GURPS Transhuman Space variant: Souls are empircally proven to exist

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

In a predicable way? In an unpredictable but statistically significant way? Totally at random?

That has yet to be determined. What, if any, rules govern the results are still being worked out.

What animals cause it to beep? Just humans? Humans, bioroids and uplifts? Wild primates and cetaceans? All mammals and birds? All vertebrates? Cephalopods? All animals?

its more than a"beep" but sapient creatures only. Any Uplifts but typical animals, no, plants no, blocks of plastic and AIs in any form, no.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Keiko

For the purpose of the premise they have. They've detected something that is apparently generated by living sapient beings that persists after the physical death of the being in question, something that defies classification according to any known rules of biology. It appears to be attached to the body to some degree but not absolutely nor are the "rules" that govern its behavior understood at all beyond the basics.

If that's what you have "soul" is a pretty unsupportable leap. What is the difference between this thing and a seashell?

And like I say, since it'd have to be a seashell made of some sort of intangible stuff - let's call it dark matter - to be this hard to detect "I've invented a dark matter detector - and who knows what the properties of dark matter are" is at least as exciting as "biosapients make dark matter structures".

As an aside, there's presumably a pretty disturbing story in how anybody determined this was something that survived bodily destruction. "The detector beeped when I put the biosapient in. Stopped when I took it out. Started again when I put it back in. Then I killed it and destroyed the body and it kept beeping" is a hard experiment to get past ethics review. It's probably worth figuring this out, since I can't help thinking that "Horrible unethical experiments involving incinerating living people prove the existence of souls" is going to have a different impact on society than some other method.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Keiko

That has yet to be determined. What, if any, rules govern the results are still being worked out.

Seems way too early to draw any profound conclusions about it.

Any Uplifts but typical animals, no,

So, it works on Doolittle dolphins but not wild-type dolphins?

[Ulzgoroth]

I think Gedrin's predictions are right on.

Originally Posted by Keiko

What it does, if nothing else is present repeatable, verifiable evidence of "something" that seems beyond current (2100) scientific understanding that resembles what's often called a "soul". One possible experiemt would be to run the same tests on areas of suspect haunting and other paranormal activity.

You've attributed no detectable traits that any half-way responsible observer would characterize as constituting a resemblance to a 'soul' or a basis to look for connections to traditional 'supernatural' beliefs.

It seems like that's the plot you really, really want, but you can't plausibly get it while keeping the souls as mysterious as you have been. When you've got a weird, measurable phenomenon that seems incompatible with known physics, you're mainly going to get tons of people frantically applying every form of experimental physics they can come up with to it because new physics is rarer and more exciting than a new gold strike. Brain science questions are going to be behind that (and probably focused on devising a minimum organic generator for these things). Theologians aren't likely to be professionally interested in the first place.

You might be better able to get somewhere if you can connect this 'goes bing when there's stuff' to some actual phenomenon rather than only to a nearly un-observable thing that apparently does nothing. Say, make 'haunting' activity actually be a verifiable thing rather than fringe belief, and have the 'soul detector' be derived from a 'haunt detector'. Suddenly the things you're detecting in sentient brains, including dead ones, are connected to poltergeist activity. It's still a dubious link if you have no idea what your detector actually does, but at least there's something to look at.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by malloyd

As an aside, there's presumably a pretty disturbing story in how anybody determined this was something that survived bodily destruction. "The detector beeped when I put the biosapient in. Stopped when I took it out. Started again when I put it back in. Then I killed it and destroyed the body and it kept beeping" is a hard experiment to get past ethics review.

Maybe it was Duncanites that discovered it.

Or just testing on terminal cases, or on ghosting procedures (Japan might be good for that).

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by malloyd

If that's what you have "soul" is a pretty unsupportable leap.

If you don't buy the premise, that's fine but these posts aren't really contributing to the thread topic.

[Gedrin]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Have they even got that?

This detector that goes beep when I put a living biosapient in it.
It also goes beep occasionally at other times.
Conclusion: it detects souls.

Um, right, that's convincing.

No, they don't even have that. What they have is an experimental device designed to detect a hypothetical phenomenon that's never before been verified. It turns out, that it does register a phenomenon, but oddly enough, it does so only in the presence of certain sapient or dead sapient beings. Why only these types of sources generate what might be (for sake of a name) "Rodenbaugh Phenomenon" is unknown. The math is exotic at best, with the AI's disagreeing about the equations (and none of their conclusions model the experimental data). The device probably doesn't even detect the, hypothetical, Rodenbaugh Phenomenon, but some other weird thing. We'd call it a glitch, but the experiment is reproducible. We got no idea what it's detecting, or if it's connected to Rodenbaugh's work.

The machine detects a phenomenon unique to certain types of bio-sapience. That phenomenon persists, variably, beyond destruction of the bio-sapient's flesh. The machine's detection patterns and the phenomenon's inscrutability (no other interactions have been found), are unlike anything currently on record.

Current Hypothesis: We found something new.

Most Likely Explanation: At this point, I'm having all our equipment checked for massive viral-meme-pranking. Sabotage of unique source components, used in all other replications of the experiment, is most likely cause of behavior. A lab in France is hand making the device in sealed environments in an attempt to verify our hypothesis of "We found something new."

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by malloyd

As an aside, there's presumably a pretty disturbing story in how anybody determined this was something that survived bodily destruction. "The detector beeped when I put the biosapient in. Stopped when I took it out. Started again when I put it back in. Then I killed it and destroyed the body and it kept beeping" is a hard experiment to get past ethics review.

Possibly, there are allot of things in THS that probably have disturbing origins. Or the device(s) were tested on patients with terminal illness/injury and monitored them up too and beyond the time of death.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It seems like that's the plot you really, really want, but you can't plausibly get it while keeping the souls as mysterious as you have been. When you've got a weird, measurable phenomenon that seems incompatible with known physics, you're mainly going to get tons of people frantically applying every form of experimental physics they can come up with to it because new physics is rarer and more exciting than a new gold strike. Brain science questions are going to be behind that (and probably focused on devising a minimum organic generator for these things). Theologians aren't likely to be professionally interested in the first place.

I think that says it pretty well.

Another approach might be to have somebody invent an active dark matter visualizer - it emits a pulse of something, looks at the echos and displays an image, but nobody can get it do anything to the dark matter, at least not at pulse energies anybody can generate yet. And it doesn't show anything more exciting than the equivalent of a diffuse gas. Eh. Then few years later somebody sees a really complex shape drift through the detection field. There's something interesting here after all. People build more and this happens several more times. Then somebody sticks his head in without turning off the detector, and there's one of those shapes co-moving with his skull.....

Still maybe not a soul, but at least the exciting part is "what the hell is that complex form" and not "amazing new unknown material" - the initial excitement over the material was already over when these things starting showing up.

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by Gedrin

No, they don't even have that. What they have is an experimental device designed to detect a hypothetical phenomenon that's never before been verified.

As I said before, if you don't buy the premise, that's fine but for the purposes of the thread the initial premise is objectively true in the setting. Could be please keep things on that track?