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Old 10-10-2014, 05:09 PM   #21
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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Mobility. Things like fully-sapient infomorphs willing to go to faraway places has done stuff for the space industry that might not be very obvious at first sight, but it's there. Ditto for the ability of e.g. SAI scientists live in EU but work offworld to produce Neat Stuff.
'Commute' has a different meaning to an Infomorph than to a meatperson.

Plus, on the metagame level, forbidding infomorph PCs to have the definitive infomorph trait - Possession - is kinda mean.

Different issue entirely.

And yet I want an upbeat THS darn it, without vaguely-justified superstition disguised as quantum mysticism. (I do have an idea of a setting where mysticism does coexist with transhumanism, but I call it Reign of Souls, not THS.)
I will always find it amusing that we call each other's beliefs superstition. Even though you disagree with my view of copies not being originals, you must admit that starting from my view, THS vanilla is a horror setting where digital life has no value.
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Old 10-10-2014, 08:17 PM   #22
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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THS vanilla is a horror setting where digital life has no value.
All things only have the value that we give them. Some, such as yourself, may not see any value in a digital copy. Others assign it the same value they would give the original.

I agree with you in one respect at least. It is exceedingly unlikely that what we experience as the continuity of consciousness (I am me, and persist from day to day as a single mind) could be transplanted from one brain/computer to another. Presumably, in THS people are not concerned about this form of continuity, instead placing value on the continuity of identity (my thoughts and personality persist in the world). Of course, from the perspective of the outside world, and the players and GM, the two are indistinguishable.

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Old 10-10-2014, 09:47 PM   #23
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

My main horror isn't whether I believe a copy is exactly the same as the original. It's that killing either is bad, but THS society doesn't consider death real if there is a copy in existence. That's the life is worthless horror for me.
And a feature that I don't consider necessary to include for it to stay a THS setting.
The unrealistically optimistic genetic engineering and impossibly rapid terraforming of mars are intrinsic to the setting in my opinion.
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Old 10-11-2014, 03:46 AM   #24
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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I will always find it amusing that we call each other's beliefs superstition. Even though you disagree with my view of copies not being originals, you must admit that starting from my view, THS vanilla is a horror setting where digital life has no value.
That's not the superstition I'm talking about. I'm talking about stuff like computer-literate AIs mistrusting of TL10 error-correction algorithms, to the point of sending 10×-100× the data needed to make the probability of a mistake negligible even on the scale of the age of the universe. I'm talking about stuff like the belief that there are hidden variables within digital information - variables that can never be transcribed as information - and this belief being founded in fact. In THS!
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Old 10-11-2014, 09:42 AM   #25
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

The first one is just an issue of specifics of the type Guprs loathes with a paranoid passion like energy output and power densities. A factor of 10 to 100 is actually rather tame in comparison.
The second one I'm not sure I understand. THS allows perfect xoxing which wouldn't be possible if some aspects weren't copyable.
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Old 10-11-2014, 09:56 AM   #26
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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The first one is just an issue of specifics of the type Guprs loathes with a paranoid passion like energy output and power densities. A factor of 10 to 100 is actually rather tame in comparison.
Thing is, we know the data speeds of various channels and the data volumes of various Infomorphs of Transhuman Space. So saying these numbers are being shied away from isn't factually correct.

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The second one I'm not sure I understand. THS allows perfect xoxing which wouldn't be possible if some aspects weren't copyable.
I was talking about this:
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What requirements? THS encryption is strategically secure even against government-level THS cryptoanalysis. A byte is a byte, and you can trivially ensure data integrity with trivial increases in the amount of data sent. I really don't understand in what way TL10 transmission protocols are worse than TL8 ones.
Well...neural net computer needed (hand wave, hand wave). And Ghosts and SAIs require special (cough, cough, mutter, mutter). Finally, I think we're all fully aware that these unique digital entities have issues regarding...Holly crap!!! What is that over there?!!!
That seems like a very vague statement about the reason why one can't just copy the Infomorph and send it by a data channel. Which seems to indicate that the bytes of the Infomorph contain something that cannot be expressed in bytes.
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Old 10-11-2014, 10:26 AM   #27
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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Thing is, we know the data speeds of various channels and the data volumes of various Infomorphs of Transhuman Space. So saying these numbers are being shied away from isn't factually correct.

I was talking about this:That seems like a very vague statement about the reason why one can't just copy the Infomorph and send it by a data channel. Which seems to indicate that the bytes of the Infomorph contain something that cannot be expressed in bytes.
It was an intentionally vague statement, because I'm not an expert in information technology or computers. I want a setting where digital entities are not beamed around the Solar system and converting into a Ghost is something only the very desperate do.

I agree that easy duplication of digital entities and the making of Ghosts cheapen life. But conversely I don't see much real difference in the continuation of consciousness versus the continuation of identity.

For me I'm just trying to make the game little easier to comprehend for a group of players who are new to Transhumanism, and I want there to be a major difference between humanity and the Zone Minds. The vat grown bio-androids provide enough moral ambiguity about what it means to be human.

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Old 10-11-2014, 12:59 PM   #28
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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For me I'm just trying to make the game little easier to comprehend for a group of players who are new to Transhumanism, and I want there to be a major difference between humanity and the Zone Minds.
There seem to be several differences. The main one being that in TS 5th wave societies there's either developing cyber-symbiosis or AI-slavery but no robot overlords at all. Purely mechanically machine sapience seems hardware dependent in RoS, but not in TS.
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Old 10-11-2014, 05:54 PM   #29
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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For me I'm just trying to make the game little easier to comprehend for a group of players who are new to Transhumanism, and I want there to be a major difference between humanity and the Zone Minds. The vat grown bio-androids provide enough moral ambiguity about what it means to be human.
I think this is the point that folks should remember in this thread: you're transplanting entities from a Transhuman Space-esque universe into a Reign of Steel-esque universe. The specifics of each world may have been changed, for the purpose of making this encounter an interesting one for the GM and players involved. We really don't need to worry about the consequences that these changes will have on vanilla THS, because the game isn't set there.
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Old 10-11-2014, 07:08 PM   #30
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Default Re: Transhuman Space in Infinite Worlds

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Thing is, we know the data speeds of various channels and the data volumes of various Infomorphs of Transhuman Space. So saying these numbers are being shied away from isn't factually correct.

I was talking about this:That seems like a very vague statement about the reason why one can't just copy the Infomorph and send it by a data channel. Which seems to indicate that the bytes of the Infomorph contain something that cannot be expressed in bytes.
What would change if you boosted the data speeds up to what seems appropriate?

Oh, the other poster's desire to keep A.I.s hardware based. That doesn't necessarily require unexpressable data. It could instead be impossible to trivially determine.
Some artificial A.I.s styles I've read of now learn how best to use their hardware in such a way that information and "mental structure" is "stored" in mechanical faults rendering them not fully digital. Meaning that you can't just copy them as you would a simple program but need a kind of ghosting procedure as well if you want the entire A.I.
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