12-10-2009, 07:46 AM | #21 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Is Transhuman Space a "silly" genre?
Proliferation and rivalry of memes, isn't it?
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Same as getting into an argument with any other system capable of presenting arguments. |
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12-10-2009, 09:08 AM | #22 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Is Transhuman Space a "silly" genre?
Quote:
Bill Stoddard |
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12-10-2009, 09:17 AM | #23 |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Is Transhuman Space a "silly" genre?
I was hoping it's a joke, but I was 90% sure you were getting tired of the topic.
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12-10-2009, 09:23 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Is Transhuman Space a "silly" genre?
Quote:
In THS terms, I might be willing to argue with an SAI, because an SAI is programmed to form and maintain a comprehensive internal model of the world. My arguments might cause it to revise that model in a substantial way, and as a result of doing so, to change the actions it chose to perform, or the content of the statements it made to me, and to perform new actions and make new statements that were not in its previous repertoire. And in doing so, it would have a chance of coming up with a statement that would be new to me as well as to it, and would give me occasion to examine my own internal model of the world from a different angle, and perhaps revise it. With an LAI, I would not have that as an option. An LAI has the ability to model limited aspects of the world . . . for example, to model its regular user. But it does not have a comprehensive model of the world, and thus cannot change its model of the world. Its actions and statements are based on a limited class of options programmed into it, and while they may be large enough to create a feeling of "talking to someone," there's really nobody home: the LAI can't add new options to the set based on its understanding of the world to which those options apply. The LAI just is its options. So arguing with an LAI will not induce it to change in any substantive way, or to come up with novel statements, or to engage with my actual positions and suggest different ways of looking at them. Ultimately I would exhaust its stored information and have nothing more to learn from it. To have an internal model of the world is part of what I mean by having a viewpoint. It's not the whole of it, but it's an important aspect of it. Bill Stoddard |
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12-10-2009, 09:34 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
Quote:
Bill Stoddard |
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12-10-2009, 09:52 AM | #26 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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12-10-2009, 10:10 AM | #27 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
Quote:
Bill Stoddard |
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12-10-2009, 10:23 AM | #28 |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
I don't know. I'm not a philosophy expert. What does that word mean in the current context?
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12-10-2009, 10:39 AM | #29 | |
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Albuquerque, NM
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Re: Is Transhuman Space a "silly" genre?
Quote:
Remember, unlike an NAI, an LAI can buy off most of its disadvantages. That tells me they can change their worldview. |
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12-10-2009, 12:26 PM | #30 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
Quote:
Aristotle said that an individual cat is an entity: a concrete entity perceivable by the senses. (In his time, known concrete entities were nearly all perceivable by the senses; in our time, the category has to also include concrete entities detectable through scientific instrumentation, such as distant planets, protein molecules, or subatomic particles.) He did not consider the abstraction "cat" to be an entity. Rather, "cat" was the form of the concrete entities that are cats. In Aristotle's view, only concretes exist in their own right; forms or abstractions exist only as attributes or aspects of concretes. Plato disagreed with this; he regarded forms or abstractions as entities in their own right. He thought that the human mind had a higher intellectual intuition that could access the realm of forms, and could compare the particular moving, breathing, vocalizing entity in front of a person with that form and say, for example, "Oh, that's a cat; it matches the form of Cat." In fact, Plato thought that abstractions had a truer reality than concretes; the concrete could come to be or cease to be, it could fall short of perfectly embodying the abstraction, it could be flawed or mutilated, whereas the abstraction was eternal, unchanging, and flawless. And thus he thought that there was an eternal Form of Man that could not perish, and that the more fully we embodied the Form of Man, the more we perfected ourselves, the more we participated in that eternity. Now, in the terms we've been using here, qualitative identity is basically a relation between a concrete entity and the abstraction that identifies it; two cats both have the qualitative identity of cat. So two different concrete entities can have the same abstract qualitative identity. But numerical identity is not a relation at all. An entity has numerical identity only with and as itself. If we extend matters over time, a cat now is numerically identical with that same cat tomorrow or last week; numerical identity is the property of being capable of being tracked through time. It makes it easier to track two entities through time in a distinguishable way if they have some distinctive qualities that are not included in the qualitative identity they share. For example, I can tell my two cats apart because one is black with a little white on the belly, and one is gray and cream tortoiseshell; because one's fur is fine and the other's is coarser; because one speaks in a variety of soft chirps and the other in a couple of loud cries. If they were identical twins, telling them apart would be much harder. But they would not be numerically identical; if I watched closely all the time, I could track each cat along its separate timelike line through the space of my apartment. I suggest that you're a Platonist because you seem to define yourself as an abstract pattern that could have different concrete embodiments; you think that you could be transferred from an organic body to a digital simulation, or that as a digital simulation you could be xoxed repeated, and all of those would be equally "you." Conversely, I define myself as a concrete individual; that is, I'm an Aristotelian. I care about my numerical identity, and not just about my qualitative identity. Bill Stoddard |
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