MachineElfPaladin
No bio...
User ID: 1858
MachineElfPaladin
7d ago
It is not the continuation of personality and experience of the biological you, as there is continuity between the sleeping you of last night and the waking you of today and the you of tomorrow.
This is begging the question. I mean, I'll grant that once the copy is made, the digital version and the biological version are not the same person, but that doesn't mean they can't have been the same person. From the perspective of the a-week-before-the-procedure SMH, he anticipates waking up to both sets of experiences.
Counter-thought-experiment: the aliens need to actually open up the skull, remove the brain, and do some very detailed but non-destructive inspections to make aforesaid digital copy, but they don't quite have enough mastery of human biological processes to put it back in. Instead they keep the brain in a life-support tank, feeding it exactly the sense data the digital copy would have received and treating the output the same way the digital copy's output would be. They also put the digital copy in a small computer that they put in the vacant brainspace, hook up to the body's nervous system, and seal the skull back up before waking the person. They don't tell people that they do this because they expect humans to act weird about it and don't think the distinction is relevant.
Which is the real person, the brain-in-a-jar that thinks it's a digital copy, or the computer-piloting-a-meat-body that thinks it's been scanned but otherwise unaffected?
MachineElfPaladin
17d ago
Every time I see “themselves” used to refer to a single person, I want to die. Sorry you had to be the immediate recipient of this rebuke, as you *art nowhere near the first to commit this grievous offense, nor *wilt you be the last.
Corrected a couple of singular/plural mixups. If thou art acceding to the modern hyperformal second-person pronoun convention, at least avoid sloppiness regarding it.
...or, to be less facetious about it, verb-pronoun agreement follows the form of the pronoun and not the reality of the referent, as we all recognize ever since the second-person singular "thou" and its attendant verb conjugations were driven out of use by second-person plural "you" creeping outwards from the formal singular context to all second-person contexts.
MachineElfPaladin
21d ago
I only read part of it, but I believe Beware of Chicken was initially aiming to be something similar. It's not exactly the described trope - rather than "clueless initiate stumbles into a position of being feared/respected" it's "young rising star decides to get out of the game and run a farm but attracts weirdness which he then disarms with his unusual mindset" (with IIRC isekai possession justifying the initial dropout) - but it has a similar theme of people misunderstanding the MC because they don't know what's actually motivating his choices.
I got the impression that as it went on it got more centered on standard cultivation, though.
MachineElfPaladin
1mo ago
I was just using it because you'd brought up "why not pick 4" - and, as demonstrated it's perfectly valid to pick 4! It would work fine. It's just that multiplying and dividing by 2 is usually easier for people, so that's what erwgv used.
MachineElfPaladin
1mo ago
You have to pick the same number for the multiplication and division, but other than that 2 is picked just because it's a small, easy number to do division and multiplication with. (You could think of it as "taking" the number out of the one you're dividing and then "putting it back in" to the one you're multiplying, so the whole problem has the same numbers in total, just moved around.) Since 8 isn't divisible by 3, 3 isn't very useful - unless you really like fraction mathematics, I guess - but 4 works equally well:
4 x 7 = 28
8 / 4 = 2
28 x 2 = 56
Or, for the way I would do that last line in my head:
(20 + 8) x 2 = (20 x 2) + (8 x 2) = 40 + 16 = 56
MachineElfPaladin
2mo ago
Nondeterministic free will is not nearly so clearly evident to me as it appears to be to you.
For those three lines of evidence you list, I can think of at least one other phenomenon which I'd say fits all of them pretty well, especially if you give me a couple hundred years' worth of leeway on technological development and scientific inquiry, and yet is unambiguously false.
For another, we have good reasons to think that decisionmaking and behavior are at the very least strongly dependent on the material actions of the brain, in that we can go screwing with neurons on chemical, electromagnetic, or mechanical levels and notice that it results in changes in those things.
MachineElfPaladin
3mo ago
You've replied to a filtered comment.
MachineElfPaladin
4mo ago
The way I've always seen it used, the humor is in the fact that people graduate past the naive idiotic conclusion by noticing some principle and grabbing onto it... and then it turns out that if you're even better you go back to the original "idiotic" answer because of some nuance that the principle overlooks.
MachineElfPaladin
4mo ago
FWIW I got this comment to rate and marked it as "neutral". You can read the suggestion of violence into it if you want but I think you have to bring that in yourself; there are other things that could just as well be referred to (culture, exit, self-segregation, etc)
MachineElfPaladin
4mo ago
What makes you think the system in the show, as described by the OP, is about "law as written"?
MachineElfPaladin
4mo ago
Because that's not what the law is, as we here and now define the law.
Bolded the bit that is, I think, the crux of the disagreement we are having.
...you could also have a pre-crime society with a totalitarian dictator where it was the written law and the whole of the law that what he says goes...but that's not pre-crime, that's just the dictator with extra steps.
That is the dictator with extra steps. It is also pre-crime. There is no requirement that the crimes being so preempted are things that you agree should be crimes, nor that all things you think should be preempted be counted among the things that the system actually does preempt.
It seems to me that anything like the Sibyl system, if it really existed, would itself have immense pressures on the nature of laws in its society. Perhaps the show plans to explore that.
MachineElfPaladin
4mo ago
So before I go any farther, I want to say that I agree with you that the series is probably going to do something about the Sybil system's reliability/methods/consequences/origin, if only because you wouldn't make a show with that as the premise unless you were going to explore it. And especially not with that kind of fallout in the first three episodes. That said...
An actual pre-crime analysis system should look at everyone who is willing to go "Yup, I have free societal rein to hate on this person, we've all agreed that they're the designated victim." and note that whoops, the law doesn't say you're allowed to abuse your social lessers according to a nebulous and ever-shifting social pecking order, you're all criminals.
Why?
I mean, certainly there are some systems that would. But it could just as easily be that in a society that is already going all-in the precrime analysis, that the predilection for ostracism is seen as too small an issue to be worth putting into that analysis. It'd be like putting a preference for popping gum in the cinema in the weighting.
Or that that kind of attitude is so common that if you were to start significantly dinging people up for it you wouldn't have enough people left to run a society.
Or that the crime analysis puts all its focus on antisocial, society-destabilizing crimes, and the ostracism is considered a pro-social, society-building behavior, binding everyone involved to the project of continuation except the person getting the brunt of it (in which case good thing we have these anti-society types).
MachineElfPaladin
4mo ago
I haven't watched the show either, but...
The color vibe checks as described don't seem to be detailed enough to reveal "guilty of pre-crime harassment". My impression given the setup of the factory episode it's very imprecise, and runs more off of "how much do you feel like you're blending in with the herd, doing the Normal Thing as you understand it, right now?" A full psycho-pass scan might pick up on it, but those aren't standard. So in the factory, all the harassment is just... what the people there do. None of it is any big deal, it's all just workplace joshing, the only person with an incentive to rebel is the one at the butt of the joke, and he's getting to comfort himself with "anyone would have got back at them, and now I don't have to deal with that asshole any more so things will get better."
And if you're one of the outcasts who got dumped in the Bad Person Pool, then whatever got you there in the first place is likely still there, and you'll have either "I am a weirdo who got dumped in the ghetto so clearly I actually am a deviant who can't hack it by normal society standards" or "Those dicks stuck me in the garbage, but actually it's them who are all garbage, fuck society's rules" as personality attractors.
A society as described can't be both a functional pre-crime enforcement state and a metaphor for modern society, because shooting people with criminal nature and intent regardless of their social status, connections, or cleverness in concealing their actual crimes would wipe out huge swathes of the people we consider movers and shakers in modern society.
If the System were newly introduced, sure. But in the setting it's supposed to have been around for a while, and any aspiring movers and shakers who had "criminal nature and intent" have already been screened out. There may have been upheaval at the time, but right at the depicted moment there wouldn't be. Just like in modern society, aspiring movers and shakers who are too vocal about, say, "there are serious double standards about how we treat denigration of men and denigration of women" get sidelined.
MachineElfPaladin
5mo ago
Only third-shortest, if we still count The Old Place. The Roko's Basilisk quip managed to dethrone it but "The far-right statement isn't: "It's okay to be white" , it is you tearing it down." is still a masterclass in pithiness.
MachineElfPaladin
5mo ago
Where am I running around directly insulting users? ...Seriously, where is my poking?
As someone who knows just enough about Elden Ring to know that certain phrases are references to it, "anti-horn golden crybabies" in response to someone going Elden Ring Reference Mode reads like either Low-Grade Flippant Hostility or Meaningless Internet Bantz, and Listening's response looks like someone who knows more about the referenced media hopping into the same stance. This makes your subsequent responses ("they're just gonna be allowed to insult me?") either completely baffling or malicious, like a kid that starts shit in order to tattle to the teacher about exactly the behavior they had opened with.
MachineElfPaladin
6mo ago
I didn't say natural selection would only come about in the future. I said the 'obvious natural selection story' you hadn't seen would only come about in the future, so its current absence is no mark against IGI's claim.
MachineElfPaladin
6mo ago
Since the obesity rate has been rising pretty constantly for the past several decades, that suggests that whichever environmental factor(s) is to blame has been increasing in intensity for that whole period. Natural selection can only happen so fast. How would you distinguish "the environmental factor caused a 15% increase in obesity rate over the past 25 years and there has been no selection" from "selection drove the obesity rate down 10% in the past 25 years, while the environmental factor pushed it up 25%"?
MachineElfPaladin
6mo ago
Either way, given the obesity numbers over the past few decades going up and to the right, I don't see an obvious natural selection story at play here.
Because there isn't one, yet. We're still in the "environmental shift" part of the scenario. The natural selection part is a prediction IGI is making about future generations.
MachineElfPaladin
6mo ago
Pre-existing, previously unimportant variation in genetics can result in varying response to environmental changes, at which point natural selection can do its thing on that particular bit of variation.
The generation that's around when that environmental shift happens are going to get affected more-or-less randomly. The generations after that, if the environmental change sticks around, are going to inherit the responses of their forebears.
That's what IGI meant by the obesity epidemic not being a result of genetics yet.
MachineElfPaladin
8mo ago
Most likely Keynesian beauty contest reasons - if you behave in an unusual way, especially in one that means you get less money out of the gate, that implies you believe you have less opportunity to make money than other prospects, which means investors will get less money if they invest in you, which compounds on itself to make you unattractive to any investor and so you end up with no money at all.
MachineElfPaladin
8mo ago
The word "disease" developed its meaning long before we'd figured out which ones were caused by infectious organisms. Congenital defects like osteogenesis imperfecta ("brittle bone disease") or deficiency syndromes like scurvy are central members of the term. Complaining that there is no microorganism that causes leukemia isn't going to stop people putting it in that group.
More to the point, comparing one single symptom to, as you already noted, a cluster of commonly co-occuring behaviors is a bad analogy. Coughing is one thing, but are you coughing alongside a runny nose, a sore throat, and a headache? (Probably just a cold.) Or are you coughing along with bloody sputum, chest pain, and weight loss? (Very concerning, might be lung cancer.) Similarly, a number of people exhibit a stereotypy - a repetitive movement or utterance - of some sort or another. But is it happening in a young child along with disinterest in social activities, extreme distress about particular sensory experiences, and an inflexible of routine? (Classic autism.) Or is it an older person, who has recently started losing control of their emotions and seems to have some trouble with speech? (Worrying signs of fronto-temporal dementia.)
MachineElfPaladin
10mo ago
You could, but the test would be less consistent, and rabies is bad enough that nobody wants to fuck around. If you take the (very unpleasant) vaccine early enough, you can survive, but once symptoms have been expressed it's basically a death sentence, even with the full might of modern medicine. Currently the rate of survival without becoming a permanently bedridden vegetable stands at one. Not one percent, one person.
MachineElfPaladin
10mo ago
The earliest and most distinctive place where rabies expresses itself physically - and the reason that it's so lethal, and its symptoms so memorable - is the central nervous system. If you want to check whether something's brain is full of viral bodies, you pretty much have to get hold of a chunk of its brain.
MachineElfPaladin
11mo ago
This seems to be a misinterpretation of some kind. If {SUBALTERN_QUALITY} is a blackmail attack surface, the method of that blackmail is finding secret evidence and threatening to reveal it to people who don't already know. But if someone is out-and-proud, that means that people already know that they have the quality, and they're not worried about new people finding out about it, so it's no longer a blackmail attack surface. If anything, being 'proud' in this way should be reckoned as a positive when it comes to evaluating their national security concerns.
...unless, of course, you're referring to the impact on their prospects from possible superiors who will use it as a way to weed them out. In which case the motivation to hide it, and therefore the existence of a blackmailable attack surface, comes from those superiors' perception that such out-and-proudness is disqualifying. That seems like a far graver instance of putting personal feelings over national security concerns!
I don't see how it does; "placed in android body" vs. "hooked up to cyberspace" does not seem to be a relevant distinction in this case, not to me at least. There was never any specification about where the "digital copy" would be instantiated, so that can just be the situation that was planned for it.
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