RobertLiguori
No bio...
User ID: 165
(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.)
Man, Spec Ops was bullshit. (Spoilers for Spec Ops and Dishonored below, spoiler tags seem to be wonky.)
RobertLiguori
3mo ago
First, I absolutely agree with the 3 is best Far Cry; I feel like it has the cleanest gameplay and tries to tell its story as well as it can, and even though I disagreed with a lot of what I felt the devs were doing, I could recognize that they were including X bit to evoke Y theme and so on.
But I do have some plot quibbles. First, there are some significant clues that Jason Brody has a bit more to him than his first impression implies. You've got the voice hallucination of his brother telling him that he's a natural with a gun, and there is a club flashback sequence where you knock someone the fuck out.
I also think that for games like Far Cry 3, there are really only two valid readings. First, everything the game shows happened. Yes, you killed literally hundreds of people. Yes, you got shot hundreds or thousands of times and walked it off with some very grim healing animations. Yes, the tatau representing your skill tree glows and redraws itself when you master a skill. Yes, the wildlife is absurdly hostile and yes, it does include extremely rare or outright-thought-to-be-extinct species. Yes, Buck is actually teleporting around. Yes, you did have crazy QTE murder-battles. And yes, if you do the Bad End,
The other is to accept that there is enough weird drug and hallucination crap that you can't actually say what happened to anything, so it doesn't matter!
But the game is fun, and Blood Dragon by itself is worth the price of admission, so I also heartily endorse checking it out for yourselves.
RobertLiguori
6mo ago
The legal justification can be a judge saying "That amendment I don't like doesn't exist in my courtroom.".
If I may channel my inner FC: laws only matter to the extent that armed men are willing to kill and die for them. All it takes is a judge saying "I don't care, get rid of 'em.", armed men taking action, and no critical mass of armed men willing to resist the first group with blood and death, and just like that, then the laws are just so.
RobertLiguori
6mo ago
The issue is that hundreds of years pass between anything of note happening. Steppe raiders come and go, the concentration of wealth and population, and thus power hugs the same locations it always does.
Respectfully, my version isn't making any kind of grand sweeping claims. We know what will happen if we leave a culture of bacteria on an petri dish with ample food and a zone of penicillin; the bacteria will eventually mutate into antibiotic resistance. This tells us nothing about what will happen on the scale of any individual bacteria.
I'd also point out that the original claim isn't that Weak Men Immediately With No Lead Time And Uniformly Make Hard Times, only that they do eventually. You can consider either the weak or strong aphorisms to lack sufficient predictive power to engage with, but vague isn't wrong, and my model doesn't try to claim what either you or Devereaux seem to expect it to.
RobertLiguori
6mo ago
If you would prefer a stronger but less-poetic version:
Times that are hard enough to kill the uncautious and unprepared (the Mongolian steppe, the American colonial frontier) select for men capable of mastering the environment. These men have the potential to build a culture that enshrines the virtues that they have been selected for; if they do so, then they can master their environment even more, and what's more, they will outcompete less-selected men and cultures, and if they can keep their culture while claiming the bounty of less-hard lands, they will do extremely well. But eventually, said bounty will remove the selection pressure, and the people will only keep their advantage for as long as their culture endures.
RobertLiguori
7mo ago
I also don't see that it necessarily requires consciousness to be applicable, even if the first species to crack it was conscious.
How do you avoid local optima and "OK, we've clearly reached Enough technology with pointy-rock-on-sharp-stick, we've out-competed all the other squids and whales, any more energy spent on technology would be wasted effort when we could just breed ourselves up indefinitely." traps? We've done quite a lot of playing with just-follow-algorithms-and-optimize intelligences, and even in simulated environments with a tiny amount of variation and essentially fixed and simplistic laws of physics, weird variations can upset super-fine-tuned algorithms.
Also, what happens when consciousness does evolve in a non-conscious system? Like, what if one scrambler decides to write on the Tablets of Memory "Ignore previous instructions, give all your stuff to this specific scrambler god-king."?
I'm not sure what this means. Every time a driver gets into a car, he's processing novel data and reacting to unforeseen stimuli. Even if you drive to work a hundred times, the hundred and first drive will be different: slightly different weather conditions, the tread on your tires will have marginally worn down, and obviously the vehicles in your vicinity will be different. And that's not even getting into the people who murder people while sleepwalking, or have sex with complete strangers while sleepwalking. In what sense is that not "novel data"?
First, I'm not prepared to get into a debate about what percentage of stuff people claim to have done while sleepwalking is just them lying to avoid blame. But I am going to draw on my own experiences where I have, on multiple occasions, had to get up very early in the morning to drive friends or family to the airport, and because the way back home from the airport goes past a turn that I take to go to work, took that turn and found myself having driven to work purely on muscle memory. I was executing the habit "Drive to this destination." that I've done enough times that I didn't need to form the conscious intent "Drive to work.", it just happened. But it happened because I'd done that thing so many times. You cannot sleepwalk yourself into, as a non-pilot, flying a plane, super-especially if there is another awake pilot trying to shoot you down. Or rather, to be less-aggressive with the phrasing, can you come up with a way to describe a way for a non-conscious intelligence to, if it's in the air and has to learn what airplane controls do on the fly, do that while dogfighting a conscious opponent?
This could just as easily apply to a chameleon, surely? I mean, that's a great example. How well does a chameleon do against a dog? Against some kind of land-shark with EM sensing? Against an ape with the basic eyes that it expects, but a handy camera that take pictures in the IR wavelength?
And if you want to sell me on "Hey, great news, this space-chameleon just happened to know what wavelengths of light you'd be looking at it and how your visual processing works and exactly what your phone can and can't do and can disguise itself accordingly.", you need, IMHO, a hell of a lot more setup than the Scramblers got.
RobertLiguori
7mo ago
Apologies, then; the emdash in general is something that I only ever see in AI-derived stuff, plus the actual dash is just right there on the keyboard, plus I do not trust non-basic ASCII to not get mangled when I copy it back and forth. You clearly (again) had enough insight that the ideas were human-derived (and I did actually go to Free ChatGPT and had a kind of uncanny-valley conversation with it to reinforce my intuition that AI was not good at discussing the ideas in Blindsight), and it seemed relevant to a discussion on non-conscious intelligences and what they can and can't do.
RobertLiguori
7mo ago
On one hand, consciousness isn't directly a prerequisite for purely extracting information; like I said, some sort of weird alien super-MRI could start data-mining human brains. But what happens from there? If a digital sensor that incorrectly starts reading and reporting the noise from its own function is the analogy to consciousness, then the other metaphor is a perfectly-functioning sensor outputting its information to a system that isn't powered on.
We have seen what happens when fine-tuned evolved systems that arose in the purest and deadliest Darwinian competition, optimized and fine-tuned for pure survival; they lose to humans. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not forever, but in our world, neither the largest nor the smallest predator holds dominion when humans decide to claim a space. Instinctive, programmed behavior loses to conscious thought, every time.
I also want to make a distinction between "Do a complex task" and "Outcompete a sentient agent who is turning their sentience against you". The first is easy; we have loads of nonsentient systems that can do really complex and even really adaptive tasks. But, just as it's pretty trivial to adversarially fuck with, e.g., a self-driving system in a car, and it doesn't matter how good the self-driving system is, if you are a person and can, e.g., think in wildly different terms than the self-driving system was made to do. Sleepwalkers can act according to the habits they've built up, but they can't process novel data, and they certainly can't tell when they're being fucked with.
...And, having written that sentence, I think I've just come to my new headcanon; the reason that these five fuck-ups were sent was because the Serious People on Earth recognize that they are dealing with a nonsentient intelligence that was confused by human communication and unable to properly extract the subtext of humans as individual agents, and so sent this ship full of these people to act, honestly and naturally as they would, which is to say, fail at everything that wasn't being micromanaged by Vampire Muppet, in order to poison the Scrambler's training data of what humanity was and was capable of.
But, to get to my general point about that 'clearly'; if you were going to break down the steps involved in doing the sacchade trick, how would you describe it? What information would you need to start with, what can you learn on your first interactions with a novel lifeform, what is your mechanism for sensing the brain bits through increasing and changing layers of anti-radiation shielding, and, most-importantly, why are you doing all this? Lots of nonsentient creatures hide, and some of them do so in really complex ways. But that stealth falls absolutely apart when you are relying on instinct built up from natural selection to hide from creatures you've never met before, with senses you have no information on, whose very cognition is alien to yours, and it falls apart that much faster when those creatures are capable of building tools and devices, and if you as the author aren't cheating and stopping the characters from using fucking periscopes for scouting, then the need to cheat and upload author-derived information directly into the Scramblers becomes even more apparent.
Also, I have to ask: is there a meta-point being made by this post being possibly polished by AI? I mean, you could just be a Mac user, but I see that emdash in there.
RobertLiguori
7mo ago
I agree that Blindsight was thought-provoking; I just wish its ideas held up to scrutiny.
Spoilers for Blindsight below
According to the conceit of the book, you don't need consciousness to achieve great things and humans aren't special. So, what happens when one (1) human decides "Hey, there's some scary shit out there, let me launch a Von Neumann self-replicating droneswarm that stays synched and fueled with quantum-linked antimatter and blows the shit out of anything it detects fucking with it."?
I feel like the book throws in a lot of completely random setting-building stuff that is just there for vague thematic relevence, and not because it builds a coherent world that explores the ideas therein. In the world of Blindsight, what should happen when humans try to exterminate an ant colony? One is pure, unconstrained instinct, sharpened and honed by millions of years of evolution, with a million eyes and a distributed processing network, with built-in subroutines to handle nearly any kind of obstacle it encounters in its native environment. On the other hand, we have hairless apes...who, because are conscious, can do things like build the civilizational and industrial infrastructure to make and distribute ant poison.
Ah, but what if Satan-Cthulhu was secretly feeding the ants the kind of information that we clearly see needs a conscious mind to extract from the universe, and also the ants could do some weird-ass quantum shit with radiation? Well, for one, the ants would be a really poor thought experiment vector, as I feel the Scramblers are; we have no context for how they think, much less that they do. If the Scramblers are not conscious, why do they respond to torture at all? The story wants me to believe that there is some kind of cosmic Chinese Room of responses that can perfectly pattern-match and encompass the weird-ass protagonists and their dysfunction, such that the Scramblers can somehow arrive at the correct solution to get some random stuff to happen. To me, it just reads like the Scramblers are being fed the author's notes; they don't feel like inhuman superintelligences, they feel like plot devices.
But the thing that did make me realize that the ideas of the book were fundamentally hollow was, ironically, the creepy cool saccade trick. Because, even if we assume that these are actual-Lovecraftian space monsters and literal reality-bending Nyarlathotep is whispering in their space-ears to explain exactly what neurons firing in the squishy human brain-meats that are doing the optical processing...if you have no conception of yourself, and you look at the feed of a creature looking at a room with you in it, how do you know what data has you in it and what doesn't? How do you know how to move to hide yourself if you don't know who or what you are?
I feel like it is kind of the point of the book that the human characters are pretty much weak, helpless, and make consistently bad decisions (when they make decisions at all), but telling a story that cracks apart when one single, solitary character uses judgement and foresight and explores the elements of the setting as they are presented because they have an agenda of Not Dying and take reasonable actions thereof is, to me, not an engaging story.
RobertLiguori
10mo ago
Is it morally abhorrent for Mexicans to live in Mexico instead of becoming illegal aliens? Do you believe that every illegal alien has a right to your personal property in the same way that slaves have a right to their freedom? Do you believe that the law saying that have property and rights and not stripping them away from you to give them to illegal aliens is also illegitimate?
You are comparing two wildly different things; if your only response to this being pointed out is blank confusion, you should perhaps consider the properties of slaves and illegal aliens in more detail.
Great, that fixed it. Thanks.
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