Re: Sister Psyche and Manticore

What you're talking about is just as made-up.

Yes, they can. Mental illness, mind-altering drugs, delusions (case in point) and a fair few other methods can create experiences that are far more real than actual experiences to the person exposed to those stimuli. That has been proven in practice enough times. If you choose to disbelieve it, you're only fooling yourself.

The reason such an idea can be dismissed so easily is arrogance and ignorance, for the most part. For someone who claims that imagination is limitless, yours certainly seems to be running against its limits pretty much the entire time.

Look at yourself.

Actually, it doesn't. "Why we're here" is an empty statement, unless you delve into religion or detached psychology. I don't need to believe in something to justify and appreciate my existence, my life or my experiences, therefore I don't need to tell myself lies to feel like these things matter. The truth is that they don't. We're not here for a reason, and any reason you make up is nothing more than fantasy to make yourself feel better.

There's nothing wrong with escapist fantasies. I should know. However, your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins. You can live in your own detached fantastic world, and I will salute you for it. But don't presume to have the authority that my fantasies, my stories and my philosophy is wrong. You have neither the authority nor the right to claim that.

Your insultingly patronising tone and self-righteously passive-aggressive rhetoric do not serve to endear you to anyone, so you do not have any credit to dictate what's right and what's wrong. Speak for yourself and keep out of other people's beliefs, understandings and fictional stories.

*edit*
And if it sounds like I'm needlessly mean, it's only because I'm sick and tired of your sugar-coated hypocrisy and veiled bully tactics.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, I can't actually imagine you having a constructive discussion beyond "Im right and your wrong because I believe it, without proving anything and using a winky every other line."

I also can't imagine you even replying to a lot of points here, simply because you cannot actually prove any of the retorts to them.

Oh, the other one; I can't Imagine GG as a Hero. That is not the mind of a good person. Or even a sane one.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

This actually is how at least a few heroes have been presented in fiction, though. Most of the ones I can think of, however, haven't actually been used AS heroes in their own stories. I want to say Major Man from the PowerPuff Girls, but I'll actually resort to a couple of Anime examples:

The X-LAWS from Shaman King. They dress in white, have a blond, dashing leader and constantly espouse slogans about justice and righteousness and good. However, they are the de-facto VILLAINS of Shaman King, going out of their way to out and out kill people for siding with Zeke/Hao and generally show complete disregard and often outright contempt for anyone who disagrees with them.

Alexander Andersen from Hellsing. An honest-to-god Catholic priest, holy man and warrior against evil, clad in white robes, constantly quoting the bible and using divine strength and human science, the man comes off as a saint. And he would be one, if he weren't also an unrepentant killer, complete bigot, sadist and all around BAD GUY. That's not to say that anyone in Hellsing is actually a good guy, Alexander is one of the recurring villains of the franchise.

I'm not sure I can come up with decent examples from American Comic Books, mostly because I don't really know much about them, but I'm sure the concept of... Oh, right, I remember!

Teen Titans, the animated series, episode Troq. The brave space hero Val-Yor comes to Earth and all of the Titans are wowed by his greatness and heroism. All except Starfire, whom he despises, calls "troq" - a derogatory insult - because she's from the planet Tamuran. Proving himself to be not just a jerk but an outright racist, the team end up shunning him by the end. Val-Yor is never played as a villain and is actually played as a hero for the most part, but he remains a negative character in the episode.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

What I'd give for a dog collar and sword-bayonet option for Dual Blades...
The only character more badass than Alucard was Anderson.
Why have they not fragging released DVDs Five and onwards for the Ultimate series English Dub...? *sigh*

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Pretty much And both of them are complete bastards. At least they're likeable, unlike that Hitler-looking dude who wants war because... War is fun? I forget his reasoning. I do wish Hellsing did a better job with their bad guys and their motivations, honestly. Or good guys and theirs...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The Major. Addicted to War. Which, in a way, makes a kinda sense. The right sort of sense for a Nazi Major with an army of vampires and werewolves at his disposal, really.
Hellsing was a fairly short series, to be fun. It was more meant to be fun/action packed rather than particularly deep, I think. Still fun though.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The human brain has an upper limit of about 3.6 X 10 to the 19th power in bytes.

So, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 x 3.6 bytes of information. While a monumental number to be sure, it is FAR from infinite.

Some people have more neural connections, some people have less. A safe estimate and average would be about 1000TB of information accessed faster than a SSD. Biomolecular computing is better then silicon, though it is arguable if it is better then a true quantum computer. A smaller number to wrap your mind around would about 8.67 exabytes.

Thankfully, our mind almost works like a RAID system on overdrive; neurons can access pieces of memories (which are stored as programmed chemical reactions; same with emotions. You get serious problems when the improper emotional response is given in some situations), making it much more streamlined, if not fragmented. Then you have the peripheral nervous system, which can store its' own set of chemical memories without answering to the brain; is that memory? If you include that, the upper limit is extended further.

The human imagination has limits. Just like the edge of our universe. Just because you can't grasp the number doesn't mean it's not there.

Source: http://mradomski.wordpress.com/2008/...-in-terabytes/


Edit: Actually, here's a quick limit test. Imagine a billion suns, individually, filling the sky. Imagination fail.

Just a point here... That's because scientists generate theories based on the best currently available evidence. As better evidence or theories are discovered and tested the less valid theories are discarded in favor of the better theories. Rarely are theories proven completely invalid; usually they end up being modified, sometimes very extensively, to incorporate new evidence and knowledge. Still, on the occasion a theory is proven completely wrong it's through using the scientific method, not a popularity contest.

Science is one of the only approaches to explaining the world that can and will say, "Hey, this new evidence proves that how we thought something worked is completely wrong. Time to revise the theory to fit the facts." Of course that doesn't always happen immediately, and some scientists have altered evidence to fit their theories, after all scientists are people too, but other scientists review the findings and attempt to duplicate them in order to verify the assertions.

It's a rather romantic notion that there are outsider scientists who have brilliant theories that are being denied or covered up by the "Scientific Establishment". The thing is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If your results use sloppy methodology or can't be reproduced by other scientists then they aren't accepted. The other thing that makes the worldwide conspiracy of scientists suppressing subversive knowledge theory silly is that scientists come from countries and cultures all over the world. There is little to no chance that scientists as a whole would all agree on hiding a particular discovery. Hell, even in a single country not all scientists agree on the approach to anything.

This actually reminds me of something I watched on the History Channel's "How the Earth Was Made" programme. The various scientists were talking about the kind of unimaginable forces involved in creating megavolcanos like the one which created the Yellowstone basin, and about plate tectonics in general. The consensus among them is that this "planetary system" involves such unbelievable energy that it's difficult to describe and imagine.

And I remember thinking... They're right. I don't really have ANY frame of reference to compare to. I couldn't begin to imagine what such energy - enough to move entire continents - would be like. I mean, I've seen videos of nuclear explosions, which are about as much energy as humans are able to put forward, but those don't really begin to compare. And even with those I have no sense of scale. I'd watch, for instance, that video of Tzar Bomba and be told that the mushroom cloud extended 40-50 miles straight up. I don't really have a good concept of what 40-50 miles is across land, let alone straight up. To this day I can never imagine exactly where the atmosphere stands in relation to the planet - close by, really far away, I don't know.

Lack of experience is where imagination fails. Just as an example, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale. When people start imagining, say, nuclear explosions, they always underestimate the energy and over-estimate the destruction. When it comes to volcanoes, their pyroclastic flows are rarely realistic. These flows can travel up to 450 mph, yet Pierce Brosnon was racing one in a beat-up pickup truck in Dante's Peak. And that's before we start even talking about larger volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa, which blew an entire island apart.

Whenever I try to write a specific story, this problem is usually the one that stifles me the most. If I want something that's truly big or truly powerful... I have no idea how to describe it, because I can't really imagine it. And it does me no good to pull numbers out of the air, because that just ends up making me a laughing stock for people who DO know what they're talking about. For instance, if I want a very powerful conventional laser device, how powerful would that be? A gigawatt? Several hundred gigawatt? A terrawatt? I don't know. I don't know where the norm is, what's laughably underpowered and what's outright absurd.

Imagination only ever feels infinite as long as you don't bother to define what it is you're imagining, and even then only because you don't actually know what it is you're imagining, so it feels like it could be anything. But that's just an illusion.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

So which drug makes you fall in love, and have all the experiences that come from a relationship?

The belief that robots could ever be the same as real people is the kind of embarrasingly childish fantasy that desperate, anti-social loners with poor people skills dream up in the empty hope that they could find friendship with a machine rather than having to interact with real people - it's the kind of thing that obesssive nerd cliches cling to in their mom's basement - as a goal, it's about as serious and realistic as trying to turn lead into gold, which was an obsession of the proto-nerds in the middle ages

The idea's fine for sci-fi stories, because they're just modern fantasy stories - believing in the possibility of a robot that was "human" is like believing that one day you'll meet a dragon - you can meet a dragon in a story, just like you can meet a "human" robot - but in the real wold, neither of them exist, or are even possible.

Are they in all the sky, or just the part in front of my eyes? Like will I have to turn in a full circle to see them all? And are they touching , or sepearte, or overlapping? And are they in a pattern, or just random?

Beer.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Y'know what, GG? Maybe meet people before you judge them. I know my girlfriend would have some very choice words to say about you. As would most of the people I know, though I think most of them would settle for 'unimaginative' and 'irritating'.

You say one thing, then completely contradict it. You bang on about imagination, and then totally dismiss it at the next step.
Face it; your point of arguement is the exact same people would have used against planes and motorised flight, horseless carriages (cars) and...oh, y'know, the notion that the Earth isn't the centre of the Galaxy? 'It'll never happen!' is the most pathetic arguement ever devised. 'Because I'm/my point of view is right and you're wrong!' is the exact excuse used by the Church for centuries to justify burning scientists, who surprise surprise turned out to be right, simply because they were disproving the existence of the God that was giving them so much control over the common man.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Those are all about physics, not souls.

If you are not using a religious definition of the Soul*, what definition are you using?

This is a serious question, if your arguement is that robots will never possess emotions because they will never have souls & souls are the source of 'deeper' emotions, then we need a working definition of the soul to disscuss.


*(I would hazard that the religious definition of the soul is the one people think of most commonly)

And you still have yet to give any tangible, empiracel proof that said concept is even real, not just an ideal that people have come up.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I don't know. Ask all the psychos who are in love with celebrities they've never met, and then proceed to harass them. Or are their emotions not "real" because waka waka waka?

Your insults are pitiful and your desperation palpable. You seem to have understood precisely none of what I've said, though that's precisely what I'd have expected. No-one ever said that machines, as built by humans today or in the foreseeable future, will ever be human-like enough to matter. What I'm saying is completely the inverse - that people themselves are nothing more than machines made out of meat, and your predictability speaks to this exact fact. Feed the right person the right cue and you produce the expected result. Neurology in action.

Furthermore, you fail on a very basic level here, because not I nor Techbot nor indeed anyone here ever spoke of the reality of machines. We spoke of fiction. And if you need to insult and browbeat people for the fantasies they hold because they don't conform to your narrow-minded view of the world, then I feel sorry for you. Because some of us are fully capable of separating fantasy from reality, and are thus fully capable of enjoying a fictional environment in the full knowledge that not a single part of it is or can be real.

You insult people to their faces, treat them like petulant children, go out of your way to dismiss their dreams and their stories, and then you cap it off with a smilie as though it's cute to treat people like garbage because you think it's funny. Do not be surprised when you are poorly received.

Last I checked, the "real world" ends where my keyboard begins, therefore anything which takes part in this game is fictional, open to interpretation and, above all else, free for people to craft as they please. There are some limitations the game imposes on the stories people can write for it, but robot intelligence and, yes, robot love is not among them. In fact, the game has multiple instances of both, and I can keep naming them till the cows come home. Bastion/Citadel, Luminari, Metronome, that AI you save from Crey, "the doctor," there are plenty of examples to make it very clear and very obvious that this is acceptable in-game narrative.

So you have no right to insult and belittle people over what fiction they write for THEIR characters in a game which not only permits it, but encourages it. Just because you're short-sighted enough to only ever produce a single idea does not give you the right to attack people who have ideas which contradict it. Contrary to what you may believe, you do not get dictate what's applicable and what isn't, nor what is "desperate," "childish" or "anti-social." And every time you try to do so, you are wrong.

But, hey, we all knew that to begin with

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Which don't exist

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Actually, they did - that's why we're having this discussion.

A discussion requires two sides willing to listen to the other

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

No, they didn't

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Discussion? Other people point out research that raises questions, suggest possible scenarios, point out that it's a fictional setting with canon that has multiple examples of de facto human level machine intelligences, or ask for a useful definition of terms you claim prove your point and you simply reply, "I'm right because I know I'm right, which therefore proves my position is true." You have yet to offer any sort of logical argument, evidence, or even a concrete definition of your terms, and you think that you're contributing anything to a discussion? Interesting.

Then you've not been paying attention