Forcasted Technologies in Science Fiction

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Post by K »

People are running into the problem where personal identity is basically just an illusion that your brain creates.

This means that a perfect clone is both you AND not you. You die every time you sleep because your consciousness does not continue unbroken, but it doesn't matter because you wake up with the illusion of unbroken consciousness and the world can't tell the difference.
Last edited by K on Wed Nov 14, 2012 5:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by ModelCitizen »

DSMatticus wrote:1) Similarity of composition. This means that two sufficiently alike people are the same 'you.' That's weird. Given a hypothetical infinite universe with hypothetically infinite matter in a similar arrangement to our little section of the universe, there would theoretically be an entity that is exactly like you despite having no connection to you whatsoever (yay, infinitely iterated trials and the inevitability of improbability).

2) Continuity of past. This means that your teleporter clone is the dude who stepped into the teleporter, because its causal originating event is the dude stepping into the teleporter. And this means that the dude standing confused in the teleporter the same dude who stepped into the teleporter. But the dude standing confused in the teleporter and the teleporter clone are not the same person, because despite having continuity with a shared past they have absolutely no continuity with eachother.
Even if I created a body with thoughts and memories identical to my own, there's no reason to believe I would begin experiencing the thoughts and memories of that body. I'm fine with defining "you-ness" based on outwardly observable phenomena* for other people (because I'll never know the difference), but if it's me going through the teleporter I have to care about the possibility of complete cessation of all experience.

*
I'm including memories and psychological conditioning as "outwardly observable phenomena" here. We're talking about the fucking space future where we can reproduce a human atom by atom; presumably we can also verify that the original and the clone are neurochemically identical.


As for how this relates to teleporters and clone tanks in sci-fi, I could see a setting where those technologies are highly controversial. Some people believe that they in effect "die" if their body is destroyed and reconstituted, others don't get what all the fuss is about. The pro-teleporter faction can't be convinced that their consciousness might not have continued seamlessly through teleportation (because they still have their pre-teleportation thoughts and memories). The anti-teleporter faction don't believe them because their experience is based on the (observable) continuation of thoughts and memories rather than the (completely unobservable to persons other than oneself) continuation of experience. The anti-teleporter faction's position is empirically indefensible and at the same time the pro-teleporter faction's position ignores axiomatically true facts. Basically this whole conversation is retarded and goes downhill from here because English and every other language I'm familiar with is completely unequipped to talk about the phenomenon of consciousness.

So if you want to explore the idea of a retarded, frustrating, politicized discourse about how people who use teleporters may or may not be committing suicide and so they can be replaced by outwardly-identical meat robots, then bring up the issue of apparently-perfect cloning vs consciousness. But seriously, fuck that. Just thinking about it makes me want to strangle everyone on my side of the issue, let alone any paintchip-eating Butthurt Atheists currently hitting Reply to accuse me of closet religiosity or whatever. If you want a space opera where the heroes can get planetside without a dropship, just posit teleporters that work seamlessly and never mention the uncomfortable philosophical questions.
Last edited by ModelCitizen on Wed Nov 14, 2012 4:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by K »

Did I mention that this is an entire area of Philosophy?

Philosophy is not an area of study that is known for getting answers.
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Post by Prak »

Would the "your perfect clone is not you" people have this same problem if we were positing a teleporter which disassembled your body, turned the particles into electrons, sent them as a signal, turned that signal back into actual matter, and reassembled you in your destination? It's all effectively you, it's even the same matter, it just doesn't give us instant cloning.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Prak_Anima wrote:Would the "your perfect clone is not you" people have this same problem if we were positing a teleporter which disassembled your body, turned the particles into electrons, sent them as a signal, turned that signal back into actual matter, and reassembled you in your destination? It's all effectively you, it's even the same matter, it just doesn't give us instant cloning.
Yes.

The safest kind of teleportation, philosophically, is one that rips a tunnel through a realm of insanity and catapults your whole body through so quickly that you really don't notice it. Taelon portals from Earth: Final Conflict, for example.
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Post by Winnah »

Philosophy! Can I play?

So you have a machine, a 'teleporter', that functions via quantum space magic. An occupant enters a chamber, is scanned and that snapshot is transmitted almost instantly to another transporter in another location. The second transporter uses the received information and space magic to create a copy of whatever was occupying the original transporter.

The range of this 'transporter' extends only as far as the distace between a matching set of transporters. So transporting to the Moon from London requires a transporter to exist in both those locations.

There is a man named Bob. Bob lives in London. Bob commits a crime. Fleeing arrest, Bob steps into a transporter, a copy of Bob appears on the Moon. Earth Bob is then apprehended by the police, while Moon Bob is immediately apprehended by Moon Base Security.

Earth Bob is charged, sent to trial and found guilty of his crimes. Meanwhile, Moon Bob patiently awaits extradition to Earth via space shuttle.

What should happen to Moon Bob when he is 'returned' to London?
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Post by Hicks »

Nothing should happen to the moon clone. Arresting the clone that shares the DNA and memories of a criminal is as dumb as arresting the identical twin of a criminal who was hypnotized to believe he committed the crime.
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Post by ModelCitizen »

Prak_Anima wrote:Would the "your perfect clone is not you" people have this same problem if we were positing a teleporter which disassembled your body, turned the particles into electrons, sent them as a signal, turned that signal back into actual matter, and reassembled you in your destination? It's all effectively you, it's even the same matter, it just doesn't give us instant cloning.
Eh, it raises the same questions about the nature of consciousness but I'm completely fine with a sci-fi setting that has teleporters or clone backups without addressing the consciousness issue at all. I can watch Star Trek without wondering whether Scotty just effectively murdered Spock.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

Winnah:

Ooh, complicating things by introducing punishment in there. I think the essential question is: what is the purpose of this punishment in the first place?

Is it to set an example? Then you can let Moon Bob go free if you want.

Is it to teach Bob a lesson? Then Moon Bob should also learn that lesson.

Is it to maintain the karmic "justice" of the society? Then whether Moon Bob needs punishing depends on the socially accepted definition of "you".
Last edited by Foxwarrior on Wed Nov 14, 2012 6:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Vebyast »

K wrote:People are running into the problem where personal identity is basically just an illusion that your brain creates.
K wrote:Did I mention that this is an entire area of Philosophy?

Philosophy is not an area of study that is known for getting answers.
Ding ding ding, double winner. People have been arguing about this for literally thousands of years without getting anywhere.
Speaking of mind-clones, uploading, and consciousness, are there any RPGs out there where the characters are uploaded AIs? Again, my lack of experience with RPGs is causing some trouble and the Google results are swamped with Cortana and Shadowrun.
Last edited by Vebyast on Wed Nov 14, 2012 6:21 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Eclipse Phase lets you play several types. Most were developed from a human mind initially.
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Post by Username17 »

Vebyast wrote:
K wrote:People are running into the problem where personal identity is basically just an illusion that your brain creates.
K wrote:Did I mention that this is an entire area of Philosophy?

Philosophy is not an area of study that is known for getting answers.
Ding ding ding, double winner. People have been arguing about this for literally thousands of years without getting anywhere.
Speaking of mind-clones, uploading, and consciousness, are there any RPGs out there where the characters are uploaded AIs? Again, my lack of experience with RPGs is causing some trouble and the Google results are swamped with Cortana and Shadowrun.
As Avoraciopoctules notes, Eclipse Phase is the game which comes closest to this. Your body is called a "Sleeve" and your self can be copied and downloaded into a new body after the old one is lost or even before. Your backups generate potential "forks" if various versions of you don't have the same memories. You can return to older forks if the newer ones get lost.

Bodies can be clonal bodies, including genetically modified dolphin bodies, and various robots including a cloud of micro drones. Some selves are actually completely artificial, having never been generated by being "born" in a traditional sense.

It's a very innovative game. It's too bad it has so many problems and blind spots. But you should probably check out Eclipse Phase if this sort of thing interests you, because the things it does right and the things it does wrong are of equal interest for moving forward.

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Post by Lokathor »

RadiantPhoenix wrote:This is probably why nobody replicates people in Star Trek. Not concerns about the ethics of cloning, but concerns about the wisdom of cloners.
Star Trek's explanation is that you can't replicate living matter.

Replicators and Transporters are two related but distinct devices.

A transporter can reassemble an arbitrary object of arbitrary complexity, but can only store the target in its transport buffer for a matter of seconds before the pattern begins to break down. Also, reassembling the object seems to destroy the pattern in the buffer in the process. You can modify a pattern while it's in the buffer (merge two things, split a thing into two things, revert a thing to be closer to an older version of itself, etc), but once you spit your results out you can't spit them out a second time.

Replicators build their objects up from the atomic level using replicator patterns, but those patterns are limited by computer space, and the results almost always contain minor replication errors. Because of this, the results you can produce are limited in complexity. You can't produce a living thing (though you could produce a very convincing corpse, or a cooked steak), and you can't produce latinum or dilithium or specific other substances (they're "too complex" for the recreations to remain molecularly stable).
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Post by Prak »

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Eclipse Phase lets you play several types. Most were developed from a human mind initially.
Rifts also has an O.C.C. based on the idea. Robot Warrior, I think, also full conversion borg is essentially the same ideam

Edit: It's the Robot Soldier, from Triax and the NGR. It covers VR control, Mind of Matter (like VR, but... your body's effectingely in a coma, I guess?) and actual brain transplant. But then Rifts was written in the 80s and still has CDs. Also, terrible game (fun setting though) and not much for philosophy or anything other than curb stomping mutant aliens and robot nazis.
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Post by Fuchs »

Star Trek had Ryker "cloned" due to a spotty or whatever transporter effect. If that's possible accidentally, then it likely can be replicated, so Star Trek totally should have perfect clones.
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Post by Lokathor »

Fuchs wrote:Star Trek had Ryker "cloned" due to a spotty or whatever transporter effect. If that's possible accidentally, then it likely can be replicated, so Star Trek totally should have perfect clones.
Yeah, they could develop in that direction, but The Federation in particular has always been very nervous about any sort of transhumanism stuff and/or drone stuff. A person is a person is a person, as long as they don't go around cloning their consciousness or being a consciousness built out of a starship's internal computer.
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Post by K »

Lokathor wrote:
Fuchs wrote:Star Trek had Ryker "cloned" due to a spotty or whatever transporter effect. If that's possible accidentally, then it likely can be replicated, so Star Trek totally should have perfect clones.
Yeah, they could develop in that direction, but The Federation in particular has always been very nervous about any sort of transhumanism stuff and/or drone stuff. A person is a person is a person, as long as they don't go around cloning their consciousness or being a consciousness built out of a starship's internal computer.
Yeh, Star Trek is technically at the "big pussy" stage of development. They have all the tech, but crap like Borg and Noonien Soong's super-men scare the crap out of them.
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Post by Vebyast »

FrankTrollman wrote:As Avoraciopoctules notes, Eclipse Phase is the game which comes closest to this. Your body is called a "Sleeve" and your self can be copied and downloaded into a new body after the old one is lost or even before. Your backups generate potential "forks" if various versions of you don't have the same memories. You can return to older forks if the newer ones get lost.

Bodies can be clonal bodies, including genetically modified dolphin bodies, and various robots including a cloud of micro drones. Some selves are actually completely artificial, having never been generated by being "born" in a traditional sense.

It's a very innovative game. It's too bad it has so many problems and blind spots. But you should probably check out Eclipse Phase if this sort of thing interests you, because the things it does right and the things it does wrong are of equal interest for moving forward.
Wow, that's one of the most thoroughly derailed threads I've ever seen.

Also, commercial commons fucking rules.
I haven't read very much, so I'll just grab a thought from the EP thread: weapon skills in settings with uploading. Condensing everything down into a single weapon skill is good, but it doesn't go far enough. In a future with cell-phone-sized AIs, killer robots, and easy brain hacking, there's no reason you'd be trying to control a weapon with the same code you use to control your fork and knife at dinner. Rather, the weapon itself would handle all the aiming and control, and you'd just designate a target and let the gun's automated routines frag it. Given this, I think that a better skill for combat might be an "intent to kill", representing your psychological readiness to designate something as a target knowing full well that the weapon you're holding will end it.

Beyond the sense that this makes technologically, there's an interesting interaction there with easy mind-state backups: violence becomes less unacceptable because killing someone just means sending them to their most recent backup. Glasshouse and Iain Banks' Culture novels both hit this topic pretty hard. I think that this has some nice properties for an RPG, mostly because the party is no longer a roving murder squad responsible for multiple kilodeaths. Eclipse Phase's setting has a sidebar about restricting military technology that drives this home nicely. An entire orbital habitat, population > 50k people, is destroyed by extremists, but fewer than 500 permadeaths occur, mostly people who hadn't backed themselves up properly. As an added bonus, the deemphasis of death realigns the setting's philosophy of war with things that play well on a tabletop - as a nation-state's population no longer fears death or minor hardship, the enemy's center of gravity no longer includes willpower or manpower, only economics.
Last edited by Vebyast on Wed Nov 14, 2012 9:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

y'all should read Battle Angel Alita (Gunnm)

It's all about what you're talking about, that and really really really fantastic cyborg martial arts.
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Post by Wesley Street »

K wrote:Yeh, Star Trek is technically at the "big pussy" stage of development. They have all the tech, but crap like Borg and Noonien Soong's super-men scare the crap out of them.
Khan, who Berlinghoff Rasmussen compared to Hitler, and the other Augments ruled over 40 nations by 1993 and Khan himself ruled 1/4th of the planet's population. So, yeah, I'd say the UFP's justifiably skittish.

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Post by DSMatticus »

ModelCitizen wrote:Even if I created a body with thoughts and memories identical to my own, there's no reason to believe I would begin experiencing the thoughts and memories of that body.
Have you considered that there is no "I" outside the thoughts and memories of that body? You are not the person now that you were when you made that post. Nevertheless, the person who made that post has put key bits of information from the time he made that post into the fleshy data storage he was kind enough to pass on to you, the current now, so you can access them and 'feel' like they are your's. But an exact copy of you can also access them and will also feel like they are his. Continuity of perception is an illusory product of the way human data storage is configured.
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Post by talozin »

K wrote: Philosophy is not an area of study that is known for getting answers.
A close look at the history of philosophy will give you the unavoidable impression that any time something philosophical starts showing signs of having practical utility, it will get spun off into a separate discipline while the philosophers go on with the navel-gazing.
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Post by nockermensch »

From another angle, I can't wait to see how religions and religious people will cope with body duplication as it's being discussed here.

Will they say the soul splits? That only the original body hosts a soul while a demon occupies the clone?

Shit will be hilarious.
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Post by ModelCitizen »

DSMatticus wrote: Have you considered that there is no "I" outside the thoughts and memories of that body? You are not the person now that you were when you made that post. Nevertheless, the person who made that post has put key bits of information from the time he made that post into the fleshy data storage he was kind enough to pass on to you, the current now, so you can access them and 'feel' like they are your's. But an exact copy of you can also access them and will also feel like they are his. Continuity of perception is an illusory product of the way human data storage is configured.
That last bit is a very definite statement, on a subject you've just asserted you can't know anything about for sure. You could say "continuity of perception might be an illusory product of the way human data storage is configured" and not be full of shit. But yeah, that had occurred to me.
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