yachts? At the kind of timespan Meths have supposedly collectively existed for, there should be millions of people in their little elite cadre. Even if they can't afford a vault of clones, whose to say someone can't afford a single clone and just live without remote backups? Or just live body-to-body?
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Feb 12, 2018 12:29
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MrMojok posted:One thing the series does have all over the books (and I love all three books) is humor. I struggle to recall even one single funny moment in the entire ~1500 page Kovacs saga.
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Feb 12, 2018 16:46
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gohmak posted:The virtual sex scene in Broken Angels? Good grief that whole situation is cringe inducing. He has has magic healing fingers (so have I, my wife told me so  ) and to finish the job he has got to bone her, but not in ~the real~ because she looks like skeletor on a bad day.Heinlein has a lot to answer for.
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Feb 12, 2018 16:58
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I never read the books but enjoyed the series enough. I thought there were some kinda interesting takes on old tropes, mainly around the AI. One, the fact that the AI are all out of date and people are turned off by the uncanny valley aspect of them. Second that the AI themselves might detest or like humans but they don't have any more ability to kill all humans than any real person, and they mostly seem preoccupied with business schemes and making money -- not even superhuman AIs can overturn capitalism. Finally an AI managers union is really funny.
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Feb 12, 2018 18:55
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gohmak posted:The virtual sex scene in Broken Angels?
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Feb 12, 2018 18:58
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I just had a really bad premonition with regards to Quell. How terrible, how cliche, could they really make it? Her d.h.f. I know where it is. Search your heart, you know too.
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Feb 12, 2018 20:52
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Collateral posted:I just had a really bad premonition with regards to Quell. How terrible, how cliche, could they really make it? In the diary? Somehow.
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Feb 12, 2018 20:53
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Strom Cuzewon posted:In the diary? Somehow. She was with him all the time.
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Feb 12, 2018 21:04
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Tiggum posted:Just knowing something doesn't make it true. If you were duplicated then the copy would also "just know" it was you. If you went to sleep and, without waking you, they made a perfect copy of you and put the two of you in a room together, how would you know when you woke up which of you was the real one? Of course there is no way to know and maybe the first example is another reason why self-cloning is so abhorred in book's future society. But the difference is that in this case I have no influence on these things. But why would someone who can make his own decisions set this up in the first place ? For example: Kovacs's clone - he knows that he is not the original, yet plays along with the original's plan. Would not the drive of self-preservation immediately make him jump ship, once he realizes that the memories are not his own and that he is just a copy ? I think there is quite a difference between knowing and not knowing that one is a clone. In Blade Runner the Nexus 6 series had a limited lifespan exactly because of this. Once they realized what they are, they immediately went awol. Tiggum posted:Because they don't believe in souls. Or they do, but they believe that the soul will transfer to the new body. Bringing us back to #1 - if I were a meth and didn't believe in a soul, but considered my own life unique and precious, then I would invest all my wealth to make sure that the original never gets destroyed. The idea of a clone replacing me, is not immortality. And if they do believe in a soul, then why even bother ? If someone is that religious/spiritual then he would happily transcend into the afterlife - the show explains how devout believers are against "unnatural" life extension, so the only reason to prolong one's life in such a way is if they knew they went to their religion's version of hell. At the same time damning themselves for using said technology to extend their stay in the material world. Ravenfood posted:For the same reason that sleep, or peri-operative deep sedation, or retrograde amnesia, or getting black-out drunk isn't some horrific thing. As far as I'm concerned, that backup would be me so yeah, I'd get to live forever. I don't understand what you're not getting about that unless you're assuming some intrinsic me-ness (like a soul) that somehow doesn't get transferred. You already addressed sleep by saying "its well-researched and society says its the same you" and it seems like a really easy thing to accept that society says a backup of you is just "you". They even keep the backups as up to date as possible, because the further away that backup is kept the stronger the "its a different you" goes. Drunk/sedated - but in those examples the bio-functions of the original never cease. I seems you and I have a very different view about what we consider immortal and waking up a clone body with my memories, once I croak, is not immortality to me. A copy of "me" is not the current living/breathing me. And if a new "me" wakes up somewhere, the original is still dead. The difference is in knowledge: knowing that you die, but a clone lives on, is not comforting to me. I think that someone who is oblivious about his origins will have an easier time accepting this, than someone who is not. Following example: Let's say it's 200 years in the future and you're a student who needs money. In the news you discover Dr. Hammerstein's laboratory which pays test subjects handsomely. So you go there and Dr. Hammerstein says: "Get on the operating table and close your eyes, you won't feel a thing. Unfortunately you will die during the experiment. But worry not - we have a perfect 1:1 clone of yourself ready, with all the memories up to the moment you lose consciousness. As soon as your brain activity ceases, we will start up your clone and he can walk away with a huge cheque of future-bucks". Would you accept this offer ? After all it's a perfect backup, so "you" get to live on. Or would the original's drive of self-preservation say "gently caress this, I'm out of here". P.S.: Just that we all understand each other, I actually consider this quite interesting and genuinely enjoy the debate. It's an eye opener to see what different takes people have about what defines "self" and which methods of life extension are acceptable. This is not about "not getting something", as Ravenfood states 
Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 21:47
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Not to mention needing to tear her arm off and graft a super-strong cybernetic one in its place just to "let" her get into fight scenes. The ones Kovacs was already enduring by his sleeve's basic fitness. Wasn't she catholic though? So no new body? Also she couldn't be re-sleeved the way kovacs just gets put into a new body because she's not an Envoy, so being put into a new body(even a combat enhanced one) is still disorienting isn't it? Can you get a sleeve augmented with the neurochem and combat enhancements after the Stack has been implanted, or do those things need to be baked into the DNA as the sleeve is printed? Augmenting a Catholic may be the only way to actually have a normie carry their own against a pimped out TactiSleeve. Unless you can just go to the drug store and have the "enhanced reflexes" package added to your birth body without needing a brand new sleeve EDIT: I don't think they did enough to differentiate the Natural Birth Bodies, enhanced Clone Bodies and Bespoke Sleeves. Like that guy who ran the underground fight ring had some weird poo poo going on, I think he was maybe pure android with a human stack or something? Felt more alien than the rest of the cast, but it's just sorta glossed over. bring back old gbs fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 22:11
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Collateral posted:She was with him all the time. Unbeknownst to Kovacs, his left arm is actually cybernetic.
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Feb 12, 2018 23:10
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bring back old gbs posted:Wasn't she catholic though? So no new body? Also she couldn't be re-sleeved the way kovacs just gets put into a new body because she's not an Envoy, so being put into a new body(even a combat enhanced one) is still disorienting isn't it? She wasn't the sort of catholic who signed the future DNR - that's what she and her mother were arguing about.
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Feb 13, 2018 00:31
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:see, here's what I'm mostly curious about in this regard. Personally I'm in the "Free will is an illusion, we're just meat robots with agency" camp. So its all irrelevant from my point of view  There is no "you". You are a self-referential loop. LORD OF BOOTY posted:see, i'm basically taking "yes, something vaguely along the lines of a soul exists" as given. i don't think we know what it is, and we might never figure it out before we go extinct, but... to put it bluntly, nothing we've actually mapped accounts for truly arbitrary judgments. WHAT? Sorry dude but no, we can account for arbitrary judgements JUST FINE without a "soul". Everything about science says there is no soul. The ONLY reason to believe in a soul is because you want there to be. In my experience, beliefs like that do not pan out. So I don't believe in one. Everything about agency can be explained by meat brains. Souls are only needed for true "free will" which when you really think about it, makes no sense. It requires something outside our universe to exist which has the capacity to manipulate this universe.... its such a huge stretch for no reason. Life already makes sense. You don't need to make poo poo up that complicates it further unless you're just really stuck on the idea of having a soul already. If you embrace not having a soul... its really not that bad. Agency gets you the same things people think they need Free Will for. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 00:51
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pile of brown posted:Still doesn't really make sense if Rei is a 200 year old Meth with a flying high tech whorehouse that caters to the ultra rich. Even if her own money and influence weren't sufficient for the President, she could have used the money and power had Bancroft or someone like him help her out any time. Everything about Rei's character in the show is "because the plot needed it". Like literally nothing she does in her entire life makes sense for her character. She is PLOT the person, a literal walking contrivance.
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Feb 13, 2018 00:52
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Hammerstein posted:I think that to the fresh clone it would not really matter, since he is alive, possibly very rich and will perceive himself as the original. But the actual question is that why the former original would bother to set up such a fallback solution in the first place. Its not too crazy to see that people would BELIEVE they'd transfer and stay alive even if the science doesn't back it up. This is a big deal in SOMA, people at first realize that brain scans are brain scans, but once they're faced with their own upcoming deaths and no way out of it, they start to grab on to the idea of brain scans as a solution even though they know it isn't one. Humans aren't always logical.
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Feb 13, 2018 00:54
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Hammerstein posted:Of course there is no way to know and maybe the first example is another reason why self-cloning is so abhorred in book's future society. But the difference is that in this case I have no influence on these things. But why would someone who can make his own decisions set this up in the first place ? For example: Kovacs's clone - he knows that he is not the original, yet plays along with the original's plan. Would not the drive of self-preservation immediately make him jump ship, once he realizes that the memories are not his own and that he is just a copy ? I think there is quite a difference between knowing and not knowing that one is a clone. No, he knows he IS the original. He made the plan. He has all those memories (and all the memories of being an Envoy, and everything before and after.) He's the Real Kovacs and so is the other fork. Neither one is 'just a copy', any more than you're 'just a copy' of yourself from yesterday. quote:Bringing us back to #1 - if I were a meth and didn't believe in a soul, but considered my own life unique and precious, then I would invest all my wealth to make sure that the original never gets destroyed. The idea of a clone replacing me, is not immortality. If you're a Meth you live in a time where stacks are commonplace and therefore people understand how the physical brain works, so you wouldn't see a backup as 'being replaced by a clone', any more than you today worry about being wiped out and replaced by a clone if you get drunk. quote:"Get on the operating table and close your eyes, you won't feel a thing. Unfortunately you will die during the experiment. But worry not - we have a perfect 1:1 clone of yourself ready, with all the memories up to the moment you lose consciousness. As soon as your brain activity ceases, we will start up your clone and he can walk away with a huge cheque of future-bucks". To your internal existence, how is this distinguishable from lying down on the table, falling asleep, and waking up with several thousand future bucks? I'm quite serious, this isn't a trick question. How is there any risk of death here? Your body has shed millions (billions?) of dead cells through its life, but what remains preserved is the pattern, the Shannon entropy encoded in the structure. That entropy will be preserved. Just because you're leaving a corpse-shaped pile of dead cells behind doesn't put you at any more risk. It's hard to imagine that your consciousness could possibly 'migrate' from one body to the other until you realize that's exactly what's happening. After you're unconscious, they scan your brain state and code it into a new substrate. Substrate's irrelevant, so this is nondestructive. This isn't a philosophical question or a matter of differing definitions. You cannot say you'd 'die' here without also believing you've died zillions of times in the course of your day to day existence. And if all those deaths don't bother you, why should this one? Zaphod42 posted:Its not too crazy to see that people would BELIEVE they'd transfer and stay alive even if the science doesn't back it up. No, you've misunderstood the game. SOMA correctly depicts brain scanning as a way for your true, real, first-person self to go on living. That's why everyone gets scanned and goes to the Ark. It genuinely is a solution and a path to immortality. SOMA also correctly depicts the problem of forking: some of your forks aren't going to get the happy ending. They're going to be left behind. And they're just as much Genuinely You. The cultish, irrational movement in SOMA was 'continuity', the belief that they could only go to the Ark if they killed their organic fork. In fact, this is just euthanizing one of the forks: it makes no difference to the other fork at all. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 00:55
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General Battuta posted:No, you've misunderstood the game. SOMA correctly depicts brain scanning as a way for your true, real, first-person self to go on living. That's why everyone gets scanned and goes to the Ark. It genuinely is a solution and a path to immortality. Either you're wrong or you're choosing to misconstrue what I said in a way that allows you to say its wrong but isn't what I meant. The ending of SOMA is literally The one woman character calling you a moron for not realizing that after you upload your consciousness to the space station, YOU will still die at the bottom of the ocean. Yes, to the new uploaded version of you, nothing stopped. That doesn't mean its "you". drat guys this is obviously a problem of philosophical perspective, you can't just pick a certain perspective and then declare everybody else wrong. You're oversimplifying the situation. General Battuta posted:SOMA also correctly depicts the problem of forking: some of your forks aren't going to get the happy ending. They're going to be left behind. And they're just as much Genuinely You. That's the whole loving point of what I just said. People believe they'd be saved, but they still die. That's that. Cloning yourself doesn't stop one of you from dying. gently caress dude, why do you have to be all "WRONG!" about this?
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Feb 13, 2018 00:58
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General Battuta posted:It genuinely is a solution and a path to immortality. NO IT IS NOT. It is a solution only to "we will stop being around" but that's not the "problem". The problem is people on the bottom of the ocean are going to die. And they are. There's no solving that problem. The "solution" isn't a solution. They still die. Period. There's no arguing this. You're wrong. You can't just pick a different problem and say they solved that. It doesn't matter. The female scientist herself talks about this the whole game, how people thought it was a solution even though they knew it wasn't. How they grabbed onto the idea that brain scanning themselves and then committing suicide right after would somehow mean that "they" would become the brain-scan. But that's just wrong. Committing suicide means you die; whether you have a clone or not. The clone already existed at that point. All you're doing is killing yourself, you're not magically jumping to the consciousness in the machine from the consciousness in your body. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 01:00
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a foolish pianist posted:She wasn't the sort of catholic who signed the future DNR - that's what she and her mother were arguing about. Ah, I figured since grandma and grandkids seemingly have the DNR, that she did too. But she didnt?
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Feb 13, 2018 01:06
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Zaphod42 posted:Everything about Rei's character in the show is "because the plot needed it". I respectfully disagree.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:06
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There is only one objectively correct answer to this problem in a causally closed, materially physical universe — but there are a LOT of fallacies and imprecise definitions which can confuse getting there. Here is one of them: You say "the problem is that people on the bottom of the ocean are going to die and we can't fix that." But that's not the problem. The problem is "people on the bottom of the ocean aren't going to live." By uploading themselves to the Ark, they get to live — not as copies who think they're the same person, but literally as the same first-person qualia, the same people. This is because there is no possible criteria to distinguish a high-fidelity brain upload from the process of ordinary existence. However, uploading yourself to the Ark is a forking procedure. It leaves behind another fork which is 100% also The Real You, no more or less genuinely You than the one in the Ark. This fork is doomed to die on the ocean floor. This is what Catherine explains to you over and over again: that continuing to live does not mean avoiding death. The Continuity people who kill themselves after the scan are wrong not because they believe THEY, the real deal, get to become the scan: that's true. They're wrong because they think murdering the other fork is necessary for this to happen. If all brain activity was suspended in the moment before the scan, and the body was then vaporized after the scan was complete, there would be no divergent fork, and this process would be indistinguishable to your consciousness from ordinary day to day life. Here is where we get to the core of the issue. Again, there is an objectively right answer, but you need to be careful about definitions to reach it. You say: "All you're doing is killing yourself, you're not magically jumping to the consciousness in the machine from the consciousness in your body." You are actually talking about three different YOUs here. Let's call them Zaphod42-Prime, the OG, the one who's trying to decide whether to get a brain scan; Zaphod42-Meat, the physical human who gets up from the chair after the scan; and Zaphod42-Scan, the digital self produced by the scan. Your problem is that you are trying to use Zaphod42-Meat's circumstances to argue that Zaphod42-Prime shouldn't get the scan. Yes, from the moment of the scan onwards, Zaphod42-Meat is on his loving own. He might as well have no backup anywhere for all the good it's going to do his consciousness. But Zaphod42-Prime has now developed into two separate entities, Meat and Scan. If Meat dies, there's still a valid causal descendant of Prime in play. Prime has not died. The scan has preserved Zaphod42-Prime from a future death. Pretty cool, huh? Zaphod42-Prime used brain scanning to achieve immortality. What's more, if Zaphod42-Meat has read up on brain scans and the truth thereof, he may decide "It's not a big deal if I die in the next few minutes after the scan. I'll only lose a few minutes of memory, and even if my whole body gets vaporized, it'll just be like I was put in a time chamber and reversed a few minutes. I don't believe that would kill me, so this wouldn't either." That's a more optimistic interpretation, so take it separately from the above.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:12
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Zaphod42 posted:NO IT IS NOT. What's SOMA, is it a game, or a book in the altered carbon series? Why are you so latched on to a concept from a completely different scifi series and extrapolating those philosophies to be true in a completely different setting? What? Like going by that logic the teleporters in Trek are murder machines, full stop. Pretty sure they just clone you from the replicator stock and the "you" that was down on that planet gets mulched up into sparkles. But in that universe the "you", the "agency" or "soul" or whatever meaningless phrase you use is still there. A conscious thought can be 'in progress' during teleportation and that same thought finishes after teleportation and it's one continuous existence for that being because that's how the rules work in this fictional setting. bring back old gbs fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 01:15
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Dreylad posted:I never read the books but enjoyed the series enough. I thought there were some kinda interesting takes on old tropes, mainly around the AI. One, the fact that the AI are all out of date and people are turned off by the uncanny valley aspect of them. Second that the AI themselves might detest or like humans but they don't have any more ability to kill all humans than any real person, and they mostly seem preoccupied with business schemes and making money -- not even superhuman AIs can overturn capitalism. Yeah this was great. Poe is probably the single best character in the show. I like how he was able to look up lessons for VR-therapy online and download them in like 5 seconds, so he's still got AI-level advantages over humans. But like you said, he's not necessarily SKYNET or anything, just another dude really with some advantages and some disadvantages. General Battuta posted:You say "the problem is that people on the bottom of the ocean are going to die and we can't fix that." But that's not the problem. The problem is "people on the bottom of the ocean aren't going to live." By uploading themselves to the Ark, they get to live — not as copies who think they're the same person, but literally as the same first-person qualia, the same people. This is because there is no possible criteria to distinguish a high-fidelity brain upload from the process of ordinary existence. What? Where are you getting this? General Battuta you seem to keep saying "casually closed" like that HAS TO BE and that PROVES EVERYTHING but it just does not. The fact is the people didn't want to die, uploaded their consciousness, and then killed themselves, hoping this would mean they (the person who shot themselves) would keep living. The game itself EXPLICITLY tells you at least 5 times in the story that THIS IS FALSE. Those people died. They did not transfer. When the scan was made there were 2 people, 2 consciousnesses, and then at some point when they commit suicide, one of them dies. There is no "merger" of consciousnesses. You made all this poo poo up dude.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:16
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bring back old gbs posted:What's SOMA, is it a game, or a book in the altered carbon series? Why are you so latched on to a concept from a completely different scifi series and extrapolating those philosophies to be true in a completely different setting? What? SOMA is a game that we keep comparing the show to because they're similar. I'm not remotely saying Altered Carbon has to be SOMA and nobody did, you're jumping to conclusions and confusing yourself. We're drawing parallels because they're obvious and make it easier to communicate. He's drawing incorrect conclusions about SOMA and I'm disagreeing with them, which is relevant since you can say the same things about Altered Carbon. Relax. Either read the posts more carefully and join in, or skip our posts and don't worry about them.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:18
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General Battuta posted:No, he knows he IS the original. He made the plan. He has all those memories (and all the memories of being an Envoy, and everything before and after.) He's the Real Kovacs and so is the other fork. Neither one is 'just a copy', any more than you're 'just a copy' of yourself from yesterday. The hill to get over is the one of “How can *I* be ME and the other also be ME simultaneously?” Our entire existence is one of a singular ME, we simply have no framework to understand existing as non-integrated plurality.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:18
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General Battuta posted:They're wrong because they think murdering the other fork is necessary for this to happen. No, they're wrong because they think murdering one fork will cause a merger or a transplant, which cannot happen. Instead the fork just dies. Death still happens. You seem to understand this but you keep telling me I'm wrong because "CAUSALLY CLOSED UNIVERSE". Stop interpreting what I'm saying in a way that lets you get to say "wrong". Lets have a conversation about the philosophy instead.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:20
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