Quote from: Scott Anderson;758954People keep saying this word around me. I do not know what it means.

I never knew that this was a genre or even a *thing* until this past month. Weird...

Quote from: dragoner;758958Science wise, it is very suspect, humans are emotional operators and very much tied to biology. Thus putting a human in a machine, would most likely irrevocably change the person. ...

This is one of the problems I have with Altered Carbon.  I can accept that it may be possible to simulate the biological processes that the consciousness waveform* would require.**  I don't see that you can drop into another biological entity that has had a previous life due to all the differences between the biological processes since it would require the same levels of simulation and/or translation layer as a "grown" or "mechanical" sleeve in addition to requiring even more translation between the old and new than in a blank slate.  i.e. it would be cheaper and easier to NOT use an existing "person."

Of course all this suggests a pre-singularity setting since post-singularity is by definition neither predictable nor understandable to us.

And none of this has to do with my personal views and it's absent any moral/ethical issues, it's just what I can accept in my fiction.


*IMHO unless our consciousness is some kind of illusion the gels out of the bits that make us, it almost has to be a waveform "riding" those bits.  I think that such a waveform could theoretically be transferable with the right simulation layer.

**Unless it's all simulation, like the simulation hypothesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

Quote from: trechriron;758966I ran a generic sci-fi game using Savage Worlds that had plenty of advanced tech, much of it "transhuman" in nature. I had standard anti-nano security on ships and people could carry "grenades" that countered nano in a similar way.

I believe that if we had technology that advanced, we would also come up with solutions to combat it. Even today we have anti-radiation meds. We can't currently counter a nuclear bomb when it explodes, but we've come up with creative ways to stop the missile before it hits. :-)

I think having the "grey goo" thing looming over the PCs heads makes the genre less fun, so instead I counter it so it has more of a "ebola virus" level of dread vs. "oh crap everything's dead button" one. If you get to it quickly, you can survive it. If you find yourself facing it unprepared, you're in trouble.

Yeah, for me it's just that it tends to fail the "fun" part of things.  Dialing it down a lot to "disease/poison" levels is a good alternative though.  Mostly I tend to keep "grey goo" to vat-level effects, so it's not something you can have running around the world eating up people.

It's kind of like sci-fi wargaming.  If we extrapolate from current tech we end with warfare looking nothing like something that could be "fun" to play.  At least it's harder to imagine autonomous drones fighting other autonomous drones (or dead in seconds people) being fun on the tabletop.  A computer sim where you set the parameters for the drones though could be fun, similarly one where you deploy the various ultra-tech fogs and counter-fogs could be a fun computer sim as well.

Quote from: smiorgan;759027Maybe. I don't know if there's a humanity cost in the current TH games (I own EP and NP but so far only skimmed them); arguably there should be. But that doesn't need to be any more mechanically complicated than humanity loss in Cyberpunk.

I personally dislike the idea of humanity loss in games.  Losing a limb can certainly cause psychological issues, but getting one back that works better seems likely to be a positive, not negative thing.

At least Shadowrun went with the more magic definition of "essence" though I think full body replacement is a big enough part of the genre it should be feasible within most (but not all) settings.

Quote from: smiorgan;759027The really hard part of TH as RPG genre is (IMO) reconciling differences in knowledge. I believe local cortical stacks can be destroyed in EP, but the player can survive by having their backup mind re-sleeved in a new one? In that case you run into issues of player vs player-character continuity. Can someone who's actually read the books say whether or not this could happen -- and if so, how it's dealt with?

Forks, Alphas, Betas, etc could certainly get interesting.  One solution is to not let the player control any more than one or know what the others are doing until they reconcile the various forks of their persona.  There is also the idea of a fork being the actual antagonist.  Maybe the PC is a fork hacked to want to kill another fork, etc. .  Yes, it's get's weird fast :-)

Quote from: Scott Anderson;758954People keep saying this word around me. I do not know what it means.

Imagine a Hunter Gatherer tribe with no prior contact suddenly thrust into the modern day. Human progress has changed things to the point where the a H/G tribesmen has no foundation to understand the daily concerns or capabilities of somebody living in the most advanced societies.

Now switch your viewpoint to the future. Logically there will be some point after which we will be in the same boat with the hunter gatherer.

Some call this a technological singularity. A singularity because after this point just about everything we know breaks down.

Transhumans are the people involved during the time period of the singularity or afterwards.

All of this involves wild ass guesses and extrapolations and people have fun with like they do with all speculative fiction. Of course some take it very seriously.

An example of the genre is figuring out what a post-scarcity society would look like. The general gist is that it is possible that technology makes resources so abundant that it is effectively free. People do not have to work to provide themselves with the necessities or even some luxuries.

Some use the culture that surrounds computers as a template, other look into the past to societies that happened to live in incredibly abundant locales.

For tabletop RPGs a lot of focus is on the kewl gear and tech. Uploading your mind and having multiple bodies and backups and so on.

But again it all boils down to a bunch of wild ass guesses little different then the speculation that goes on when figuring out what impact X magic system has on a medieval society.

I personally think there will a future time that will be incomprehensible to use now. But if we were suddenly thrust forward to that future present day human would adapt to the conditions. Similar to hunter gather societies after first contact. Oh there will be issues, problems, and a probably a lot of "Yeah I get that works even tho I still don't get your explanation why."

Growing up in the 70s and reading older sci-fi along with Popular Mechanics there was this vision of the 21st century. Well it the 21st century and yeah things are very different but only with a few of the predicting things. And the really important changes (Internet, Green Revolution, etc) were totally unforeseen.

Quote from: Brander;759089I personally dislike the idea of humanity loss in games.  Losing a limb can certainly cause psychological issues, but getting one back that works better seems likely to be a positive, not negative thing.

Especially when you consider that if was a problem people would be working on fixing it with the same intensity they had when the come up with the original tech. Look at all the work on the issues surrounding the Phantom Limb syndrome when a arm or leg is amputated.

One ingenious thing I read about is for when you lose an arm and experiencing phantom pain. You can set up a mirror in a way that when you look at it the reflection of your remaining arm looks like your old arm is back. By moving your phantom limb and your remaining limb in the exact same pattern you can fool your body into thinking the phantom limb is back.

This helps ease the aches, pains, and discomfort that the person is feeling. Something to with fooling the nerve connections in the brain enough so that they quiet down.

I believe Buck Rogers XXVC is considered the first "transhuman" RPG.  In fact, it's pulp transhumanism.  The leader of Mars is an AI based on a long dead guy that had his memories and brain pattern uploaded before his death.  Most of humanity is actually genetically engineered to survive their habitats, from Mercury to Mars to the outer rim, and the farther you get from Earth the less human their inhabitants actually are.  The pulp comes from the Buck Rogers elements... rocketships, ray guns, etc.  It's a danged fantastic setting, IMO.

Now, Eclipse Phase... weirds me out a bit.  That's a bit too transhumanist for me, not to mention the horror aspects, and the pinko commie political views of the authors that were if any more obvious I'd feel like my head was hit with a sledgehammer.

Quote from: Brander;758957I do still like putting bits of transhumanism in my games, though I'm as likely to do it in fantasy as I am sci-fi.  After all, most fantasy settings are effectively transhuman as is with all the various odd magics(technologies), weird species, monsters, and the like.  Though their ubiquity has as much impact as their existence, whether fantasy or sci-fi.

  Interesting ... one could make an argument that BECMI D&D and Dark Sun contain transhuman elements and themes, what with the Immortal ascension rules in the former and the dragon/avangion/elemental ascension rules in the latter. Ravenloft, by contrast, would be almost anti-transhuman, as the transformation into something inhuman is caused by/reflective of moral and spiritual decay.

Transhuman technology is not something I've ever dealt with in my sci-fi games but I think I have a handle on what it all means. I wonder how wide the definition is.

In Fred Pohl's Gateway books Humans learn how to upload their brain into computers and live as an electronic intelligence. In addition computer programs are so finely written that some of those too become AI or close enough not to matter. That seems to be a clear case of transhumanism.

Dan Simmons' Hyperion books have elements of AI programs running amok which boils out to a future war between Man and Machine.

John Scalzi's Old Man's War series involves Human souls transferred into new bodies via somewhat magical machinery. That too is transhumanism.

But does Transhumanism always have to involve machines? What about a more basic genetic manipulation? Nancy Kress has a series based on the idea of a new breed of Human being created: those who have eidetic memory, very high IQ and don't require sleep. The "Sleepless" quickly become leaders in every field of human endeavor and become despised for that.

In Julian May's Metapsychic books a leading psychic fears aliens will dominate mankind so he creates a secret "Mental Man" project to breed hundreds, then thousands, of powerful psychics to combat the threat. He grows them in tubes and manipulates them so they will work together under his command. Would that be considered "Transhuman"?

How about Frank Herbert's Dune books? Would the genetic manipulations of the Bene Gesserit be considered transhuman? How about characters such as the Mentats, the Guild Navigators and the Bene Tleilax "Face Dancers"?

Would the characters of the TV show Dark Angel be considered transhuman?

Would transhumanism also cover genetic manipulation of animals? Or, since it is animals, by definition not transhuman (perhaps a close cousin?) Would David Brin's Uplift novels be an example of transhuman technology? In Leo Frankowski's Lord Conrad series there is an artificial horse with human intelligence. Transhuman or no?

Personally I think there are limits to what we can do with the human body. Sure, we might find techniques to genetically alter people and feed them the proper nutrition to increase average IQ by say 15 or 20 points. But to go so far as making the entire Human population 200+ IQ? Nah, not buying it. At least not anytime soon or in the foreseeable future.

Quote from: estar;759098This helps ease the aches, pains, and discomfort that the person is feeling. Something to with fooling the nerve connections in the brain enough so that they quiet down.

From what I understand, usually when a limb is amputated the limb is tightened or clenched before being severed.  As a result, once the limb is lost, the brain no longer sends commands to it to relax.  The nerves, however, that are supposed to send to it are still in clenched mode, which leads to phantom pain.  Doing the mirror thing then clenching and relaxing the real limb fools the brain into sending the messages to the non-existent limb to relax, which ends the phantom pain.

Fucking brilliant whoever thought that one up.  They explain it on an episode of House and an episode of Regenesis.

Quote from: Necrozius;759083I never knew that this was a genre or even a *thing* until this past month. Weird...

My guess is that it's become A Thing on some marginalized political bulletin board or something. Even though it's weird, it's actually too normal to come out of Academe.

Quote from: Scott Anderson;759211My guess is that it's become A Thing on some marginalized political bulletin board or something. Even though it's weird, it's actually too normal to come out of Academe.

Posthuman
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/posthuman

Technological Singularity
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/singularity

SFE entry on GURPS Transhuman Space, mentions Post Cyberpunk
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/transhuman_space

Wikipedia
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumanism
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

Point being, it's been a thing (in genre terms) since the 60s.
There's a huge bibliography in Eclipse Phase.

Quote from: Scott Anderson;758954People keep saying this word around me. I do not know what it means.

Have you heard of Wikipedia, or Google?

Quote from: Brander;759086...  i.e. it would be cheaper and easier to NOT use an existing "person."

Yes, and to just let the AI develop on it's own being the better solution.

Maybe someday we might be close to the simulation, but then that becomes the problem of who is controlling it and for what purpose? We know why nature has the central nervous system in women release endorphins into the brain when she nurses, in order to inculcate the nurture aspect. But the ability to control this in other ways is scary. Then talking missing limb syndrome, what about missing body syndrome? Psychic collapse.

Quote from: Nexus;758953What's your opinion? It seems to be very popular and has provided the inspiration for a number of games. I haven't really seen the appeal. Most of the settings seem either very weird, a little bleak or, honestly, kind of dull, unless you play certain types of characters. And some of "transhumanist" technology and ideals are a disturbing.

I think a lot of it is weird for the sake of weird, with a wrapping of science fiction to claim that it is not pure fantasy. Nanotech is not magic, but a lot of transhumanist settings assume that it is in order to justify settings that do not make any sense. There is a belief that human nature will suddenly change and we will become a race of godlings which snaps my disbelief suspenders every time. That and things like Eclipse Phase, which looks less like a game and more like a wish list for SJW politics.

In short, I find it unappealing.