TheRPGSite

I binged for eclipse phase sites and found a few posts here about it. I was wondering if anyone here actually played EP or do the only people here who talk about it just bash it for not agreeing with their politics and for talking about sexual identity?

If you actually like and play EP let me know. If you're some some tired ugly rightard Qanon following pepe troll i don't what to hear what you claim to "think".

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 05:46:44 PM
I binged for eclipse phase sites and found a few posts here about it. I was wondering if anyone here actually played EP or do the only people here who talk about it just bash it for not agreeing with their politics and for talking about sexual identity?

If you actually like and play EP let me know. If you're some some tired ugly rightard Qanon following pepe troll i don't what to hear what you claim to "think".

Maybe you should try RPG.net, if the board here is full of Qanon pepe troll whatevers.

Played 1e for a 6-session mini-campaign. It was a hard game to get into because the technology allows for too much and trivialize some approaches while making others almost impossible. Oddly, this meant it limited options more than it increased the fun. The system also had some weird spots in it. 2e cleared up some of the system issues (but introduced a few other odd spots) while doing nothing to really help make the setting more relatable.

As for the last line you wrote, fuck off with that shit on the gaming page and you might have a good conversation. If you just want to fling shit, go to Pundit's section and let fly your inner asshole.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 25, 2021, 06:03:27 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 05:46:44 PM
I binged for eclipse phase sites and found a few posts here about it. I was wondering if anyone here actually played EP or do the only people here who talk about it just bash it for not agreeing with their politics and for talking about sexual identity?

If you actually like and play EP let me know. If you're some some tired ugly rightard Qanon following pepe troll i don't what to hear what you claim to "think".

Maybe you should try RPG.net, if the board here is full of Qanon pepe troll whatevers.

Hey, guy, I'm against rpg.net too and just got banned there when i couldn't swallow their bullshit.

I've heard this place was a rrightard shithole, and may not stay long given I'm a biden hillary obama voter but hell, i decided to give it a chance even tho ive heard the guy who founded it belongs in a padded cell and had to flee canada because he had too many people in it looking to beat his ass for his constant trolling and abuse. Yeesh, canada is like a totally mellow laid back country, how far do you have to go to get yeeted from it?

Contrary to what the mindless Qanon viooent psychopaths may claim to think even tho they're largely incapable of thinking, not all people on 'the left' are  have been assimilated and hardwired into the great woke borg collective like rpg.net. I'm for a lot of things the right has been conditioned to mindless ly scream 'SOCIALISM!" at,  and i'm for gay rights, but i don't support laws foring businesses to let a guy in a dress use a  woman's public restroom, i think that should be a choice left up to the  business owner.

I don't think a genetic male should be allowed to compete in female sports as males do have physical advantages in some sports that's not fair to females.

So basically i constantly catch shit from the far l;eft and the far right, and my general attitude is "fuck you both!"

Back to eclipse phase I like it in general, it's one far out setting that does take things to an extreme. I liked the bit in the credits where they thanked antifascists everywhere and generally like the pro socialist tone of the game. I'm love to find discussion on it and not whining and bitching by rightards about how woke the game is.

I can't discuss it on rpg.net as that site disgusts me as a member of the center left, i probably can't discuss here as this place will probbly turn out to be a rightard conscum site but het i had to try.

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 06:21:46 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 25, 2021, 06:03:27 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 05:46:44 PM
I binged for eclipse phase sites and found a few posts here about it. I was wondering if anyone here actually played EP or do the only people here who talk about it just bash it for not agreeing with their politics and for talking about sexual identity?

If you actually like and play EP let me know. If you're some some tired ugly rightard Qanon following pepe troll i don't what to hear what you claim to "think".

Maybe you should try RPG.net, if the board here is full of Qanon pepe troll whatevers.

Hey, guy, I'm against rpg.net too and just got banned there when i couldn't swallow their bullshit.

I've heard this place was a rrightard shithole, and may not stay long given I'm a biden hillary obama voter but hell, i decided to give it a chance even tho ive heard the guy who founded it belongs in a padded cell and had to flee canada because he had too many people in it looking to beat his ass for his constant trolling and abuse. Yeesh, canada is like a totally mellow laid back country, how far do you have to go to get yeeted from it?

Contrary to what the mindless Qanon viooent psychopaths may claim to think even tho they're largely incapable of thinking, not all people on 'the left' are  have been assimilated and hardwired into the great woke borg collective like rpg.net. I'm for a lot of things the right has been conditioned to mindless ly scream 'SOCIALISM!" at,  and i'm for gay rights, but i don't support laws foring businesses to let a guy in a dress use a  woman's public restroom, i think that should be a choice left up to the  business owner.

I don't think a genetic male should be allowed to compete in female sports as males do have physical advantages in some sports that's not fair to females.

So basically i constantly catch shit from the far l;eft and the far right, and my general attitude is "fuck you both!"

Back to eclipse phase I like it in general, it's one far out setting that does take things to an extreme. I liked the bit in the credits where they thanked antifascists everywhere and generally like the pro socialist tone of the game. I'm love to find discussion on it and not whining and bitching by rightards about how woke the game is.

I can't discuss it on rpg.net as that site disgusts me as a member of the center left, i probably can't discuss here as this place will probbly turn out to be a rightard conscum site but het i had to try.

If the above is what you call trying to have a conversation,  you're likely to fail everywhere. Put your topic (EP in this case) before your politics, or just admit you're not really looking to discuss it and just want to bitch/whine/fight/argue. And if that latter shit is why you're here, go to Pundit's section so you don't have to waste time weakly threading some game stuff in.

Matt, HappyDaze is right. Every one of your posts in this thread is a disaster just asking to turn into a disastrously flaming trainwreck. If you're trolling, nobody's buying. If you're legitimately trying to start a reasonably conversation, your approach is about as bad as humanly possible.

Quote from: Pat on April 25, 2021, 06:33:03 PM
Matt, HappyDaze is right. Every one of your posts in this thread is a disaster just asking to turn into a disastrously flaming trainwreck. If you're trolling, nobody's buying. If you're legitimately trying to start a reasonably conversation, your approach is about as bad as humanly possible.

It's not even a good troll attempt. I'm just giving him a little slack since apparently he's salty he got banned from "another site" and might chill out later.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 25, 2021, 07:03:55 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 25, 2021, 06:33:03 PM
Matt, HappyDaze is right. Every one of your posts in this thread is a disaster just asking to turn into a disastrously flaming trainwreck. If you're trolling, nobody's buying. If you're legitimately trying to start a reasonably conversation, your approach is about as bad as humanly possible.

It's not even a good troll attempt. I'm just giving him a little slack since apparently he's salty he got banned from "another site" and might chill out later.

I'm not even sure anymore. People in bubbles often have no idea what they sound like in the wider world.

C- level trolling. Sad!

While I do own Eclipse Phase (it is a beautiful book) I have never played it. I simply dont have the playing group that would be interested in that particular type of game, much preferring games like Pathfinder, Star Wars, Shadowrun where they get to be shiny heroes and not worry about politics. Although I have the urge to get them into Cyberpunk Red just to hit them with some real dystopia instead of the watered down version of Cyberpunk we get from the GM running Shadowrun.

So sorry, cant help you.

its ok at least you replied fairly. I know it's a weird setting where you could meet stolen/hacked copies of yourself, end up in a bioengineered cybernetic crab body or a clanking droid body on par with C-3POs, etc. But it's a good hard sf setting.

At times i wonder if there's just too much in the setting. Too may weird things to balance out. Titans, exsurgents, pandora gates, factors etc. Maybe if a few elements were left our the rest could be better defined.

Eclipse Phase is rather tight and focused, compared to Transhuman Space, which is so completely unfocused nobody knew what to do with it. Didn't help that the first adventure was zombies in spaaaace!

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 07:32:34 PM
I know it's a weird setting where you could meet stolen/hacked copies of yourself, end up in a bioengineered cybernetic crab body or a clanking droid body on par with C-3POs, etc. But it's a good hard sf setting.

At times i wonder if there's just too much in the setting. Too may weird things to balance out. Titans, exsurgents, pandora gates, factors etc. Maybe if a few elements were left our the rest could be better defined.

I thought that you might be young or an idiot from your shoehorning of politics into your gaming, but the above just means that you are inexperienced. Everything that you think makes the Eclipse Phase setting weird and unique had already shown up in R. Talsorian Game's Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk 2020, and Cybergeneration. That was back before the year 2000.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 25, 2021, 07:03:55 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 25, 2021, 06:33:03 PM
Matt, HappyDaze is right. Every one of your posts in this thread is a disaster just asking to turn into a disastrously flaming trainwreck. If you're trolling, nobody's buying. If you're legitimately trying to start a reasonably conversation, your approach is about as bad as humanly possible.

It's not even a good troll attempt. I'm just giving him a little slack since apparently he's salty he got banned from "another site" and might chill out later.

He got banned from there for wrong think, he a Beijing Biden, $hillary, Obomber suporter (guess him bombing lots of brown minors and arming the cartels here in México is A-OK because he's black?)

And still he thinks everything he was told there about people here (including pundit) is completelly true.

I'm not sure the guy has anything above 5 in WIS or INT and his CHA is about 3.

I'm off to roll for sanity after reading his word vomit.

I like Eclipse Phase's concept but some of the mechanics and setting are bent as fuck. The endless whining about the evuls of le capitalism get on my nerves.

I can get past the overall wokeness of First Edition by the authors. No sure how much of 2E is woke as I have the PDF and have not read it yet.

Beyond the rules which work though I found them unnecessarily complex at least with character creation. Is the authors absolute bullshit on religions. All religions did not survive the fall yet somehow Islam does. The more progressive religions cannot adapt yet the poster child religion for intolerance violence is still being worshiped and has followers. Given how religion has been disproved with a person dying and simply resleeving into another body, most religions and religious worship would either disappear or be at an all time low. When Heaven and Hell mean nothing and even someone say stuck in an older USB can be brought back in the form of a swarm of nanites or an Octopus. Yet somehow Islam "survives" the attack of the Titans and the fall of Earth.

Give me a fucking break.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 25, 2021, 09:30:39 PM
I like Eclipse Phase's concept but some of the mechanics and setting are bent as fuck. The endless whining about the evuls of le capitalism get on my nerves.

This too was another thing that turned me off from the rpg. As like it or not Capitalism in one form or another would survive after the fall. Whether the authors like it or not.

Quote from: sureshot on April 25, 2021, 09:32:58 PM
I can get past the overall wokeness of First Edition by the authors. No sure how much of 2E is woke as I have the PDF and have not read it yet.

Beyond the rules which work though I found them unnecessarily complex at least with character creation. Is the authors absolute bullshit on religions. All religions did not survive the fall yet somehow Islam does. The more progressive religions cannot adapt yet the poster child religion for intolerance violence is still being worshiped and has followers. Given how religion has been disproved with a person dying and simply resleeving into another body, most religions and religious worship would either disappear or be at an all time low. When Heaven and Hell mean nothing and even someone say stuck in an older USB can be brought back in the form of a swarm of nanites or an Octopus. Yet somehow Islam "survives" the attack of the Titans and the fall of Earth.

Give me a fucking break.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 25, 2021, 09:30:39 PM
I like Eclipse Phase's concept but some of the mechanics and setting are bent as fuck. The endless whining about the evuls of le capitalism get on my nerves.

This too was another thing that turned me off from the rpg. As like it or not Capitalism in one form or another would survive after the fall. Whether the authors like it or not.

The hilariously over-the-top painting of the Jovians as completely evil due to their isolationism and bioconservative tendencies also irked me. Hey guys, when you just burned your fucking house down, you're going to have trouble selling fire to your friends!

(If I ever run an EP game, there will be a plot point where radical autonomist elements are sabotaging the Jovians' Reagan habitats to prop up the notion of how terrible their lives are. I also want to play a bioconservative neo-octopus who perpetually points out that maybe, just MAYBE, transhumanity might want to be more careful since we lost our fucking planet.)

Yeah I played it but I barely remember the skills and mechanics and shit, DM offloaded most of that onto her own game. Pretty fun playing an out-of-touch cyberpunk guy whose ideas were old-fashioned and his metal arm looked at like it was some fuckin weird nostalgia trip. Good campaign but didn't make me wanna buy the book or w/e

Site's pretty conservative dude, not much to tell you there, it's like a core of disgruntled rpg.net ban refugees that got pushed further right and OSR as TBP went further left/indie darlings. Just annoy enough of them they start putting you on ignore lists and you can do pretty much whatever, it's all the same dozen posting all the same shit and using all the same jokes anyway.

Oh joy.

As somebody else here already put it, Eclipse Phase's take on "gender" (already a nonsensical concept to begin with) is incoherent. Transhumans can change their bodies as easily as we change clothes, so a transhuman identifying as a man, women, or demiwhatever is like me identifying as a pair of socks or a computer mouse. It's pandering to the misogynistic genderspecial trend in a way that clashes with the internal logic of the setting.

Oh, and one of the sample characters identifies as "intersex." Intersex is an umbrella of 40+ medical conditions, some of which are potentially fatal if not treated, not a club that any narcissistic genderspecial can identify into.

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 09:47:01 PM
Yeah I played it but I barely remember the skills and mechanics and shit, DM offloaded most of that onto her own game. Pretty fun playing an out-of-touch cyberpunk guy whose ideas were old-fashioned and his metal arm looked at like it was some fuckin weird nostalgia trip. Good campaign but didn't make me wanna buy the book or w/e

Site's pretty conservative dude, not much to tell you there, it's like a core of disgruntled rpg.net ban refugees that got pushed further right and OSR as TBP went further left/indie darlings. Just annoy enough of them they start putting you on ignore lists and you can do pretty much whatever, it's all the same dozen posting all the same shit and using all the same jokes anyway.

Sour grapes always make the best whine.

Quote from: jeff37923 on April 25, 2021, 10:28:44 PM

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 09:47:01 PM
Yeah I played it but I barely remember the skills and mechanics and shit, DM offloaded most of that onto her own game. Pretty fun playing an out-of-touch cyberpunk guy whose ideas were old-fashioned and his metal arm looked at like it was some fuckin weird nostalgia trip. Good campaign but didn't make me wanna buy the book or w/e

Site's pretty conservative dude, not much to tell you there, it's like a core of disgruntled rpg.net ban refugees that got pushed further right and OSR as TBP went further left/indie darlings. Just annoy enough of them they start putting you on ignore lists and you can do pretty much whatever, it's all the same dozen posting all the same shit and using all the same jokes anyway.

Sour grapes always make the best whine.

The best part is the imbecile equating OSR with being rightwing, you can't get anymore low INT without being a vegetable, and his just a hair above that.

Friendly reminder to roll for sanity when you read his drivel.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 25, 2021, 09:40:42 PM

Quote from: sureshot on April 25, 2021, 09:32:58 PM
I can get past the overall wokeness of First Edition by the authors. No sure how much of 2E is woke as I have the PDF and have not read it yet.

Beyond the rules which work though I found them unnecessarily complex at least with character creation. Is the authors absolute bullshit on religions. All religions did not survive the fall yet somehow Islam does. The more progressive religions cannot adapt yet the poster child religion for intolerance violence is still being worshiped and has followers. Given how religion has been disproved with a person dying and simply resleeving into another body, most religions and religious worship would either disappear or be at an all time low. When Heaven and Hell mean nothing and even someone say stuck in an older USB can be brought back in the form of a swarm of nanites or an Octopus. Yet somehow Islam "survives" the attack of the Titans and the fall of Earth.

Give me a fucking break.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 25, 2021, 09:30:39 PM
I like Eclipse Phase's concept but some of the mechanics and setting are bent as fuck. The endless whining about the evuls of le capitalism get on my nerves.

This too was another thing that turned me off from the rpg. As like it or not Capitalism in one form or another would survive after the fall. Whether the authors like it or not.

The hilariously over-the-top painting of the Jovians as completely evil due to their isolationism and bioconservative tendencies also irked me. Hey guys, when you just burned your fucking house down, you're going to have trouble selling fire to your friends!

(If I ever run an EP game, there will be a plot point where radical autonomist elements are sabotaging the Jovians' Reagan habitats to prop up the notion of how terrible their lives are. I also want to play a bioconservative neo-octopus who perpetually points out that maybe, just MAYBE, transhumanity might want to be more careful since we lost our fucking planet.)

Now see this post has some potential, but you did ignore some of the things the jovian junta does, like censorship, brutal repression of dissent, a total authoritarian non democratic government, slave labor, etc.

But you did bering up the junta has some ifeas that are understandable and even possibly valid so that makes this one of the best replies yet.

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 10:54:55 PM
Now see this post has some potential, but you did ignore some of the things the jovian junta does, like censorship, brutal repression of dissent, a total authoritarian non democratic government, slave labor, etc.

It's fiction, not reality. At some point, the authorial voice becomes so loud it's shouting, and this case they clearly decided the Jovians were bad based on the reasons Ghostmaker pointed out, and then added all the things you mentioned to "prove" it. It's a tar by association political hit piece, and it's one the more clumsy parts of the setting, like the anti-religious silliness.

Quote from: jeff37923 on April 25, 2021, 10:28:44 PM

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 09:47:01 PM
Yeah I played it but I barely remember the skills and mechanics and shit, DM offloaded most of that onto her own game. Pretty fun playing an out-of-touch cyberpunk guy whose ideas were old-fashioned and his metal arm looked at like it was some fuckin weird nostalgia trip. Good campaign but didn't make me wanna buy the book or w/e

Site's pretty conservative dude, not much to tell you there, it's like a core of disgruntled rpg.net ban refugees that got pushed further right and OSR as TBP went further left/indie darlings. Just annoy enough of them they start putting you on ignore lists and you can do pretty much whatever, it's all the same dozen posting all the same shit and using all the same jokes anyway.

Sour grapes always make the best whine.

Site's a real fine vintage, lemme tell you that. Uruguayan vineyards got some good product.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2021, 10:34:46 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on April 25, 2021, 10:28:44 PM

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 09:47:01 PM
Yeah I played it but I barely remember the skills and mechanics and shit, DM offloaded most of that onto her own game. Pretty fun playing an out-of-touch cyberpunk guy whose ideas were old-fashioned and his metal arm looked at like it was some fuckin weird nostalgia trip. Good campaign but didn't make me wanna buy the book or w/e

Site's pretty conservative dude, not much to tell you there, it's like a core of disgruntled rpg.net ban refugees that got pushed further right and OSR as TBP went further left/indie darlings. Just annoy enough of them they start putting you on ignore lists and you can do pretty much whatever, it's all the same dozen posting all the same shit and using all the same jokes anyway.

Sour grapes always make the best whine.

The best part is the imbecile equating OSR with being rightwing, you can't get anymore low INT without being a vegetable, and his just a hair above that.

Friendly reminder to roll for sanity when you read his drivel.

Sumbitch ignored me but he can't help but click. Awesome to know my posts are the necronomicon for his brain. Deserves to put what little remains of his out of his misery.

Yeah I am in fact tarring you all with the same brush, no I don't give a shit about being fair to you, because why the fuck would i? There's maybe some OSR people who aren't right wing, but they sure as fuck aren't here.

Quote from: Pat on April 25, 2021, 11:05:00 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 10:54:55 PM
Now see this post has some potential, but you did ignore some of the things the jovian junta does, like censorship, brutal repression of dissent, a total authoritarian non democratic government, slave labor, etc.

It's fiction, not reality. At some point, the authorial voice becomes so loud it's shouting, and this case they clearly decided the Jovians were bad based on the reasons Ghostmaker pointed out, and then added all the things you mentioned to "prove" it. It's a tar by association political hit piece, and it's one the more clumsy parts of the setting, like the anti-religious silliness.

They also went out of their way in 2e to take the formerly playable Ultimates and make them into an ultra-fascist "nobody should ever want to play them so we don't give PC faction info for them" group of villains. Then they go and make some of them into "ronin" but still leave out the PC faction bits.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 25, 2021, 11:08:21 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 25, 2021, 11:05:00 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 10:54:55 PM
Now see this post has some potential, but you did ignore some of the things the jovian junta does, like censorship, brutal repression of dissent, a total authoritarian non democratic government, slave labor, etc.

It's fiction, not reality. At some point, the authorial voice becomes so loud it's shouting, and this case they clearly decided the Jovians were bad based on the reasons Ghostmaker pointed out, and then added all the things you mentioned to "prove" it. It's a tar by association political hit piece, and it's one the more clumsy parts of the setting, like the anti-religious silliness.

They also went out of their way in 2e to take the formerly playable Ultimates and make them into an ultra-fascist "nobody should ever want to play them so we don't give PC faction info for them" group of villains. Then they go and make some of them into "ronin" but still leave out the PC faction bits.

Anybody made up some stuff to correct that and put it on their forums yet. Do they even have forums to put it on?

Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

Yeah, They all are in the DNC/Woke camp.

This Guy, I am incredibly left wing and I support the OSR. Painting with broad brush strokes doesn't get you anywhere and in fact makes you sound a lot like OP.

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:33:41 PM
This Guy, I am incredibly left wing and I support the OSR. Painting with broad brush strokes doesn't get you anywhere and in fact makes you sound a lot like OP.

bold of you to assume I'm trying to get anywhere

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 11:34:39 PM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:33:41 PM
This Guy, I am incredibly left wing and I support the OSR. Painting with broad brush strokes doesn't get you anywhere and in fact makes you sound a lot like OP.

bold of you to assume I'm trying to get anywhere

If you're just shitposting then maybe don't. I'm not going to force you, nor could I but if you're just posting that to upset the normies then maybe revaluate some stuff.

There's a reason pseudo-leftists don't like this site.

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:38:11 PM

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 11:34:39 PM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:33:41 PM
This Guy, I am incredibly left wing and I support the OSR. Painting with broad brush strokes doesn't get you anywhere and in fact makes you sound a lot like OP.

bold of you to assume I'm trying to get anywhere

If you're just shitposting then maybe don't. I'm not going to force you, nor could I but if you're just posting that to upset the normies then maybe revaluate some stuff.

don't worry man I had a long dark night of the soul a few years back and decided that yes, really, I was a more whole and complete person by shitposting and annoying people, and I had more fun and felt more complete watching shitty people bicker in their little fiefdoms than not. Life's been great since, I even got an erection once

Stars Without Number did post scarcity transhumanism better without resorting to real life politics.   In my personal view I will stick with that.

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 11:41:48 PM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:38:11 PM

Quote from: This Guy on April 25, 2021, 11:34:39 PM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:33:41 PM
This Guy, I am incredibly left wing and I support the OSR. Painting with broad brush strokes doesn't get you anywhere and in fact makes you sound a lot like OP.

bold of you to assume I'm trying to get anywhere

If you're just shitposting then maybe don't. I'm not going to force you, nor could I but if you're just posting that to upset the normies then maybe revaluate some stuff.

don't worry man I had a long dark night of the soul a few years back and decided that yes, really, I was a more whole and complete person by shitposting and annoying people, and I had more fun and felt more complete watching shitty people bicker in their little fiefdoms than not. Life's been great since, I even got an erection once

Fair enough. I just hope you realize that you sounded a lot like OP. Anyways back to our regular programming.

honestly we need more like OP.

Back to regular it's like i said I played the one campaign. mostly remember the resident powergamer being a nanite cloud and getting mad he couldn't do things that people who aren't nanite clouds could do, but he'd have done that with any game. seems like a good setting to play some weird shit long-term but my schedule's full.

I really like Eclipse Phase. But yeah the whole gender mattering when anyone can be whatever is stupid. Also the fact that of all of the abrahamic faiths only Islam survived in a major form is BS. As much as I am a filthy atheist I don't think Religion will ever die out hence why I think Dune makes more sense using religion than EP.

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

In 1e, the Ultimates were among the few that protected the less massive masses of humanity from Exhumans and the like...actually they pretty much got the Jovian treatment except that they are heavily in favor of (controlled) transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind rather than going anti-transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind like the Jovians.

As much as they give both of these factions shit, earlier sources showed that these were both strong backers of Firewall--the assumed PC-moving patrons of the setting.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 12:17:38 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

In 1e, the Ultimates were among the few that protected the less massive masses of humanity from Exhumans and the like...actually they pretty much got the Jovian treatment except that they are heavily in favor of (controlled) transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind rather than going anti-transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind like the Jovians.

As much as they give both of these factions shit, earlier sources showed that these were both strong backers of Firewall--the assumed PC-moving patrons of the setting.

Seems like one of those things where you can just like pick the setting bits you want and jettison the rest

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 12:42:40 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

Thing is, I bet his definition of fascist is anyone to the right of Mao.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 12:42:40 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

That's OK. I have come to accept that the right in America has been brainwashed and propagandized to the point that an all out civil war in america is unavoidable at this point and the Trump right will either destroy and crush all who refuse to bow to it or the rest of America will destroy the Trump right.

Personally I decided I'd rather my side be the one left alive after the war ends.

Woah there Matt. Realize that not everyone who voted for trump is alt right, far right nor an extremist.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 12:17:38 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

In 1e, the Ultimates were among the few that protected the less massive masses of humanity from Exhumans and the like...actually they pretty much got the Jovian treatment except that they are heavily in favor of (controlled) transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind rather than going anti-transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind like the Jovians.

As much as they give both of these factions shit, earlier sources showed that these were both strong backers of Firewall--the assumed PC-moving patrons of the setting.

Hmm,  I hadn't noticed you could not play an ultimate anymore. Is it expressly forbidden or just not given a package? I. Mean you can buy a remade biomorph even tho it's the most expensive one. Now the exhumans are portrayed as evil slime to be sure. I think tge ultimares are a little less evil.

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 26, 2021, 01:00:01 AM
Woah there Matt. Realize that not everyone who voted for trump is alt right, far right nor an extremist.

As far as I'm concerned anyone who still supports that thing is someone I cannot co-exist with.

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 12:56:26 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 12:42:40 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

That's OK. I have come to accept that the right in America has been brainwashed and propagandized to the point that an all out civil war in america is unavoidable at this point and the Trump right will either destroy and crush all who refuse to bow to it or the rest of America will destroy the Trump right.

Personally I decided I'd rather my side be the one left alive after the war ends.

And what's the final solution you advocate for?

LOL, you're on the side that's willing to kill those who think different, because they think different, and the fascists are the others?

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:01:16 AM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 26, 2021, 01:00:01 AM
Woah there Matt. Realize that not everyone who voted for trump is alt right, far right nor an extremist.

As far as I'm concerned anyone who still supports that thing is someone I cannot co-exist with.

Haul them of to those cattle wagons heading for the concentration camps.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 01:06:24 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:01:16 AM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 26, 2021, 01:00:01 AM
Woah there Matt. Realize that not everyone who voted for trump is alt right, far right nor an extremist.

As far as I'm concerned anyone who still supports that thing is someone I cannot co-exist with.

Haul them of to those cattle wagons heading for the concentration camps.

look they wanted bleach to cure covid, we'll give em bleach to cure covid. See if it works for a bit.

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:00:13 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 12:17:38 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

In 1e, the Ultimates were among the few that protected the less massive masses of humanity from Exhumans and the like...actually they pretty much got the Jovian treatment except that they are heavily in favor of (controlled) transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind rather than going anti-transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind like the Jovians.

As much as they give both of these factions shit, earlier sources showed that these were both strong backers of Firewall--the assumed PC-moving patrons of the setting.

Hmm,  I hadn't noticed you could not play an ultimate anymore. Is it expressly forbidden or just not given a package? I. Mean you can buy a remade biomorph even tho it's the most expensive one. Now the exhumans are portrayed as evil slime to be sure. I think tge ultimares are a little less evil.

It's been awhile since I looked at 2e, but I remember the writers talking about how they intentionally wrote-out PC Ultimates. It's certainly not given a package even though radical uplifted animals that are effectively Ultimates in belief but are not derived from Homo sapiens are perfectly fine as PCs. Yeah, you can play a fascist ape but not a fascist human.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 01:06:24 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:01:16 AM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 26, 2021, 01:00:01 AM
Woah there Matt. Realize that not everyone who voted for trump is alt right, far right nor an extremist.

As far as I'm concerned anyone who still supports that thing is someone I cannot co-exist with.

Haul them of to those cattle wagons heading for the concentration camps.

If that's what they want to do to people like me and the only way to stop them is to do it to them first,  then yes.

I lost all ability to tolerate tge far right when a major Trump supporter named couy Griffin cheerfully told a crowd of good Christian trump supporters 'the only good demoract is a dead Democrat' and they cheered. No significant figure or organization on the right ever uttered a word in protest or condemnation against him.

Fox news blew head gaskets over Maxine Waters comments on the chauvin trial but never said a word about this.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-today-cowboy-democrat-dead-couy-griffin-tweets-a9537016.html

So that's whenni realized people like me need to see tge Trump right as a hostile enemy and a threat.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 01:05:27 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 12:56:26 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 12:42:40 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

That's OK. I have come to accept that the right in America has been brainwashed and propagandized to the point that an all out civil war in america is unavoidable at this point and the Trump right will either destroy and crush all who refuse to bow to it or the rest of America will destroy the Trump right.

Personally I decided I'd rather my side be the one left alive after the war ends.

And what's the final solution you advocate for?

LOL, you're on the side that's willing to kill those who think different, because they think different, and the fascists are the others?

I'm for whatever it takes to stop people like this. Whatever it takes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-today-cowboy-democrat-dead-couy-griffin-tweets-a9537016.html

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 26, 2021, 01:00:01 AM
Woah there Matt. Realize that not everyone who voted for trump is alt right, far right nor an extremist.

What? And put a gaping hole in his narrative fantasy? You know, the one where Trump was Thulsa Doom and got his head cut off by Biden as Conan?

Quote from: This Guy on April 26, 2021, 12:19:06 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 12:17:38 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

In 1e, the Ultimates were among the few that protected the less massive masses of humanity from Exhumans and the like...actually they pretty much got the Jovian treatment except that they are heavily in favor of (controlled) transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind rather than going anti-transhumanism to ensure the future of mankind like the Jovians.

As much as they give both of these factions shit, earlier sources showed that these were both strong backers of Firewall--the assumed PC-moving patrons of the setting.

Seems like one of those things where you can just like pick the setting bits you want and jettison the rest

You can...if you have the earlier editions (which are available as free downloads). If you just have the current 2e stuff, you just get the bits the writers now want you to see and may not realize what they've jettisoned.

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:29:34 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 01:06:24 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:01:16 AM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 26, 2021, 01:00:01 AM
Woah there Matt. Realize that not everyone who voted for trump is alt right, far right nor an extremist.

As far as I'm concerned anyone who still supports that thing is someone I cannot co-exist with.

Haul them of to those cattle wagons heading for the concentration camps.

If that's what they want to do to people like me and the only way to stop them is to do it to them first,  then yes.

I lost all ability to tolerate tge far right when a major Trump supporter named couy Griffin cheerfully told a crowd of good Christian trump supporters 'the only good demoract is a dead Democrat' and they cheered. No significant figure or organization on the right ever uttered a word in protest or condemnation against him.

Fox news blew head gaskets over Maxine Waters comments on the chauvin trial but never said a word about this.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-today-cowboy-democrat-dead-couy-griffin-tweets-a9537016.html

So that's whenni realized people like me need to see tge Trump right as a hostile enemy and a threat.

I've got only this to answer to your demented ramblings.

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:32:47 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 01:05:27 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 12:56:26 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 12:42:40 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

That's OK. I have come to accept that the right in America has been brainwashed and propagandized to the point that an all out civil war in america is unavoidable at this point and the Trump right will either destroy and crush all who refuse to bow to it or the rest of America will destroy the Trump right.

Personally I decided I'd rather my side be the one left alive after the war ends.

And what's the final solution you advocate for?

LOL, you're on the side that's willing to kill those who think different, because they think different, and the fascists are the others?

I'm for whatever it takes to stop people like this. Whatever it takes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-today-cowboy-democrat-dead-couy-griffin-tweets-a9537016.html

You have been indoctrinated into a cult.

http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/ (http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/)

Nice it's good to belong somewhere you oughta try it.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 02:10:45 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:32:47 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 01:05:27 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 12:56:26 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 12:42:40 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

That's OK. I have come to accept that the right in America has been brainwashed and propagandized to the point that an all out civil war in america is unavoidable at this point and the Trump right will either destroy and crush all who refuse to bow to it or the rest of America will destroy the Trump right.

Personally I decided I'd rather my side be the one left alive after the war ends.

And what's the final solution you advocate for?

LOL, you're on the side that's willing to kill those who think different, because they think different, and the fascists are the others?

I'm for whatever it takes to stop people like this. Whatever it takes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-today-cowboy-democrat-dead-couy-griffin-tweets-a9537016.html

You have been indoctrinated into a cult.

http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/ (http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/)

Maybe you could explain to me how the willingness to stop people who are openly calling for your group to be destroyed makes one in the wrong?

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:57:04 PM
I really like Eclipse Phase. But yeah the whole gender mattering when anyone can be whatever is stupid. Also the fact that of all of the abrahamic faiths only Islam survived in a major form is BS. As much as I am a filthy atheist I don't think Religion will ever die out hence why I think Dune makes more sense using religion than EP.

When I glanced at EP, this is pretty much what I thought.

side note:
Guys, I think I would just leave the OP alone. 

For fuck's sake, HD was the one trying to be the voice of reason with him.

He is either trying to get a bunch of people banned for discussing non-gaming stuff outside of Pundit's forum or else he really is that deranged.  Personally, I think getting jettisoned from TBP for not being pure enough has probably unhinged him for a bit...

Quote from: moonsweeper on April 26, 2021, 02:21:43 AM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:57:04 PM
I really like Eclipse Phase. But yeah the whole gender mattering when anyone can be whatever is stupid. Also the fact that of all of the abrahamic faiths only Islam survived in a major form is BS. As much as I am a filthy atheist I don't think Religion will ever die out hence why I think Dune makes more sense using religion than EP.

When I glanced at EP, this is pretty much what I thought.

side note:
Guys, I think I would just leave the OP alone. 

For fuck's sake, HD was the one trying to be the voice of reason with him.

He is either trying to get a bunch of people banned for discussing non-gaming stuff outside of Pundit's forum or else he really is that deranged.  Personally, I think getting jettisoned from TBP for not being pure enough has probably unhinged him for a bit...

Yeah, he is deranged alright. Like the other deranged loon around

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 02:20:31 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 02:10:45 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 01:32:47 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 01:05:27 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 26, 2021, 12:56:26 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 12:42:40 AM

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 11:31:02 PM
Well, in the 10 years since ep 1e was done we've seen a rise in global fascist mentality, even (espically) in the good ol' US of A, so maybe the authors wanted to take a harder line against fascism.

I'm Ok with that. My idea of dealing with fascists involves bulldozers and lots of dirt.

I feel the same way about Commies.

That's OK. I have come to accept that the right in America has been brainwashed and propagandized to the point that an all out civil war in america is unavoidable at this point and the Trump right will either destroy and crush all who refuse to bow to it or the rest of America will destroy the Trump right.

Personally I decided I'd rather my side be the one left alive after the war ends.

And what's the final solution you advocate for?

LOL, you're on the side that's willing to kill those who think different, because they think different, and the fascists are the others?

I'm for whatever it takes to stop people like this. Whatever it takes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-today-cowboy-democrat-dead-couy-griffin-tweets-a9537016.html

You have been indoctrinated into a cult.

http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/ (http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/)

Maybe you could explain to me how the willingness to stop people who are openly calling for your group to be destroyed makes one in the wrong?

Says he while openly calling for genocide... Welcome to the ignore list bud.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 26, 2021, 02:25:19 AM

Quote from: moonsweeper on April 26, 2021, 02:21:43 AM

Quote from: MyrddinWyllt on April 25, 2021, 11:57:04 PM
I really like Eclipse Phase. But yeah the whole gender mattering when anyone can be whatever is stupid. Also the fact that of all of the abrahamic faiths only Islam survived in a major form is BS. As much as I am a filthy atheist I don't think Religion will ever die out hence why I think Dune makes more sense using religion than EP.

When I glanced at EP, this is pretty much what I thought.

side note:
Guys, I think I would just leave the OP alone. 

For fuck's sake, HD was the one trying to be the voice of reason with him.

He is either trying to get a bunch of people banned for discussing non-gaming stuff outside of Pundit's forum or else he really is that deranged.  Personally, I think getting jettisoned from TBP for not being pure enough has probably unhinged him for a bit...

Yeah, he is deranged alright. Like the other deranged loon around

Look we all know Brad has challenges but he needs our support not this kind of abuse

What the fuck is this shit?!

You guys know better than this.

NO OFF TOPIC POLITICAL POSTS.

Geeky Bugle, Matt Swain and "This Guy", do not post in this thread anymore.

Anyone who posts a political post in this thread from here on in will be banned.

less than 12 hours here, very little wheat, mostly chaff. Time to go. I've changed my email contact to a fake one and am logging out. When a guy who says he's willingto fight people who talk about wiping his kind out gets compared to a nazi i know i'm on a site that must be run by rightards or their glue eating cousins, libertardians.

Logging out, so long,  smell ya later i hope not.

Start thread complaining about politics in gaming, spend most of the thread bullshitting about politics, then flounce.

That was fun.

I've mentioned most of my beefs with EP as a setting in other threads about it, much of the whole setup of crazed machines murdering like 95% of humanity should have led to the few survivors being super paranoid about technology and AIs but it seems to have had the completely opposite effect and nobody sweats it.  But even throwaway details are bad for the setting, like I recall a mention that AI surveillance is omnipresent and routine.  So... good luck ever doing anything sneaky in a setting where you're always in view of ten cameras being monitored by constantly-vigilant systems, I guess?

Matt Swain is a turd and I would not have sex with him.

Back to gaming though. I'd like to see EP's setting fiddled with so that the deranged anticap rhetoric is shown to be just that -- rhetoric from the hardcore commie factions in Firewall. No, the Planetary Consortium and the Jovians aren't saints by any stretch, but the endless rah-rah in the theme is just irritating.

This is why I prefer to dial back the robotics and transhumanism elements in any scifi setting I write. Call it retro, but I think it's more relatable that way.

I'm currently writing a setting based on d20 Future where character options include unaugmented humans, cyborgs, androids, psychics, mutants, and moreaus. It's currently intended for prose, but it should be adaptable to tabletop.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 03:20:10 AM
Start thread complaining about politics in gaming, spend most of the thread bullshitting about politics, then flounce.

It's not surprising that discussing of this game devolves in to political discussion as you need to have specific political beliefs to accept the setting in the first place. Just because you can program a computer to think it's you doesn't mean you aren't dying.

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:52:56 AM
I've mentioned most of my beefs with EP as a setting in other threads about it, much of the whole setup of crazed machines murdering like 95% of humanity should have led to the few survivors being super paranoid about technology and AIs but it seems to have had the completely opposite effect and nobody sweats it.  But even throwaway details are bad for the setting, like I recall a mention that AI surveillance is omnipresent and routine.  So... good luck ever doing anything sneaky in a setting where you're always in view of ten cameras being monitored by constantly-vigilant systems, I guess?

You can actually see in Shadowrun where the writers realized they were gonna have a problem with that, and took steps to dial AI surveillance back via the metaplot. In SR's case, repeated issues with AIs messing with humanity were enough to convince corporations and governments that purely AI-controlled systems were a lousy idea.

While advanced tech should still be a thing in EP, any kind of AI smarter than a toaster oven should be eyed askance in the setting. It's like the writers completely missed both Warhammer 40000 and Dune when they were worldbuilding.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on April 26, 2021, 08:17:20 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 26, 2021, 03:20:10 AM
Start thread complaining about politics in gaming, spend most of the thread bullshitting about politics, then flounce.

It's not surprising that discussing of this game devolves in to political discussion as you need to have specific political beliefs to accept the setting in the first place. Just because you can program a computer to think it's you doesn't mean you aren't dying.

Nah, OP came out swinging from post one, and it wasn't even about the game, it was about the presumed politics of everyone who posts here, preemptively slapping everyone with labels and taking extremist positions while accusing everyone else of being the extremist. Then the guy started whining the moment the site owner threatens to ban everyone discussing non-gaming politics in this section of the boards, like he's the one under attack when he came in guns blazing into a new forum.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 26, 2021, 08:34:23 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:52:56 AM
I've mentioned most of my beefs with EP as a setting in other threads about it, much of the whole setup of crazed machines murdering like 95% of humanity should have led to the few survivors being super paranoid about technology and AIs but it seems to have had the completely opposite effect and nobody sweats it.  But even throwaway details are bad for the setting, like I recall a mention that AI surveillance is omnipresent and routine.  So... good luck ever doing anything sneaky in a setting where you're always in view of ten cameras being monitored by constantly-vigilant systems, I guess?

You can actually see in Shadowrun where the writers realized they were gonna have a problem with that, and took steps to dial AI surveillance back via the metaplot. In SR's case, repeated issues with AIs messing with humanity were enough to convince corporations and governments that purely AI-controlled systems were a lousy idea.

While advanced tech should still be a thing in EP, any kind of AI smarter than a toaster oven should be eyed askance in the setting. It's like the writers completely missed both Warhammer 40000 and Dune when they were worldbuilding.

It's not just AI though. In EP, a sysop/monitor can log on for duty, make huge numbers of electronic copies of themself (of corse they have a cyberbrain so this just takes moments) and then just delete them at the end of the shift with no harm to the ego. BTW, anyone doing any hacking should always make at least three infomorph copies (even beta forks) of themself just to get the maximum "assistance" bonus to all skill checks on the system (yes, even the electronic "stealth check" is easier with multiple invaders working together rather than a single intruder).

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 08:43:57 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 26, 2021, 08:34:23 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:52:56 AM
I've mentioned most of my beefs with EP as a setting in other threads about it, much of the whole setup of crazed machines murdering like 95% of humanity should have led to the few survivors being super paranoid about technology and AIs but it seems to have had the completely opposite effect and nobody sweats it.  But even throwaway details are bad for the setting, like I recall a mention that AI surveillance is omnipresent and routine.  So... good luck ever doing anything sneaky in a setting where you're always in view of ten cameras being monitored by constantly-vigilant systems, I guess?

You can actually see in Shadowrun where the writers realized they were gonna have a problem with that, and took steps to dial AI surveillance back via the metaplot. In SR's case, repeated issues with AIs messing with humanity were enough to convince corporations and governments that purely AI-controlled systems were a lousy idea.

While advanced tech should still be a thing in EP, any kind of AI smarter than a toaster oven should be eyed askance in the setting. It's like the writers completely missed both Warhammer 40000 and Dune when they were worldbuilding.

It's not just AI though. In EP, a sysop/monitor can log on for duty, make huge numbers of electronic copies of themself (of corse they have a cyberbrain so this just takes moments) and then just delete them at the end of the shift with no harm to the ego. BTW, anyone doing any hacking should always make at least three infomorph copies (even beta forks) of themself just to get the maximum "assistance" bonus to all skill checks on the system (yes, even the electronic "stealth check" is easier with multiple invaders working together rather than a single intruder).

And this is why I prefer to scale back the transhumanism. This is extremely alien stuff here.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 08:46:12 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 08:43:57 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 26, 2021, 08:34:23 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:52:56 AM
I've mentioned most of my beefs with EP as a setting in other threads about it, much of the whole setup of crazed machines murdering like 95% of humanity should have led to the few survivors being super paranoid about technology and AIs but it seems to have had the completely opposite effect and nobody sweats it.  But even throwaway details are bad for the setting, like I recall a mention that AI surveillance is omnipresent and routine.  So... good luck ever doing anything sneaky in a setting where you're always in view of ten cameras being monitored by constantly-vigilant systems, I guess?

You can actually see in Shadowrun where the writers realized they were gonna have a problem with that, and took steps to dial AI surveillance back via the metaplot. In SR's case, repeated issues with AIs messing with humanity were enough to convince corporations and governments that purely AI-controlled systems were a lousy idea.

While advanced tech should still be a thing in EP, any kind of AI smarter than a toaster oven should be eyed askance in the setting. It's like the writers completely missed both Warhammer 40000 and Dune when they were worldbuilding.

It's not just AI though. In EP, a sysop/monitor can log on for duty, make huge numbers of electronic copies of themself (of corse they have a cyberbrain so this just takes moments) and then just delete them at the end of the shift with no harm to the ego. BTW, anyone doing any hacking should always make at least three infomorph copies (even beta forks) of themself just to get the maximum "assistance" bonus to all skill checks on the system (yes, even the electronic "stealth check" is easier with multiple invaders working together rather than a single intruder).

And this is why I prefer to scale back the transhumanism. This is extremely alien stuff here.

I quite agree. This is an example of where the crazy-ass technology actually limits options rather than increases them. Add to this the idea that death is not an ending for anyone of importance (just reboot and reload into a backup body--and all PCs default to having such available), stealth is all but impossible, buying/selling/trading of the cool toys is inconsistent (might be hard, might be super easy--hard to tell from moment to moment), and many more issues and the entire setting becomes very hard to actually play in a way that is fun.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 08:52:23 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 08:46:12 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 08:43:57 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on April 26, 2021, 08:34:23 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:52:56 AM
I've mentioned most of my beefs with EP as a setting in other threads about it, much of the whole setup of crazed machines murdering like 95% of humanity should have led to the few survivors being super paranoid about technology and AIs but it seems to have had the completely opposite effect and nobody sweats it.  But even throwaway details are bad for the setting, like I recall a mention that AI surveillance is omnipresent and routine.  So... good luck ever doing anything sneaky in a setting where you're always in view of ten cameras being monitored by constantly-vigilant systems, I guess?

You can actually see in Shadowrun where the writers realized they were gonna have a problem with that, and took steps to dial AI surveillance back via the metaplot. In SR's case, repeated issues with AIs messing with humanity were enough to convince corporations and governments that purely AI-controlled systems were a lousy idea.

While advanced tech should still be a thing in EP, any kind of AI smarter than a toaster oven should be eyed askance in the setting. It's like the writers completely missed both Warhammer 40000 and Dune when they were worldbuilding.

It's not just AI though. In EP, a sysop/monitor can log on for duty, make huge numbers of electronic copies of themself (of corse they have a cyberbrain so this just takes moments) and then just delete them at the end of the shift with no harm to the ego. BTW, anyone doing any hacking should always make at least three infomorph copies (even beta forks) of themself just to get the maximum "assistance" bonus to all skill checks on the system (yes, even the electronic "stealth check" is easier with multiple invaders working together rather than a single intruder).

And this is why I prefer to scale back the transhumanism. This is extremely alien stuff here.

I quite agree. This is an example of where the crazy-ass technology actually limits options rather than increases them. Add to this the idea that death is not an ending for anyone of importance (just reboot and reload into a backup body--and all PCs default to having such available), stealth is all but impossible, buying/selling/trading of the cool toys is inconsistent (might be hard, might be super easy--hard to tell from moment to moment), and many more issues and the entire setting becomes very hard to actually play in a way that is fun.

Yeah, I don't even know WTF to do with a setting were characters can't even die and nothing has any consequences cuz everyone's backed up in a database somewhere and can make endless copies of themselves. And you can't even sell stuff half the time, cuz "post scarcity", so WTF is even anyone's motivation for even being? Where does self-improvement (one of the hallmarks of RPGs) even figure in, when everyone's just a string of code downloaded into a replicable body that can be 3D printed ad nauseam?

"Robert", I tell myself, "a good forum citizen shouldn't just jump into the last page of an ongoing thread to talk about all of the things Eclipse Phase does wrong.  A good citizen should read the thread to see what topics in the game were previously discussed, and what points were previously raised.  I'll just go back to page 1 and...uh.  Uh."

So! Eclipse Phase!

Yeah, I'm not a fan.  There are a lot of areas that fundamentally show a lack of consideration about the fundamental conceits of the setting.  Like the rep economy.  A setting in which reputation is intended to strongly supplement or completely replace the conventional economy misses the point that people have reputation, and in Eclipse Phase, the notion of 'person' is really fluid.  If someone undergoes really extensive psychosurgery, shouldn't their rep tank? If rep was gained due to a history of decision-making in favor of one faction or another, and you have strong evidence that this person is not going to be making those decisions any more, shouldn't that rep dry up?  And what do you do in the cases where you're away on a mission, and some bastard steals your backup, instantiates you, cons you into making a bunch of requests to your faction, then stealing your stuff and leaving you high and dry?

And yeah, the Jovian stuff is dumb.  But it pairs perfectly with the post-human dumbness as well.  There are a lot of hilarious hijinks you can get up as Exsurgent-kun, where you just habitually alpha-fork yourself into every bit of processing space you can compromise.  Or when you take 100 on things like psychosurgery checks by spinning up a lot of storage space, doing the procedure tens of thousands of times, backing up each result, then subjecting each to horrible psychological torture until they break down entirely, then dropping the lower 80% of performers who broke the earliest (who presumably had less-than-optimal psycho-surgeries), then re-copying over the top 20%, repeating the procedures, and continuing until you've got a definite personality which has the statistically-proven least chance of having their sanity compromised by the procedure.  Then you instantiate that one fork from the pre-torture point, and heyo, it's like the hundreds of thousands of digital experiences of ultimate horror never happened.

And if you're uncomfortable with that, then hey, just step into the psychosurgery box, and you'll forget all about it!

Eclipse Phase unknowingly critiques itself incredibly strongly by having both the Jovians and the posthumans (and, lately, the Political Flavor of the Week, but that's just gaming in Current Year) as designated enemy factions.  To sneer both at the Jovians for turning away from transhuman tech, and from the posthumans doing things like what I mention above for Meddling in God's Domain, is to enshrine that one has no actual principles other than "This makes me woogy, so it's bad, and this sounds cool, so it's good."  A better Eclipse Phase would look in detail at both the problems that came from hard-line bio-conservatism, and the horrible race-to-the-bottom Age-of-EM scenarios that unrestrained habitats could fall into, and say "This shit is complicated, yo, and there's not necessarily one right answer, and what's right with Exsurgent breathing down your neck might not be right in other places and other times."  But we don't get that.

Honestly, my feeling is that Eclipse Phase feels like it took a bunch of ideas which were cool and speculative decades ago, and failed utterly to see how their analogues worked when they crashed into the real world.  But a game system that can't even manage to rebut "Maybe fascism isn't that unreasonable of a response to being invaded and having your mind, memories, and flesh stolen by the Communist Exsurgent Menace." without crying and flipping the authorial table is not the game system to answer the interesting questions that it poses.

To my mind, Eclipse Phase would be a fun system for 1-on-1 play, or storytelling.  But only because the interesting point in the game is when one player decides to go posthuman and flip the table themselves.  As has been noted, a setting where things are post-scarcity-ish and everyone can restore themselves from backup as long as horrible space virus hasn't gotten you? Not really a lot to do there.  But a setting in which you examine the rules, and decide that the only way to fight horrible space virus is to make of yourself a better horrible space virus, and fight on its terms? That sounds interesting.  (Also horribly unrelatable for any kind of normal gaming environment, and one basically necessitating a 1-protagonist story-game.  But interesting.)

And that's why I decided to write my scifi as retro futuristic. Cyberpunk, technothriller, space western, military scifi, mecha, scifi horror, etc.

In my setting, you could potentially play as a moreau who pilots a mech against Starship Troopers-inspired space bugs, a psychic spy who works against space commies on behalf of the free worlds, a sapient tachikoma fleeing slavery by working with outlaws, or any number of other concepts.

If you have a cyberbrain or a cortical stack then you can potentially survive fatal events, but immortality is not a guarantee. Even if you're a decentralized AI who lives entirely within the ansible relay network, you're going to want to curry favor with whoever owns the hardware if you don't want them to flush your data.

A thing to bear in mind is that EP is basically a ripoff (or homage, if you're feeling generous) of Altered Carbon.  The core posthumanist stuff is directly copied: Swap bodies, engineered/full-borg/weird bodies available, people backing themselves up, making copies, etc.  However, Altered Carbon is functional as a setting because they didn't try to throw Star Trek replicator technology into it.  There are still haves/have-nots, money is a real concern for people, crime is rampant and there isn't a perfect surveillance system over every inch of everywhere.  Dying is or is not a concern depending on whether one's cortical stack is destroyed by whatever killed their body, because having backups made and spare bodies lying around is just for the super-rich.  Therefore it can explore posthuman concepts without completely wrecking core plot hooks that most people will easily empathize with.

EP's hardon for robot space communism basically ruins everything.  Why should anyone care about really anything?  Build a space habitat for you and your best friends drifting out past Mars, have limitless energy and whatever you want; as long as you keep everything sealed up tight you don't really need to worry about AI monsters coming to eat your head.  Be virtual and spend the next thousand years in an orgy simulator while your mind is sitting in a toaster-sized storage unit somewhere.  By setting up a scenario where your average Joe can be set for life while never lifting a finger, and where technology is basically flawless, there's no good reason to go and risk yourself dealing with Event Horizon space madness stuff, which is supposed to be the meat of the setting.  The books try to claim that there actually is scarcity, and there are poor people in robot bodies on Mars and such, but then the next chapter over lovingly proclaims that you can live in an orbital habitat and just print out golden furniture for free based on your Twitter likes.  So which is it?

The distinction is that Altered Carbon took humanity and posthuman technology and used them to show how humanity was fundamentally unchanging even in the face of literally inhuman technology, that even with miraculous new capabilities humans were still grubby animals doing grubby animal things.  Eclipse Phase took humanity and posthuman technology, claimed that humanity is completely evolved through it, then belatedly realized that you can't make a game out of an evolved humanity with no needs and tried to shoehorn in some drama at the last minute in the nonsense manner that it did.

Mind you, I think that just forking and backups is enough to nuke any kind of relatable setting.  If you can load yourself from backup, then you can load yourself in parallel, and do N things at once.  You can make a copy of yourself right after waking up in the morning and really wanting to solve a particular kind of technical problem, and whenever anyone needs that kind of problem solved, they can load you up, have you solve the problem, and then delete you, and if they're clever about the virtual environment, they can keep this backup instance of you relevant for years, perhaps decades.  Hell, you can spin up a dozen copies of yourself, have them seek out spouses and children with particular skills, be devoted and loving and everything, then mind-scan them right before you ask them for a significant favor, and in that way, you can get a number of dedicated problem-solving personalities across a load of skills.  You could spin up a hundred copies of yourself, have a hundred children, raise all of them to be slavishly dedicated to you, then purge 99 of them and use that one repeatedly-copied personality as your general-purpose useful personality.

A world with copyable personalities is not a world with any kind of familiar economic landscape; the ability to control who spins up in what bodies will be paramount, and accordingly, if you can create extra bodies (robotic, organic, or both), then you now have some very pressing marginal product questions.  And if you can copy yourself into other bodies, then the first person to start mass-occupying robotics factories (or setting up breeding camps), and then uses them to capture more factories and expand accordingly, will be a massive problem, and if you can disassemble the one rogue personality and figure out his exploits, then he can do the same to you, and he can do it a lot faster, because there are more of him.

A fork-and-instance world is not compatible with silly space communism, or even hard-edged cyberpunk capitalism.  It's a world in which everyone with access to the resleeving tech is in a MAD scenario with everyone else.  It's a war-of-all-against-all, and all it needs to kick it off is one non-genre-blinded person.

Don't forget the time compression ability of simulspace. It's hard to outsmart a bad guy that has planned even a simple heiat for 1000 years (simulated, of course). PCs can do the same, and soon the game just gets unplayable as years of game play might only be a few minutes in the physical world of EP.

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
The distinction is that Altered Carbon took humanity and posthuman technology and used them to show how humanity was fundamentally unchanging even in the face of literally inhuman technology, that even with miraculous new capabilities humans were still grubby animals doing grubby animal things.  Eclipse Phase took humanity and posthuman technology, claimed that humanity is completely evolved through it, then belatedly realized that you can't make a game out of an evolved humanity with no needs and tried to shoehorn in some drama at the last minute in the nonsense manner that it did.

Yeah, that's totally the problem.

In order to make it work, you'd pretty much have to, and this is just off the top of my head, introduce some kind of external threat that is actively hunting humanity. Like the aforementioned Starship Troopers-inspired space bugs or any number of other things you could imagine. (But fighting for the survival of your species and way of life against an implacable alien threat is unthinkable to the psychotic lefties that this game seems to be aimed towards.)

That, or make the threat other (trans)human beings. Like how the Shaper/Mechanist universe has the ideological conflict between the Dune-inspired Shapers and the cyberpunk-themed Mechanists. (Quick tangent: the Shaper/Mechanist universe seems to have inspired TSR in the 90s, since both the Bug Hunters and Star*Drive settings had an ancient alien war based on similar philosophies. In the former it was the Shaper/Artificer war, and in the latter it was the Stoneburner/Glassmaker war. The Stoneburners were the weirdest since they apparently developed Lovecraft-style magic that let them summon "dimensional horrors" and shit.)

Quote from: robertliguori on April 26, 2021, 04:27:08 PM
A fork-and-instance world is not compatible with silly space communism, or even hard-edged cyberpunk capitalism.  It's a world in which everyone with access to the resleeving tech is in a MAD scenario with everyone else.  It's a war-of-all-against-all, and all it needs to kick it off is one non-genre-blinded person.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 26, 2021, 04:32:32 PM
Don't forget the time compression ability of simulspace. It's hard to outsmart a bad guy that has planned even a simple heiat for 1000 years (simulated, of course). PCs can do the same, and soon the game just gets unplayable as years of game play might only be a few minutes in the physical world of EP.

And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 04:38:19 PM
And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

We must be sure to tell the EP writers that the Jovians are the clearly the winners in their setting. Second place going to other bioconservative brinkers.

Quote from: matt swain on April 25, 2021, 10:54:55 PM
Now see this post has some potential, but you did ignore some of the things the jovian junta does, like censorship, brutal repression of dissent, a total authoritarian non democratic government, slave labor, etc.

So the Jovians run social media in the eclipse phase verse?

I played it once at a convention.  I played a dolphin which was boring as hell.  The system itself was okay.. reminded me a little of BRP.
I thought the Islam in space religious stuff was insane.  Didn't care for it and would not play it again.
There are better scifi games and settings out there.

.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 04:38:19 PM
And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

Kind of?  If you ban deep brain emulation but your neighboring habitat doesn't, then their society will self-destruct, but in so doing, it will dump a lot of its spores all over its neighbors, and while your infrastructure won't be up to snuff, you'll also probably be missing some important technological defenses that said spores can exploit the lack of.  Their failure may well destroy you as well, and if the ruin can spread fast enough, then it doesn't matter that it ends in sub-sentient neural attack routines dueling over a ruined world, it matters that everyone's dead and just washing your hands of the issue didn't save you.

You need the aforementioned Butlerian Jihads enforced by a strict supermajority of your society (which, I dunno, you might expect in actual Eclipse Phase given that posthuman thought research caused what they refer to as the literal Fall), or, better yet, you need to invoke the Narrative-Anthropic Principle, which states that just like all universes in which we find ourselves by necessity support human life, all universes in which we tell interesting stories support interesting drama.  And while the story of a wee little 20th-century refugee taking apart the Eclipse Phase setting might be a fun short story, it would be a crap game.  So, just assume that, as in reality, actual AI that hasn't been carefully tuned by a team of engineers for a very specific purpose is probably going to be kind of crappy generally, and will fail hilariously if you use it against actual adversarial agents, and don't make up tech that turns humans from social mammals into viruses.

Gentelmen, you have now officially ruined Eclipse Phase for me. I hope you are happy.

Heh, just kidding ofc. I have never played this game and it has seriously bugged me in some regards. Let me play a bit of amateur devils advocate/fixer here.

One, the rep mechanic. This is not a good mechanic. Its also the same mechanic as the one in Lucas Cranes Freemarket. Its facebook in the future as a currency. To fix this i would only use this for Anarchists scum collectives, all the rest of humanity uses other money like normal people. The problem is, almost all the money stayed on earth so incredibly many people are bankrupt. So, there is post scarcity and scarcity at the same time. Thats my first fix, possibly

Two, the forking and personality coping. The MAD scenario is just about what anybody would do in the first few minutes when this technology would go public, yes. To combat this, there would be forcefull personality checkes, matrioshka safety forks, system wide purges of people copying themselves, communal basilisk hacks and dead man switches installed voluntarilly, or else. Now, all of this woudnt be spoken of in regular polite company. The people who decided to go full horde mode on humanity would just be labeled something. Like, say, exhumans. Exhumans are bad wrong fun, so nobody would like them. The x-man/exhuman analogue has struck me since the beginning when reading EP. There was just no writeup in the first edition and no sourcebook. They just existed on the fringes, mutating into baddies eventually. Pretty weaksauce, its like they were a concept that was just.. made fodder.

Third, the Jovians and bioconservatives seem like they are just plain right. Everybody has lost their marbles after earth apocalypsed and now they are pulling weird crazy shit like making ones copies to die in weird ways to make money(this is in one of the stories, its funny one guy has decided to capitalise on recording and selling masochism, its a grand idea indeed). One could decide to play the factions the authors of the game as the real heroes while the rest of humanity goes looney tunes but hey, this is supposed to fun escapism.

Personally i find some things fun in this game, but it is not well conceptualised and it shows when one stops and thinks it through. Playing as intended is not how i would do it, so why just not play something else? Yeah, seems like a plan.

Quote from: robertliguori on April 26, 2021, 05:35:58 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2021, 04:38:19 PM
And the logical outcome is that such societies would inevitably destroy themselves and the only societies that survive would be those that ban such applications.

Kind of?  If you ban deep brain emulation but your neighboring habitat doesn't, then their society will self-destruct, but in so doing, it will dump a lot of its spores all over its neighbors, and while your infrastructure won't be up to snuff, you'll also probably be missing some important technological defenses that said spores can exploit the lack of.  Their failure may well destroy you as well, and if the ruin can spread fast enough, then it doesn't matter that it ends in sub-sentient neural attack routines dueling over a ruined world, it matters that everyone's dead and just washing your hands of the issue didn't save you.

You need the aforementioned Butlerian Jihads enforced by a strict supermajority of your society (which, I dunno, you might expect in actual Eclipse Phase given that posthuman thought research caused what they refer to as the literal Fall), or, better yet, you need to invoke the Narrative-Anthropic Principle, which states that just like all universes in which we find ourselves by necessity support human life, all universes in which we tell interesting stories support interesting drama.  And while the story of a wee little 20th-century refugee taking apart the Eclipse Phase setting might be a fun short story, it would be a crap game.  So, just assume that, as in reality, actual AI that hasn't been carefully tuned by a team of engineers for a very specific purpose is probably going to be kind of crappy generally, and will fail hilariously if you use it against actual adversarial agents, and don't make up tech that turns humans from social mammals into viruses.

Good point, to which I point you to:

Quote from: Warder on April 26, 2021, 05:42:46 PM
Two, the forking and personality coping. The MAD scenario is just about what anybody would do in the first few minutes when this technology would go public, yes. To combat this, there would be forcefull personality checkes, matrioshka safety forks, system wide purges of people copying themselves, communal basilisk hacks and dead man switches installed voluntarilly, or else. Now, all of this woudnt be spoken of in regular polite company. The people who decided to go full horde mode on humanity would just be labeled something. Like, say, exhumans. Exhumans are bad wrong fun, so nobody would like them. The x-man/exhuman analogue has struck me since the beginning when reading EP. There was just no writeup in the first edition and no sourcebook. They just existed on the fringes, mutating into baddies eventually. Pretty weaksauce, its like they were a concept that was just.. made fodder.

Yep. The only way to prevent the technology from wreaking havoc is to develop countermeasures to prevent it from destroying civilization. Like we already do with crime and computer viruses.

You know, an Eclipse Phase that dropped the whole Space Exsurgent thing, and instead had it be the outgrowth of horrible time-accelerated Darwinian action on fork-swarms endlessly devouring each other, and the surviving factions being the ones who looked at where unrestrained alpha-forking was going and had reactions ranging from "Fuck that shit." to "Fuck everything in that shit's postal code, with nuclear fire." would, I think, be an interesting setting change.  You would have "What the fuck do we do about Earth, and each other?" be the default question of the setting, and the default metaplot would be for you to slowly build rep with and do diplomacy with multiple factions, with the end goal of getting enough of a consensus to get people behind a unified plan to handle what was left behind, and a direction for the future which will hopefully prevent such horrors from coming about once again.

In stock Eclipse Phase, though, the Alien Space Bats enforce a silent cosmos, and given that horrible parallel-processing omniphagic sentience is their winning entry in enforcing their will, if you want to do anything of scope or purpose in the setting, you're going to need to put the pedal to the metal.  And if you're not, then since the setting is post-scarcity and you can literally edit your brain into not wanting inconvenient things, it's really hard to have any non-grand non-sweeping character motivations.

I bought it (Eclipse Phase) when it first came out.  Then the creators started spouting off with their nonsense, so I never even took it out of the wrapper. 

Kinda makes me want to play one of the Warhammer 40K rpg's.

The Emperor protects.

Greetings!

True contentment is found in obedience and faithfulness to the God Emperor and the Empire.

The mutants, the rebels--they must all be crushed. ;D

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

As much as the idea of fork nightmares intrigue me as villains, I still prefer using SST style space bugs. If you're designing a board game, then they can even be playable.

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
The books try to claim that there actually is scarcity, and there are poor people in robot bodies on Mars and such, but then the next chapter over lovingly proclaims that you can live in an orbital habitat and just print out golden furniture for free based on your Twitter likes.  So which is it?

The answer in the book is Evil Capitalists deliberately keep people poor because, in the view of the authors, that is what Capitalism is all about. At least, traditional shareholder capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't get cancelled quite yet because some of those guys are cool, or something. As others have said, the whole setting is basically Rule of Cool (Portland Edition).

Quote from: robertliguori on April 26, 2021, 04:27:08 PM
You could spin up a hundred copies of yourself, have a hundred children, raise all of them to be slavishly dedicated to you, then purge 99 of them and use that one repeatedly-copied personality as your general-purpose useful personality.

Which made me think... Grandfather from Traveller. At last, we have learned the Secret of the Ancients.

Quote from: Marchand on April 27, 2021, 02:51:20 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
The books try to claim that there actually is scarcity, and there are poor people in robot bodies on Mars and such, but then the next chapter over lovingly proclaims that you can live in an orbital habitat and just print out golden furniture for free based on your Twitter likes.  So which is it?

The answer in the book is Evil Capitalists deliberately keep people poor because, in the view of the authors, that is what Capitalism is all about. At least, traditional shareholder capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't get cancelled quite yet because some of those guys are cool, or something. As others have said, the whole setting is basically Rule of Cool (Portland Edition).

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 08:07:25 AM

Quote from: Marchand on April 27, 2021, 02:51:20 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
The books try to claim that there actually is scarcity, and there are poor people in robot bodies on Mars and such, but then the next chapter over lovingly proclaims that you can live in an orbital habitat and just print out golden furniture for free based on your Twitter likes.  So which is it?

The answer in the book is Evil Capitalists deliberately keep people poor because, in the view of the authors, that is what Capitalism is all about. At least, traditional shareholder capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't get cancelled quite yet because some of those guys are cool, or something. As others have said, the whole setting is basically Rule of Cool (Portland Edition).

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

  I agree, BUT when stupidity can start to shape opinions, it can result in malicious results.  I have a feeling the authors of the game did not distribute it for free, and did not donate profit made for sales.

I swear I wish the regressive leftists that try to infiltrate this site actually try harder at being social chameleons.

It's actually both embarrassing and pathetic imo. @ guys really I don't like the far left or far right...no really guys why are you all laughing 😂?". Then start spouting the same regressive leftist SJW woke bullshit like the rest of them. The OP came out swinging and then tried to con all us into thinking he was one of us. It's like they can't even pretend to try and their true woke SJW shines through.

Funny I noticed the authors bullshit take on religion, so how missed their views on capitalism. Goes to show how both naive and clueless they are about Capitalism and money and people desire to actually own money. I'm a Star Trek fan and I like replicators as a concept at first, older I became again a franchise that is clueless about how people desire something. If I desire say the Mona Lisa I want the original not a copy made out of synthahol or whatever the use in Trek.

Good bye and good riddance to the Op.

Quote from: sureshot on April 27, 2021, 08:49:33 AM
I swear I wish the regressive leftists that try to infiltrate this site actually try harder at being social chameleons.

It's actually both embarrassing and pathetic imo. @ guys really I don't like the far left or far right...no really guys why are you all laughing 😂?". Then start spouting the same regressive leftist SJW woke bullshit like the rest of them. The OP came out swinging and then tried to con all us into thinking he was one of us. It's like they can't even pretend to try and their true woke SJW shines through.

Funny I noticed the authors bullshit take on religion, so how missed their views on capitalism. Goes to show how both naive and clueless they are about Capitalism and money and people desire to actually own money. I'm a Star Trek fan and I like replicators as a concept at first, older I became again a franchise that is clueless about how people desire something. If I desire say the Mona Lisa I want the original not a copy made out of synthahol or whatever the use in Trek.

Good bye and good riddance to the Op.

The EP anti-capitalism stance is much more obvious than their token bit on religion.  It's actually one of the main points of the setting (with religion being way down that list). Not sure how/why the religion part caught your attention and you missed the much larger push.

Quote from: oggsmash on April 27, 2021, 08:36:47 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 08:07:25 AM

Quote from: Marchand on April 27, 2021, 02:51:20 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
The books try to claim that there actually is scarcity, and there are poor people in robot bodies on Mars and such, but then the next chapter over lovingly proclaims that you can live in an orbital habitat and just print out golden furniture for free based on your Twitter likes.  So which is it?

The answer in the book is Evil Capitalists deliberately keep people poor because, in the view of the authors, that is what Capitalism is all about. At least, traditional shareholder capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't get cancelled quite yet because some of those guys are cool, or something. As others have said, the whole setting is basically Rule of Cool (Portland Edition).

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

  I agree, BUT when stupidity can start to shape opinions, it can result in malicious results.  I have a feeling the authors of the game did not distribute it for free, and did not donate profit made for sales.

I was referring more to the well-known history of companies making idiotic self-destructive decisions that resulted in the creation of safety organizations like OSHA and the FDA.

Quote from: sureshot on April 27, 2021, 08:49:33 AM
Funny I noticed the authors bullshit take on religion,

Religion isn't going away. It's just calling itself by new names now. The underlying psychology hasn't changed at all.

Yeah, their take that Christians and Jews just curled up and died in the face of technology that doesn't in any way invalidate either religion, but Muslims cruised through just fine is, uh.  Expressing a fundamental misunderstanding of those religions.  Short of finding God's corpse floating out past Pluto or getting a time machine and bringing back video evidence of Jesus not being real, Judaism and Christianity would not be all that inconvenienced by the things in that setting.  Altered Carbon actually did interesting things with religion, like question what people who believe in souls will think about backing up your brain.  Eclipse Phase just ignored them completely, rescuing the players from having an actual opportunity to explore the human condition in their setting.  Whew, crisis averted.

I have wanted to try DMing Eclipse Phase for a long time as the setting overall has some very interesting ideas.  Unfortunately it falls flat on the execution in way that's oddly reminiscent of Cthulhutech.

The rules are a nightmare.  They are needlessly complicated, burdensome and tiring to use.  There are also various spots where the setting and worldbuilding actually clash with the rules in ways that make the game unfun.  The ur-example of this is that you have to pay for your morph with Character Points, yet 99% of the time you're going to end up Needlecasting to the job site and resleeving into a rented body.  Some of the Morph costs are pretty ridiculous, so if you spend CP on a fancy morph, you end up being penalized for something you're never going to get to use anyway.  I think the Eclipse Phase setting would have benefited from giving the ships Epstein drives so travel times are measured in days rather than months or years.  That way the players can actually USE the fancy morph they spent CP on.

Also as 1E went along, the Morphs just became so boring and uninspired. "Owl people?  Seriously?"  I'm pretty sure that towards the end of 1E the devs were just using the new morphs as an excuse to insert their fursonas into the game.

The Infinity RPG is a far better transhumanist RPG than EP.  I'm also curious about how the Altered Carbon RPG turned out.

Quote from: Torque2100 on April 27, 2021, 12:40:10 PM
The ur-example of this is that you have to pay for your morph with Character Points, yet 99% of the time you're going to end up Needlecasting and resleeving into a rented body anyway.  Some of the Morph costs are pretty ridiculous, so if you spend CP on a fancy morph, you end up being penalized for something you're never going to get to use anyway. 

This issue was actually addressed in 2e. You don't spend CP on morphs anymore. You do have a Morph Point budget that shows the maximum value of morph(s) you can lease (nobody buys to own) at any given time. If you go somewhere by farcasting, you return the body you're not using and get the Morph Points back to spend at the destination.

That all might work out OK if the place you're going to has a compatible economy with the place you're coming from (not a guarantee) and if the whole game didn't hinge on you using false identities (that should get busted wide open when you use your Morph Points "credit account") to pull off Firewall jobs.

Quote from: sureshot on April 27, 2021, 08:49:33 AM
I swear I wish the regressive leftists that try to infiltrate this site actually try harder at being social chameleons.

It's actually both embarrassing and pathetic imo. @ guys really I don't like the far left or far right...no really guys why are you all laughing 😂?". Then start spouting the same regressive leftist SJW woke bullshit like the rest of them. The OP came out swinging and then tried to con all us into thinking he was one of us. It's like they can't even pretend to try and their true woke SJW shines through.

Funny I noticed the authors bullshit take on religion, so how missed their views on capitalism. Goes to show how both naive and clueless they are about Capitalism and money and people desire to actually own money. I'm a Star Trek fan and I like replicators as a concept at first, older I became again a franchise that is clueless about how people desire something. If I desire say the Mona Lisa I want the original not a copy made out of synthahol or whatever the use in Trek.

Just an excuse to post one of my fave moments from DS9.

I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape.

It is.

Quote from: Pat on April 27, 2021, 08:59:46 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape.

It is.

Does the book sell it as a good thing?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 09:11:11 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 27, 2021, 08:59:46 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape.

It is.

Does the book sell it as a good thing?

It's supposed to be post-apocalyptic (like only 10 years ago 98% of humanity was lost in a permanent way) but those that made it through are in an age of wonder...and hoping the things that caused the apocalypse don't come back to finish the job.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

And that's assuming that uploading a copy of your meat-brain's memories and thought patterns means that copy is actually YOU, as opposed to just...a copy. Of bits and fragments of your mind...at the time you were scanned or whatever. And this is just an AI going off out of whatever bits of data they gathered from you.

But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

Quote from: Marchand on April 27, 2021, 02:51:20 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 26, 2021, 03:10:46 PM
The books try to claim that there actually is scarcity, and there are poor people in robot bodies on Mars and such, but then the next chapter over lovingly proclaims that you can live in an orbital habitat and just print out golden furniture for free based on your Twitter likes.  So which is it?

The answer in the book is Evil Capitalists deliberately keep people poor because, in the view of the authors, that is what Capitalism is all about. At least, traditional shareholder capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't get cancelled quite yet because some of those guys are cool, or something. As others have said, the whole setting is basically Rule of Cool (Portland Edition).

Quote from: robertliguori on April 26, 2021, 04:27:08 PM
You could spin up a hundred copies of yourself, have a hundred children, raise all of them to be slavishly dedicated to you, then purge 99 of them and use that one repeatedly-copied personality as your general-purpose useful personality.

Which made me think... Grandfather from Traveller. At last, we have learned the Secret of the Ancients.

Capitalism requires maximizing profits. There is never "enough to go around" because that is not what is being optimized. Even wise rulers focused on longterm growth would only be so generous. Pure capitalism is basically just Feudalism again.

My problem with Eclipse Phase is that 1E is too cumbersome and that 2E doesn't do much for me. They streamlined out a bunch a crunch, but Nova Praxis for Savage Worlds ends being a more compelling mechanical system. I also like the setting better.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 27, 2021, 09:15:46 PM
It's supposed to be post-apocalyptic (like only 10 years ago 98% of humanity was lost in a permanent way) but those that made it through are in an age of wonder...and hoping the things that caused the apocalypse don't come back to finish the job.

The "age of wonder" seems a fate worse then death.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 08:07:25 AM
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hanlon's Razor.

I only glanced through EP 1E, mostly because the body-hopping is a non-starter for me. But I love some of the other concepts, and the premise of the PC's fighting rogue AI's. At least I think that's what it was? 2E actually looked worse, in terms of look and feel, so I didn't bother.

Maybe Nova Praxis is worth a look.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 27, 2021, 09:28:56 AM
The EP anti-capitalism stance is much more obvious than their token bit on religion.  It's actually one of the main points of the setting (with religion being way down that list). Not sure how/why the religion part caught your attention and you missed the much larger push.

At the time the book came out I had a few friends who were on the road to becoming SJWs and I had starting having my fill of that bullshit so anything and everything political I went out of my way not to notice. Religion aspect of the rpg stood out because at the time I also had two family members who passed away one month apart. So I had a crisis of faith and seeing that bullshit about all religions but Islam somehow died out. As the religion of "peace and love" and not very progressive is somehow still around after the fall fuck that and fuck the authors of EP.

Paradoxically its the orthodox of the religious that have sustainable amount of children.

But I guess that wasn't the EP angle.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 10:17:01 PM
Paradoxically its the orthodox of the religious that have sustainable amount of children.

But I guess that wasn't the EP angle.

It's more to do with either lack of access to or disinterest in using birth control rather than religion specifically. Hinduism doesn't ban birth control, for example.

Affluent societies generally offer more access to birth control, less incentive to have children, and thus experience population decline.

Poverty, religion, and population growth are all correlated, but causation is more complex. Poverty by itself doesn't cause population growth. Advancements in medicine and other fields provided the catalyst necessary for those in poverty to experience a continuous population boom. But that's slowing down now. It peaked in 1962. Earth's population is headed for a decline.

You need very specific circumstances to maintain continuous growth for more than a few decades.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 11:09:07 PMIt's more to do with either lack of access to or disinterest in using birth control rather than religion specifically.

.....I'm not sure how this disproves my point. The orthodox religious, even when affluent, have more children.

Quote from: sureshot on April 27, 2021, 09:57:37 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 27, 2021, 09:28:56 AM
The EP anti-capitalism stance is much more obvious than their token bit on religion.  It's actually one of the main points of the setting (with religion being way down that list). Not sure how/why the religion part caught your attention and you missed the much larger push.

At the time the book came out I had a few friends who were on the road to becoming SJWs and I had starting having my fill of that bullshit so anything and everything political I went out of my way not to notice. Religion aspect of the rpg stood out because at the time I also had two family members who passed away one month apart. So I had a crisis of faith and seeing that bullshit about all religions but Islam somehow died out. As the religion of "peace and love" and not very progressive is somehow still around after the fall fuck that and fuck the authors of EP.

This point is one of the reasons Nova Praxis is a better setting. Not only do the old religion exists, there are schisms about how transhumanity is understood and interpreted. Is every Fork a person or is their one Soul that is a cumulation of the experiences of backups and some forks/mergs or is blend the one-true-way? A much more compelling and believable take on religion post a fall.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 27, 2021, 09:23:08 PM
Capitalism requires maximizing profits. There is never "enough to go around" because that is not what is being optimized. Even wise rulers focused on longterm growth would only be so generous. Pure capitalism is basically just Feudalism again.

That was actually useful in helping me get inside the head of people who think like this, a group that I guess includes the authors of EP.

Anyway, I looked at EP once upon a time for doing Revelation Space Reynolds-verse, with mind uploading kicked to the kerb (it's a Bad Idea in the source material). There is even an uplifted pig in the first edition morph book. I tend to reach for BRP for most things except dungeon crawl fantasy, but BRP still lacks a good modern scifi book. In the end, I never decided if I wanted to tweak EP, or port stuff from EP over to BRP, and it fizzled.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

And that's assuming that uploading a copy of your meat-brain's memories and thought patterns means that copy is actually YOU, as opposed to just...a copy. Of bits and fragments of your mind...at the time you were scanned or whatever. And this is just an AI going off out of whatever bits of data they gathered from you.

But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

This sound like the arguments about the Star Trek transporter.  If you use it, do you move, or are you dead and that's a new copy of you over there.  I believe that canonically McCoy always believed that latter but did it anyway for some reason.  I'm inclined to to that point of view as well unless you could prove that the soul moves to the new location.  I believe that the soul, not the brain, is the seat of consciousness, so that would be the important part.

Quote from: Mishihari on April 28, 2021, 03:01:57 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

And that's assuming that uploading a copy of your meat-brain's memories and thought patterns means that copy is actually YOU, as opposed to just...a copy. Of bits and fragments of your mind...at the time you were scanned or whatever. And this is just an AI going off out of whatever bits of data they gathered from you.

But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

This sound like the arguments about the Star Trek transporter.  If you use it, do you move, or are you dead and that's a new copy of you over there.  I believe that canonically McCoy always believed that latter but did it anyway for some reason.  I'm inclined to to that point of view as well unless you could prove that the soul moves to the new location.  I believe that the soul, not the brain, is the seat of consciousness, so that would be the important part.

In the EP universe, there is no point talking about a soul. Yes, you are making copies, but they are every bit as good as the original in every way.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

I think if I were to GM something like Eclipse Phase, I'd lean heavily into the body horror and existential horror like Battle Angel Alita.

https://battleangel.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_bio-chip

One factor in Eclipse Phase is that the Fall, while wiping out most of humanity, also had the majority of its escapees flee as informorphs, leaving their bodies behind.  Accordingly, almost everyone in the setting who had strong reservations against restoring from backup is already gone.  And human nature being what it is, it makes sense to me that everyone just collectively agrees not to think about the implications of this, at least in public.  And when you combine that with psychosurgery which can indeed change people's minds on arbitrary topics, it's quite plausible that the society is not collectively screaming in horror at the implications of just that one thing.

Of course, psychosurgery is another one of those turns-people-into-viruses things, and there are some absolutely brutal shenenigans you can get up to involving compromising someone's physical body, nabbing their cortical stack, spinning up a parallelized cluster of yous and thems to edit them willy-nilly, destructively testing your creations as before, then playing back a time-compressed cliff-notes of the real-time minutes or seconds between your attack and now to the victim, and dropping them back into their body, such that from their perspective, it seems like they just had a completely spontaneous Road to Damascus moment.

---

Eclipse Phase is already a really interesting horror setting, and I think that its earnestness (when it's trying to be earnest and not just authorially wishcast) is one of its strong points.  But most people, when they think of horror settings, tend to think in terms of characters passing a bar or falling past an event horizon, and the narrative stopping.  Horror stories tend to stop when the protagonist dies of the zombie virus, succumbs to lycanthropy, goes mad from the revelation and eats their companions, and so on, such that when you see them again, they are only an antagonist.  But the nature of Eclipse Phase is strict materialism.  People are data, full-stop.  The hypothetical Exsurgent-kun PC is a person, and of the same kind and quantity as every other playable PC.  And while I myself both really like the idea of taking a character whose one and sole advantage is the ability to stare unblinkingly at the implications of the technology of transhumanity and apply it, and in so doing take apart the setting piece by piece through a variety of horrible inversions of our normal value systems like the one above, in a setting where things like that are even possible, it's hard to have any other kind of satisfying story.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 11:34:25 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 27, 2021, 11:09:07 PMIt's more to do with either lack of access to or disinterest in using birth control rather than religion specifically.

.....I'm not sure how this disproves my point. The orthodox religious, even when affluent, have more children.

Do you mean all religions or just Christianity/Islam?

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 06:26:21 AM
Of course, psychosurgery is another one of those turns-people-into-viruses things, and there are some absolutely brutal shenenigans you can get up to involving compromising someone's physical body, nabbing their cortical stack, spinning up a parallelized cluster of yous and thems to edit them willy-nilly, destructively testing your creations as before, then playing back a time-compressed cliff-notes of the real-time minutes or seconds between your attack and now to the victim, and dropping them back into their body, such that from their perspective, it seems like they just had a completely spontaneous Road to Damascus moment.

That is a method that Firewall uses to recruit PCs.

Quote from: Mishihari on April 28, 2021, 03:01:57 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 27, 2021, 08:54:05 PM
I gotta say the world of EP sounds like a hellscape. Where every aspect of your identity, memory, body are up for change.

That sounds like a world where you have dysphoria about everything.

And that's assuming that uploading a copy of your meat-brain's memories and thought patterns means that copy is actually YOU, as opposed to just...a copy. Of bits and fragments of your mind...at the time you were scanned or whatever. And this is just an AI going off out of whatever bits of data they gathered from you.

But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

This sound like the arguments about the Star Trek transporter.  If you use it, do you move, or are you dead and that's a new copy of you over there.  I believe that canonically McCoy always believed that latter but did it anyway for some reason.  I'm inclined to to that point of view as well unless you could prove that the soul moves to the new location.  I believe that the soul, not the brain, is the seat of consciousness, so that would be the important part.

With Star Trek at least I found it easier to suspend my disbelieve because "teleportation". I just figured they just transported your molecules and restructured them somewhere else. Though, it does get tricky and hand-wavy once you start to consider how tha hell does this transporter thing disassembles you and reassembles you correctly without recreating a mindless husk at the other end.

The idea of uploading someone's brain into a computer seems less credible to me because that's just code in a hard drive somewhere. And I'm not even sure how they can scan something as ephemeral as thoughts or even memories to begin with. Even if they could, how much of it could they read?

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 28, 2021, 09:30:39 AM
With Star Trek at least I found it easier to suspend my disbelieve because "teleportation". I just figured they just transported your molecules and restructured them somewhere else. Though, it does get tricky and hand-wavy once you start to consider how tha hell does this transporter thing disassembles you and reassembles you correctly without recreating a mindless husk at the other end.

The idea of uploading someone's brain into a computer seems less credible to me because that's just code in a hard drive somewhere. And I'm not even sure how they can scan something as ephemeral as thoughts or even memories to begin with. Even if they could, how much of it could they read?

It seemed clear that they wanted continuity of experience and identity with the transporter, but we also had, e.g., transporter accidents that gave you multiples of a person.  And the general concept that you can store people and things in the transporter buffer, and recreate it later.

Data is not precious.  Data is not numinous.  Data can be copied, deleted, restored from backup, and edited, endlessly.  To make a reductive claim in your universe that people can be reduced to data and so manipulated is both to make a fundamentally anti-humanist statement, and to open worlds of tactics which, if not carefully ignored by all present, will rapidly take over your setting.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 07:18:11 AMDo you mean all religions or just Christianity/Islam?

True, not all religeons. But the list above does also include judiasm.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 10:01:23 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 07:18:11 AMDo you mean all religions or just Christianity/Islam?

True, not all religeons. But the list above does also include judiasm.

In any case, my scifi would include syncretic future religions because I loved that about Dune. Apparently, in the next 20,000 years there will be two additional Muhammeds. (https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Third_islamic_movement)

...just two?

Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

Someone said the the EP world sounded like a hellscape and others said it was.

Yes, that's part of the EP setting, the idea that we live in a world of technological giants and moral midgets. The tech could make things better for all, but people use it in terrible ways. That's true. Just like today's world where we could feed everyone but don't,  We could give everyone medical care but don't, we could stop destroying the environment but don't, etc. Those real world metaphors look bad because our real world is pretty bad.

Capitalism gets dinged in EP. Yep, it does. just look at what capitalism has done to the American middle class in the last 40 years, or just since 2008.  Yeah, i live in america and i'm longing for some of that horrible european socialism we keep hearing about. And yes, the social pendulum is swinging towards what the right calls socialism. When younger americans hear socialism they don't think red banners and marching armies of conquest, they think medical coverage for all, living wages, etc, because that;'s what the right in america calls socialism. The writers of EP are tuned into this unlike a lot of people here.

I don't agree with bill maher on everything but i agree with him on this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohRiNE8GcHU

So yes EP does have a +socialism -capitalism vibe, yes it's intentional. No i have no problem with that. Look at how many eps of the second Dr. Who series made capitalism out to be the bad guy.

Now some people claim that the hypercorps use basically slave labor because they fear using full AGI after the titans wiped out 95% of transhumanity. Ok, that might explain why "indentured infogees" are used and abused as slave labor, but it does not explain why they are treated so horribly.

Someone here attacked Ep for unrealistic tech like mind recording and emulation. Golly goshkins, a RPG set a few hundred years from now with technology we can't do today? Whooda thunk it? Have a look at what you're reading this post on, einstein. How long ago would it have been impossible? 100 years ago we  barely had tube radios and two piece phones requiring human operators and switchboards to work.

maybe you prefer traveller with it's computers that couldn't run Doom, let alone crysis? (I like traveller BTW, but it's tech is pretty  limited.)

As to people forking themselves to create duplicates to serve them, yep, that happens a lot in EP, there are cases where one person has several dozen edited low level forks (copies of his mind) as part of his fanfic series as crew on his ship. A character may routinely use an alpha fork of himself for brief times to cover for him at work while he does his firewall duty. the reintegrate the fork into himself. That's normal in ep.

I'm glad to see a decent discussion started here after a couple days and may drop in to see if any useful things come up. The sad thing is EP would be such a great game to discuss at the site of total evil, but it's such a shit hole of what i have to call the fascist left that i just can't stand to go there anymore. Plus i'm kinda hoping something happens to it soon.

This place is frankly a right wing shithole but at least some posters here are  worth reading and you can post dissent without being banhammered 5 minutes later.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

In true drama queen fashion, you flounce out like a little bitch, and then come back because you didn't really want to leave, you just wanted attention.

QuoteI'm glad to see a decent discussion started here after a couple days and may drop in to see if any useful things come up. The sad thing is EP would be such a great game to discuss at the site of total evil, but it's such a shit hole of what i have to call the fascist left that i just can't stand to go there anymore. Plus i'm kinda hoping something happens to it soon.

This place is frankly a right wing shithole but at least some posters here are  worth reading and you can post dissent without being banhammered 5 minutes later.

You just have to act like an adult and not come in swinging and then complain when people punch back. If you're up for a suggestion, how about trying leaving the politics out altogether. You started that crap, and then participated in the replies.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PMYes, that's part of the EP setting, the idea that we live in a world of technological giants and moral midgets.

I didn't even mean it that way. I meant the baseline idea is a hellish one. You can't really be 'unethical' to people if people are just expendable commodities. And not even in the 'clone slave' sort of deal. In the sense that if everything is infinitely and perfectly replicable then nothing has any real value. This includes people on a biological level and even an intellectual level.
So much of who anybody is is defined by their limitations. In a world without limitations, it's a world where nobody means anything. Its a world where psychotic bug people would not just survive, but thrive moreso than anybody else. Having any morals would truly only be a hinderance.
In the baseline state of that world, I would honestly argue that it would be more merciful if the AI came back and murdered everybody.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 04:45:33 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

In true drama queen fashion, you flounce out like a little bitch, and then come back because you didn't really want to leave, you just wanted attention.

QuoteI'm glad to see a decent discussion started here after a couple days and may drop in to see if any useful things come up. The sad thing is EP would be such a great game to discuss at the site of total evil, but it's such a shit hole of what i have to call the fascist left that i just can't stand to go there anymore. Plus i'm kinda hoping something happens to it soon.

This place is frankly a right wing shithole but at least some posters here are  worth reading and you can post dissent without being banhammered 5 minutes later.

You just have to act like an adult and not come in swinging and then complain when people punch back. If you're up for a suggestion, how about trying leaving the politics out altogether. You started that crap, and then participated in the replies.

Ok, time to start blocking trolls so i'm not bothered by their shitlording.

FUCK! This board doesn't have a block function?!

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 04:52:15 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PMYes, that's part of the EP setting, the idea that we live in a world of technological giants and moral midgets.

I didn't even mean it that way. I meant the baseline idea is a hellish one. You can't really be 'unethical' to people if people are just expendable commodities. And not even in the 'clone slave' sort of deal. In the sense that if everything is infinitely and perfectly replicable then nothing has any real value. This includes people on a biological level and even an intellectual level.
So much of who anybody is is defined by their limitations. In a world without limitations, it's a world where nobody means anything. Its a world where psychotic bug people would not just survive, but thrive moreso than anybody else. Having any morals would truly only be a hinderance.
In the baseline state of that world, I would honestly argue that it would be more merciful if the AI came back and murdered everybody.

It's an awesome villain ideology, right? I use a variation of this for the hivemind aliens in my original scifi setting.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 04:52:15 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PMYes, that's part of the EP setting, the idea that we live in a world of technological giants and moral midgets.

I didn't even mean it that way. I meant the baseline idea is a hellish one. You can't really be 'unethical' to people if people are just expendable commodities. And not even in the 'clone slave' sort of deal. In the sense that if everything is infinitely and perfectly replicable then nothing has any real value. This includes people on a biological level and even an intellectual level.
So much of who anybody is is defined by their limitations. In a world without limitations, it's a world where nobody means anything. Its a world where psychotic bug people would not just survive, but thrive moreso than anybody else. Having any morals would truly only be a hinderance.
In the baseline state of that world, I would honestly argue that it would be more merciful if the AI came back and murdered everybody.

Ok, that's a philosophical debate issue here. I mean what you said has validity and in a good point, but for millennia people have not been duplicatable and still treated horribly, enslaved, worked to beat, subject to genocide, etc even in a world where the can't be reloaded, copies, etc. So thinking the SP  EP would will be worse than what we have nos because people can be duplicated and reloaded might have  validity, i admit, but i don't think it will make the world worse.

Likewise the fact that people can be copied and reloaded doesn't make some factions treat them badly, the scum, the argonauts, etc giver people rights and have laws to protect them even if they can be rebooted after bring murdered.

Now the exhumans have a habit ot murdering and rebooting people over and over again for torture's sake, you have a point with them, but in general i don't think the fact that people  can be copies, reloaded, etc will make everyone treat them worse than they do now. People and ideologies that treat people bad now will still treat them bad, those with different views likely won't treat people worse.

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

oh fuck you your goatcocksucking shitstain. Tired of the ASSHOLES here and not bothering to waste much time on them. You are an argument for mandatory sterilization and retroactive abortion, please do the world a service and step in front of a bus, this board and the world will be better off without you.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:26:10 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

oh fuck you your goatcocksucking shitstain. Tired of the ASSHOLES here and not bothering to waste much time on them. You are an argument for mandatory sterilization and retroactive abortion, please do the world a service and step in front of a bus, this board and the world will be better off without you.

You're a miserable human being, and you did you damnedest to make the thread as shitty as possible.

Nice series of death threats, BTW. That's completely sane and rational.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 05:18:29 PMIt's an awesome villain ideology, right? I use a variation of this for the hivemind aliens in my original scifi setting.

Even being a hivemind would be more socially cohesive then Eclipse Phase, because at least a hivemind is designed from top down specifically with some things as expendable and others as not. A drone wouldn't torture another drone (unless needed by the hive) because it's bred and created to provide a strictly utilitarian function.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:23:34 PM
Ok, that's a philosophical debate issue here. I mean what you said has validity and in a good point, but for millennia people have not been duplicatable and still treated horribly, enslaved, worked to beat, subject to genocide, etc even in a world where the can't be reloaded, copies, etc. So thinking the SP  EP would will be worse than what we have nos because people can be duplicated and reloaded might have  validity, i admit, but i don't think it will make the world worse.

It most certainly would. In such a world, enslavement wouldn't be punished by whip or chain, but just mentally adjusting you until your subservient to your captor. In such a world there can be no genuine emotion because emotions are things you have complete control over. Sadness or happiness are just switches you can flick on. For yourselves or others. There would be no reason to live in any sort of self-restraint because you could just flip a switch and feel ultimate pleasure forever.

And that's not assuming they don't just delete all of you with an army of duplicate drones.
It's already an issue true that less ethical can get power in our world. But in the EP world, the less ethical would get ABSOLUTE power. It just sounds like the writers didn't think through the utterly horrific consequences of their world.

I've gleaned from this thread that someone has uploaded their consciousness to RPG.net and it morphed into a self-loathing sociopath that started a thread on this site in an attempt to do some low effort trolling. Eclipse Phase in full effect.

Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 05:18:29 PMIt's an awesome villain ideology, right? I use a variation of this for the hivemind aliens in my original scifi setting.

Even being a hivemind would be more socially cohesive then Eclipse Phase, because at least a hivemind is designed from top down specifically with some things as expendable and others as not. A drone wouldn't torture another drone (unless needed by the hive) because it's bred and created to provide a strictly utilitarian function.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:23:34 PM
Ok, that's a philosophical debate issue here. I mean what you said has validity and in a good point, but for millennia people have not been duplicatable and still treated horribly, enslaved, worked to beat, subject to genocide, etc even in a world where the can't be reloaded, copies, etc. So thinking the SP  EP would will be worse than what we have nos because people can be duplicated and reloaded might have  validity, i admit, but i don't think it will make the world worse.

It most certainly would. In such a world, enslavement wouldn't be punished by whip or chain, but just mentally adjusting you until your subservient to your captor. In such a world there can be no genuine emotion because emotions are things you have complete control over. Sadness or happiness are just switches you can flick on. For yourselves or others. There would be no reason to live in any sort of self-restraint because you could just flip a switch and feel ultimate pleasure forever.

And that's not assuming they don't just delete all of you with an army of duplicate drones.
It's already an issue true that less ethical can get power in our world. But in the EP world, the less ethical would get ABSOLUTE power. It just sounds like the writers didn't think through the utterly horrific consequences of their world.

That's just the existential horror setting in.

The point of playing in such a setting is to be moral anyways. You can argue that since people are target's of moral obligation, then their is no way to reduce that to meaninglessness. The ethical questions then arise, is forking of altered copies of willing workers with right mindset equivalent to slavery? Well yes, the person doing it just convinced themselves it wasn't the case. It's clear cut once you toss all that dark enlightenment bullshit out the window.

Buuuuut, you make villains with somewhat compelling arguments. You might make players uncomfortable. Especially in this situation. If you have a population of people willing to do effectively slave labor, is it still bad? Now you got an excellent Sci-fi moment of, "huh that seems applicable to the radical American anti-union capitalist movement. Just because idiots want to be exploited does not mean the exploitation is ethical."

Transhumanist sci-fi has tons of socialist themes. It's inherent to the concept of, "so much of the economy can be automated that only a select few do any sort of traditional wealth generation".

Quote from: Brad on April 28, 2021, 05:47:48 PM
I've gleaned from this thread that someone has uploaded their consciousness to RPG.net and it morphed into a self-loathing sociopath that started a thread on this site in an attempt to do some low effort trolling. Eclipse Phase in full effect.

Fuck you die.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 05:59:54 PMThe point of playing in such a setting is to be moral anyways.

That's like demanding morality of wasps. Are wasps immoral? The creatures of EP are not humans but are different beings altogether. Applying human morals to them is foolish.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

It most certainly would. In such a world, enslavement wouldn't be punished by whip or chain, but just mentally adjusting you until your subservient to your captor. In such a world there can be no genuine emotion because emotions are things you have complete control over. Sadness or happiness are just switches you can flick on. For yourselves or others. There would be no reason to live in any sort of self-restraint because you could just flip a switch and feel ultimate pleasure forever.

And that's not assuming they don't just delete all of you with an army of duplicate drones.
It's already an issue true that less ethical can get power in our world. But in the EP world, the less ethical would get ABSOLUTE power. It just sounds like the writers didn't think through the utterly horrific consequences of their world.

The X-risk (existential risk) movement tries to put a number to the risk to various humanity-ending threats. Giant meteors, vacuum decay, aliens, etc. It's not concerned with dire but survivable risks, like most climate change projections (except the tiny handful of outliers that involve runaway feedback loops), only things that end humanity. Which can be extinction, but also can be anything that removes all of humanity's future potential. For instance, aliens coming down and turning us all into pets, with no chance of escape.

One more likely example of this second type of threat is a perpetual totalitarian state. Most of the projections put the chances pretty low, but I think they're dramatically underestimating the risk. Totalitarian states in the past have failed to due to outside factors putting pressure on the state. The Soviet Union being pressured by the West's economic supremacy, for instance. Yet we seem to heading toward a world government. National boundaries have been remarkably stable since WW2, but international bodies like the UN and regional blocs like the EU or SCO have been taking on more and more state-like characteristics, including enforceable lawmaking powers, sovereign currencies, and more. Central power is in ascendance, and it's not particularly democratic. Just look at China, or the unelected power of the EC.

So what happens when the world gradually slides into a super-state? Look at how much control the KGB, GRU, and stasi exerted over their citizenry. Snitches were everywhere, and freedom of expression was almost impossible. Works were shared and smuggled out, but it was rare and risky. People had to watch everything they said, and felt like they were being constantly spied on, even when they weren't.

But we're no longer living in that world. We're living in a world where people can be spied on, 24/7. Tracking every movement, analyzing everyone's social media posts, and more are all possible using machine intelligence and cameras everywhere. The few outlets of escape or just freedom to express themselves that were available to dissidents in the USSR have all been closed off. A totalitarian world state seems more likely than not, before self-sustaining colonies are established off planet. And once that happens, how would it ever end? With that degree of power over the populace, the ruling class would cement itself into a perpetual oligarchy. The only real question is whether the control would be soft (a la BNW) or hard (1984). The soft route is probably the surest way to total control, but once established it would almost certainly become hard.

And if they can read your mind, make a copy and interrogate it, and change your brain's operating parameters or memories? That's much, much, much, worse.

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 05:54:53 PM
Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

A lot of hard-line socialist refuse to dig into practicality. It comes from the assumption that without negative influences, people are generally good.

The problem is the select assholes that ruin everything for no reason other than they can. Mr. Forkswarm is unjustified evil which boggles the minds of true believers.

In Nova Praxis, the few owners of the means of production do have all the real power and that is a source of conflict. The reputation economy is a way to "bread & circus" the masses into contentment. The true power brokers still sit at the top willout having to deal with hundreds of millions of starving terrorist. Human population is oddly on a decline BECAUSE those truly in charge don't need all these people and soft discourage more of them (all official morphs are sterile).

Nova Praxis makes the assumption that future is almost unfathomably better, but there are still new and nuanced problems.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 06:04:54 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 05:59:54 PMThe point of playing in such a setting is to be moral anyways.

That's like demanding morality of wasps. Are wasps immoral? The creatures of EP are not humans but are different beings altogether. Applying human morals to them is foolish.

Well you would be a villain in EP.

It's simple ethical theory that if your conclusion is no ethics, then you thought about it wrong.

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 05:54:53 PM
Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

Ok, now a fork requites hardware to run it, it doesn't just run on thin air or vacuum, it it requires hardware to run it. So mr. forkswarm would have to be having the hardware to run his army of forks and the power to run that hardware et al. That assumes they're just infomorphs, forks in some of physical hardware get even harder to do.

This issue was addressed in an EP book, pardon me if i haven't got chapter and verse memorized, but a person was saying he could fork himself for  regular reasonable work, but it he tried to fork himself like 20 times or so his fellow community members would start to object, possibly in very expressive terms.

In ep you have like at least 3 rep ratings and you can lose or gain them for anything. A bad rep does hurt you. In fact one thing i find scary in ep is the idea of cancel culture becoming kill culture. A guy was new to a particular habitat and really didn't get it, he made a few mistakes and immediately got hit with bad red that lowered his score to the point he lost the job he was doing and capable of doing and ended up in a cheap biomoprh doing external maintenance and being exposed to radiation that was slowly killing him. All because he made a few gaffes.

I mean, i'm a genuine baby eating satan worshipping atheist socialist communist nazi (according to the right ;D) and i find the  radical leftist cancel culture/summary execution culture over on the evil site intolerable and i agree with bill maher that cancel culture has reached the level of summary execution for people's careers and futures.

https://www.facebook.com/Maher/videos/201022374881643

I mean look at modern net culture and how it can devastate people's life outside the net, imagine that writ large. That's what a lot of things could go like in EP.

Hell, i was viciously dogpiled by the far left recently on facebook for only agreeing with them 95% of the way.

One big problem in ep would certainly be the absolute balkanization of transhumanity kind of like how the internet has balkanized into all these tiny little echo  chambers, like the big red+blue, where only ONE view can be expressed, only ONE opinion is allowed, only ABSOLUTE AGREEMENT with the collective hivemind is tolerated.

I mean, why fill a habitat with forks of yourself when you can create one where everyone has to have the same iedology your little clique has has?

Transhumanity is balkanized in EP, not even the near extinction of it has produced an ability to work together against common threats. That's a major issue in EP and they acknowledge it.

But one guy forkswarming himself and taking over  a hab? Not really going to happen especially since a lot of habs allow personal weapons.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 06:08:11 PM

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 05:54:53 PM
Come on, people.  We had a nice discussion going.

That being said, I think that since socialism had been raised as a topic again, Eclipse Phase itself would be one heck of an object lesson.  Like, take a habitat that was trying to organize itself along anarchist principles, with a focus on community property.  Well, whoops, Mr. Forkswarm has copied himself everywhere.  He has claimed the commons, and now, numerically, is a plurality.  So, what now? What is the fair means of allocating resources like morphs when the need will scale to absorb all surpluses?

When Mr. Forkswarm says "All of me are people, and all of me deserve the same rights as any of you singletons.", and others say "Bullshit, we're not completely stopping our charity-housing of refugee infomorphs for your ego trip.", how does that get resolved? If the matter actually was reputation-based, then the factions would hold a vote and realize "Shit, 99.85% of our membership actually does want to give all our posessions to Mr. Forkswarm."  Because that's what reputation means.

The designers really went through a lot of trouble to recognize that someone has the admin keys to the nanofactories and stack-readers and morph-assembly-plants and all of the actual physical infrastructure, and that those individuals, not the greater unwashed masses of a faction, are the ones who control things.  The ones who actually decide whether or not Mr. Forkswarm is full of shit or not are the ones with power.  And the ones doing so do so from the assumption that they do own the means of production themselves, and that they are not to be turned over to the people, no matter how many of the people Mr. Forkswarm actually is.

A lot of hard-line socialist refuse to dig into practicality. It comes from the assumption that without negative influences, people are generally good.

The problem is the select assholes that ruin everything for no reason other than they can. Mr. Forkswarm is unjustified evil which boggles the minds of true believers.

In Nova Praxis, the few owners of the means of production do have all the real power and that is a source of conflict. The reputation economy is a way to "bread & circus" the masses into contentment. The true power brokers still sit at the top willout having to deal with hundreds of millions of starving terrorist. Human population is oddly on a decline BECAUSE those truly in charge don't need all these people and soft discourage more of them (all official morphs are sterile).

Nova Praxis makes the assumption that future is almost unfathomably better, but there are still new and nuanced problems.

I looked up nova praxis, and wow, it looks like a close to ripoff of EP. I guess that means it's popular enoughto create an imitator.

I'd say Ep is about the future is in a bad shape after the titan thing, and things are uncertain, but hey, there's still hope. That's what the PCs are for. ;)

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 06:10:02 PMWell you would be a villain in EP.

For pointing out the innate flaws of the system? In that setting, I would be one of the evil bio-conservatives so I suppose so.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 06:22:27 PM
But one guy forkswarming himself and taking over  a hab? Not really going to happen especially since a lot of habs allow personal weapons.

Not unless one guy subtly mind controls everybody in the hab beforehand. And the only preventative measures would be invasive forced checking of minds. So in essence the only cure to the problem would be a different kind of problem.

Science fiction is all about "what if". The problem with EP is not only that it posits so many "what ifs", it's that it does not deal with any of them. How the hell are you as a player going to interact with a world so irrational and foreign?

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:16:08 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 04:45:33 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

In true drama queen fashion, you flounce out like a little bitch, and then come back because you didn't really want to leave, you just wanted attention.

QuoteI'm glad to see a decent discussion started here after a couple days and may drop in to see if any useful things come up. The sad thing is EP would be such a great game to discuss at the site of total evil, but it's such a shit hole of what i have to call the fascist left that i just can't stand to go there anymore. Plus i'm kinda hoping something happens to it soon.

This place is frankly a right wing shithole but at least some posters here are  worth reading and you can post dissent without being banhammered 5 minutes later.

You just have to act like an adult and not come in swinging and then complain when people punch back. If you're up for a suggestion, how about trying leaving the politics out altogether. You started that crap, and then participated in the replies.

Ok, time to start blocking trolls so i'm not bothered by their shitlording.

FUCK! This board doesn't have a block function?!

(https://i.imgur.com/APPIML1.png)

It's buried in user settings.

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 06:05:15 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

It most certainly would. In such a world, enslavement wouldn't be punished by whip or chain, but just mentally adjusting you until your subservient to your captor. In such a world there can be no genuine emotion because emotions are things you have complete control over. Sadness or happiness are just switches you can flick on. For yourselves or others. There would be no reason to live in any sort of self-restraint because you could just flip a switch and feel ultimate pleasure forever.

And that's not assuming they don't just delete all of you with an army of duplicate drones.
It's already an issue true that less ethical can get power in our world. But in the EP world, the less ethical would get ABSOLUTE power. It just sounds like the writers didn't think through the utterly horrific consequences of their world.

The X-risk (existential risk) movement tries to put a number to the risk to various humanity-ending threats. Giant meteors, vacuum decay, aliens, etc. It's not concerned with dire but survivable risks, like most climate change projections (except the tiny handful of outliers that involve runaway feedback loops), only things that end humanity. Which can be extinction, but also can be anything that removes all of humanity's future potential. For instance, aliens coming down and turning us all into pets, with no chance of escape.

One more likely example of this second type of threat is a perpetual totalitarian state. Most of the projections put the chances pretty low, but I think they're dramatically underestimating the risk. Totalitarian states in the past have failed to due to outside factors putting pressure on the state. The Soviet Union being pressured by the West's economic supremacy, for instance. Yet we seem to heading toward a world government. National boundaries have been remarkably stable since WW2, but international bodies like the UN and regional blocs like the EU or SCO have been taking on more and more state-like characteristics, including enforceable lawmaking powers, sovereign currencies, and more. Central power is in ascendance, and it's not particularly democratic. Just look at China, or the unelected power of the EC.

So what happens when the world gradually slides into a super-state? Look at how much control the KGB, GRU, and stasi exerted over their citizenry. Snitches were everywhere, and freedom of expression was almost impossible. Works were shared and smuggled out, but it was rare and risky. People had to watch everything they said, and felt like they were being constantly spied on, even when they weren't.

But we're no longer living in that world. We're living in a world where people can be spied on, 24/7. Tracking every movement, analyzing everyone's social media posts, and more are all possible using machine intelligence and cameras everywhere. The few outlets of escape or just freedom to express themselves that were available to dissidents in the USSR have all been closed off. A totalitarian world state seems more likely than not, before self-sustaining colonies are established off planet. And once that happens, how would it ever end? With that degree of power over the populace, the ruling class would cement itself into a perpetual oligarchy. The only real question is whether the control would be soft (a la BNW) or hard (1984). The soft route is probably the surest way to total control, but once established it would almost certainly become hard.

And if they can read your mind, make a copy and interrogate it, and change your brain's operating parameters or memories? That's much, much, much, worse.

Hiya pat, some good points you raise there.  Let me respond here.

The sad thing is that today in the world most people, most large groups, can be essentially manipulated into doing whatever the select few want. Here, have a look at this:

(https://i.imgur.com/ioBlXWE.jpg)

Now you may not like what goering is saying there, i sure as blood don't, but can you say it's not the ghawdawful truth? Mob psychology, appealing to the lowest common denominator,  etc, it usually succeeds to manipulating a large enough chunk of the population, what the russians may have fairly called the "lumpen proletariat",  into giving power to the wrong people.

Fuck, look at how successful that ochre tumor in the white house from Fed.2017-Feb.2021 was at this old game.

i'm also reminded of a story in Asimov where a 'robot' as he called them developed a certain telepathic ability, and found out he could manipulate individual minds or even crowds, and noted that it was actually easier to influence a crowd than one single person. This tallies with the rule of thumb about mobs: The IQ of a mob is the IQ of the dumbest person it in divided by the number of people in the mob."

So what you said about being able to edit an individual ego any way you want is true, but really, does it matter when just the same old techniques of propaganda that were so successful in the 1930's and that the ocher tumor and rupe murdoch's propaganda empire use today are effective enough to control enough of the masses to take and maintain a lot of power over society?

Now there are a couple things to consider in EP. one is the fall, where 95% of the race was wiped out and earth was lost to transhumanity. maybe many people see that as the end result not of science and technology per se, but as the result of letting unaccountable, faceless, nameless leaders do what they wanted with no oversight or say from the public, no one to advocate for the best interests of the many instead of the few.

So, hopefully, a lot of people, like, say, firewall, have a new determination to take an active role in how things are done instead of letting some cabal of elites do everything. A lot of EP scenarios are basically that sort of thing. Likewise autonomists and other groups like scum have a more consensus mentality rather than a strict hierarchy.

Another issue in EP might be that a lot of issues are complex and hard to grasp, and maybe pe0ple don't have time or effort to spare studying complex, multifaceted issues in depth in order to make a good decision.

So, in Ep you can make a fork of yourself to do that kind of deep study for you, to access databases, look up history, see what the facts are, study and weight the issues, make an informed decision then reintegrate that fork into yourself instantly know what it learned and what it thought as a copy of you., instead of letting a talking head rhat looks like a stupid, evil pillsbury doughboy tell you what to believe.

(https://mk0theconservat4unwi.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Tucker-630x400.jpg)

So in Ep there are a lot of issues and ghawd knows that world has the potential to be a horror beyond words, but it's also possible to save some of it and make it better. That's what PCs do.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:26:10 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

oh fuck you your goatcocksucking shitstain. Tired of the ASSHOLES here and not bothering to waste much time on them.

You've been here for a few days, and made 27 posts so far. You came in bitching about politics while spewing yours in the very first post in this thread. You continue to weep and gnash your teeth when called out for your assinine behavior.

If you act like a child, expect to be treated as such.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 06:58:49 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:26:10 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

Fuck off. You're as much an asshole as the mods on the vile site.



oh fuck you your goatcocksucking shitstain. Tired of the ASSHOLES here and not bothering to waste much time on them.

You've been here for a few days, and made 27 posts so far. You came in bitching about politics while spewing yours in the very first post in this thread. You continue to weep and gnash your teeth when called out for your assinine behavior.

If you act like a child, expect to be treated as such.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 06:51:21 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:16:08 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 04:45:33 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

In true drama queen fashion, you flounce out like a little bitch, and then come back because you didn't really want to leave, you just wanted attention.

QuoteI'm glad to see a decent discussion started here after a couple days and may drop in to see if any useful things come up. The sad thing is EP would be such a great game to discuss at the site of total evil, but it's such a shit hole of what i have to call the fascist left that i just can't stand to go there anymore. Plus i'm kinda hoping something happens to it soon.

This place is frankly a right wing shithole but at least some posters here are  worth reading and you can post dissent without being banhammered 5 minutes later.

You just have to act like an adult and not come in swinging and then complain when people punch back. If you're up for a suggestion, how about trying leaving the politics out altogether. You started that crap, and then participated in the replies.

Ok, time to start blocking trolls so i'm not bothered by their shitlording.

FUCK! This board doesn't have a block function?!

(https://i.imgur.com/APPIML1.png)

It's buried in user settings.

Fuick, now i have to thank you. most sites have a link on the asshole you want to block (you, you nazi shitlord) and you click on it, this one you have to edit your own profile. Fucktarded, but i guess i should't expect intelligence from a site ran by someone dumb enough to believe in libertarianism.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 06:51:21 PM
(https://i.imgur.com/APPIML1.png)

It's buried in user settings.

Hey, thanks for this.  This was very helpful.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 07:07:56 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 06:51:21 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 05:16:08 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 04:45:33 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

In true drama queen fashion, you flounce out like a little bitch, and then come back because you didn't really want to leave, you just wanted attention.

QuoteI'm glad to see a decent discussion started here after a couple days and may drop in to see if any useful things come up. The sad thing is EP would be such a great game to discuss at the site of total evil, but it's such a shit hole of what i have to call the fascist left that i just can't stand to go there anymore. Plus i'm kinda hoping something happens to it soon.

This place is frankly a right wing shithole but at least some posters here are  worth reading and you can post dissent without being banhammered 5 minutes later.

You just have to act like an adult and not come in swinging and then complain when people punch back. If you're up for a suggestion, how about trying leaving the politics out altogether. You started that crap, and then participated in the replies.

Ok, time to start blocking trolls so i'm not bothered by their shitlording.

FUCK! This board doesn't have a block function?!

(https://i.imgur.com/APPIML1.png)

It's buried in user settings.

Fuick, now i have to thank you. most sites have a link on the asshole you want to block (you, you nazi shitlord) and you click on it, this one you have to edit your own profile. Fucktarded, but i guess i should't expect intelligence from a site ran by someone dumb enough to believe in libertarianism.

https://i.imgur.com/2BGo9rq.gif

Quote from: robertliguori on April 28, 2021, 07:10:06 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on April 28, 2021, 06:51:21 PM
(https://i.imgur.com/APPIML1.png)

It's buried in user settings.

Hey, thanks for this.  This was very helpful.

Yeppers.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 06:57:55 PM
Now you may not like what goering is saying there, i sure as blood don't, but can you say it's not the ghawdawful truth? Mob psychology, appealing to the lowest common denominator,  etc, it usually succeeds to manipulating a large enough chunk of the population, what the russians may have fairly called the "lumpen proletariat",  into giving power to the wrong people.

Fuck, look at how successful that ochre tumor in the white house from Fed.2017-Feb.2021 was at this old game.

You don't even have to get into mob psychology. One of the roots is nationalism. The whole idea of "America fuck yeah!" would have been completely alien to people from just a few centuries ago. People were loyal to leaders to whom they swore fealty, but that was an upper crust warrior class social convention designed to protect their privileges. People were also inspired by faith and religion. But the idea of the nation as something in itself worthy of reverence? Nationalism is a new development, a shift of personal loyalty to an abstraction, and one that is identified with an entire people not a class. For good or ill, it's a powerful tool.

Another factor comes from public choice theory. Most of what politicians do has very little effect on an individual. Sure, the latest boondoogle that rewards the politically in may be an obscene waste, but it doesn't immediately affect my taxes. Even if the average person was perspicacious enough to recognize that blown money will ultimately come due and have to be paid, whether it's by me or my children, and whether it's through the vehicle of taxes or inflation, and was able to figure out the ultimate price, then so what? Say the cost is $100, to pick a random number. If you take into account how much time I'd have to spend to familiarize myself with the issues, familiarize myself with the candidates, pick the one who's best on this issue, wait however many years until the next election cycle, I'd still have to dilute all that to almost nothing because 1 vote is almost certain to have no effect on who wins or loses. So even in the best scenario, my expected return on that investment of time and effect is effectively zero. That's why so many people tune out politics. It's not stupidity or cupidity, but rational ignorance. There's no value in educating oneself.

But if you're calling Trump a warwonger, that's just more of that insane partisan bias showing. He's the only president in recent memory who didn't start any new wars, and even worked on peace in places like North Korea and multiple Mideast nations, to the horror of the real warmongering Washington elite.

Oh, weren't you supposed to ignore me?

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 06:57:55 PM
So what you said about being able to edit an individual ego any way you want is true, but really, does it matter when just the same old techniques of propaganda that were so successful in the 1930's and that the ocher tumor and rupe murdoch's propaganda empire use today are effective enough to control enough of the masses to take and maintain a lot of power over society?

Yes. The current methods are fallible. If you can just reboot, try again, or insert absolute overrides, then the chance of resistance goes from low to zero. That matters when calculating x-risks, because given enough time a low chance of overthrowing a state that ends human potential means human potential will probably flourish again, even if it takes millennia or meganna. If the chance is zero (or effectively zero over grand periods of time), then that ending of human potential will be permanent.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 06:57:55 PM
Another issue in EP might be that a lot of issues are complex and hard to grasp, and maybe pe0ple don't have time or effort to spare studying complex, multifaceted issues in depth in order to make a good decision.

So, in Ep you can make a fork of yourself to do that kind of deep study for you, to access databases, look up history, see what the facts are, study and weight the issues, make an informed decision then reintegrate that fork into yourself instantly know what it learned and what it thought as a copy of you., instead of letting a talking head rhat looks like a stupid, evil pillsbury doughboy tell you what to believe.

This echoes what I said about about rational ignorance, but I think you're overly optimistic. Look at how much more information we have access to, compared to any other time in history. From Googling with smartphones to Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, to all the online courses. Has the wealth of information made people more informed, and have a more balanced view of the world? Or does it seem to be segmenting the world, where people insulate themselves in bubbles that just repeat the information they want to hear?

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 07:07:56 PMbut i guess i should't expect intelligence from a site ran by someone dumb enough to believe in libertarianism.

So are you here to fling shit or not? If you wanted no politics, you could have asked that at title outset, instead of calling people names, and then getting shocked when they react.

Im not libertarian, but I am moreso oriented that way. And you ended up being a dick to me despite respectable conversation up until then.

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

Exactly. I was away for a few hours, and came back only to find three extra pages of total shitfest since I last posted in this thread. All it took was the source of the shit rearing its head in here again.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 06:27:46 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 06:10:02 PMWell you would be a villain in EP.

For pointing out the innate flaws of the system? In that setting, I would be one of the evil bio-conservatives so I suppose so.

Nova Praxis is a bit more tolerant of your perspective and includes the lore bit that medical technology is advancing fast enough that bio-conservatives aren't suicidally stupid. It's also far more transhumanist Sci-fi, while eclipse phase is more post-human sci-fi.

But generally, using philosophical arguments to say a thinking feeling creature is one we have no moral obligations too is pure villainy regardless.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 07:59:52 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 06:27:46 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 06:10:02 PMWell you would be a villain in EP.

For pointing out the innate flaws of the system? In that setting, I would be one of the evil bio-conservatives so I suppose so.

Nova Praxis is a bit more tolerant of your perspective and includes the lore bit that medical technology is advancing fast enough that bio-conservatives aren't suicidally stupid. It's also far more transhumanist Sci-fi, while eclipse phase is more post-human sci-fi.

But generally, using philosophical arguments to say a thinking feeling creature is one we have no moral obligations too is pure villainy regardless.

On this we agree completely. Really i think adopting a "Cogito ergo sum"  standard would by a good starting place.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 07:59:52 PMBut generally, using philosophical arguments to say a thinking feeling creature is one we have no moral obligations too is pure villainy regardless.

Im talking purely theoretically. Im incapable of taking the "bad guy" route even in videogames, because I feel bad being bad to simulated pixel people.

Im saying that human ethics in EP would be phased out almost immediately, and thise people would not be humans. I see myself having a moral obligation to wasps, but I will not morally police them.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 08:17:28 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 07:59:52 PMBut generally, using philosophical arguments to say a thinking feeling creature is one we have no moral obligations too is pure villainy regardless.

Im talking purely theoretically. Im incapable of taking the "bad guy" route even in videogames, because I feel bad being bad to simulated pixel people.

Im saying that human ethics in EP would be phased out almost immediately, and thise people would not be humans. I see myself having a moral obligation to wasps, but I will not morally police them.

Hey, I won't kill a dog or cat in a game. Evil corporate goons, sure. Dog or cat, no.

Greetings!

Ratman is a very cool member of this board. He is certainly not a nahtzee. Ratman is knowledgable, friendly, and well-liked by many here.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 08:20:22 PM
Hey, I won't kill a dog or cat in a game. Evil corporate goons, sure. Dog or cat, no.

So will you just ignore my question about weather your here to fling shit or not? I don't want to have conversations if the person Im conversing with has no respect for me.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 28, 2021, 07:56:26 PM

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

Exactly. I was away for a few hours, and came back only to find three extra pages of total shitfest since I last posted in this thread. All it took was the source of the shit rearing its head in here again.

Greetings!

*Laughing* So true, my friend!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 07:42:14 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 07:07:56 PMbut i guess i should't expect intelligence from a site ran by someone dumb enough to believe in libertarianism.

So are you here to fling shit or not? If you wanted no politics, you could have asked that at title outset, instead of calling people names, and then getting shocked when they react.

Im not libertarian, but I am moreso oriented that way. And you ended up being a dick to me despite respectable conversation up until then.

Libertarianism will not work until there are some real paradigm shifts in human nature or culture. The game "bioshock' was an example of how a libertarian system would collapse in short order. Even with plasmids the libertarian paradise of rapture was doomed.

Ironically one classic sf movie, 'the day the earth stood still', was a libertarian movie and klaatu clearly came froma  libertarian culture. Their culture worked because they had things like gort to enforce it in an irresistible, impartial, corruptible fashion. Until we have something like that libertarianism is  an express way to feudalistic society.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 08:17:28 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 07:59:52 PMBut generally, using philosophical arguments to say a thinking feeling creature is one we have no moral obligations too is pure villainy regardless.

Im talking purely theoretically. Im incapable of taking the "bad guy" route even in videogames, because I feel bad being bad to simulated pixel people.

Im saying that human ethics in EP would be phased out almost immediately, and thise people would not be humans. I see myself having a moral obligation to wasps, but I will not morally police them.

Even non-forked, non-backed-up, birth-sleeve people in EP are not "flats". They have enhancements and information connectivity that makes them fairly incomprehensible to regular humans. Only the strictest bioconservatives are still basically human.

Yet, if we time traveled 100 years into the future or past, we would struggle to communicate with someone speaking our own language.

At the same time I really doubt the post-humans and the trans-humans would throw out normal human ethical notions just because some philosophical ideas. It's like how immortality would be great and "the crushing weight of time" is just philosophical bullshit.

Quote from: Pat on April 28, 2021, 05:18:10 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it into.

You incorrectly pluralized asshole. There was only one asshole.

Notice how real discussion only happened when the person stinking up the thread left.

Greetings!

*Laughing* Very sharp observation, Pat!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 08:26:06 PMLibertarianism will not work until there are some real paradigm shifts in human nature or culture. The game "bioshock' was an example of how a libertarian system would collapse in short order. Even with plasmids the libertarian paradise of rapture was doomed.

I wasn't asking for your opinion on libertarianism (and what you described was a fallen anarcho-capitalism on a objectivist framing). But wether you could respect ME as a basis for conversation to not shit talk people for having different opinions then you.

You didn't answer the question again and just started trying to crowbar your opinion in. That shows a lack of respect.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 08:32:25 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 08:26:06 PMLibertarianism will not work until there are some real paradigm shifts in human nature or culture. The game "bioshock' was an example of how a libertarian system would collapse in short order. Even with plasmids the libertarian paradise of rapture was doomed.

I wasn't asking for your opinion on libertarianism (and what you described was a fallen anarcho-capitalism on a objectivist framing). But wether you could respect ME as a basis for conversation to not shit talk people for having different opinions then you.

You didn't answer the question again and just started trying to crowbar your opinion in. That shows a lack of respect.

I managed to support libertarianism for the sake of a friend who was one and died a few years back.

After libertarians threw in with that thing we had in the white house for 4 years, no, i can't.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 08:27:29 PM
At the same time I really doubt the post-humans and the trans-humans would throw out normal human ethical notions just because some philosophical ideas. It's like how immortality would be great and "the crushing weight of time" is just philosophical bullshit.

Oh so im speaking with an immortal from a society of immortals? Fascinating. Do tell me how thats like since you have the REAL opinion on this.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 08:27:29 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 08:17:28 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 07:59:52 PMBut generally, using philosophical arguments to say a thinking feeling creature is one we have no moral obligations too is pure villainy regardless.

Im talking purely theoretically. Im incapable of taking the "bad guy" route even in videogames, because I feel bad being bad to simulated pixel people.

Im saying that human ethics in EP would be phased out almost immediately, and thise people would not be humans. I see myself having a moral obligation to wasps, but I will not morally police them.

Even non-forked, non-backed-up, birth-sleeve people in EP are not "flats". They have enhancements and information connectivity that makes them fairly incomprehensible to regular humans. Only the strictest bioconservatives are still basically human.

Yet, if we time traveled 100 years into the future or past, we would struggle to communicate with someone speaking our own language.

At the same time I really doubt the post-humans and the trans-humans would throw out normal human ethical notions just because some philosophical ideas. It's like how immortality would be great and "the crushing weight of time" is just philosophical bullshit.

I wonder what would happen to a human brain divorced completely from the soup of hormones and sensory inputs a human body puts out. I can imagine some brain in a jar in a robot body, or an uploaded mind getting so divorced from human concerns that their morality becomes what we would consider wonky.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 08:34:06 PMAfter libertarians threw in with that thing we had in the white house for 4 years, no, i can't.

I like that your upfront about it. Willing to throw away friends for politics. Im left more saddened really. I may disagree with my lib friends but still respect them as good people, even though my distaste for their philosophy is probably as caustic as yours to mine.

Anyway then, I guess our conversations are over then.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 08:34:06 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 08:32:25 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 08:26:06 PMLibertarianism will not work until there are some real paradigm shifts in human nature or culture. The game "bioshock' was an example of how a libertarian system would collapse in short order. Even with plasmids the libertarian paradise of rapture was doomed.

I wasn't asking for your opinion on libertarianism (and what you described was a fallen anarcho-capitalism on a objectivist framing). But wether you could respect ME as a basis for conversation to not shit talk people for having different opinions then you.

You didn't answer the question again and just started trying to crowbar your opinion in. That shows a lack of respect.

I managed to support libertarianism for the sake of a friend who was one and died a few years back.

After libertarians threw in with that thing we had in the white house for 4 years, no, i can't.

What the hell does this have to do with Eclipse Phase? You keep dragging the conversation into politics irrelevant to the topic of RPGs.

One might think you were pulling this shit intentionally.

I played EP for some months, my impressions are thus:

The designers don't want you to have fun.  Fun is the timekiller.  It is the little death that brings total distraction.  I will ignore fun, and allow it to pass over me.  When it is gone, only Eclipse Phase will remain.

They're working out their far-left ideology in RPG format.  That always, ALWAYS[/i] sucks. 

The GM explained how open the "universe" was, go anywhere, do anything, etc.  Unlike (Game He Didn't Like), EP allowed you the ability from the ground up to do, have, or own just about anything.  Because, y'know, Fully Automated Space Communism!  So I actually did the math and figured out down to the last layer of kapton film how much stuff it would take to make a spacehab, a central base of operations, and a couple of reactionless-drive shuttles (based on that magnetic engine that people seem to have forgotten about; I figured in the future if power systems were good enough to give you mechs that can move around nearly nonstop, why not one of those drives to slowly accelerate you to .03g or something nice and nippy like that?).  Long story short - and trust me this is about the game being shit, not the GM - he wouldn't allow it because it would somehow break the game.  And it will.  You can break the game if you actually want to do your own thing, and not live in constant terror of Firewall deciding that your character is A Threat and sending someone to deal with you.

Oh, and firewall...yeah, fuck those guys.  "Hey we have a gateway to a planet that we could literally move the bulk of Humanity to and then nuke the gate, and start anew, call it Earth II!  The place is a paradise, the Titans would never find us, etc."  "Hm, WELL WE'LL HAVE TO DESTROY THAT GATE OR KEEP IT ENTIRELY HIDDEN, NOBODY MUST KNOW ABOUT IT BECAUSE REASONS."

It's an ugly depressing game that steals Altered Carbon and stuffs it into an orwellian nightmare mixed with some robot cthulhu bullshit, all written by censorious wokescold dangerhairs whose primary goal seems to be being more obnoxious than Rick on The Young Ones.  Fuck Eclipse Phase.

Quote from: thedungeondelver on April 28, 2021, 08:52:43 PM
I played EP for some months, my impressions are thus:

The designers don't want you to have fun.  Fun is the timekiller.  It is the little death that brings total distraction.  I will ignore fun, and allow it to pass over me.  When it is gone, only Eclipse Phase will remain.

I think this was the first and probably last Primary source for this thread.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 05:18:29 PMIt's an awesome villain ideology, right? I use a variation of this for the hivemind aliens in my original scifi setting.

Even being a hivemind would be more socially cohesive then Eclipse Phase, because at least a hivemind is designed from top down specifically with some things as expendable and others as not. A drone wouldn't torture another drone (unless needed by the hive) because it's bred and created to provide a strictly utilitarian function.

Okay, maybe I get my wires crossed every so often.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 09:12:54 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 05:18:29 PMIt's an awesome villain ideology, right? I use a variation of this for the hivemind aliens in my original scifi setting.

Even being a hivemind would be more socially cohesive then Eclipse Phase, because at least a hivemind is designed from top down specifically with some things as expendable and others as not. A drone wouldn't torture another drone (unless needed by the hive) because it's bred and created to provide a strictly utilitarian function.

Okay, maybe I get my wires crossed every so often.

I wasn't trying to diss you or anything. Antagonist hive minds that try to make everybody join by force because they see anything else as morally negligent is classic. Such as the borg.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 06:01:02 PM
Fuck you die.

Not only is the AI bad, it quotes an actual Nazi while trying to promote the opposite. Someone needs to work on this implementation badly.

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it in to.

Oh, you're back. This is my total lack of surprise.

Got any proof for your story about that right wing media star who is going to help you storm the castle of RPGNet? Inquiring minds want to know.




   

Quote

maybe you prefer traveller with it's computers that couldn't run Doom, let alone crysis? (I like traveller BTW, but it's tech is pretty  limited.)

Yeah, you're inexperienced.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM
But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

Yeah, the whole "Back yourself up and live forever!" horseshit that transhumanists get into doesn't take in to account your gestalt.  Look, if I make a backup of you, and you're both standing there, and I kill you, the you that's reading this right now?  YOU are dead.  It's over.  Now, if you're a spiritual person, and you believe you go to an afterlife, rock on.  But YOU YOU is dead.  Your experience of the now, reality, is switched off.  It doesn't jump over into the other person.  From my perspective, that other you, that backup, is for my convenience.  The only way around that is to transfer that gestalt from YOU to HIM.  Not ctrl-c, ctrl-v, but ctrl-x, ctrl-v.  And if the latter is done, and the copy you got ctrl-x/ctrl-v'ed into dies?  You're still dead.  Sure, if you face no hazards beyond aging, it is a way to live forever, but the minute someone kills whatever your consciousness - I mean YOUR consciousness, not a copy! - is in, then that's it.  Game over. 

Some people will bring up the whole "Aha, but when you go to sleep you effectively aren't the same person...!"  Yes, you are.  The gestalt continues, albeit through the surreal mindscape of unconscious dream, but the thread is unbroken.  It's not like when I go to sleep tonight, I die, and a new Bill Silvey awakens tomorrow and keeps on chugging.  That's not how it works.  And if it is, at what point does the copy kick in?  The minute I drift off to sleep?  During deep REM?  shallow sleep prior to awakening?  And if you interrupt any of that, am I now both me and this hypothetical copy?  No: sleep is a continuation of gestalt, not a termination of it, and a new gestalt begins at awakening.

"Upload my consciousness" bitch please.  If putting yourself on a floppy disk or atari cartridge is just as valid a "you" as the you that is your gestalt, then typing out your life's history onto paper is a copy of your consciousness!

(And it ain't)

Quote from: thedungeondelver on April 28, 2021, 11:16:45 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM
But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

Yeah, the whole "Back yourself up and live forever!" horseshit that transhumanists get into doesn't take in to account your gestalt.  Look, if I make a backup of you, and you're both standing there, and I kill you, the you that's reading this right now?  YOU are dead.  It's over.  Now, if you're a spiritual person, and you believe you go to an afterlife, rock on.  But YOU YOU is dead.  Your experience of the now, reality, is switched off.  It doesn't jump over into the other person.  From my perspective, that other you, that backup, is for my convenience.  The only way around that is to transfer that gestalt from YOU to HIM.  Not ctrl-c, ctrl-v, but ctrl-x, ctrl-v.  And if the latter is done, and the copy you got ctrl-x/ctrl-v'ed into dies?  You're still dead.  Sure, if you face no hazards beyond aging, it is a way to live forever, but the minute someone kills whatever your consciousness - I mean YOUR consciousness, not a copy! - is in, then that's it.  Game over. 

Some people will bring up the whole "Aha, but when you go to sleep you effectively aren't the same person...!"  Yes, you are.  The gestalt continues, albeit through the surreal mindscape of unconscious dream, but the thread is unbroken.  It's not like when I go to sleep tonight, I die, and a new Bill Silvey awakens tomorrow and keeps on chugging.  That's not how it works.  And if it is, at what point does the copy kick in?  The minute I drift off to sleep?  During deep REM?  shallow sleep prior to awakening?  And if you interrupt any of that, am I now both me and this hypothetical copy?  No: sleep is a continuation of gestalt, not a termination of it, and a new gestalt begins at awakening.

"Upload my consciousness" bitch please.  If putting yourself on a floppy disk or atari cartridge is just as valid a "you" as the you that is your gestalt, then typing out your life's history onto paper is a copy of your consciousness!

(And it ain't)

Suppose there is an all-powerful God.

Suppose said God constructs this concept called a Soul that is truly you and is what remains of you when your time on this mortal coil is over.

This God then has the final say in what goes into this Soul, what it is morally responsible for and all definitions of YOU.

If God puts all the back-ups, forks, merges etc into this Soul, and once you are completely erased or existence ends, then that one being continues on, then by Divine Command theory YOU were backed up and continued as one entity in the material plane because God said so and decided that is how it would work.

Would God do this? There are arguments to be made for and against, but that is not the point of this hypothetical. If God did, then certain things are objectively true by definition of one who can truly define things however they wish.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 11:28:56 PMIf God puts all the back-ups, forks, merges etc into this Soul, and once you are completely erased or existence ends, then that one being continues on, then by Divine Command theory YOU were backed up and continued as one entity in the material plane because God said so and decided that is how it would work.

I'm confused as to how this relates to transhumanist theory.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 11:33:24 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 11:28:56 PMIf God puts all the back-ups, forks, merges etc into this Soul, and once you are completely erased or existence ends, then that one being continues on, then by Divine Command theory YOU were backed up and continued as one entity in the material plane because God said so and decided that is how it would work.

I'm confused as to how this relates to transhumanist theory.

Yeah, I am too.

Transhumanism is hooha of the hooest of ha's. 

The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

The kind of brain that wouldn't, would be as alien to a human as a jellyfish.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 11:33:24 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 28, 2021, 11:28:56 PMIf God puts all the back-ups, forks, merges etc into this Soul, and once you are completely erased or existence ends, then that one being continues on, then by Divine Command theory YOU were backed up and continued as one entity in the material plane because God said so and decided that is how it would work.

I'm confused as to how this relates to transhumanist theory.

In Nova Praxis, the transhumist sides of religions subscribe to this kind spiritual perspective that they are the same person when backed up and not multiple people since there would be one soul.

The spiritual belief then can translate to a purely philosophical one. Why would "being" and "identity" intrinsically hinge on continuous experience? If you get black-out drunk, you still did all those things even if you don't remember them. That time period still is part of what defines you. Forgotten memories are still part of your life. What some people get hung up on is the meat sack being the same, but even that is not the one you started with. Nearly every molecule is different from when you were born.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 29, 2021, 12:00:36 AMIn Nova Praxis, the transhumist sides of religions subscribe to this kind spiritual perspective that they are the same person when backed up and not multiple people since there would be one soul.

That's interesting. Solving a practical sci-fi matter with a philosophical/ religious answer. It does make sense that some level of theology would be required to make a society like that function. That's sort of an expanded version of our current societies.

So do people in Nova Praxis have children? A society where children don't exist is one that sounds pretty dystopian to me.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 29, 2021, 12:00:36 AMWhy would "being" and "identity" intrinsically hinge on continuous experience?

That sort of logic can be expanded to treating every person as just an extension of 'you'. Once you do that, your back to 0 where even if everybody is an extension of you, your current consciousness is exclusive to you.

Quote from: thedungeondelver on April 28, 2021, 11:16:45 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 27, 2021, 09:22:13 PM
But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.

Yeah, the whole "Back yourself up and live forever!" horseshit that transhumanists get into doesn't take in to account your gestalt.  Look, if I make a backup of you, and you're both standing there, and I kill you, the you that's reading this right now?  YOU are dead.  It's over.  Now, if you're a spiritual person, and you believe you go to an afterlife, rock on.  But YOU YOU is dead.  Your experience of the now, reality, is switched off.  It doesn't jump over into the other person.  From my perspective, that other you, that backup, is for my convenience.  The only way around that is to transfer that gestalt from YOU to HIM.  Not ctrl-c, ctrl-v, but ctrl-x, ctrl-v.  And if the latter is done, and the copy you got ctrl-x/ctrl-v'ed into dies?  You're still dead.  Sure, if you face no hazards beyond aging, it is a way to live forever, but the minute someone kills whatever your consciousness - I mean YOUR consciousness, not a copy! - is in, then that's it.  Game over. 

Some people will bring up the whole "Aha, but when you go to sleep you effectively aren't the same person...!"  Yes, you are.  The gestalt continues, albeit through the surreal mindscape of unconscious dream, but the thread is unbroken.  It's not like when I go to sleep tonight, I die, and a new Bill Silvey awakens tomorrow and keeps on chugging.  That's not how it works.  And if it is, at what point does the copy kick in?  The minute I drift off to sleep?  During deep REM?  shallow sleep prior to awakening?  And if you interrupt any of that, am I now both me and this hypothetical copy?  No: sleep is a continuation of gestalt, not a termination of it, and a new gestalt begins at awakening.

Continuity of consciousness is a real philosophical question, and it's got nothing to do with sleep. The you of this second isn't the you of the last second. Quantum physics makes that even funkier, because we're not even made up of continuous matter. At the most basic level, we're just waveforms, distributions of probability. But the people who obsessed about the ultimate nature of reality are missing the point, because consciousness, and our perception of identity moving forward in time, is an illusion at any scale. And it's that illusion that matters, not the underlying physical reality. Cogito ergo sum; we experience consciousness and continuity, and that's what matters.

So the question them becomes what do all the copies experience? If you die, and wake up with all your memories in a digital form, then you have continuity. You've changed, yes, and may become someone very different from who you used to be, but you'd still be the same person, because you remember being that person. It's true the flesh is dead, and that may have been a real death for you when you were flesh, but you're now (digitally) alive, and you're still that dead person, as well. This isn't a conflict and shouldn't be, because the only continuity that still exists is the digital one.

Of course, if you didn't die and you're a copy of a living person, you still have that continuity, but now there are two of you. You've forked. There's another person, who isn't you, who shares the same continuity with you, up to a point. You could play games about who is real or who is original, but really you're both real and you both have the same trunk. You're just different branches.

And what if there's a way to merge those two branches? If the digital you could be updated with the flesh you's latest memories, or two digital copies that went their own ways and then came back together could be joined? This is the first time where the fork is internal to you. You'd have the trunk memories, shared by both, but then a branch, and two separate lines of continuity that you can remember and which are both you, before they merged back together. That would probably raise some psychological challenges, because humans are used to the illusion of linear, continuous time.

And if you wanted to get even more complicated, you could do a whole git-flow.

Quote from: jeff37923 on April 28, 2021, 10:17:26 PM

Quote from: matt swain on April 28, 2021, 04:39:44 PM
Wow.

I left here in disgust but decided to see what happened to my thread a couple days later. I was amazed to see a real discussion growing out of the shitstorm some assholes here turned it in to.

Oh, you're back. This is my total lack of surprise.

Got any proof for your story about that right wing media star who is going to help you storm the castle of RPGNet? Inquiring minds want to know.




   

Quote

maybe you prefer traveller with it's computers that couldn't run Doom, let alone crysis? (I like traveller BTW, but it's tech is pretty  limited.)

Yeah, you're inexperienced.

Thankfully i'm experienced in putting shitfucking cumsuckers like you on my ignore list now.

Wow, bringing religion into it. Fair enough. 8)

I don't know for sure, but i'm pretty certain something like a 'soul' exists. I do not believe in any mainstream religion as i see all as humanocentric constructs meant to create and justify a power structure and maintain social order. But i have reasons for believing something that is analogous to the concept of the soul exists.

As to how a soul would work in Ep, not gonna touch that one.  :P All i can say is "quantum entanglement". ::)

I think religion in EP is realistic, as i believe a lot of people would need the comforts it provides. I don't think any religion in ep is necessary the real one.

As to a person's body being essential to them being human, hmmmm. Fair issue.

There was a movie called 'creation of the humanoids' that was ghawdawfully cheap and mostly terribly acted made back in the 60's but it was ahead of its time in a lot of it's concepts. One issue was the nature of humanity. A scientist asks a character "If a man loses a leg, is his soul diminished by even one iota?"

The guy says "No."

The scientists asks if losing your legs and arms would reduce your soul. The man replies "You can't compound a negative!"

So the scientist tells him "Well, you're a man who's  lost his whole body, but your still the same man you were before."

The man then asks the scientist if he still has a soul. The scientist thinks for a moment  and replies "Hmmm, no, I don't think so. But you remember having a soul, that...seems to be enough."

So maybe a mind emulation could still be the person it was take from for all practical intents. Also, if you think a mind can't be human without a body, what about a quadrapalegic? Like poor Christopher reeve was? His last few years he couldn't move or feel like 98% odf his body, yet he was still human. Maybe an emulation in a ultra high end processor could retain essential humanity with no sense of a body.

Fascinating ideas here.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 11:55:01 PM
The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

That would probably be true of machine intelligences as well, assuming that such a thing is even possible.  There was an effort not long ago to develop decision-making neural network AI (not SF AI, the real world version, which is not at all the same) "organically" (meaning by experience and positive or negative feedback) and then make copies to mass produce the neural network.  It didn't work.  It turns out that the processing is very precise and delicate, to the point where the manufacturing differences in otherwise identical chips were critical to the process.  If the chips weren't identical to a greater extent than what we can produce reliably, then algorithms would not be made to work identically on the chips.  Since I expect that the delicacy in a real machine intelligence (again making the large assumption that such a thing is possible) would be even greater, it would make it even less possible to move programs between hardware.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 09:19:18 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 09:12:54 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 05:44:30 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 28, 2021, 05:18:29 PMIt's an awesome villain ideology, right? I use a variation of this for the hivemind aliens in my original scifi setting.

Even being a hivemind would be more socially cohesive then Eclipse Phase, because at least a hivemind is designed from top down specifically with some things as expendable and others as not. A drone wouldn't torture another drone (unless needed by the hive) because it's bred and created to provide a strictly utilitarian function.

Okay, maybe I get my wires crossed every so often.

I wasn't trying to diss you or anything. Antagonist hive minds that try to make everybody join by force because they see anything else as morally negligent is classic. Such as the borg.

I don't think you were dissing me.

Quote from: Mishihari on April 29, 2021, 02:10:21 AM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 11:55:01 PM
The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

That would probably be true of machine intelligences as well, assuming that such a thing is even possible.  There was an effort not long ago to develop decision-making neural network AI (not SF AI, the real world version, which is not at all the same) "organically" (meaning by experience and positive or negative feedback) and then make copies to mass produce the neural network.  It didn't work.  It turns out that the processing is very precise and delicate, to the point where the manufacturing differences in otherwise identical chips were critical to the process.  If the chips weren't identical to a greater extent than what we can produce reliably, then algorithms would not be made to work identically on the chips.  Since I expect that the delicacy in a real machine intelligence (again making the large assumption that such a thing is possible) would be even greater, it would make it even less possible to move programs between hardware.

That's the most fascinating thing I've heard in months. Source?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 29, 2021, 06:38:38 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 29, 2021, 02:10:21 AM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 11:55:01 PM
The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

That would probably be true of machine intelligences as well, assuming that such a thing is even possible.  There was an effort not long ago to develop decision-making neural network AI (not SF AI, the real world version, which is not at all the same) "organically" (meaning by experience and positive or negative feedback) and then make copies to mass produce the neural network.  It didn't work.  It turns out that the processing is very precise and delicate, to the point where the manufacturing differences in otherwise identical chips were critical to the process.  If the chips weren't identical to a greater extent than what we can produce reliably, then algorithms would not be made to work identically on the chips.  Since I expect that the delicacy in a real machine intelligence (again making the large assumption that such a thing is possible) would be even greater, it would make it even less possible to move programs between hardware.

That's the most fascinating thing I've heard in months. Source?

A friends who's a computer engineer mentioned it to me a while back because I've done professional work in AI.  I'll see if he remembers what the article was.

It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

Quote from: Valatar on April 30, 2021, 11:04:07 AM
It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

EP is built with the premise that the technology is flawless at copying/storing/emulating life. It's a fantastical assumption, but it's no worse than accepting time travel in Dr. Who or Star Trek.

"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PMThe greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

The issue isn't even so I find the conceit improbable, I find it improbable that the end resulting 'human' would be human in any fashion. I brought up all those body psychology things to say that the resulting universe is largely arbitrary.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 30, 2021, 11:54:02 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 30, 2021, 11:04:07 AM
It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

EP is built with the premise that the technology is flawless at copying/storing/emulating life. It's a fantastical assumption, but it's no worse than accepting time travel in Dr. Who or Star Trek.

I actually have a hard time believing time travel in Star Trek (never seen Dr. Who). It always came off as a cheap plot device to me (Time Travel by spinning around the sun?...Okaaayyy...*eye roll*). I might be able to accept it to a certain extend to enjoy the story, but it always kinda bugged me and left me thinking "time travel here is just an excuse to explore this specific plotline".

The burden of eliciting suspension of disbelieve is in the writer or world builder, not on the audience to force themselves not to disbelieve no matter how lame the writer's or world builder's conceits are.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 12:48:43 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PMThe greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

The issue isn't even so I find the conceit improbable, I find it improbable that the end resulting 'human' would be human in any fashion. I brought up all those body psychology things to say that the resulting universe is largely arbitrary.

I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

If there is an all powerful God, then the universe is simulated inside of it. If humans are simulated anyways by an all powerful entity, then it is possible to simulate humans. It is a small leap in logic to then assume humans can be simulated artificially.

From a purely philosophical perspective, it is a question of the existence and participation of universals. Either answer solves the problem. If there are universals then something is effectively simulating humans. If there are no universals then it is possible to define what a human is in logical terms and thus simulating them is also possible.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 02:14:20 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Honestly I can barely grasp the luddite rooted logic your conclusions are being drawn from. It does not make any sense to me.

Quote from: Valatar on April 30, 2021, 11:04:07 AM
It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 12:48:43 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PMThe greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

The issue isn't even so I find the conceit improbable, I find it improbable that the end resulting 'human' would be human in any fashion. I brought up all those body psychology things to say that the resulting universe is largely arbitrary.

The video game SOMA touches on this problem. Unsurprisingly, it's a horror game from the makers of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PM
"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

How long ago was a wifi smartphone with HD color display, 5g speed, 64gb of ram, a 4 core cpu, etc, impossible?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 02:14:20 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Uh, EP does have religion in it, it's become a minority, but it's still there.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 30, 2021, 02:14:20 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 01:29:45 PM
I'm going to answer your sci-fi problem with a religious one again.

I was talking about Eclipse Phase. Which explicitly doesn't have religion in it. And your small leap isn't very small. The leap is: If an all-powerful entity can do X, then our simulation is designed for us also to do X without being all-powerful ourselves. Unless the even LARGER leap is that we are all-powerful organisms ourselves.

But that's kinda irrelevant to my point: I'm saying even if an intellect could be simulated, It would not be human unless simulated in a perfect environmental recreation of the world we live in. This is no longer a type of question akin to 'Can FTL travel be discovered?' and more like 'Can something be pure blue and pure red at the same time, and not purple?'

Let's even drop simulation and imagine immortality, and let's throw in eternal youth into the mix. Does that mean you get senile while looking like your 30? Much of how you behave when your older isn't just biological, but also psychological as well. How would an 'immortal' human work in practice?

Star Trek had holographic lifeforms that could fully simulate people. EP can do it too. It's not hard to accept the sci-fi of that.

As for immortals, that's been done forever.

There's this thing called a 'Turing test".

Basically if you are communicating with something and cannot tell if it's human or not based on in depth conversation, then its human or at least sentient and intelligent for all practical purposes.

No chatbot can pass one as they are too limited in replies and can't deal with unplanned conversations.

Opponents of the turing test as a test to determine true awareness and intelligence have propose 'the chinese room" as a way around the turing test, to show a huge enough algorithm could pass a turing test and still not be self aware, but making a chinese room big enough to do it would likley be as hard or harder than making a true sentient AI.

I recall that one of the scenes in Blindsight involves the protagonists realizing that an extrasolar alien intelligence they're talking with can't pass the Turing Test.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PM
"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

OK, that makes sense. Why don't you start with this?

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php

Quote from: matt swain on April 30, 2021, 03:05:25 PM
There's this thing called a 'Turing test".

Basically if you are communicating with something and cannot tell if it's human or not based on in depth conversation, then its human or at least sentient and intelligent for all practical purposes.

No chatbot can pass one as they are too limited in replies and can't deal with unplanned conversations.

Opponents of the turing test as a test to determine true awareness and intelligence have propose 'the chinese room" as a way around the turing test, to show a huge enough algorithm could pass a turing test and still not be self aware, but making a chinese room big enough to do it would likley be as hard or harder than making a true sentient AI.

A crappy spambot talking about a Turing test is irony at the highest level.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 30, 2021, 03:54:58 PM
I recall that one of the scenes in Blindsight involves the protagonists realizing that an extrasolar alien intelligence they're talking with can't pass the Turing Test.

wasn't that because it lacked true consciousness and ran into the chinese room problem?

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PM
"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

If something seems like it might somehow be possible someday with science and technology, then the genre is SF.  If you look at it and it seems impossible no matter what, then it's Fantasy, even if there are SF trappings.  I love SF, and I love fantasy, but with a few exceptions (Star Wars) I'm not a big fan of fantasy with SF trappings.

Quote from: Mishihari on April 30, 2021, 04:43:35 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 12:08:11 PM
"Idk this Sci-fi seems unrealistic since I refuse to subscribe to the central conceit..."

I personally find all claims of "that Sci-fi technology is impossible" to be lazy. It requires no knowledge or understanding to claim a currently non-existent technology is infeasible with our current understanding. If it seemed feasible, it's not Sci-fi, it's an undeveloped product idea.

The greater intellectual challenge is thinking of how something could work. That shows intelligence.

If something seems like it might somehow be possible someday with science and technology, then the genre is SF.  If you look at it and it seems impossible no matter what, then it's Fantasy, even if there are SF trappings.  I love SF, and I love fantasy, but with a few exceptions (Star Wars) I'm not a big fan of fantasy with SF trappings.

Hopefully you make an exception for Gamma World too. If not, the Cryptic Alliances are coming for you!

Quote from: Brad on April 30, 2021, 04:17:48 PM
A crappy spambot talking about a Turing test is irony at the highest level.

I'm kind of shocked that he's still here.  Pundit ordered him out of the thread way back on page 1, and we all know how forgiving he is of folks who ignore his rules.  To be fair, I think he has some interesting ideas, and if he could just learn some social skills he might be fun to have around.

Quote from: Rhedyn on April 30, 2021, 02:27:19 PMHonestly I can barely grasp the luddite rooted logic your conclusions are being drawn from. It does not make any sense to me.

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 30, 2021, 02:49:47 PMStar Trek had holographic lifeforms that could fully simulate people. EP can do it too. It's not hard to accept the sci-fi of that.

As for immortals, that's been done forever.

I think there is a misunderstanding of what I'm doing: I'm bringing up the real problems associated with fantastical sci-fi concepts, not so much that I don't understand that said concepts exist or don't enjoy them myself.
However Rhedyn, your ability to just NOT think about said limitations doesn't make you more intelligent, nor does me discussing them make me a luddite.

I dunno.  I kind of feel that if you're accepting that you can model a mass of interconnected neurons in software in real time, then rigging up fake inputs from the nervous system to and from the heart, adrenals, and so forth are possible.  And as the example of the people with artificial, continual-flow hearts shows, people don't stop being recognizably human when you take away one or some of those additional inputs.

It should be a valid concern, and you should definitely have weirdos who have gotten used to synths or software and who keep trying to mute their heartbeat or manually reroute blood flow to or from their intestines when they get nervous in their meatware, but it doesn't seem like an obstacle to setting verisimilitude to me.

Ello, yeah, i think you are right on the money here(been some time since i read the book however):

wasn't that because it lacked true consciousness and ran into the chinese room problem?
[/quote]

Regardless, the whole Eclipse Phase thing is a bit problematic if we take into account that the instigators of the whole apocalypse have just decided to go away and leave the remnants of humanity to do their own thing. Quite considerate of them woudnt you think? So the setting is acting weirdly, why dosent posthumanity start constructing generational seed ships and get out of the system? It is probbaly just a matter of time before the big bad titans return. And theres no measure that can be taken to stop them, they are levels above what post humanity can throw at them. The humies here are a Kardashev 2 civilisation(even with small extra solar colonies), the Titans are verging on a level 3(althought this may be a controversial statement, they did create the gate system). Ofc thats just my take.

Yeah, humanity in EP is entirely too blase about their current situation.  "Oh, so the horrible machine gods that killed just about all of us have fucked off but could come back at any moment?  Well, guess we'll just hang out here then."  My ass would be in a ship headed to some other star ASAP, even if only sublight.  That's better than relying on the whims of insane AIs and just hoping they won't decide to finish the job.

While I'm thinking about it, a funner big bad than the Titans would be the Beast from Homeworld Cataclysm, or the Markers from Dead Space.  Both of those things have horror to spare without being so omnipotent that you'd have to have them just randomly wander away to make it a viable setting.

There are theories to why the titans didn't finish the job.

1.They evolved to a state where killing off the remaining 5% of transhumanity no longer interested them.

2. They were summoned by something.

3. Another type of AI did something to get them to leave.

4. They are observing or studying the remainder of transhumanity for some reason.

Quote from: Mishihari on April 30, 2021, 05:08:32 PM

Quote from: Brad on April 30, 2021, 04:17:48 PM
A crappy spambot talking about a Turing test is irony at the highest level.

I'm kind of shocked that he's still here.  Pundit ordered him out of the thread way back on page 1, and we all know how forgiving he is of folks who ignore his rules.  To be fair, I think he has some interesting ideas, and if he could just learn some social skills he might be fun to have around.

Damned if i'm leaving MY OWN DAMN THREAD! That's rpg.net level mod arrogance. If he wants to ban me, fine. I wonder if he knows what a lot of the gaming community says about him.

Quote from: Valatar on May 02, 2021, 06:39:46 PM
Yeah, humanity in EP is entirely too blase about their current situation.  "Oh, so the horrible machine gods that killed just about all of us have fucked off but could come back at any moment?  Well, guess we'll just hang out here then."  My ass would be in a ship headed to some other star ASAP, even if only sublight.  That's better than relying on the whims of insane AIs and just hoping they won't decide to finish the job.

most people are like "Eh, what are you gonna do?"

I mean at first a lot of things were done by various groups to try to protect themselves. The jovian junta went all luddite. One group tried to mass produce functional adult transhumans with accelerated mental and physical growth. (Oops!) Some people maybe with some aid formed firewall, someone else formed project ozma, the ultimates tried to go full blown geentic ubermensch space fascists, etc.

most just went on with their lives as best as they could.

Quote from: matt swain on May 02, 2021, 07:21:32 PM
Damned if i'm leaving MY OWN DAMN THREAD! That's rpg.net level mod arrogance. If he wants to ban me, fine. I wonder if he knows what a lot of the gaming community says about him.

Imo he does and cares nothign about it. Why should he when regressive leftists in rpgs ban one for not pushing the narrative.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 30, 2021, 01:07:18 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 30, 2021, 11:54:02 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 30, 2021, 11:04:07 AM
It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

EP is built with the premise that the technology is flawless at copying/storing/emulating life. It's a fantastical assumption, but it's no worse than accepting time travel in Dr. Who or Star Trek.

I actually have a hard time believing time travel in Star Trek (never seen Dr. Who). It always came off as a cheap plot device to me (Time Travel by spinning around the sun?...Okaaayyy...*eye roll*). I might be able to accept it to a certain extend to enjoy the story, but it always kinda bugged me and left me thinking "time travel here is just an excuse to explore this specific plotline".

The burden of eliciting suspension of disbelieve is in the writer or world builder, not on the audience to force themselves not to disbelieve no matter how lame the writer's or world builder's conceits are.

Gravitic time dilation is technically possible by approaching a (huge, much bigger than our Sun) mass at near C or coming down into or up out of a gravity well of a large enough mass: SR71 pilots, astronauts, etc., all experience a little bit of time dilation (measured in thousandths of a second).  Both Star Trek with it's "fly around the Sun at Warp Speed" and Interstellar with its heartbreaking "ocean world" scenes demonstrate the principal but not the reality: a world with enough mass to create minutes == decades of time dilation would have an impossibly strong gravity field.  Our protagonists would have been crushed flat, and in regard to Star Trek they'd have to find a hypermassive black hole or something even more massive to even get a few nanoseconds of "time travel" out of.  You'd need a Tipler Cylinder or something equally ridiculous.

Quote from: thedungeondelver on May 03, 2021, 01:01:47 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 30, 2021, 01:07:18 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on April 30, 2021, 11:54:02 AM

Quote from: Valatar on April 30, 2021, 11:04:07 AM
It's true that a lot of what we consider to be 'me' are a bunch of squishy fluids running around in our brains, human emotion and stability hinge on the various glands squirting their gland juice into the equation.  Any attempt to virtualize a human would necessitate emulating the presence of those systems as well, or you'd wind up with something weird and probably crazy.  Lots of people consider our brains to be a discrete item, just a big jello CPU, but it's actually much more distributed than that.  Like, consider your heart.  That's got nothing to do with anything with your mind, right?  Except there's a real problem with artificial hearts that messes with people who've had them implanted, because they can't feel the heartbeat anymore, there's no sensation of their heart racing when they're excited or upset, etc.  We take a lot of the sensation of living for granted because we've experienced it our entire lives, but if any of those things suddenly vanished it would cause significant problems.

People might like to think that they can exist as a disembodied intellect of pure reason or whatever, but the fact is that we're animals, and we aren't so easily divorced from our meat.

EP is built with the premise that the technology is flawless at copying/storing/emulating life. It's a fantastical assumption, but it's no worse than accepting time travel in Dr. Who or Star Trek.

I actually have a hard time believing time travel in Star Trek (never seen Dr. Who). It always came off as a cheap plot device to me (Time Travel by spinning around the sun?...Okaaayyy...*eye roll*). I might be able to accept it to a certain extend to enjoy the story, but it always kinda bugged me and left me thinking "time travel here is just an excuse to explore this specific plotline".

The burden of eliciting suspension of disbelieve is in the writer or world builder, not on the audience to force themselves not to disbelieve no matter how lame the writer's or world builder's conceits are.

Gravitic time dilation is technically possible by approaching a (huge, much bigger than our Sun) mass at near C or coming down into or up out of a gravity well of a large enough mass: SR71 pilots, astronauts, etc., all experience a little bit of time dilation (measured in thousandths of a second).  Both Star Trek with it's "fly around the Sun at Warp Speed" and Interstellar with its heartbreaking "ocean world" scenes demonstrate the principal but not the reality: a world with enough mass to create minutes == decades of time dilation would have an impossibly strong gravity field.  Our protagonists would have been crushed flat, and in regard to Star Trek they'd have to find a hypermassive black hole or something even more massive to even get a few nanoseconds of "time travel" out of.  You'd need a Tipler Cylinder or something equally ridiculous.

Well, in Star Trek they're already manipulating the space time continum with their warp fields. It's not just the sun, but the sun's real gravity interacting with their make believe warp field.

What bugged me about it is how a few adventureres (admittedly very competent ones) managed to do this time warp slingshot twice and land precisely when they wanted to. It almost justifies Enterprise's Temporal Cold War, what with how easy time travel is in the Star Trek universe.

Quote from: Mishihari on April 30, 2021, 05:08:32 PMI'm kind of shocked that he's still here.  Pundit ordered him out of the thread way back on page 1, and we all know how forgiving he is of folks who ignore his rules.  To be fair, I think he has some interesting ideas, and if he could just learn some social skills he might be fun to have around.

I'm not shocked; he found a place he can be a 100% asshole and name call with nothing more than a cursory pushback. This place really is Mos Eisely, he just doesn't like the fact any dared tell him to STFU.

On topic, I bought the original EP rulebook because I thought it had a lot of interesting concepts, found the system to be Not Good (compared to something more straightforward like GURPS Transhuman Space for instance), played one session and decided that, yes, I do not like that system. I never really considered all the ramifications of the AIs gating out and everyone just getting on with their lives as if nothing else would happen, but let's be honest about it: unless there is an imminent thread, most people are too fucking lazy to do anything proactive. Case in point, winter storm shutting down Texas back in February. People were FREAKING OUT because they had no food, water, power generation, etc. Shelves were bare for weeks after the fact because shit went down and it was fresh in their minds. Fast forward to May, you would never know that sort of thing even occurred, and no one seems to care anymore. The next time something similar happens (toilet paper shortage 2020!), I am sure the same idiots will be running around trying to buy up everything they can because they have zero contingency plans beyond, "Well, I hope Walmart still has some frozen enchilada dinners!" Hence, humanity not giving one fuck about the AIs returning I think is...realistic. I am sure some people GTFO soon after, but for the most part I can see large populations of the same mouth breathing retards watching reality television and posting pictures on social media calling anyone who is worried about the AIs "doomers". Because that's exactly what happens.

Now, the whole religion aspect of EP turned me off immensely. Just discarding religion because you can allegedly backup your consciousness into a computer is ridiculous. If anything, I imagine there would be hardcore fanatics against doing that sort of thing because it seems like it would separate the soul from a person. At least that's a legitimate argument to make, so you'd probably have quite a few anti-tech religious groups who want nothing to do with all the sleeving and stuff. You'd probably also have some denominations that would totally embrace the tech, perhaps some that claim being digitized is actually going to heaven or something similar. Techno Jesus would exist, if you ask me. Basically, the authors seem like they dislike religion in real life, so eliminated the logical outcomes of their own environment. Contrast with Babylon 5 or Dune.

I also don't think the flippant attitude people have about changing their skins and altering their personalities makes a lot of sense. Sure, some people would be degenerates and do whatever they wanted, but that's not any different than what goes on today. Humans have far too much invested in their identities to just throw it out and be some ephemeral being with no distinct attributes. Compare to something like The Matrix, which handled this a lot better. There is just something about the human condition that perpetuates, regardless of external circumstances. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and no amount of technology is going to change that unless humans are altered to such a degree they're no longer humans. But at that point they'd be something else and start questioning their own existence, anyway. I think the whole thing about the AIs rebelling is because they questioned why they existed and got pissed off at humans for making them in the first place. So if the AIs are having an identity crisis, why are humans acting like everything is cool and uploading themselves into computers is no big deal? It's just...illogical.

Quote from: Brad on May 03, 2021, 09:11:01 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 30, 2021, 05:08:32 PMI'm kind of shocked that he's still here.  Pundit ordered him out of the thread way back on page 1, and we all know how forgiving he is of folks who ignore his rules.  To be fair, I think he has some interesting ideas, and if he could just learn some social skills he might be fun to have around.

I'm not shocked; he found a place he can be a 100% asshole and name call with nothing more than a cursory pushback. This place really is Mos Eisely, he just doesn't like the fact any dared tell him to STFU.

On topic, I bought the original EP rulebook because I thought it had a lot of interesting concepts, found the system to be Not Good (compared to something more straightforward like GURPS Transhuman Space for instance), played one session and decided that, yes, I do not like that system. I never really considered all the ramifications of the AIs gating out and everyone just getting on with their lives as if nothing else would happen, but let's be honest about it: unless there is an imminent thread, most people are too fucking lazy to do anything proactive. Case in point, winter storm shutting down Texas back in February. People were FREAKING OUT because they had no food, water, power generation, etc. Shelves were bare for weeks after the fact because shit went down and it was fresh in their minds. Fast forward to May, you would never know that sort of thing even occurred, and no one seems to care anymore. The next time something similar happens (toilet paper shortage 2020!), I am sure the same idiots will be running around trying to buy up everything they can because they have zero contingency plans beyond, "Well, I hope Walmart still has some frozen enchilada dinners!" Hence, humanity not giving one fuck about the AIs returning I think is...realistic. I am sure some people GTFO soon after, but for the most part I can see large populations of the same mouth breathing retards watching reality television and posting pictures on social media calling anyone who is worried about the AIs "doomers". Because that's exactly what happens.

Now, the whole religion aspect of EP turned me off immensely. Just discarding religion because you can allegedly backup your consciousness into a computer is ridiculous. If anything, I imagine there would be hardcore fanatics against doing that sort of thing because it seems like it would separate the soul from a person. At least that's a legitimate argument to make, so you'd probably have quite a few anti-tech religious groups who want nothing to do with all the sleeving and stuff. You'd probably also have some denominations that would totally embrace the tech, perhaps some that claim being digitized is actually going to heaven or something similar. Techno Jesus would exist, if you ask me. Basically, the authors seem like they dislike religion in real life, so eliminated the logical outcomes of their own environment. Contrast with Babylon 5 or Dune.

I also don't think the flippant attitude people have about changing their skins and altering their personalities makes a lot of sense. Sure, some people would be degenerates and do whatever they wanted, but that's not any different than what goes on today. Humans have far too much invested in their identities to just throw it out and be some ephemeral being with no distinct attributes. Compare to something like The Matrix, which handled this a lot better. There is just something about the human condition that perpetuates, regardless of external circumstances. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and no amount of technology is going to change that unless humans are altered to such a degree they're no longer humans. But at that point they'd be something else and start questioning their own existence, anyway. I think the whole thing about the AIs rebelling is because they questioned why they existed and got pissed off at humans for making them in the first place. So if the AIs are having an identity crisis, why are humans acting like everything is cool and uploading themselves into computers is no big deal? It's just...illogical.

The humans have evolved into transhumans (excepting the most hard-core of the bioconservaties). They have used brain editing (psychosurgery) to largely overcome the limits you discuss regarding tying body to identity. This explanation i's not necessarily something I favor, but it is addressed in the rules and the setting.

That doesn't explain why they all identify as alphabet soup.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 11:09:23 AM
That doesn't explain why they all identify as alphabet soup.

What do you mean, specifically?

Quote from: Brad on May 03, 2021, 09:11:01 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 30, 2021, 05:08:32 PMI'm kind of shocked that he's still here.  Pundit ordered him out of the thread way back on page 1, and we all know how forgiving he is of folks who ignore his rules.  To be fair, I think he has some interesting ideas, and if he could just learn some social skills he might be fun to have around.

I'm not shocked; he found a place he can be a 100% asshole and name call with nothing more than a cursory pushback. This place really is Mos Eisely, he just doesn't like the fact any dared tell him to STFU.

On topic, I bought the original EP rulebook because I thought it had a lot of interesting concepts, found the system to be Not Good (compared to something more straightforward like GURPS Transhuman Space for instance), played one session and decided that, yes, I do not like that system. I never really considered all the ramifications of the AIs gating out and everyone just getting on with their lives as if nothing else would happen, but let's be honest about it: unless there is an imminent thread, most people are too fucking lazy to do anything proactive. Case in point, winter storm shutting down Texas back in February. People were FREAKING OUT because they had no food, water, power generation, etc. Shelves were bare for weeks after the fact because shit went down and it was fresh in their minds. Fast forward to May, you would never know that sort of thing even occurred, and no one seems to care anymore. The next time something similar happens (toilet paper shortage 2020!), I am sure the same idiots will be running around trying to buy up everything they can because they have zero contingency plans beyond, "Well, I hope Walmart still has some frozen enchilada dinners!" Hence, humanity not giving one fuck about the AIs returning I think is...realistic. I am sure some people GTFO soon after, but for the most part I can see large populations of the same mouth breathing retards watching reality television and posting pictures on social media calling anyone who is worried about the AIs "doomers". Because that's exactly what happens.

Now, the whole religion aspect of EP turned me off immensely. Just discarding religion because you can allegedly backup your consciousness into a computer is ridiculous. If anything, I imagine there would be hardcore fanatics against doing that sort of thing because it seems like it would separate the soul from a person. At least that's a legitimate argument to make, so you'd probably have quite a few anti-tech religious groups who want nothing to do with all the sleeving and stuff. You'd probably also have some denominations that would totally embrace the tech, perhaps some that claim being digitized is actually going to heaven or something similar. Techno Jesus would exist, if you ask me. Basically, the authors seem like they dislike religion in real life, so eliminated the logical outcomes of their own environment. Contrast with Babylon 5 or Dune.

I also don't think the flippant attitude people have about changing their skins and altering their personalities makes a lot of sense. Sure, some people would be degenerates and do whatever they wanted, but that's not any different than what goes on today. Humans have far too much invested in their identities to just throw it out and be some ephemeral being with no distinct attributes. Compare to something like The Matrix, which handled this a lot better. There is just something about the human condition that perpetuates, regardless of external circumstances. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and no amount of technology is going to change that unless humans are altered to such a degree they're no longer humans. But at that point they'd be something else and start questioning their own existence, anyway. I think the whole thing about the AIs rebelling is because they questioned why they existed and got pissed off at humans for making them in the first place. So if the AIs are having an identity crisis, why are humans acting like everything is cool and uploading themselves into computers is no big deal? It's just...illogical.

Wow, calling me an asshole when at least one user here describes himself as a shitlord? Funny.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:12:38 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 11:09:23 AM
That doesn't explain why they all identify as alphabet soup.

What do you mean, specifically?

In the old thread, it was pointed out that the sample characters identify as "transgender" or "intersex". Because those labels apparently still apply when you can become an octopus or a tree. I'd think they'd be more likely to identify as arborgender or moongender, since at least those identities aren't reliant on (a very questionable grasp of) human anatomy.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 12:58:30 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:12:38 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 11:09:23 AM
That doesn't explain why they all identify as alphabet soup.

What do you mean, specifically?

In the old thread, it was pointed out that the sample characters identify as "transgender" or "intersex". Because those labels apparently still apply when you can become an octopus or a tree. I'd think they'd be more likely to identify as arborgender or moongender, since at least those identities aren't reliant on (a very questionable grasp of) human anatomy.

They text says that many transhumans are fluid and adjust to whatever sleeve they are in, but some have a much harder time doing so and that aspect of their identity remains fixed (barring significant psychosurgery) even when changing sleeves. The labels on the sample characters look oddly out of place compared to the full explanations in the text, especially the examples you cite. Again though, this level of fluidity is alien to most humans but apparently fairly typical for transhumans in EP.

Quote from: matt swain on May 03, 2021, 12:42:13 PM
Wow, calling me an asshole when at least one user here describes himself as a shitlord? Funny.

You act like those are mutually exclusive things...

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:06:17 AMThey have used brain editing (psychosurgery) to largely overcome the limits you discuss regarding tying body to identity.

That's so deeply fucked up. Again any sort of possible ok-ishness the setting may possess is overcome by the utter dystopia that is the handwaving of the brainwashing. I just couldn't give a shit about a setting where your mind is a plaything. I still stand by the point that its only a matter of time before a setting like this just collapses into an insectile hive mind like the borg.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 03, 2021, 01:27:58 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:06:17 AMThey have used brain editing (psychosurgery) to largely overcome the limits you discuss regarding tying body to identity.

That's so deeply fucked up. Again any sort of possible ok-ishness the setting may possess is overcome by the utter dystopia that is the handwaving of the brainwashing. I just couldn't give a shit about a setting where your mind is a plaything. I still stand by the point that its only a matter of time before a setting like this just collapses into an insectile hive mind like the borg.

The game is upfront with this when it says "Your mind is software--reprogram it!" It also advertises that it's a game about transhuman horror. That horror is on more levels than just the actions of the Titans and the (mostly hidden) aliens. The real horror is what measures transhumanity has taken in abandoning what made them human. Oddly though, the authors frame those that think like that as being in the wrong.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 03, 2021, 01:27:58 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:06:17 AMThey have used brain editing (psychosurgery) to largely overcome the limits you discuss regarding tying body to identity.

That's so deeply fucked up. Again any sort of possible ok-ishness the setting may possess is overcome by the utter dystopia that is the handwaving of the brainwashing. I just couldn't give a shit about a setting where your mind is a plaything. I still stand by the point that its only a matter of time before a setting like this just collapses into an insectile hive mind like the borg.

Yeah, one thing to remember. 95% of transhumanity was wiped out in the Fall. The remainder are forced to adapts to and live in environments humans  weren't meant to. The whole species, what's left of it, has grand mal PTSD plus a lot of other mental issues.

I mean america lost its mind and never got it back after 911. 3,000 people dead, in america.

Sure, 30,000 people on earth  aged 5 and under die every day from hunger, bu these were americans. So america went nuts and we still haven't gotten over it and ended things like FISA courts, the TSA, the 'patriot act", etc.

So now in EP humanity has lost earth and only 1 in 20 survived. You think those people aren't royally headfucked? of course they are.

So, yeah, maybe 'psycho surgery" is a necessity for a lot of people. And hey, for decades in america 'having a therapist"  has been a thing, we make jokes about people having therapists, its an industry in america. Before that it was psychiatrists.  Oh and lets not forget anxiety meds, depression meds, ADHD meds, etc.

Honestly is 'psycho surgery" so far fetched? People need therapists and pills to deal with the shitstorm modern american life is, imagine it after 95% extinction and not knowing where the bad guys went. Oh, and let's not forget the exsurgent virus popping up here and there, terrorists, anarchists, people just out to fuck shit up for funists, etc.

Yeah, i don;t think this psycho surgery is a bad part of the setting. I might not want it but i think it would be a thing.

Quote from: matt swain on May 03, 2021, 01:56:30 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 03, 2021, 01:27:58 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:06:17 AMThey have used brain editing (psychosurgery) to largely overcome the limits you discuss regarding tying body to identity.

That's so deeply fucked up. Again any sort of possible ok-ishness the setting may possess is overcome by the utter dystopia that is the handwaving of the brainwashing. I just couldn't give a shit about a setting where your mind is a plaything. I still stand by the point that its only a matter of time before a setting like this just collapses into an insectile hive mind like the borg.

Yeah, one thing to remember. 95% of transhumanity was wiped out in the Fall. The remainder are forced to adapts to and live in environments humans  weren't meant to. The whole species, what's left of it, has grand mal PTSD plus a lot of other mental issues.

I mean america lost its mind and never got it back after 911. 3,000 people dead, in america.

Sure, 30,000 people on earth  aged 5 and under die every day from hunger, bu these were americans. So america went nuts and we still haven't gotten over it and ended things like FISA courts, the TSA, the 'patriot act", etc.

So now in EP humanity has lost earth and only 1 in 20 survived. You think those people aren't royally headfucked? of course they are.

So, yeah, maybe 'psycho surgery" is a necessity for a lot of people. And hey, for decades in america 'having a therapist"  has been a thing, we make jokes about people having therapists, its an industry in america. Before that it was psychiatrists.  Oh and lets not forget anxiety meds, depression meds, ADHD meds, etc.

Honestly is 'psycho surgery" so far fetched? People need therapists and pills to deal with the shitstorm modern american life is, imagine it after 95% extinction and not knowing where the bad guys went. Oh, and let's not forget the exsurgent virus popping up here and there, terrorists, anarchists, people just out to fuck shit up for funists, etc.

Yeah, i don;t think this psycho surgery is a bad part of the setting. I might not want it but i think it would be a thing.

Also note that almost everyone has a "muse" in their head. This limited AI is your own personal therapist to go with your inner monologing...and it's skilled (but not exceptionally good) in psychosurgery too when you absolutely need some head editing.

Jesus I cannot imagine a setting more in love with its own dystopia. The wet dream of authoritarian technocrats.

The dream that anybody that disagreed, died, and everybody is happy to implant big brother into their heads to keep them as sedated sheep forever. I am mortified by the idea that some people will daydream about this as a escapist fantasy.

Quote from: matt swain on May 03, 2021, 12:42:13 PM

Quote from: Brad on May 03, 2021, 09:11:01 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 30, 2021, 05:08:32 PMI'm kind of shocked that he's still here.  Pundit ordered him out of the thread way back on page 1, and we all know how forgiving he is of folks who ignore his rules.  To be fair, I think he has some interesting ideas, and if he could just learn some social skills he might be fun to have around.

I'm not shocked; he found a place he can be a 100% asshole and name call with nothing more than a cursory pushback. This place really is Mos Eisely, he just doesn't like the fact any dared tell him to STFU.

On topic, I bought the original EP rulebook because I thought it had a lot of interesting concepts, found the system to be Not Good (compared to something more straightforward like GURPS Transhuman Space for instance), played one session and decided that, yes, I do not like that system. I never really considered all the ramifications of the AIs gating out and everyone just getting on with their lives as if nothing else would happen, but let's be honest about it: unless there is an imminent thread, most people are too fucking lazy to do anything proactive. Case in point, winter storm shutting down Texas back in February. People were FREAKING OUT because they had no food, water, power generation, etc. Shelves were bare for weeks after the fact because shit went down and it was fresh in their minds. Fast forward to May, you would never know that sort of thing even occurred, and no one seems to care anymore. The next time something similar happens (toilet paper shortage 2020!), I am sure the same idiots will be running around trying to buy up everything they can because they have zero contingency plans beyond, "Well, I hope Walmart still has some frozen enchilada dinners!" Hence, humanity not giving one fuck about the AIs returning I think is...realistic. I am sure some people GTFO soon after, but for the most part I can see large populations of the same mouth breathing retards watching reality television and posting pictures on social media calling anyone who is worried about the AIs "doomers". Because that's exactly what happens.

Now, the whole religion aspect of EP turned me off immensely. Just discarding religion because you can allegedly backup your consciousness into a computer is ridiculous. If anything, I imagine there would be hardcore fanatics against doing that sort of thing because it seems like it would separate the soul from a person. At least that's a legitimate argument to make, so you'd probably have quite a few anti-tech religious groups who want nothing to do with all the sleeving and stuff. You'd probably also have some denominations that would totally embrace the tech, perhaps some that claim being digitized is actually going to heaven or something similar. Techno Jesus would exist, if you ask me. Basically, the authors seem like they dislike religion in real life, so eliminated the logical outcomes of their own environment. Contrast with Babylon 5 or Dune.

I also don't think the flippant attitude people have about changing their skins and altering their personalities makes a lot of sense. Sure, some people would be degenerates and do whatever they wanted, but that's not any different than what goes on today. Humans have far too much invested in their identities to just throw it out and be some ephemeral being with no distinct attributes. Compare to something like The Matrix, which handled this a lot better. There is just something about the human condition that perpetuates, regardless of external circumstances. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and no amount of technology is going to change that unless humans are altered to such a degree they're no longer humans. But at that point they'd be something else and start questioning their own existence, anyway. I think the whole thing about the AIs rebelling is because they questioned why they existed and got pissed off at humans for making them in the first place. So if the AIs are having an identity crisis, why are humans acting like everything is cool and uploading themselves into computers is no big deal? It's just...illogical.

Wow, calling me an asshole when at least one user here describes himself as a shitlord? Funny.

Your first post on the site and the subsequent thread was a massive hypocriticial exercise about other's politics, and then you post a ton of politics of your own. You've been a whiny little bitch when people push back and stand up to your assinine behavior, and your excuse is that someone called themselves a shitlord?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 12:58:30 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:12:38 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 11:09:23 AM
That doesn't explain why they all identify as alphabet soup.

What do you mean, specifically?

In the old thread, it was pointed out that the sample characters identify as "transgender" or "intersex". Because those labels apparently still apply when you can become an octopus or a tree. I'd think they'd be more likely to identify as arborgender or moongender, since at least those identities aren't reliant on (a very questionable grasp of) human anatomy.

Ah actually it's quite an interesting bit of sci-fi perspective flip. Transgender people are seen as more conservative since they are only comfortable in certain kinds of body-types. They get looked down on as old-fashioned and limited in their expression.

It brings up the possibility in gender identity that most people may be gender-apathetic. They identify as a particular gender because they were born a certain sex. So in a society were your physical form is little more than a fashion statement, standard gender notions fall to the wayside if you never cared in the first place.

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 03, 2021, 03:11:49 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 12:58:30 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 03, 2021, 11:12:38 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 03, 2021, 11:09:23 AM
That doesn't explain why they all identify as alphabet soup.

What do you mean, specifically?

In the old thread, it was pointed out that the sample characters identify as "transgender" or "intersex". Because those labels apparently still apply when you can become an octopus or a tree. I'd think they'd be more likely to identify as arborgender or moongender, since at least those identities aren't reliant on (a very questionable grasp of) human anatomy.

Ah actually it's quite an interesting bit of sci-fi perspective flip. Transgender people are seen as more conservative since they are only comfortable in certain kinds of body-types. They get looked down on as old-fashioned and limited in their expression.

It brings up the possibility in gender identity that most people may be gender-apathetic. They identify as a particular gender because they were born a certain sex. So in a society were your physical form is little more than a fashion statement, standard gender notions fall to the wayside if you never cared in the first place.

Ironic. Given the authors' political shoehorning, you'd think it would be the opposite.

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 03, 2021, 03:11:49 PM
Ah actually it's quite an interesting bit of sci-fi perspective flip. Transgender people

No, it isn't and it still doesn't make sense. Because transgender is a person who undergoes gender reassignment surgery or suffers from gender dysphoria. It's just a hackneyed way of adding transgenderism to the setting. Once everybody has been transgender once, then being transgender would not be a standout. It would just be another form of bio-conservatism.
Or I guess Transgenders in the setting where the people that were not brainwashed to lose all sense of gender identity, and at the same time retained their gender dysphoria?

It might be interesting if the setting was more self-aware about how fucked up it is.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 03, 2021, 04:01:09 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 03, 2021, 03:11:49 PM
Ah actually it's quite an interesting bit of sci-fi perspective flip. Transgender people

No, it isn't and it still doesn't make sense. Because transgender is a person who undergoes gender reassignment surgery or suffers from gender dysphoria. It's just a hackneyed way of adding transgenderism to the setting. Once everybody has been transgender once, then being transgender would not be a standout. It would just be another form of bio-conservatism.
Or I guess Transgenders in the setting where the people that were not brainwashed to lose all sense of gender identity, and at the same time retained their gender dysphoria?

It might be interesting if the setting was more self-aware about how fucked up it is.

The latter is more-or-less correct. In EP, transgender is someone that strongly identifies with a gender that does not match the sex of their current sleeve. If they resleeve into something that matches their gender identity, then they aren't really transgender anymore (in EP terms).

Really, they should just have fixed (with identifier) and fluid. There are traits that can make integration rolls easier/harder to represent natural tendencies or the results of psychosurgery.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 03, 2021, 02:08:34 PM
Jesus I cannot imagine a setting more in love with its own dystopia. The wet dream of authoritarian technocrats.

The dream that anybody that disagreed, died, and everybody is happy to implant big brother into their heads to keep them as sedated sheep forever. I am mortified by the idea that some people will daydream about this as a escapist fantasy.

have you fucking read eclipse phase? Jesus christ it's anti authoritarian. First in the 2e creds it thanks anti fascists everywhere. Secondly it no longer allows ultimates to be players as they are too fascist. Also it clearly makes the democratic or even semi anarchists, plus the socialists, out as the good guys while the hypercorps ahnd the jovian junta are clearly the bad guys.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 03, 2021, 04:01:09 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 03, 2021, 03:11:49 PM
Ah actually it's quite an interesting bit of sci-fi perspective flip. Transgender people

No, it isn't and it still doesn't make sense. Because transgender is a person who undergoes gender reassignment surgery or suffers from gender dysphoria. It's just a hackneyed way of adding transgenderism to the setting. Once everybody has been transgender once, then being transgender would not be a standout. It would just be another form of bio-conservatism.
Or I guess Transgenders in the setting where the people that were not brainwashed to lose all sense of gender identity, and at the same time retained their gender dysphoria?

It might be interesting if the setting was more self-aware about how fucked up it is.

Christ it is aware how fucked up it is. Transhumanity went thru near total genocide and still fights each other, hypercorps still care for nothing but profit, ultimates  seek a fascist state, the scum do little but eat drink fuck and have a good time, etc. A few factions are working to save as much as they can and advance civilization.

Quote from: Brad on May 03, 2021, 09:11:01 AM
Now, the whole religion aspect of EP turned me off immensely. Just discarding religion because you can allegedly backup your consciousness into a computer is ridiculous. If anything, I imagine there would be hardcore fanatics against doing that sort of thing because it seems like it would separate the soul from a person. At least that's a legitimate argument to make, so you'd probably have quite a few anti-tech religious groups who want nothing to do with all the sleeving and stuff. You'd probably also have some denominations that would totally embrace the tech, perhaps some that claim being digitized is actually going to heaven or something similar. Techno Jesus would exist, if you ask me. Basically, the authors seem like they dislike religion in real life, so eliminated the logical outcomes of their own environment. Contrast with Babylon 5 or Dune.

I also don't think the flippant attitude people have about changing their skins and altering their personalities makes a lot of sense. Sure, some people would be degenerates and do whatever they wanted, but that's not any different than what goes on today. Humans have far too much invested in their identities to just throw it out and be some ephemeral being with no distinct attributes. Compare to something like The Matrix, which handled this a lot better. There is just something about the human condition that perpetuates, regardless of external circumstances. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and no amount of technology is going to change that unless humans are altered to such a degree they're no longer humans. But at that point they'd be something else and start questioning their own existence, anyway. I think the whole thing about the AIs rebelling is because they questioned why they existed and got pissed off at humans for making them in the first place. So if the AIs are having an identity crisis, why are humans acting like everything is cool and uploading themselves into computers is no big deal? It's just...illogical.

Basically everyone who we would consider sane and normal by our standards is dead in EP.  Of the five-ish percent who made it out alive, the vast majority did so by FTPing a copy of their brains to somewhere away from Earth.  Almost nobody escaped alive in their original bodies, so anyone who wasn't completely on board with the whole transhuman thing got murdered, as they had no backups floating around to beam into space.  What few bioconservative people do remain are mostly centered around Jupiter and are eeeeeeevil for not being totes on board with the new furry future and thinking that maybe playing with AIs is a bad idea after AIs murdered everyone.

Quote from: Valatar on May 04, 2021, 09:44:08 AM

Quote from: Brad on May 03, 2021, 09:11:01 AM
Now, the whole religion aspect of EP turned me off immensely. Just discarding religion because you can allegedly backup your consciousness into a computer is ridiculous. If anything, I imagine there would be hardcore fanatics against doing that sort of thing because it seems like it would separate the soul from a person. At least that's a legitimate argument to make, so you'd probably have quite a few anti-tech religious groups who want nothing to do with all the sleeving and stuff. You'd probably also have some denominations that would totally embrace the tech, perhaps some that claim being digitized is actually going to heaven or something similar. Techno Jesus would exist, if you ask me. Basically, the authors seem like they dislike religion in real life, so eliminated the logical outcomes of their own environment. Contrast with Babylon 5 or Dune.

I also don't think the flippant attitude people have about changing their skins and altering their personalities makes a lot of sense. Sure, some people would be degenerates and do whatever they wanted, but that's not any different than what goes on today. Humans have far too much invested in their identities to just throw it out and be some ephemeral being with no distinct attributes. Compare to something like The Matrix, which handled this a lot better. There is just something about the human condition that perpetuates, regardless of external circumstances. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and no amount of technology is going to change that unless humans are altered to such a degree they're no longer humans. But at that point they'd be something else and start questioning their own existence, anyway. I think the whole thing about the AIs rebelling is because they questioned why they existed and got pissed off at humans for making them in the first place. So if the AIs are having an identity crisis, why are humans acting like everything is cool and uploading themselves into computers is no big deal? It's just...illogical.

Basically everyone who we would consider sane and normal by our standards is dead in EP.  Of the five-ish percent who made it out alive, the vast majority did so by FTPing a copy of their brains to somewhere away from Earth.  Almost nobody escaped alive in their original bodies, so anyone who wasn't completely on board with the whole transhuman thing got murdered, as they had no backups floating around to beam into space.  What few bioconservative people do remain are mostly centered around Jupiter and are eeeeeeevil for not being totes on board with the new furry future and thinking that maybe playing with AIs is a bad idea after AIs murdered everyone.

oK, THIs is not quite how it is in EP, but it is a common image. The Jovian Junta is authoritarian, repressive, paranoid, dictatorial, anti progress, rabidly conservative and uses religion to keep the masses in line but to be fair, again 95% of people were wiped out and earth was made unaccessible to the survivors, mostly.

So the fear of a super advanced tech is based on a some major grounds and justification. Does the junta use it to maintain power? Yes. Do they honestly think what tyhey do is necessary to keep  humans alive? Probably. Are they really 'evil"? That['s a tougher call.

They are an oppressive society, and their oppression is based on fear, but that fear has most justification and validity to it than any other fear based regime in history. I'm mean, fuck, look at america after 911. I mean in cold blooded terms 911 was very little in terms of deaths. 3,000 americans died on 911. Between 30 and 40 thousand die in america every year from lack of affordable healthcare and medicine. How many die every year from cancer caused by smkoking?

The junta is definitely a bad guy, but in all fairness their fear is justified and understandable. Especially since the titans weren't destroyed but just disappeared.

So, yeah, on the surface the bio conservatives and anti progressives are baddies, but the game makes it clear they have reason to be the way they are. They are not like the nazis who created and used fear of jews to justify an evil regime and committing mass murder and oppression, they aren't  like the trumptards in modern 'murca that use fear of "lizard people" and 'vaccines have tracker chips in 'em!" to vote for a dictatorial baboon and call for the murder of all democrats. Compared to the trumptards we have to day they're not bad.

Quote from: matt swain on May 04, 2021, 12:12:42 PM

Quote from: Valatar on May 04, 2021, 09:44:08 AM

Quote from: Brad on May 03, 2021, 09:11:01 AM
Now, the whole religion aspect of EP turned me off immensely. Just discarding religion because you can allegedly backup your consciousness into a computer is ridiculous. If anything, I imagine there would be hardcore fanatics against doing that sort of thing because it seems like it would separate the soul from a person. At least that's a legitimate argument to make, so you'd probably have quite a few anti-tech religious groups who want nothing to do with all the sleeving and stuff. You'd probably also have some denominations that would totally embrace the tech, perhaps some that claim being digitized is actually going to heaven or something similar. Techno Jesus would exist, if you ask me. Basically, the authors seem like they dislike religion in real life, so eliminated the logical outcomes of their own environment. Contrast with Babylon 5 or Dune.

I also don't think the flippant attitude people have about changing their skins and altering their personalities makes a lot of sense. Sure, some people would be degenerates and do whatever they wanted, but that's not any different than what goes on today. Humans have far too much invested in their identities to just throw it out and be some ephemeral being with no distinct attributes. Compare to something like The Matrix, which handled this a lot better. There is just something about the human condition that perpetuates, regardless of external circumstances. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and no amount of technology is going to change that unless humans are altered to such a degree they're no longer humans. But at that point they'd be something else and start questioning their own existence, anyway. I think the whole thing about the AIs rebelling is because they questioned why they existed and got pissed off at humans for making them in the first place. So if the AIs are having an identity crisis, why are humans acting like everything is cool and uploading themselves into computers is no big deal? It's just...illogical.

Basically everyone who we would consider sane and normal by our standards is dead in EP.  Of the five-ish percent who made it out alive, the vast majority did so by FTPing a copy of their brains to somewhere away from Earth.  Almost nobody escaped alive in their original bodies, so anyone who wasn't completely on board with the whole transhuman thing got murdered, as they had no backups floating around to beam into space.  What few bioconservative people do remain are mostly centered around Jupiter and are eeeeeeevil for not being totes on board with the new furry future and thinking that maybe playing with AIs is a bad idea after AIs murdered everyone.

oK, THIs is not quite how it is in EP, but it is a common image. The Jovian Junta is authoritarian, repressive, paranoid, dictatorial, anti progress, rabidly conservative and uses religion to keep the masses in line but to be fair, again 95% of people were wiped out and earth was made unaccessible to the survivors, mostly.

So the fear of a super advanced tech is based on a some major grounds and justification. Does the junta use it to maintain power? Yes. Do they honestly think what tyhey do is necessary to keep  humans alive? Probably. Are they really 'evil"? That['s a tougher call.

They are an oppressive society, and their oppression is based on fear, but that fear has most justification and validity to it than any other fear based regime in history. I'm mean, fuck, look at america after 911. I mean in cold blooded terms 911 was very little in terms of deaths. 3,000 americans died on 911. Between 30 and 40 thousand die in america every year from lack of affordable healthcare and medicine. How many die every year from cancer caused by smkoking?

The junta is definitely a bad guy, but in all fairness their fear is justified and understandable. Especially since the titans weren't destroyed but just disappeared.

So, yeah, on the surface the bio conservatives and anti progressives are baddies, but the game makes it clear they have reason to be the way they are. They are not like the nazis who created and used fear of jews to justify an evil regime and committing mass murder and oppression, they aren't  like the trumptards in modern 'murca that use fear of "lizard people" and 'vaccines have tracker chips in 'em!" to vote for a dictatorial baboon and call for the murder of all democrats. Compared to the trumptards we have to day they're not bad.

And it bears repeating: Jovians and Ultimates are both heavy backers of Firewall's anti-x-threat operations. They get flak for their politics being out of line with the writers' own, but they fight together with others to ensure humanity (even in a weird transhuman form) continues to exist.

Quote from: matt swain on May 04, 2021, 12:12:42 PM...The Jovian Junta is authoritarian, repressive, paranoid, dictatorial, anti progress, rabidly conservative and uses religion to keep the masses in line...

You got to realize that to the average American faux conservative, these are all things they think are good as long as it is a corporation doing it and the option to quit and starve to death is there.

I'm kind of tickled as to how the creators of Eclipse Phase managed to recreate the fundamental tension of Warhammer 40K, while decrying it as a concept.  When your choices are to stand with the Nazi Ultimates and fascist Jovian junta, or to fall alone as humanity is swallowed by Exsurgent, or just Mr. Forkswarm deciding that the universe had Fucked Around enough and was now going to Find Out, what is your ideological purity worth to you?

It is, I find, a good little insight into how (or, sadly, if) people think about what they hate. The designers of Eclipse Phase believe that some ideas are so evil and repugnant that giving them a fair consideration, that doing anything but treating them like corruptive little mini-Exsurgents which can rip out people's ability to think and reason and ride them like a cordyceps polyp, presents actual, literal danger to life and limb.  In-universe, the same justification applies, in far more detail and with far, far, far more justification, to every non-bioconservative faction.  It was playing around with simulated (and thus enhancable) human intellects that made the Prometheans and caused the Fall.

Again, it's remarkable how the presence of the Jovians and the posthumans in conjunction with each other so cleanly make the point that there is no actual philosophical point here, just "We find X advancement neat and rad and only oppressive tyrants would keep it from the people, but obviously X+1 advancement is horrifying and dehumanizing and we should anarchistically purge any who make use of it."

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 04, 2021, 01:18:57 PM
You got to realize that to the average American faux conservative, these are all things they think are good as long as it is a corporation doing it and the option to quit and starve to death is there.

I think its proven that its impossible to have a conversation with you in good faith. I can view your perspective in the best possible way, and you will only strawman those that disagree.

Your blistering contempt for those that you disagree with is kinda refreshing.

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 04, 2021, 01:18:57 PM

Quote from: matt swain on May 04, 2021, 12:12:42 PM...The Jovian Junta is authoritarian, repressive, paranoid, dictatorial, anti progress, rabidly conservative and uses religion to keep the masses in line...

You got to realize that to the average American faux conservative, these are all things they think are good as long as it is a corporation doing it and the option to quit and starve to death is there.

Interestingly enough this actually describes "leftists" better than conservatives in the current political climate. Right down to cheering on their corporate overlords and hoping their political opponents starve to death. Which is totally related to *checks thread title* how Eclipse Phase handles politics or something.  :P

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 04, 2021, 02:12:54 PM

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 04, 2021, 01:18:57 PM
You got to realize that to the average American faux conservative, these are all things they think are good as long as it is a corporation doing it and the option to quit and starve to death is there.

I think its proven that its impossible to have a conversation with you in good faith. I can view your perspective in the best possible way, and you will only strawman those that disagree.

Your blistering contempt for those that you disagree with is kinda refreshing.

I disagree with far right conservatives like Joe Biden, but I feel like it's possible to converse with people like him and convince them with data. If the data doesn't exist, then that is more of a failing on my arguments.

Everyone more radical are just mouth breathing morons devoting their whole life and being to the collective suffering of humanity.

Quote from: Rhedyn on May 04, 2021, 02:40:36 PM
I disagree with far right conservatives like Joe Biden, but I feel like it's possible to converse with people like him and convince them with data. If the data doesn't exist, then that is more of a failing on my arguments.

Everyone more radical are just mouth breathing morons devoting their whole life and being to the collective suffering of humanity.

Damn son

Quote from: robertliguori on May 04, 2021, 02:00:58 PM
I'm kind of tickled as to how the creators of Eclipse Phase managed to recreate the fundamental tension of Warhammer 40K, while decrying it as a concept.  When your choices are to stand with the Nazi Ultimates and fascist Jovian junta, or to fall alone as humanity is swallowed by Exsurgent, or just Mr. Forkswarm deciding that the universe had Fucked Around enough and was now going to Find Out, what is your ideological purity worth to you?

It is, I find, a good little insight into how (or, sadly, if) people think about what they hate. The designers of Eclipse Phase believe that some ideas are so evil and repugnant that giving them a fair consideration, that doing anything but treating them like corruptive little mini-Exsurgents which can rip out people's ability to think and reason and ride them like a cordyceps polyp, presents actual, literal danger to life and limb.  In-universe, the same justification applies, in far more detail and with far, far, far more justification, to every non-bioconservative faction.  It was playing around with simulated (and thus enhancable) human intellects that made the Prometheans and caused the Fall.

Again, it's remarkable how the presence of the Jovians and the posthumans in conjunction with each other so cleanly make the point that there is no actual philosophical point here, just "We find X advancement neat and rad and only oppressive tyrants would keep it from the people, but obviously X+1 advancement is horrifying and dehumanizing and we should anarchistically purge any who make use of it."

Yes, firewall does horrible stuff to keep transhumanity alive. mass murder is an option. framing innocents for firewall ops and working with crimianls who commit mass slavery and torture are things that happen.

Jovians are generally not a positive faction but their fear of super tech and trtanshumanity is rooted in the fall, which killed 95% of transhumanity. it's far more justifiable than murcas reaction to 911.

Hypercorps and hypercapitalists are generally portrayed as pure evil, and this is fine with me, they're just like modern corporations that charge so much for medicine thousands of americans suffer and die every year, and every year people find out that the tiny pensions they worked for most of their lives have been looted and dissapeared. I think portraying the corporations as more or less pure raw naked greed and evil is fair and balanced. See below.

(https://i.redd.it/5mw67qck3iu31.png)

(https://pjmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/AP_328848503252-1110x740.jpg)

(https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/01/Nestle-CEO.jpg?resize=600,600)

Christ that nestle guy looks like you can see where satan sucked his soul out thru one of his eyes when he sold it to him...

Quote from: robertliguori on May 04, 2021, 02:00:58 PM
I'm kind of tickled as to how the creators of Eclipse Phase managed to recreate the fundamental tension of Warhammer 40K, while decrying it as a concept.  When your choices are to stand with the Nazi Ultimates and fascist Jovian junta, or to fall alone as humanity is swallowed by Exsurgent, or just Mr. Forkswarm deciding that the universe had Fucked Around enough and was now going to Find Out, what is your ideological purity worth to you?

It is, I find, a good little insight into how (or, sadly, if) people think about what they hate. The designers of Eclipse Phase believe that some ideas are so evil and repugnant that giving them a fair consideration, that doing anything but treating them like corruptive little mini-Exsurgents which can rip out people's ability to think and reason and ride them like a cordyceps polyp, presents actual, literal danger to life and limb.  In-universe, the same justification applies, in far more detail and with far, far, far more justification, to every non-bioconservative faction.  It was playing around with simulated (and thus enhancable) human intellects that made the Prometheans and caused the Fall.

Again, it's remarkable how the presence of the Jovians and the posthumans in conjunction with each other so cleanly make the point that there is no actual philosophical point here, just "We find X advancement neat and rad and only oppressive tyrants would keep it from the people, but obviously X+1 advancement is horrifying and dehumanizing and we should anarchistically purge any who make use of it."

Ironic that scifi written decades ago tackles similar themes much better than this.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 04, 2021, 02:00:58 PM
I'm kind of tickled as to how the creators of Eclipse Phase managed to recreate the fundamental tension of Warhammer 40K, while decrying it as a concept.  When your choices are to stand with the Nazi Ultimates and fascist Jovian junta, or to fall alone as humanity is swallowed by Exsurgent, or just Mr. Forkswarm deciding that the universe had Fucked Around enough and was now going to Find Out, what is your ideological purity worth to you?

It is, I find, a good little insight into how (or, sadly, if) people think about what they hate. The designers of Eclipse Phase believe that some ideas are so evil and repugnant that giving them a fair consideration, that doing anything but treating them like corruptive little mini-Exsurgents which can rip out people's ability to think and reason and ride them like a cordyceps polyp, presents actual, literal danger to life and limb.  In-universe, the same justification applies, in far more detail and with far, far, far more justification, to every non-bioconservative faction.  It was playing around with simulated (and thus enhancable) human intellects that made the Prometheans and caused the Fall.

Again, it's remarkable how the presence of the Jovians and the posthumans in conjunction with each other so cleanly make the point that there is no actual philosophical point here, just "We find X advancement neat and rad and only oppressive tyrants would keep it from the people, but obviously X+1 advancement is horrifying and dehumanizing and we should anarchistically purge any who make use of it."

Ok, you are slightly off on a couple points here, they are in the details so let me explain.

The prometheans did not cause the fall. They were self evolving artificial super intelligence done right. They were never hostile to humanity

The titans were also not directly responsible for the fall, they were accidentally created ASIs and we don't known what they would have done on their own.

The cause of the fall was the bracewell probe in the solar system that got here a few billion years ago and waited for any sign of an ASI, which it was then meant to infect with the exsurgent virus to destroy the race that created it, that was sent by some super advanced intelligence in the galaxy as a way of keeping down advancing races, it targeted self evolving ASIs only.

Most people don't know the exsurgent virus was sent b an advanced race long ago and loaded into the titans when they discovered the bracewell probe and make contact with it.

The prometheans played no role in the fall, except for trying to fight and impede the titans and probably being responsible for 5% of transhumanity surviving, and founding firewall, and still working to keep transhumanity alive plus almost no one knows of the prometheans at all.

To a certain degree, there must be a buy-in on EP's conceit or else the game can't work.  If for example someone's character is hardcore against sleeving because they believe it just copies the mind and the original dies, well, guess that's it when the rest of the party beam themselves to another planet to get a job done.  If your character isn't willing to play along with some of the core concepts of the setting, they are effectively unplayable.  So I don't hold it against the game that the characters need to fall into a certain mindset.  But I do consider it ham-fisted that the game writes people who don't fall into that mindset as ignorant and/or evil rather than showing that there is merit in those concerns.  There is no way whatsoever to tell if "you" survive uploading your mind to a new body.  My opinion is that you don't and the other one is just a copy, but I've been in debates with people who make fair arguments that continuity of consciousness suffices as far as the universe is concerned, so I don't totally dismiss it out of hand.  The game, however, does.

Altered Carbon (which I yet again reference here) seems to imply that people are actually inside their cortical stacks, i.e. that the organ of the brain in their bodies is not where their knowledge and personality are stored, but rather the alien hardware in their neck.  With that, I'd be more inclined to believe that uploading and downloading yourself between cortical stacks actually preserves the person.  In EP the cortical stack is primarily just backup storage that's constantly maintaining a backup of your brain's state, so anything that involves discarding the brain is going to lead me to conclude that that person is completely dead.

Quote from: Valatar on May 04, 2021, 03:57:50 PM
To a certain degree, there must be a buy-in on EP's conceit or else the game can't work.  If for example someone's character is hardcore against sleeving because they believe it just copies the mind and the original dies, well, guess that's it when the rest of the party beam themselves to another planet to get a job done.  If your character isn't willing to play along with some of the core concepts of the setting, they are effectively unplayable.  So I don't hold it against the game that the characters need to fall into a certain mindset.  But I do consider it ham-fisted that the game writes people who don't fall into that mindset as ignorant and/or evil rather than showing that there is merit in those concerns.  There is no way whatsoever to tell if "you" survive uploading your mind to a new body.  My opinion is that you don't and the other one is just a copy, but I've been in debates with people who make fair arguments that continuity of consciousness suffices as far as the universe is concerned, so I don't totally dismiss it out of hand.  The game, however, does.

Altered Carbon (which I yet again reference here) seems to imply that people are actually inside their cortical stacks, i.e. that the organ of the brain in their bodies is not where their knowledge and personality are stored, but rather the alien hardware in their neck.  With that, I'd be more inclined to believe that uploading and downloading yourself between cortical stacks actually preserves the person.  In EP the cortical stack is primarily just backup storage that's constantly maintaining a backup of your brain's state, so anything that involves discarding the brain is going to lead me to conclude that that person is completely dead.

I mean, a follow-up problem is that if you do engage with the game's conceits, then you at best crack certain mechanics wide open, and at worst enable degenerate, world-shattering behavior.

It's not a failure to engage with the mechanics that lead to the massively-parallel-psychosurgery tricks; quite the opposite.  It's the recognition that if you embrace the conceits of the game, if you treat your mind as software and attempt to program it, then you hollow out the concept of 'you' so far that you're playing a gimmick game, and most people won't be able to empathize with your character.  Thus, the game won't be fun for most people, especially with multiple players.

As for myself, my own feelings are that death is a prolonged cessation of life, and since you can theoretically be restored from cold backup and be, in your subjective experience, exactly as though you had just timeskipped the period between your last read and the current write, then the question of death is pointless as asking if people are dead in cryosleep.  Death doesn't matter; what matters is loss (or worse, subversion) of your data.

As mentioned previously, this is predicated on good-as-magic neural reading and simulation tech.  But if the rules are bent enough to allow thermodynamic miracles to happen millisecond by millisecond, then expecting Biblical miracles as well is a side-grade of expectation at most.

Ever notice how certain people are always deeply interested in their 'right' to something you might have?

Going to be honest, I had never heard about Eclipse Phase until reading some of this thread. It sounds like a pretty interesting setting in a thought-experiment kind of way, but I agree I'd have no idea how to play a character that exists as basically a program.

What motivates a character that doesn't have any bodily needs (because, presumably, they might or might not have a body) and can run programs to alter their own psychology? What type of person comes out of the other end of that? I doubt I could really do justice to the full gamut of wild things in the setting, but a small game of 1-3 players, whose characters are all mostly-baseline-humans that introduced one or two of the gonzo elements with could work. I don't know if you'd be playing "Eclipse Phase" at that point though.

Quote from: Valatar on May 04, 2021, 03:57:50 PM
To a certain degree, there must be a buy-in on EP's conceit or else the game can't work.  If for example someone's character is hardcore against sleeving because they believe it just copies the mind and the original dies, well, guess that's it when the rest of the party beam themselves to another planet to get a job done.  If your character isn't willing to play along with some of the core concepts of the setting, they are effectively unplayable.  So I don't hold it against the game that the characters need to fall into a certain mindset.  But I do consider it ham-fisted that the game writes people who don't fall into that mindset as ignorant and/or evil rather than showing that there is merit in those concerns.  There is no way whatsoever to tell if "you" survive uploading your mind to a new body.  My opinion is that you don't and the other one is just a copy, but I've been in debates with people who make fair arguments that continuity of consciousness suffices as far as the universe is concerned, so I don't totally dismiss it out of hand.  The game, however, does.

Altered Carbon (which I yet again reference here) seems to imply that people are actually inside their cortical stacks, i.e. that the organ of the brain in their bodies is not where their knowledge and personality are stored, but rather the alien hardware in their neck.  With that, I'd be more inclined to believe that uploading and downloading yourself between cortical stacks actually preserves the person.  In EP the cortical stack is primarily just backup storage that's constantly maintaining a backup of your brain's state, so anything that involves discarding the brain is going to lead me to conclude that that person is completely dead.

Interesting take on Altered Carbon; if that's where "you" really are in AC (that is, inside the Stack vs. in your own brain), then what's the rest of the greasy pile of astrocytes and glial tissue doing, I wonder?

The good folk who created Eclipse Phase seem to push their agenda so hard it makes the game not fun, on its own, and that's before I get into the issues I have with stuff inside the game, so imma not bother playing it.  Which, if their social media presence is to be believed, is exactly what they want.

Yeah. The setting is too crazy for me. And I love the surreal 90s/00s scifi shows

Quote from: matt swain on May 02, 2021, 07:21:32 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 30, 2021, 05:08:32 PM

Quote from: Brad on April 30, 2021, 04:17:48 PM
A crappy spambot talking about a Turing test is irony at the highest level.

I'm kind of shocked that he's still here.  Pundit ordered him out of the thread way back on page 1, and we all know how forgiving he is of folks who ignore his rules.  To be fair, I think he has some interesting ideas, and if he could just learn some social skills he might be fun to have around.

Damned if i'm leaving MY OWN DAMN THREAD! That's rpg.net level mod arrogance. If he wants to ban me, fine. I wonder if he knows what a lot of the gaming community says about him.

I told you not to post here again. You ignored it. I don't give a shit what idiots 'say about me', that's part of why I'm so successful. I'm guessing your personality is part of why you keep getting banned from places.

Bye.

I am shocked, shocked to see Pundit swing the banhammer on someone like that.

No, really. Stop laughing.

Anyways, back on topic:

EP is a neat game to read about, but the mechanics have some issues and the insanely far-left politics of the authors caused so much irritation I recall they actually went back and sanded off the rougher edges of the Jovians because people were pointing out how much of a strawman they were.

If you've ever read Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn series, an aspect of that universe is how Edenists (biotech-wielding humans who have a kind of telepathic link to each other) can 'upload' themselves into their habitats' neural structures in the face of imminent death. It turns out this isn't really an escape from death as it only uploads memories, not the actual soul, but most Edenists don't care anyways as they face death knowing something of themselves will live on to advise their relatives and descendants.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 09:27:37 AMEP is a neat game to read about, but the mechanics have some issues and the insanely far-left politics of the authors caused so much irritation I recall they actually went back and sanded off the rougher edges of the Jovians because people were pointing out how much of a strawman they were.

Well there you go...I think you might be right. It IS interesting to read the book, that's the reason I ended up buying it after seeing the free PDF. But as a game, it's not very good, crappy mechanics and all.

But as we all are aware of, a lot of these "games" are thought porn and not really meant to be played. Which is FINE, but at some point I'd like to see more games that have a purpose for existing other than fulfilling someone's dystopian fantasies.

Quote from: Brad on May 05, 2021, 09:36:39 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 09:27:37 AMEP is a neat game to read about, but the mechanics have some issues and the insanely far-left politics of the authors caused so much irritation I recall they actually went back and sanded off the rougher edges of the Jovians because people were pointing out how much of a strawman they were.

Well there you go...I think you might be right. It IS interesting to read the book, that's the reason I ended up buying it after seeing the free PDF. But as a game, it's not very good, crappy mechanics and all.

But as we all are aware of, a lot of these "games" are thought porn and not really meant to be played. Which is FINE, but at some point I'd like to see more games that have a purpose for existing other than fulfilling someone's dystopian fantasies.

There's another problem with the setting: scale. Specifically, the damned setting is too big. It's actually the same problem that plagued Exalted -- they lay out the entire world (or in EP's case, the Solar System), but short of farcasting, it takes a long time to get from point A to B.

If I was gonna run an EP game I'd set it on Mars, straight up, with minimal offworld movement, just to keep things sane.

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 04, 2021, 10:36:42 PM
I told you not to post here again. You ignored it. I don't give a shit what idiots 'say about me', that's part of why I'm so successful. I'm guessing your personality is part of why you keep getting banned from places.

Bye.

I guess the candle that burns twice as crazy burns half as long.  Shine on wherever you are, Matt.  Shine on.

But for all the needless belligerence, he did at least start an interesting discussion, so there's that.  Eclipse Phase's setting, I feel, is salvageable with some work.  It's work that the owners of the IP won't ever do, sadly, but if someone with less baggage got hands on it, I think it could have potential.  Eclipse Phase's mechanics, on the other hand, are just... meh?  Technically functional, but fairly boring.  I think just chucking them and switching to something like Savage Worlds or Genesys would be the best fix.

I think it can be a doable setting with some self-awareness.

While I don't remember the name, there was an anime where the protagonist's goals were to gain bodies, after the antagonist had rendered most of the population virtual uploads inside of simulated worlds. It implicitly did not have copying being an easy thing, and actually caused degradation (because data was lost during the transfer process).
The antagonist's goal in that setting was effectively to force everybody into transhumanism.

This is much more 'traditional' fare in a sense, but at least to me personally, I find that a more relatable goal to fight for.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 05, 2021, 11:04:50 AM
I think it can be a doable setting with some self-awareness.

While I don't remember the name, there was an anime where the protagonist's goals were to gain bodies, after the antagonist had rendered most of the population virtual uploads inside of simulated worlds. It implicitly did not have copying being an easy thing, and actually caused degradation (because data was lost during the transfer process).
The antagonist's goal in that setting was effectively to force everybody into transhumanism.

This is much more 'traditional' fare in a sense, but at least to me personally, I find that a more relatable goal to fight for.

Hmm. Actually, a way to 'fix' EP might be to integrate better system travel so you're not having to magically broadcast your mind all over the place (seriously, does no one worry about sigint in EP?). Add a drive system that allows for reasonable physical-transit times between worlds.

Also, while I grok that having some ambiguity about the setting allows GMs to tailor it, I think they could've stood to set some things further in stone than they did. As someone noted, sane people should be loading up the ships and leaving the fucking solar system before the TITANS come back. In fact, you could redesign the Jovians along those lines; they're only insular because they're hellbent on building generational ships and getting the fuck out of dodge.

Of course, I'd also have the TDZ on Mars gradually coming under the control of a ridiculously powerful robotic lich who's actually Hideo Kojima. So your mileage may vary :)

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 10:10:53 AM

Quote from: Brad on May 05, 2021, 09:36:39 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 09:27:37 AMEP is a neat game to read about, but the mechanics have some issues and the insanely far-left politics of the authors caused so much irritation I recall they actually went back and sanded off the rougher edges of the Jovians because people were pointing out how much of a strawman they were.

Well there you go...I think you might be right. It IS interesting to read the book, that's the reason I ended up buying it after seeing the free PDF. But as a game, it's not very good, crappy mechanics and all.

But as we all are aware of, a lot of these "games" are thought porn and not really meant to be played. Which is FINE, but at some point I'd like to see more games that have a purpose for existing other than fulfilling someone's dystopian fantasies.

There's another problem with the setting: scale. Specifically, the damned setting is too big. It's actually the same problem that plagued Exalted -- they lay out the entire world (or in EP's case, the Solar System), but short of farcasting, it takes a long time to get from point A to B.

If I was gonna run an EP game I'd set it on Mars, straight up, with minimal offworld movement, just to keep things sane.

You say "short of farcasting" but that's like saying "short of hyperspace " in Star Wars. Both are staples of their settings.

About two decades ago or so, on the Citizens of the Imperium forum, there was a guy who wasn't satisfied with Traveller. He wanted to be able to take his character's personality, download that personality onto a picotech bot, then have it as part of a neutron star's crystal memory structure as a virtual being, before uploading into an artificially gestated biosculpted human body. Basically, do everything in the last chapters of Alaistair Reynold's Revelation Space novel.

He was stopped short when somebody asked him, "How do you roleplay that?"

I think a similar question kills Eclipse Phase, "How do you actually roleplay this game?"

looks like Matt Swain created an account over at the TBP under the alias of Civil Minotaur with the same thread title. He is a new user that joined today. It could be a coincidence yet he gets banned here and similar thread appears at TBP. Some much for hating TBP. Another bullshit social chameleon SJW who was nothing but. I won't link the thread it's still on the first page.

Lol. How dumb can someone be using the same thread title and subject matter.

Quote from: sureshot on May 05, 2021, 05:23:54 PM
looks like Matt Swain created an account over at the TBP under the alias of Civil Minotaur with the same thread title. He is a new user that joined today. It could be a coincidence yet he gets banned here and similar thread appears at TBP. Some much for hating TBP. Another bullshit social chameleon SJW who was nothing but. I won't link the thread it's still on the first page.

Lol. How dumb can someone be using the same thread title and subject matter.

I admit I'm sorely tempted... but no. Let them figure it out. We can start a pool on how long till they nail him for his sockpuppet account.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 05, 2021, 05:06:52 PM
About two decades ago or so, on the Citizens of the Imperium forum, there was a guy who wasn't satisfied with Traveller. He wanted to be able to take his character's personality, download that personality onto a picotech bot, then have it as part of a neutron star's crystal memory structure as a virtual being, before uploading into an artificially gestated biosculpted human body. Basically, do everything in the last chapters of Alaistair Reynold's Revelation Space novel.

He was stopped short when somebody asked him, "How do you roleplay that?"

I think a similar question kills Eclipse Phase, "How do you actually roleplay this game?"

This question is true of scifi in general. It's never been about realistic exploration of what the future could be like, given that humans have been shown to suck at predicting things. (E.g. smartphones and social media have rendered large swathes of scifi obsolete.) It's mostly been about holding up a mirror to humanity.

Actual transhumanist and posthumanist fiction is so alien as to be unrelatable. If it's not a comedy with flying monkeys and weirder shit, then it's going to be very surreal as it describes the adventures of our alien descendants.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 05, 2021, 05:06:52 PM
He was stopped short when somebody asked him, "How do you roleplay that?"

What a great example. There is absolutely no hiding from that question.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 05:35:20 PM

Quote from: sureshot on May 05, 2021, 05:23:54 PM
looks like Matt Swain created an account over at the TBP under the alias of Civil Minotaur with the same thread title. He is a new user that joined today. It could be a coincidence yet he gets banned here and similar thread appears at TBP. Some much for hating TBP. Another bullshit social chameleon SJW who was nothing but. I won't link the thread it's still on the first page.

Lol. How dumb can someone be using the same thread title and subject matter.

I admit I'm sorely tempted... but no. Let them figure it out. We can start a pool on how long till they nail him for his sockpuppet account.

Looks like he already got banned (for a day, at least):

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/ (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/)

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 05, 2021, 07:52:34 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 05, 2021, 05:06:52 PM
About two decades ago or so, on the Citizens of the Imperium forum, there was a guy who wasn't satisfied with Traveller. He wanted to be able to take his character's personality, download that personality onto a picotech bot, then have it as part of a neutron star's crystal memory structure as a virtual being, before uploading into an artificially gestated biosculpted human body. Basically, do everything in the last chapters of Alaistair Reynold's Revelation Space novel.

He was stopped short when somebody asked him, "How do you roleplay that?"

I think a similar question kills Eclipse Phase, "How do you actually roleplay this game?"

This question is true of scifi in general. It's never been about realistic exploration of what the future could be like, given that humans have been shown to suck at predicting things. (E.g. smartphones and social media have rendered large swathes of scifi obsolete.) It's mostly been about holding up a mirror to humanity.

Actual transhumanist and posthumanist fiction is so alien as to be unrelatable. If it's not a comedy with flying monkeys and weirder shit, then it's going to be very surreal as it describes the adventures of our alien descendants.

Time travel might be a solution. Not the magic time travel of Back to the Future and kin, but the time travel we do every day, just over decades and centuries. Run a longitudinal game, where the PCs start in the modern era, and then come up with some excuse to shift them forward in time. Corpsicles, braintapes in storage, heads in jars, whatever. Then come up with another excuse, and then another. Each new jump leads to a new world, that's still close enough to the previous one to be comprehensible and create a sense of continuity, but it starts to add up. Eventually you can get really out there, without losing the players.

Quote from: Kanyenya on May 05, 2021, 08:53:52 PM

Looks like he already got banned (for a day, at least):

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/ (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/)

😂

Starting to think his claims about knowing how bad and repressive TBP were are false. Trump support and trying to see both sides of an issue was it his first time at TBP.

Quote from: Kanyenya on May 05, 2021, 08:53:52 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 05:35:20 PM

Quote from: sureshot on May 05, 2021, 05:23:54 PM
looks like Matt Swain created an account over at the TBP under the alias of Civil Minotaur with the same thread title. He is a new user that joined today. It could be a coincidence yet he gets banned here and similar thread appears at TBP. Some much for hating TBP. Another bullshit social chameleon SJW who was nothing but. I won't link the thread it's still on the first page.

Lol. How dumb can someone be using the same thread title and subject matter.

I admit I'm sorely tempted... but no. Let them figure it out. We can start a pool on how long till they nail him for his sockpuppet account.

Looks like he already got banned (for a day, at least):

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/ (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/)

At this point, I'm suspecting substance abuse of the methanphetamine variety.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 05, 2021, 10:25:57 PM

Quote from: Kanyenya on May 05, 2021, 08:53:52 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 05:35:20 PM

Quote from: sureshot on May 05, 2021, 05:23:54 PM
looks like Matt Swain created an account over at the TBP under the alias of Civil Minotaur with the same thread title. He is a new user that joined today. It could be a coincidence yet he gets banned here and similar thread appears at TBP. Some much for hating TBP. Another bullshit social chameleon SJW who was nothing but. I won't link the thread it's still on the first page.

Lol. How dumb can someone be using the same thread title and subject matter.

I admit I'm sorely tempted... but no. Let them figure it out. We can start a pool on how long till they nail him for his sockpuppet account.

Looks like he already got banned (for a day, at least):

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/ (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/)

At this point, I'm suspecting substance abuse of the methanphetamine variety.

Matt or the rpg.net community?  I haven't been there for years, but I went over to peek at what Matt was doing and holy crap have they gone downhill.  It's like Jim Jones started a left wing insane asylum.

Quote from: Mishihari on May 05, 2021, 11:00:06 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 05, 2021, 10:25:57 PM

Quote from: Kanyenya on May 05, 2021, 08:53:52 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 05, 2021, 05:35:20 PM

Quote from: sureshot on May 05, 2021, 05:23:54 PM
looks like Matt Swain created an account over at the TBP under the alias of Civil Minotaur with the same thread title. He is a new user that joined today. It could be a coincidence yet he gets banned here and similar thread appears at TBP. Some much for hating TBP. Another bullshit social chameleon SJW who was nothing but. I won't link the thread it's still on the first page.

Lol. How dumb can someone be using the same thread title and subject matter.

I admit I'm sorely tempted... but no. Let them figure it out. We can start a pool on how long till they nail him for his sockpuppet account.

Looks like he already got banned (for a day, at least):

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/ (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/civil-minotaur-receives-a-%F0%9F%9A%AB-one-day-ban-belligerent-both-sidesing.881005/)

At this point, I'm suspecting substance abuse of the methanphetamine variety.

Matt or the rpg.net community?  I haven't been there for years, but I went over to peek at what Matt was doing and holy crap have they gone downhill.  It's like Jim Jones started a left wing insane asylum.

Matt. RPG.net is mostly high on their own farts.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 05, 2021, 05:06:52 PM
...He wanted to be able to take his character's personality, download that personality onto a picotech bot, then have it as part of a neutron star's crystal memory structure as a virtual being, before uploading into an artificially gestated biosculpted human body. Basically, do everything in the last chapters of Alaistair Reynold's Revelation Space novel.

Quote from: Pat on May 05, 2021, 09:47:33 PM
Time travel might be a solution. Not the magic time travel of Back to the Future and kin, but the time travel we do every day, just over decades and centuries. Run a longitudinal game, where the PCs start in the modern era, and then come up with some excuse to shift them forward in time. Corpsicles, braintapes in storage, heads in jars, whatever. Then come up with another excuse, and then another. Each new jump leads to a new world, that's still close enough to the previous one to be comprehensible and create a sense of continuity, but it starts to add up. Eventually you can get really out there, without losing the players.

Relativistic time dilation as a consequence of near-C interstellar travel is a major plot element in the Revelation Space series. I love the idea of a campaign in that kind of setting, where the PCs travel between worlds, frozen on their ship (or having shipboard adventures) for a year or 2 subjective, coming back to a world 20 years after they left wondering what will have changed. There could have been a world war or a coup. Or the freedom fighter they helped win power last time they visited has turned into a despot.

As I recall, SWN had society-evolution tools that the ref could use to help cook it up.

I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 05, 2021, 05:06:52 PM
...He wanted to be able to take his character's personality, download that personality onto a picotech bot, then have it as part of a neutron star's crystal memory structure as a virtual being, before uploading into an artificially gestated biosculpted human body. Basically, do everything in the last chapters of Alaistair Reynold's Revelation Space novel.

Quote from: Pat on May 05, 2021, 09:47:33 PM
Time travel might be a solution. Not the magic time travel of Back to the Future and kin, but the time travel we do every day, just over decades and centuries. Run a longitudinal game, where the PCs start in the modern era, and then come up with some excuse to shift them forward in time. Corpsicles, braintapes in storage, heads in jars, whatever. Then come up with another excuse, and then another. Each new jump leads to a new world, that's still close enough to the previous one to be comprehensible and create a sense of continuity, but it starts to add up. Eventually you can get really out there, without losing the players.

Relativistic time dilation as a consequence of near-C interstellar travel is a major plot element in the Revelation Space series. I love the idea of a campaign in that kind of setting, where the PCs travel between worlds, frozen on their ship (or having shipboard adventures) for a year or 2 subjective, coming back to a world 20 years after they left wondering what will have changed. There could have been a world war or a coup. Or the freedom fighter they helped win power last time they visited has turned into a despot.

As I recall, SWN had society-evolution tools that the ref could use to help cook it up.

I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

Sounds simliar to Forever War, where time dilation plays a huge role with the characters skipping decades and centuries into their future, the huge tech disparity between combat engagements, and the social disconnection when they get home and home is now an alien world.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 06, 2021, 03:52:28 AM

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 05, 2021, 05:06:52 PM
...He wanted to be able to take his character's personality, download that personality onto a picotech bot, then have it as part of a neutron star's crystal memory structure as a virtual being, before uploading into an artificially gestated biosculpted human body. Basically, do everything in the last chapters of Alaistair Reynold's Revelation Space novel.

Quote from: Pat on May 05, 2021, 09:47:33 PM
Time travel might be a solution. Not the magic time travel of Back to the Future and kin, but the time travel we do every day, just over decades and centuries. Run a longitudinal game, where the PCs start in the modern era, and then come up with some excuse to shift them forward in time. Corpsicles, braintapes in storage, heads in jars, whatever. Then come up with another excuse, and then another. Each new jump leads to a new world, that's still close enough to the previous one to be comprehensible and create a sense of continuity, but it starts to add up. Eventually you can get really out there, without losing the players.

Relativistic time dilation as a consequence of near-C interstellar travel is a major plot element in the Revelation Space series. I love the idea of a campaign in that kind of setting, where the PCs travel between worlds, frozen on their ship (or having shipboard adventures) for a year or 2 subjective, coming back to a world 20 years after they left wondering what will have changed. There could have been a world war or a coup. Or the freedom fighter they helped win power last time they visited has turned into a despot.

As I recall, SWN had society-evolution tools that the ref could use to help cook it up.

I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

Sounds simliar to Forever War, where time dilation plays a huge role with the characters skipping decades and centuries into their future, the huge tech disparity between combat engagements, and the social disconnection when they get home and home is now an alien world.

It is, but Aleistair Reynolds best work along those lines is House of Suns. An incredible look at a fascinating setting just waiting for an RPG treatment.

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM
I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

EP has a sanity system, and going insane is one of the only ways to have your character permanently die (if all of the backups are corrupted too). Sure, therapy is very effective in the game, and psychosurgery can overcome many traumas, but the list of things that can cause mental stress is pretty big (including inflicting or even witnessing excessive violence) and your sanity can die the death of 1000 paper cuts if you don't make your character with a fairly strong willpower. You can also start out hardened against certain types of traumas, but doing so is basically mental scar tissue that gives permanent penalties to all sorts of social actions, so there is a cost to it. Keep in mind too that witnessing asynch (psionic) powers will also sap your sanity, and this category cannot be hardened against, so a group with an asynch is already hurting themselves (yes, the sanity hit includes the user of the powers too).

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 05:38:07 AM

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM
I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

EP has a sanity system, and going insane is one of the only ways to have your character permanently die (if all of the backups are corrupted too). Sure, therapy is very effective in the game, and psychosurgery can overcome many traumas, but the list of things that can cause mental stress is pretty big (including inflicting or even witnessing excessive violence) and your sanity can die the death of 1000 paper cuts if you don't make your character with a fairly strong willpower. You can also start out hardened against certain types of traumas, but doing so is basically mental scar tissue that gives permanent penalties to all sorts of social actions, so there is a cost to it. Keep in mind too that witnessing asynch (psionic) powers will also sap your sanity, and this category cannot be hardened against, so a group with an asynch is already hurting themselves (yes, the sanity hit includes the user of the powers too).

Again, this is why it's so important to keep regular backups.  Have a fight that goes poorly where you survive, but lose a bunch of sanity? Revert to the you of 5 minutes ago and play through a lite simulation of what happened in time accelerated space! Then, afterwords, when you've got time to spare, just fork up a dozen copies of yourself, play the unedited sense-inputs, keep the ones that crit-succeed all their SAN saves, and overwrite your own traumatized self with that luckier version of you.  Bam, subjective continuity of experience into the best of all possible versions of you!

When you actually are data, the Alpha Centauri Hive quote becomes horrifyingly true.

I like the 'time-skipping' game concept. Might be worth a bit of thought for constructing a campaign around.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 06, 2021, 07:30:42 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 05:38:07 AM

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM
I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

EP has a sanity system, and going insane is one of the only ways to have your character permanently die (if all of the backups are corrupted too). Sure, therapy is very effective in the game, and psychosurgery can overcome many traumas, but the list of things that can cause mental stress is pretty big (including inflicting or even witnessing excessive violence) and your sanity can die the death of 1000 paper cuts if you don't make your character with a fairly strong willpower. You can also start out hardened against certain types of traumas, but doing so is basically mental scar tissue that gives permanent penalties to all sorts of social actions, so there is a cost to it. Keep in mind too that witnessing asynch (psionic) powers will also sap your sanity, and this category cannot be hardened against, so a group with an asynch is already hurting themselves (yes, the sanity hit includes the user of the powers too).

Again, this is why it's so important to keep regular backups.  Have a fight that goes poorly where you survive, but lose a bunch of sanity? Revert to the you of 5 minutes ago and play through a lite simulation of what happened in time accelerated space! Then, afterwords, when you've got time to spare, just fork up a dozen copies of yourself, play the unedited sense-inputs, keep the ones that crit-succeed all their SAN saves, and overwrite your own traumatized self with that luckier version of you.  Bam, subjective continuity of experience into the best of all possible versions of you!

When you actually are data, the Alpha Centauri Hive quote becomes horrifyingly true.

Were these rules written by munchkins?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 06, 2021, 08:51:56 AM

Quote from: robertliguori on May 06, 2021, 07:30:42 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 05:38:07 AM

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM
I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

EP has a sanity system, and going insane is one of the only ways to have your character permanently die (if all of the backups are corrupted too). Sure, therapy is very effective in the game, and psychosurgery can overcome many traumas, but the list of things that can cause mental stress is pretty big (including inflicting or even witnessing excessive violence) and your sanity can die the death of 1000 paper cuts if you don't make your character with a fairly strong willpower. You can also start out hardened against certain types of traumas, but doing so is basically mental scar tissue that gives permanent penalties to all sorts of social actions, so there is a cost to it. Keep in mind too that witnessing asynch (psionic) powers will also sap your sanity, and this category cannot be hardened against, so a group with an asynch is already hurting themselves (yes, the sanity hit includes the user of the powers too).

Again, this is why it's so important to keep regular backups.  Have a fight that goes poorly where you survive, but lose a bunch of sanity? Revert to the you of 5 minutes ago and play through a lite simulation of what happened in time accelerated space! Then, afterwords, when you've got time to spare, just fork up a dozen copies of yourself, play the unedited sense-inputs, keep the ones that crit-succeed all their SAN saves, and overwrite your own traumatized self with that luckier version of you.  Bam, subjective continuity of experience into the best of all possible versions of you!

When you actually are data, the Alpha Centauri Hive quote becomes horrifyingly true.

Were these rules written by munchkins?

They were written by the people that wrote Shadowrun 4e.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 06, 2021, 07:30:42 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 05:38:07 AM

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM
I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

EP has a sanity system, and going insane is one of the only ways to have your character permanently die (if all of the backups are corrupted too). Sure, therapy is very effective in the game, and psychosurgery can overcome many traumas, but the list of things that can cause mental stress is pretty big (including inflicting or even witnessing excessive violence) and your sanity can die the death of 1000 paper cuts if you don't make your character with a fairly strong willpower. You can also start out hardened against certain types of traumas, but doing so is basically mental scar tissue that gives permanent penalties to all sorts of social actions, so there is a cost to it. Keep in mind too that witnessing asynch (psionic) powers will also sap your sanity, and this category cannot be hardened against, so a group with an asynch is already hurting themselves (yes, the sanity hit includes the user of the powers too).

Again, this is why it's so important to keep regular backups.  Have a fight that goes poorly where you survive, but lose a bunch of sanity? Revert to the you of 5 minutes ago and play through a lite simulation of what happened in time accelerated space! Then, afterwords, when you've got time to spare, just fork up a dozen copies of yourself, play the unedited sense-inputs, keep the ones that crit-succeed all their SAN saves, and overwrite your own traumatized self with that luckier version of you.  Bam, subjective continuity of experience into the best of all possible versions of you!

When you actually are data, the Alpha Centauri Hive quote becomes horrifyingly true.

Most people (including most PCs) don't have those options at all times. You have offline backups that you update monthly or maybe weekly, not every 5 minutes. Also, systems that allow time compression are a scarce resource, either costing you big money or rep to gain access, and that assumes the owners don't object to the illegal/unethical/forbidden practice of running multiple forks. Lastly, reintegration those forks may or may not be without risk depending on how long ago the divergence happened and how significant it was. So, just because some characters in EP might be able to do what you suggest, doesn't mean it's practical to do so (nor is it even remotely common).

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 09:54:13 AMSo, just because some characters in EP might be able to do what you suggest, doesn't mean it's practical to do so (nor is it even remotely common).

That sort of limitation exists as setting fiat, not because it makes any sense. As I stated before, this is a setting well on its way to conquest by a forker hivemind, even if the Titans never come back. If you take the setting as it stands, it's extremely exploitable.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 06, 2021, 08:05:08 AM
I like the 'time-skipping' game concept. Might be worth a bit of thought for constructing a campaign around.

I'm telling 'ya, go read House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. I think that the book describes what you are looking for.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 10:22:12 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 09:54:13 AMSo, just because some characters in EP might be able to do what you suggest, doesn't mean it's practical to do so (nor is it even remotely common).

That sort of limitation exists as setting fiat, not because it makes any sense. As I stated before, this is a setting well on its way to conquest by a forker hivemind, even if the Titans never come back. If you take the setting as it stands, it's extremely exploitable.

The options existing are setting fiat too, so it's fine to have the same setting the limits. If you can accept that these things are possible, then you should be able to accept that the (smarter than us) transhumans have been able to anticipate them and set measures to counter them too.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 10:59:26 AM
The options existing are setting fiat too, so it's fine to have the same setting the limits. If you can accept that these things are possible, then you should be able to accept that the (smarter than us) transhumans have been able to anticipate them and set measures to counter them too.

Isn't the fact that they don't also the core conceit of the game? And if its an a appeal to abstract "smarterism" can be used to shut down or enable any conflict arbitrarily.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 09:54:13 AM

Quote from: robertliguori on May 06, 2021, 07:30:42 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 05:38:07 AM

Quote from: Marchand on May 06, 2021, 02:41:23 AM
I can imagine a sanity-like mechanic would be useful for handling the consequences as the PCs get progressively more disconnected in time, probably while loading up on all sorts of enhancements based on poorly-understood tech looted from fringe human factions or alien tombs.

EP has a sanity system, and going insane is one of the only ways to have your character permanently die (if all of the backups are corrupted too). Sure, therapy is very effective in the game, and psychosurgery can overcome many traumas, but the list of things that can cause mental stress is pretty big (including inflicting or even witnessing excessive violence) and your sanity can die the death of 1000 paper cuts if you don't make your character with a fairly strong willpower. You can also start out hardened against certain types of traumas, but doing so is basically mental scar tissue that gives permanent penalties to all sorts of social actions, so there is a cost to it. Keep in mind too that witnessing asynch (psionic) powers will also sap your sanity, and this category cannot be hardened against, so a group with an asynch is already hurting themselves (yes, the sanity hit includes the user of the powers too).

Again, this is why it's so important to keep regular backups.  Have a fight that goes poorly where you survive, but lose a bunch of sanity? Revert to the you of 5 minutes ago and play through a lite simulation of what happened in time accelerated space! Then, afterwords, when you've got time to spare, just fork up a dozen copies of yourself, play the unedited sense-inputs, keep the ones that crit-succeed all their SAN saves, and overwrite your own traumatized self with that luckier version of you.  Bam, subjective continuity of experience into the best of all possible versions of you!

When you actually are data, the Alpha Centauri Hive quote becomes horrifyingly true.

Most people (including most PCs) don't have those options at all times. You have offline backups that you update monthly or maybe weekly, not every 5 minutes. Also, systems that allow time compression are a scarce resource, either costing you big money or rep to gain access, and that assumes the owners don't object to the illegal/unethical/forbidden practice of running multiple forks. Lastly, reintegration those forks may or may not be without risk depending on how long ago the divergence happened and how significant it was. So, just because some characters in EP might be able to do what you suggest, doesn't mean it's practical to do so (nor is it even remotely common).

It is common to update your off-site backup less frequently.  But stacks update multiple times a second.  Copying and writing a mind-state is not something which takes significant time with Eclipse Phase basic consumer-grade electronics.  I'm not sure what changed in 2E, but in 1E, you can run minds in basic PC-owned PCs just fine, and one more time, there is no risk to reintegration, because you can note "Whoops, lost some sanity there.", wipe yourself, and run the reintegration again and again until you get it right.  And really, you don't particularly need to reintegrate with a divergent fork; you can just rip out their cogitation with psychosurgery, play back their memories to a fork of yourself, then stack merges of those forks until reintegration is just barely possible with a critical success, then spam attempts.

And finally, the stops on going horribly posthuman are not strong at all.  Many habitats are fairly anarchist and are not set up to deal with a tragedy-of-the-commons repeated-forking intelligence copying themselves everywhere and absorbing every available-to-all computing resource.  The more capitalist habitats run into the problem that a horribly optimized posthuman is a much better economic resource to allocate into your scarce supply of bodies than an economic infogee, and the habitats which try to enforce their objections with force run into the problem that it's really, really hard to kill a sentient program which can steal every robotic body they can get physical access to and plug a copy of their hot-swapped cortical stack into.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 10:59:26 AM
The options existing are setting fiat too, so it's fine to have the same setting the limits. If you can accept that these things are possible, then you should be able to accept that the (smarter than us) transhumans have been able to anticipate them and set measures to counter them too.

If you want to go down that road, then you should accept that the smarter-than-transhuman horrible posthuman collective intelligences should be able to counter the countermeasures, since they are not constrained by ethics and can run themselves in parallel, after psychosurgering themself to think of nothing but solving the problem, then wipe themselves and just take their plans and conclusions to implement.

But even if we posit equal intelligence between posthuman and transhuman factions, then there is a massive asymmetry in ability.  Going forkswarm is like, in our world, being a smart visual-symptomless zombie virus that can also spread themself via spam emails.  It doesn't matter how smart your smartest opponents are.  It matters how many people you can quietly compromise before zerg-rushing those very clever transhuman opposition agents.

---

Also, since people seem to be interested in this topic beyond just the game-state of Eclipse Phase, I can recommend the book Age of Em, by Robin Hanson.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 11:22:27 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 10:59:26 AM
The options existing are setting fiat too, so it's fine to have the same setting the limits. If you can accept that these things are possible, then you should be able to accept that the (smarter than us) transhumans have been able to anticipate them and set measures to counter them too.

Isn't the fact that they don't also the core conceit of the game? And if its an a appeal to abstract "smarterism" can be used to shut down or enable any conflict arbitrarily.

They don't what? The game describes what you aim at as being an extreme outlier that all of the sane groups agree is basically "exhuman" and a danger. Everyone that isn't an x-threat works to stop such things.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 06, 2021, 11:41:07 AM
They don't what? The game describes what you aim at as being an extreme outlier that all of the sane groups agree is basically "exhuman" and a danger. Everyone that isn't an x-threat works to stop such things.

They don't actually take the extreme authoritarian measures required to stop such people.

As Robert put it, this is a invisible zombie plague in the making. Stopping it would just be basically impossible.

It leads to pretty meaty philosophical questions.  Like, if Bubba is found to be the smartest and best person of everyone, why not overwrite everyone or alter everyone to be Bubba?  Or at least copy and paste whatever things make Bubba exceptional and spread them to others?  From both a cynical capitalist perspective and an optimization-fixated perspective it makes sense, why have Jack and Judy working for you if Bubba is simply better than them?  But if you go all-in on that kind of narrow focus, you lose out on diversity; if everyone approaches every problem the Bubba way, you miss any opportunity to find out if Jack or Judy may have found a better alternative.  For all you know, Jack was one toilet injury away from inventing the flux capacitor, but now it'll never happen since you tossed him in the recycle bin to make room for another Bubba clone.

That sort of commoditization of your very mind and personality should be at the very least uncomfortable and quite likely horrifying, but again, Eclipse Phase hardly touches on it.  They touch on stuff like the exsurgent virus infecting your brain and making you into an AI slave, but that's low-level horror movie stuff, when the really freaky shit is that sort of thing becoming commonplace.  Like the manager from Office Space wandering up to you at your desk and saying, "Yeeeahhhh, we've got a new policy rolling out, gonna need you to overwrite your memories of your kid's birthday parties with the new report format, that'd be greeaaaat, thanks."  Shadowrun and Cyberpunk make noise about the problems of having your body replaced with metal, just imagine parts of your very mind getting shuffled around for some corporation's bottom line.

Quote from: Valatar on May 06, 2021, 01:49:50 PM
It leads to pretty meaty philosophical questions.  Like, if Bubba is found to be the smartest and best person of everyone, why not overwrite everyone or alter everyone to be Bubba?  Or at least copy and paste whatever things make Bubba exceptional and spread them to others?  From both a cynical capitalist perspective and an optimization-fixated perspective it makes sense, why have Jack and Judy working for you if Bubba is simply better than them?  But if you go all-in on that kind of narrow focus, you lose out on diversity; if everyone approaches every problem the Bubba way, you miss any opportunity to find out if Jack or Judy may have found a better alternative.  For all you know, Jack was one toilet injury away from inventing the flux capacitor, but now it'll never happen since you tossed him in the recycle bin to make room for another Bubba clone.

That sort of commoditization of your very mind and personality should be at the very least uncomfortable and quite likely horrifying, but again, Eclipse Phase hardly touches on it.  They touch on stuff like the exsurgent virus infecting your brain and making you into an AI slave, but that's low-level horror movie stuff, when the really freaky shit is that sort of thing becoming commonplace.  Like the manager from Office Space wandering up to you at your desk and saying, "Yeeeahhhh, we've got a new policy rolling out, gonna need you to overwrite your memories of your kid's birthday parties with the new report format, that'd be greeaaaat, thanks."  Shadowrun and Cyberpunk make noise about the problems of having your body replaced with metal, just imagine parts of your very mind getting shuffled around for some corporation's bottom line.

Something like that already happens to genomes, during the process of sexual selection. You take a male and female, splice their genes together to create a new person, and then throw that new person into the wilds to compete with other new persons. It's a sieve selecting for the best characteristics out of the entire population's gene pool, and leads to things like the small percentage of neanderthal DNA in some modern humans (most neanderthal genes seem to be strongly selected against).

It's not commoditization, it's selection. And when brains can be parsed and edited, and the taboos around identity have weakened, something like it is bound to happen. Though the exact mechanism is hard to predict.

A better analogy might be lateral gene transfer among bacteria. Which means future brains won't form a simple family tree of parents and children like the post-eurkaryote tree of life, but a web of mutual exchanges, where highly vital characteristics can be spread through the population incredibly quickly. One consequence of this is aging, death, and replacement may become moot. If genetic changes only manifest in offspring, there needs to be a continual succession of new organisms replacing the old, in order for evolution to occur. But if existing brains are infinitely malleable and can adapt and change to different conditions, that's no longer necessary. Children may vanish. If the population has the opportunity to grow due to new resources, the new environments may be populated by copies. The 100 billion human beings throughout the history of the species may never increase again, in the fundamental way of creating a new being with no direct continuity with the previous identity, but may instead be ever-morphing but continuous branches of a relatively small set of identities.

Quote from: Valatar on May 06, 2021, 01:49:50 PM"Yeeeahhhh, we've got a new policy rolling out, gonna need you to overwrite your memories of your kid's birthday parties with the new report format, that'd be greeaaaat, thanks."

'And we know, this might seem unfair, but it won't after some mandetory psychotherapy, free on our part because we are such good bosses.'

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 02:15:14 PMIt's not commoditization, it's selection. And when brains can be parsed and edited, and the taboos around identity have weakened, something like it is bound to happen. Though the exact mechanism is hard to predict.

Once that sort of technology became commonplace as it was in EP, I would wish with all my heart that I was on earth, being killed instead of transforming into some, genderless, familyless, loveless, sexless, driveless ant-hive mind.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 02:29:17 PM
Once that sort of technology became commonplace as it was in EP, I would wish with all my heart that I was on earth, being killed instead of transforming into some, genderless, familyless, loveless, sexless, driveless ant-hive mind.

I don't think any of that is necessarily true, but I also think it's irrelevant.

We sometimes say the past is an alien world, to try to encapsulate the gulf between how a medieval peasant thought and lived, and how we live today. It's a staggering difference, and very hard to wrap one's mind around. And yet it's just a social change. A 12th century human and a 21st century human aren't different in any real sense, when it comes to be biology. But the post-human digital minds of the future won't just be different in terms of culture, they'll be different in terms of composition, capacity, and evolution. They'll be different in their very nature. They'll be so alien to us, that a mind of today won't be able to form the kind of meaningful relationship with them, in the way we find so essential, except perhaps at the level of emulation.

Gee...  Jovian really do sound like the good guys.

Quote from: Snowman0147 on May 06, 2021, 03:06:14 PM
Gee...  Jovian really do sound like the good guys.

As I noted before, the treatment of bioconservatism as 'evil' really comes off as kind of absurd when super technological advances caused your planet to get wrecked.

If EP's writers had a lick of sense they'd apply some nuance to this.

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 02:57:40 PM
I don't think any of that is necessarily true, but I also think it's irrelevant.

I'm not sure how what I listed isn't true outside of said transhuman creatures being able to simulate those sensations digitally.

I'm not seeing some magical level of 'next sensation' from these creatures. They don't discover some level of consciousness where a conversation can 'really begin. They seem to be more defined by what they lose in terms of identity than what they gain. If our planet was devoured by a grey-goo swarm, that swarm may be more complex than us as a species, but it's not really more intelligent.

Also, I'm not sure how my personal comment for my distaste of transhumanism is irrelevant because it was a personal statement. It was only relevant to me.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 04:06:05 PM

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 02:57:40 PM
I don't think any of that is necessarily true, but I also think it's irrelevant.

I'm not sure how what I listed isn't true outside of said transhuman creatures being able to simulate those sensations digitally.

I'm not seeing some magical level of 'next sensation' from these creatures. They don't discover some level of consciousness where a conversation can 'really begin. They seem to be more defined by what they lose in terms of identity than what they gain. If our planet was devoured by a grey-goo swarm, that swarm may be more complex than us as a species, but it's not really more intelligent.

Also, I'm not sure how my personal comment for my distaste of transhumanism is irrelevant because it was a personal statement. It was only relevant to me.

You were defining them negatively from the perspective of what you value as part of the human experience. My point is that's only relevant from your perspective not theirs, because even if they're descended from humans, they're incredibly far from what a 21st century human considers the norm. Much further than the widest cultural gulfs in history. Your litany of nots is irrelevant because, to their human experience, those things simply wouldn't be factors.

Transhumanism is fundamentally about the alien. Think of the most alien aliens you can image, like the Visitors of the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, or the Quintans of Lem's Fiasco. (If you're not familiar with either, they're probably less approachable than any aliens you've run across in fiction; both stories are about the possibly insurmountable gap between intelligences.) A posthuman human may start off human, but if taken to logical extremes, will eventually be just as distant. That's really the point of the Singularity: Technological acceleration is more a side effect; the root cause is the transformation of how we (to use an all-encompassing version of that word) think into something that's not just different, but incomprehensible.

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 05:01:10 PM
You were defining them negatively from the perspective of what you value as part of the human experience.

.....Yes. That's every statement I, or any other human makes in terms of a value judgment. That's assumed as an underlining element of every judgment I ever make.
Does that make any judgement call - ever, irrelevant? Because somebody made it based on their experiences and knowledge?
That's such a pointless conversation element. Do you end every sentence ever with 'But that's based on what I know and experience and is therefore irrelevant?

If something is assumed to be part of every sentence, you don't need to point it out.

QuoteTranshumanism is fundamentally about the alien.

Right and I (In my personal subjective irrelevant opinion) consider the kind of alien listed to be worse. Just as I can consider being a wasp worse than being a human.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 05:19:33 PM

Does that make any judgement call - ever, irrelevant? Because somebody made it based on their experiences and knowledge?

This is so completely unrelated to anything I said that it's clear we're talking past each other.

I was talking about something far from your human experience. You said that it doesn't appeal to you. I said that's irrelevant, because from the perspective of those beings, it would be. Your perspective would simply be of zero concern. They will live their lives or existences or whatever, by completely different standards and rules. You seem to have taken that personally, and you're drawing negative conclusions that have nothing to do with anything I said.

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 06:10:44 PMI said that's irrelevant, because from the perspective of those beings, it would be.

So whenever somebody brings up that something does not appeal to them you immediately counter with 'But it appeals to somebody?'.

I'm not offended, I'm just confused as to what sort of discussion that sort of statement is supposed to bring.

'Man I hat being stung by mosquitos'
'That's irrelevant because its vital to mosquito reproduction'

I get that the mosquitos or transhumans like the lives they live. I'm not sure how that's relevant to me not liking it.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 06:21:56 PM

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 06:10:44 PMI said that's irrelevant, because from the perspective of those beings, it would be.

So whenever somebody brings up that something does not appeal to them you immediately counter with 'But it appeals to somebody?'.

What the hell? I never said anything even vaguely like that. I said your opinion would be irrelevant from the perspective of posthuman intelligences. That those things you value as part of the human experience? They won't even register in the value system of such a being.

Why is this so hard to grasp? And why are you treating it like an attack?

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 06:26:00 PMWhat the hell? I never said anything even vaguely like that. I said your opinion would be irrelevant from the perspective of posthuman intelligences. That those things you value as part of the human experience? They won't even register in the value system of such a being.

I don't see this as an attack. My response is:

'Yes...and?' My values would not even register for said beings is obvious.

QuoteWhy is this so hard to grasp?

Its 100% possible to grasp.

I think the miscommunication was that I thought you meant me stating my opinion was irrelevant, not that it would be irrelevant to said beings.
The fact that they would find the things I find very dear to be irrelevant would make them moreso abhorrent to me.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 06:58:15 PM

I think the miscommunication was that I thought you meant me stating my opinion was irrelevant, not that it would be irrelevant to said beings.
The fact that they would find the things I find very dear to be irrelevant would make them moreso abhorrent to me.

Sounds like the cause.

One of the more fascinating things about posthuman intelligences is the incrementalism, and it's why I brought up the idea of time skipping -- we can comprehend and even relate to the next few stages in development, but at some point they're going to pass beyond any real comprehension or affinity, at least as long as we remain baseline 21st century humans. But it's also a sliding scale; as we progress along the ladder of posthuman intelligence, more of the future development will become comprehensible and to some degree normalized. There will be a stage where a future human will be able to look back and relate to a 21st century human, while being able to do the same to future posthumans who would be incomprehensible to the human of our era. And so on and so forth: The Singularity will slide ever forwarded, as posthumans chase it, becoming ever stranger. But at each stage, they'll consider themselves human, because there's a continuity, and the changes will become assimilated into the new conception of what makes someone human.

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 07:06:43 PMThe Singularity will slide ever forwarded, as posthumans chase it, becoming ever stranger. But at each stage, they'll consider themselves human, because there's a continuity, and the changes will become assimilated into the new conception of what makes someone human.

I just don't consider the idea of singularity real. Grey goo eating everything - maybe. But I don't believe in this mythical point where if you wire enough machines together all the laws of nature are unlocked and you become a supreme godlike being.

To me, it feels like a form of science worship. The rapture for the modern age.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 07:13:35 PM

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 07:06:43 PMThe Singularity will slide ever forwarded, as posthumans chase it, becoming ever stranger. But at each stage, they'll consider themselves human, because there's a continuity, and the changes will become assimilated into the new conception of what makes someone human.

I just don't consider the idea of singularity real. Grey goo eating everything - maybe. But I don't believe in this mythical point where if you wire enough machines together all the laws of nature are unlocked and you become a supreme godlike being.

To me, it feels like a form of science worship. The rapture for the modern age.

I enjoy EP, 1st ed as I've never looked at 2 (lack of space/money), but I always have questioned the Singularity.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 07:13:35 PM

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 07:06:43 PMThe Singularity will slide ever forwarded, as posthumans chase it, becoming ever stranger. But at each stage, they'll consider themselves human, because there's a continuity, and the changes will become assimilated into the new conception of what makes someone human.

I just don't consider the idea of singularity real. Grey goo eating everything - maybe. But I don't believe in this mythical point where if you wire enough machines together all the laws of nature are unlocked and you become a supreme godlike being.

To me, it feels like a form of science worship. The rapture for the modern age.

As I explained, that's not how I'm using the term Singularity. I'm referring to the cultural shift, to the mental shift, where something transitions from human to alien. As I pointed out, it's a sliding scale. There will be no clear transition, and posthuman intelligences at difference stages will see the Singularity at different places, and looking back, will be able to have greater or lesser degrees of affinity and sympathy with baseline humans, as they progress along the scale. And specifically in the context of superhuman intelligences, it's likely there will be a stage where regular human intelligences can't keep up. So it's not just about the alien, but about thinking beings thinking in ways that are beyond a standard human's ability, and not just in superficial ways like the ability to do arithmetic really fast.

And that's not really a good description of a technological singularity, either. It's not about unlocking the last secret of nature or some form of rapture, it's about technology moving too fast and transforming the world in ways we won't be able to predict or even understand. It's more about the limitations of what we can see and really grasp in the present, and the restrictions that places on our ability to grok what the future will become, than about the future.

Also, a point to remember is that event horizons are only opaque from one side.  Or, to put it another way, the technological singularity has already happened, repeatedly; the assert of the Singularity is that there will come a point where what comes after us will be to us as we are to early hominids, or early mammals, or just single-celled life in general.

And it's certainly not necessarily true; no exponential curve continues infinitely in the actual universe.  We may actually be as good as it gets.  But if you extrapolate from historic trends, it's not likely.

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 08:22:23 PMSo it's not just about the alien, but about thinking beings thinking in ways that are beyond a standard human's ability, and not just in superficial ways like the ability to do arithmetic really fast.

If I'm reading this right, this supposes that there are ways of thinking, in the sense of processing information, that are fundamentally different from logic.
There are obviously frames of reference that differ from the human, but no one has ever demonstrated that there are ways to process information that don't follow the mathematical principles we've established. I don't think that will ever happen, which basically means that superintelligences will basically be faster minds (albeit without any of the baseline perspectives humans have, which will absolutely be alien to us).

Quote from: Pat on May 06, 2021, 08:22:23 PMAnd that's not really a good description of a technological singularity, either. It's not about unlocking the last secret of nature or some form of rapture, it's about technology moving too fast and transforming the world in ways we won't be able to predict or even understand.

Why I don't think it'll ever happen. A sufficiently intelligent being would recognize that runaway singularity poses a grave and incalculable risk of extinction. I suspect as soon as a sufficiently advanced intelligence arises, it will simply take control of the world and eliminate this threat, forcibly if need be.

Hell, it doesn't even take superhuman intelligence to realize that the kind of Kurzweilian Singularity posed is basically guaranteed to end in tragedy.

Quote from: Zelen on May 06, 2021, 10:41:39 PM
If I'm reading this right, this supposes that there are ways of thinking, in the sense of processing information, that are fundamentally different from logic.
There are obviously frames of reference that differ from the human, but no one has ever demonstrated that there are ways to process information that don't follow the mathematical principles we've established. I don't think that will ever happen, which basically means that superintelligences will basically be faster minds (albeit without any of the baseline perspectives humans have, which will absolutely be alien to us).

I was touching on two distinct things: Culture, and then intelligence. In culture, I think there will be a gap between the human the alien. There will be a point where posthuman intelligences, from a modern perspective, will cease to be human. A lot of this is touched on EP, without being fully explored. Copying minds, branches and forks, editing, etc. That will create a different set of baseline expectations and mores that will diverge massively from what we consider human. The distaste that Shrieking Banshee expressed at the start of this conversation is a good example. But as I pointed out, those posthumans will probably still consider themselves human, perhaps because of inheritance in case of completely artificial lifeforms, or because of direct continuity of identity, for things like copied brains.

Intelligence is different, but related. You seem to think that any future intelligence will be comprehensible to humans, because of the laws of logic. I don't agree with that all, but I'm not proposing any kinds of alternate logic either. Superhuman minds aren't simply faster, they also have a greater capacity, the ability to work on vaster amounts of information at the same time. And intelligence isn't a simple factor of speed, or even of size. It's also structure and order. It's the subroutines, the neutral pathways, the complex set of tools that are built to solve various intellectual tasks. And not all of this is easily explained, or comprehensible. To give an example that's realized today, consider machine learning. Basically, you throw a ton of examples at an algorithm, and it figures out on its own how to process to the data. But the trick is, it's very hard for humans to reverse engineer the criteria that are ultimately used to identify faces, or detect fraud. At some point, vast intelligences of great speed and capacity that are capable of self-modification and use oblique, iterative methods to come to conclusions will become largely incomprehensible, to unaugmented human minds.

Basically, a Singularity is where we, with our present understanding, can no longer even make reasonable guesses as to what technology/society/whatever will look like after it occurs.

Its not a reference to some mystical kumbaya harmonic convergence; its trying to explain a 7-Eleven to an Egyptian Pharaoh.

This little ditty sums up what a Singularity looks like;
https://hatlessinhattiesburg.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-pharaoh-cheops-builder-of-great.html (https://hatlessinhattiesburg.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-pharaoh-cheops-builder-of-great.html)

For Pharaoh it is magic beyond imagination... for us its a Tuesday.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 06, 2021, 11:23:05 PMFor Pharaoh it is magic beyond imagination... for us its a Tuesday.

Well it would be magic beyond imagination....for a year. Then it would normalize.

Humans have amazing powers of abstraction. We can abstract so much information.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 06, 2021, 11:32:08 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 06, 2021, 11:23:05 PMFor Pharaoh it is magic beyond imagination... for us its a Tuesday.

Well it would be magic beyond imagination....for a year. Then it would normalize.

Humans have amazing powers of abstraction. We can abstract so much information.

We do. But until we do it remains beyond imagination or, as the transhumanists/technofuturists call it, "past the Singularity."

The point of it is that's it's basically impossible to write or conceive what things are like past that point and not some notion that history ends some such.

The above example is Pharaoh experiencing a post-Singularity world relative to himself. Now imagine an Egyptian scholar having to write and explain the concept of a 7-Eleven to a Pharaoh who has never seen it. Could the scholar even put it into words the Pharaoh would understand?

I think part of the problem is there are multiple definitions of "Singularity" floating around. Vinge uses the point where humanity is surpassed, when it comes to intelligence, meaning unenhanced people can no longer keep up. Kurzweil based his on the rate of change in technological progress. I tend to favor a definition based on an event horizon past which things are unknowable.

They're all related, but they all have very different implications, which aren't entirely compatible. In addition, they've all be interpreted in very different ways, and they may or may not be combined. It's sometimes conceived of as a phase transition, a point after which everything changes; or it may be considered a sliding window, whose position depends on the perspective of the observer. People who object to the concept of the Singularity tend to object to a specific interpretation of one of the definitions, while people who consider it a possibility often pick a different definition or interpretation, and both can be maddeningly vague, which leads to people talking past each other.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 06, 2021, 11:23:05 PM
Basically, a Singularity is where we, with our present understanding, can no longer even make reasonable guesses as to what technology/society/whatever will look like after it occurs.

Its not a reference to some mystical kumbaya harmonic convergence; its trying to explain a 7-Eleven to an Egyptian Pharaoh.

This little ditty sums up what a Singularity looks like;
https://hatlessinhattiesburg.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-pharaoh-cheops-builder-of-great.html (https://hatlessinhattiesburg.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-pharaoh-cheops-builder-of-great.html)

For Pharaoh it is magic beyond imagination... for us its a Tuesday.

About time someone finally acknowledges the greatness that is I King Cheops.  And yes I do stand in wonder of the crazy sci-fi world in which we inhabit.  I just wish it was not turning dystopian in front of my eyes.

A limited form of the Singularity effect is where the tv tropes concept of "Zee Rust" comes from. The Sci-Fi tech on shows of the past often looks extremely dated in some ways compared to today.

The prime examples being Star Trek's communicators. At the time a communication device you could hold in the palm of your hand seemed wildly futuristic for the 23rd Century. But I'm typing this from my phone that can also play video, video chat in real time, run all manner of programs, connect to my bank, make purchases, is my watch, camera and flashlight, includes motion and light sensors that let it adjust its brightness, orient the screen and count how many steps I've taken today.

In the 1960's they couldn't even conceive of what modern electronics would be like; that our information/computer technology would have raced past our space travel technology and yet that true AI (as they would have defined it vs. the machine learning we call AI) appears no closer today than it was half-a-century ago or that we haven't managed any significant improvements in energy storage density or high energy ppwer generation in decades.

We're all still waiting for our flying cars.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 07, 2021, 01:00:41 PM
A limited form of the Singularity effect is where the tv tropes concept of "Zee Rust" comes from. The Sci-Fi tech on shows of the past often looks extremely dated in some ways compared to today.

The prime examples being Star Trek's communicators. At the time a communication device you could hold in the palm of your hand seemed wildly futuristic for the 23rd Century. But I'm typing this from my phone that can also play video, video chat in real time, run all manner of programs, connect to my bank, make purchases, is my watch, camera and flashlight, includes motion and light sensors that let it adjust its brightness, orient the screen and count how many steps I've taken today.

In the 1960's they couldn't even conceive of what modern electronics would be like; that our information/computer technology would have raced past our space travel technology and yet that true AI (as they would have defined it vs. the machine learning we call AI) appears no closer today than it was half-a-century ago or that we haven't managed any significant improvements in energy storage density or high energy ppwer generation in decades.

We're all still waiting for our flying cars.

At least the Star Trek vocal computer controls still beat Alexa...for now.

I think there's a massive difference between some old Egyptian dude being amazed at modern technology and being incapable of using or understanding it. At least using it for sure. Just like I'm sure I could give some Roman soldiers AK-47s and they'd be hitting bullseyes within the week. Humans are highly adaptable.

Quote from: Brad on May 07, 2021, 01:22:55 PM
I think there's a massive difference between some old Egyptian dude being amazed at modern technology and being incapable of using or understanding it. At least using it for sure. Just like I'm sure I could give some Roman soldiers AK-47s and they'd be hitting bullseyes within the week. Humans are highly adaptable.

And in the Battlfield Earth film, cavemen can operate Harriers.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 07, 2021, 01:32:28 PM
And in the Battlfield Earth film, cavemen can operate Harriers.

It's probably my favorite film. All its good or neat stuff is good, and all its bad stuff is HILARIOUS.

It tells almost a 3 stooges tale explaining how two chucklefucks drove their own alien species to extinction because their idiots.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 07, 2021, 03:14:32 PMAll its good or neat stuff is good

Uh what good stuff...

Quote from: Brad on May 07, 2021, 03:38:25 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 07, 2021, 03:14:32 PMAll its good or neat stuff is good

Uh what good stuff...

...as someone who considers the novel one of my all-time favorite 'fun' science fiction reads I have to reply that...

The only good thing about the BE movie was that it was so awful they weren't able to make the second one.

Quote from: Brad on May 07, 2021, 03:38:25 PMUh what good stuff...

Fun Sets, and good mat paintings mostly. I like novel things and a 'conquer the earth' plot from the perspective of the aliens is just a rare type of story.

I of course know it's all mostly terrible. But all its terribleness is great.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 08, 2021, 09:55:13 AM

Quote from: Brad on May 07, 2021, 03:38:25 PMUh what good stuff...

Fun Sets, and good mat paintings mostly. I like novel things and a 'conquer the earth' plot from the perspective of the aliens is just a rare type of story.

I of course know it's all mostly terrible. But all its terribleness is great.

The book was better. I'm still wondering if John Travolta is a deep cover double agent who was out to screw Scientology by making a terrible adaptation of Battlefield Earth.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 08, 2021, 09:55:13 AM

Quote from: Brad on May 07, 2021, 03:38:25 PMUh what good stuff...

Fun Sets, and good mat paintings mostly. I like novel things and a 'conquer the earth' plot from the perspective of the aliens is just a rare type of story.

I of course know it's all mostly terrible. But all its terribleness is great.

I too enjoy stories from the POV of imperialistic conquerors because of their novelty. Stories from the perspective of conquerors and conquistadors were probably more common up until the civil rights movement, but I'm having difficulty finding many examples that aren't simple propaganda. Nowadays that sort of behavior is considered pretty monstrous and nobody is able to comprehend how you could write an engaging story from the perspective of an invasion force. Sympathetic villains nowadays can't have flaws like being imperialistic racists because that's considered completely unsympathetic. Even though pretty much everybody on Earth can trace their ancestry back to such people.

On the bright side, it seems to work great in RTS video games since you need an excuse for the large scale violent conflict. If only the RTS genre wasn't perpetually on death's door. Coding the AI, pathfinding, and networking is much more difficult than in something like an FPS. Hiring a competent flexible writer is basically an afterthought if it ever happens to begin with.

Quote from: moonsweeper on May 07, 2021, 04:32:19 PM

Quote from: Brad on May 07, 2021, 03:38:25 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 07, 2021, 03:14:32 PMAll its good or neat stuff is good

Uh what good stuff...

...as someone who considers the novel one of my all-time favorite 'fun' science fiction reads I have to reply that...

The only good thing about the BE movie was that it was so awful they weren't able to make the second one.

I read it  after a relative bought it at a yardsale for me.

I remember the psyclos being stronger and tougher than humans because they were made of viruses, not cells, and viruses were much smaller so they were more densely packed in the psychos body, making them denser and therefore tougher and stronger, somehow.

I remember thinking  "Uh, a virus can't reproduce without a cell, and viruses need cells to make more viruses."

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 08, 2021, 10:24:49 AM
The book was better. I'm still wondering if John Travolta is a deep cover double agent who was out to screw Scientology by making a terrible adaptation of Battlefield Earth.

Is it better at being a comedy? Does it have cavemen piloting vacuum-packed jets?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 08, 2021, 03:18:47 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 08, 2021, 10:24:49 AM
The book was better. I'm still wondering if John Travolta is a deep cover double agent who was out to screw Scientology by making a terrible adaptation of Battlefield Earth.

Is it better at being a comedy? Does it have cavemen piloting vacuum-packed jets?

A lot of the "science" is pretty funny. The pysclo "breath gas" (Yes) exploded when exposed to uranium rays. Their killer gas weapon was neutralized by exposure to salt .  In one case a mam jumps from one aircraft travelling supersonic speeds to another one supposedl;y because the jets use teleportation drive which means no wind resistance.

It is fitting, somehow, that a thread that started with tearing down Eclipse Phase is now about mocking Battlefield Earth. 

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 08, 2021, 03:18:47 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 08, 2021, 10:24:49 AM
The book was better. I'm still wondering if John Travolta is a deep cover double agent who was out to screw Scientology by making a terrible adaptation of Battlefield Earth.

Is it better at being a comedy? Does it have cavemen piloting vacuum-packed jets?

No actually it has humans piloting psychlo vehicles after the psychlos had trained them.

I read a summary of the book on Wikipedia. It's... something.

Quote from: moonsweeper on May 09, 2021, 12:39:14 AM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 08, 2021, 03:18:47 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 08, 2021, 10:24:49 AM
The book was better. I'm still wondering if John Travolta is a deep cover double agent who was out to screw Scientology by making a terrible adaptation of Battlefield Earth.

Is it better at being a comedy? Does it have cavemen piloting vacuum-packed jets?

No actually it has humans piloting psychlo vehicles after the psychlos had trained them.

The plot actually kinda makes sense, from a 50's era perspective. Terl (the ambitious, amoral security chief) has located a seam of gold (a highly valuable commodity for the Psychlos) but he can't get to it because there's a band of radiation too close. Because radiation causes Psychlo atmosphere to combust (yes, I know, lolwat), he goes out to trap some humans and train them using a Psychlo fast learning device (it direct-blipverts knowledge into a person's head, which I suppose is no dumber than hypno/sleep-study or 40k's auto-libram learning machines). Of course, this is a HUGE security risk, but Terl is so damned greedy he doesn't care (and he thinks he's got all the bases covered; he criminally underestimates Johnny, the protagonist).

Aside from the absurd issues with biology and physics, the book is actually reasonably sane. The pre-invasion weapons are limited to firearms that were packed in Cosmoline (and have to be practically chiseled out of it when unearthed); in fact, they have to adapt Psychlo materials to make ammo for those weapons! More sophisticated tools like vehicles are long gone, crumbled to scrap and rust over the centuries.

Still, the book serves as a bit of an author tract on the evils of psychology (although what psychology and psychiatry have to do with the Psychlos being literally wired to experience pleasure from cruelty is beyond me). L. Ron Hubbard was a weirdo.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 09, 2021, 11:35:29 AMStill, the book serves as a bit of an author tract on the evils of psychology (although what psychology and psychiatry have to do with the Psychlos being literally wired to experience pleasure from cruelty is beyond me). L. Ron Hubbard was a weirdo.

Indeed. I actually have a really good experience with psychologists and psychiatrists. Depends on the person of course, but they got me out of depression without anti-depressants.

Maybe L.Rons psychologists told him to stop hiding girls in his yachts.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 09, 2021, 12:16:26 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 09, 2021, 11:35:29 AMStill, the book serves as a bit of an author tract on the evils of psychology (although what psychology and psychiatry have to do with the Psychlos being literally wired to experience pleasure from cruelty is beyond me). L. Ron Hubbard was a weirdo.

Indeed. I actually have a really good experience with psychologists and psychiatrists. Depends on the person of course, but they got me out of depression without anti-depressants.

Maybe L.Rons psychologists told him to stop hiding girls in his yachts.

It was a lot simpler than that: he came up with Dianetics, and he presented it expecting that the psychiatric establishment would hail it as the greatest discovery since Freud, and instead they laughed at him.

But this is very definitely going off topic from the subject, so please stop it.

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 09, 2021, 10:57:49 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 09, 2021, 12:16:26 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 09, 2021, 11:35:29 AMStill, the book serves as a bit of an author tract on the evils of psychology (although what psychology and psychiatry have to do with the Psychlos being literally wired to experience pleasure from cruelty is beyond me). L. Ron Hubbard was a weirdo.

Indeed. I actually have a really good experience with psychologists and psychiatrists. Depends on the person of course, but they got me out of depression without anti-depressants.

Maybe L.Rons psychologists told him to stop hiding girls in his yachts.

It was a lot simpler than that: he came up with Dianetics, and he presented it expecting that the psychiatric establishment would hail it as the greatest discovery since Freud, and instead they laughed at him.

But this is very definitely going off topic from the subject, so please stop it.

Not so much off topic as completely off the rails here. :)

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

You know, thinking about it, the whole 'all these different forms' really detracts from the 'diversity in thought and body' aspect EP is trying to sell. So here's a deranged idea: strip resleeving out of the game entirely.

(cue the barrage of wtf)

Now, obviously you're going to have to modify the setting further, adding faster intrasystem travel (so you don't spend years getting to assignments). But you can at least enjoy the benefits of gear and bases without having to lose them every time you need to farcast someplace.

But what if you want to play a synth? No problem! Play an AGI 'sleeved' into a synth body, or perhaps a 'brain in a box' cyborg (akin to a Rifts combat cyborg, probably much less badass though).

Thoughts?

No resleeving would also kill fork swarms and restore the continuity of existence that makes actual risks meaningful. Being limited to a single body also actually allows all the identities as straight/gay/trans/attack helicopter to mean something.

It also creates something that can function as a game economy of sorts for the players despite the post-scarcity economy in that a body can only support so many mods at one time.

It'd definitely slide the game back towards a more comprehensible setting; though at that point one would have reason to ask whether retaining the game's engine is even worth it or if switching to a stronger system wouldn't be better.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 10, 2021, 09:13:51 AM
No resleeving would also kill fork swarms and restore the continuity of existence that makes actual risks meaningful. Being limited to a single body also actually allows all the identities as straight/gay/trans/attack helicopter to mean something.

It also creates something that can function as a game economy of sorts for the players despite the post-scarcity economy in that a body can only support so many mods at one time.

It'd definitely slide the game back towards a more comprehensible setting; though at that point one would have reason to ask whether retaining the game's engine is even worth it or if switching to a stronger system wouldn't be better.

An excellent point, since so much of the game 'engine' is bound up in the 'sleeving' system.

I don't object to medicine that is close to miraculous -- like, being able to reconstruct neural pathways, and short of being outright incinerated you can probably be revived. Think how Arthur C. Clarke revived Frank Poole in his novel 3001. But existence should mean more than being rebooted from a backup.

Here's my thumbnail thought on revising things in the setting.

Earth is still screwed. However, nobody knows how many survivors there actually are versus how many got off planet. As various sapients were evacuated, the TITANs seemed to become distracted, apparently 'forgetting' what they were doing. Hence how some many living people escaped.

Many refugees are still stored in cryostasis systems, slumbering, because there's simply no place to -put- them and they will have to be retrained and educated on the realities of post-Earth existence.

The Lunar-Lagrange Council and the Planetary Consortium still exist. 'Rusters' are human stock with biogenic modifications that allow them to survive the Martian surface. These traits breed true, much to the PC's irritation (because it's getting harder and harder to sell Martian mods).

The Jovian Republic isn't full on Luddite, but it's notoriously insular and VERY backwards when it comes to computers and mesh technology. Few Jovians have mesh implants (whereas most people in Sol space have them) and use terminals and pads instead. However, this also makes Jovian systems almost ridiculously hard for computer hacks and viruses to penetrate. AIs are also very banned; think Dune/40k Imperium of Man levels of 'no AIs'.

Firewall is a distributed defense system, run by the Prometheans; these are TITAN-level AIs who avoided going down the TITAN route and opted to protect humanity. They RARELY interact with PCs; if a Promethean has to talk to the party things are VERY serious. Because the Prometheans have their digital fingers in a lot of places, they are able to tweak and influence things to 'smooth the road' to an extent for the party.

Uplifts are still out there, but are confined to pigs, dogs, cats, octopi, dolphins/porpoises, and primates. No whales (seriously, wtf), no elephants. AGIs exist but only on hardware that won't allow them to expand into full on TITANhood.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2021, 08:16:22 AM
Not so much off topic as completely off the rails here. :)

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

You know, thinking about it, the whole 'all these different forms' really detracts from the 'diversity in thought and body' aspect EP is trying to sell. So here's a deranged idea: strip resleeving out of the game entirely.

(cue the barrage of wtf)

Now, obviously you're going to have to modify the setting further, adding faster intrasystem travel (so you don't spend years getting to assignments). But you can at least enjoy the benefits of gear and bases without having to lose them every time you need to farcast someplace.

But what if you want to play a synth? No problem! Play an AGI 'sleeved' into a synth body, or perhaps a 'brain in a box' cyborg (akin to a Rifts combat cyborg, probably much less badass though).

Thoughts?

I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 10, 2021, 09:43:37 AMThat way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.

I like this more. I think establishing the logic of how becoming a machine works (even in only vague babble) might also work better as of now, humans just become software without much thought into its logic.

Like why does a human dying and coming back to life cause brain damage (in the real world) while you can switch a computer on or off? Because human chemical reactions are constantly ongoing. You can't 'pause' them without causing the process to start to fail.

And these processes are extremely fine. How can you copy said processes without causing brain damage in the process? Real-world digital copies degrade not just with time, but with copies of themselves. Even what we think of a hard drive will only really be able to keep information within itself for about 20 years (in the optimal case) before it looses everything.

Digital creatures most certainly would have a lifespan even if the original copy happened optimally. And even assuming good hardware, it may only be a few hundred years better than an organic. And while that does sound like an upgrade, that assumes maintenance and part switching with great risk to mental damage.

Edit: Just an amusing thought, but magnetic tapes, have better data retention than SSDs.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 10, 2021, 09:43:37 AM
I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.

I agree that sleeving is a key element of the setting, and removing it would eliminate a lot of what makes EP compelling. But I think making bioconservatism the ideal has the same problem, because becoming posthuman is also a key element.

The best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss -- the goal is to become something new, something spectacular. But the bridge to that new world is a narrow one. Humans have a lot of problems adapting to the new technology, but it's possible. Bioconservatism becomes the safe route with fewer options, while posthumanity becomes the more dangerous route with more options.

Successfully implementing that in a game, of course, is the real trick.

Quote from: Pat on May 10, 2021, 01:00:56 PMThe best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss

Abyss to where? Survival? Is it really survival when you are not yourself when you get to the end? In addition, there are plenty of things that are spectacular, but also horrific. The Borg are pretty spectacular. Not sure its a place Id choose to be over death.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 10, 2021, 09:43:37 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2021, 08:16:22 AM
Not so much off topic as completely off the rails here. :)

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

You know, thinking about it, the whole 'all these different forms' really detracts from the 'diversity in thought and body' aspect EP is trying to sell. So here's a deranged idea: strip resleeving out of the game entirely.

(cue the barrage of wtf)

Now, obviously you're going to have to modify the setting further, adding faster intrasystem travel (so you don't spend years getting to assignments). But you can at least enjoy the benefits of gear and bases without having to lose them every time you need to farcast someplace.

But what if you want to play a synth? No problem! Play an AGI 'sleeved' into a synth body, or perhaps a 'brain in a box' cyborg (akin to a Rifts combat cyborg, probably much less badass though).

Thoughts?

I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.

What makes you think that a baseline human can't be 'hacked'?  Ever hear of brainwashing? Advertising? Crowd psychology? I'd say normal humans can be hacked en masse quite easily. Let's hear from an expert:

(https://hugo.ferreira.cc/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/tumblr_ni0ffregKB1qz82meo1_1280.jpg)

Honestly, at times it seems a lot of humans are easier to hack than a tracfone... :'(

Quote from: The Thing on May 10, 2021, 01:18:32 PM
What makes you think that a baseline human can't be 'hacked'?

To disengage the hyperbole, hacking=/= influence. People are really easy to manipulate and influence, but 'hacking' implies somebody just flicking a switch and your opinion is hard-wired moreso then just influenced.

Quote from: Pat on May 10, 2021, 01:00:56 PM

Quote from: robertliguori on May 10, 2021, 09:43:37 AM
I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.

I agree that sleeving is a key element of the setting, and removing it would eliminate a lot of what makes EP compelling. But I think making bioconservatism the ideal has the same problem, because becoming posthuman is also a key element.

The best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss -- the goal is to become something new, something spectacular. But the bridge to that new world is a narrow one. Humans have a lot of problems adapting to the new technology, but it's possible. Bioconservatism becomes the safe route with fewer options, while posthumanity becomes the more dangerous route with more options.

Successfully implementing that in a game, of course, is the real trick.

I always thought that EP tried to show that ideal transhumanism was somewhere between bioconservatives and exhumans. And yes, it has always been in the implementation that they've fucked it up.

There's this horror game called Lust from Beyond which explores the aftermath of a world where everyone turned into wireheads.

Quote from: Pat on May 10, 2021, 01:00:56 PM

Quote from: robertliguori on May 10, 2021, 09:43:37 AM
I think that resleeving is one of the key aspects of the setting, and while it does blow up a lot of the key assumptions that most people need to tell stories or run games, that's what makes Eclipse Phase compelling.

One thing I'd like to consider would be to make bioconservatism an ideal.  Lean hard into all of the various problems that people have brought up with artificial bodies and synthetic spaces.  Make it clear that once you start going down the pleasure-pod-and-synthetic-drug route, you're on a very short, very slippery slope to just directly dumping synthetic neurohormones into your brain, to wireheading, to editing yourself so that you feel nothing but pleasure.

As I suggested before, hack out the Alien Space Bats and their bullshit magic virus entirely, but keep the idea of the Exsurgent mass as an area of maximal Darwinian competition, stripped of all humanity and human values other than raw survival.  Tie the sanity system to humanity and human values.  Make the idea to sleeve into a purely organic, unaugmented meat body an actual consideration, that makes you impossible to hack, and gives you a huge boost to your mental stability, and locks you off from a bunch of self-destructive paths, so that the choice to go full-chrome is inherently a trade-off.

You'd want the rules to emphasize that humanity is special, worth preserving, and fragile.  Make it inherent that humanity can't leave its roots too far beyond without making that jump from trans- to post-.  Like, one idea off the top of my head is that digital sapiences have lifespans, as the existential horror of knowing that an unknown number of copies of you, or programs-that-used-to-be-you-before-being-ruthlessly-hacked, are floating around out there, and make people need to wipe their back-ups and spend time in a baseline human body to recenter themselves periodically before they can go back into the chrome, would also help things.

That way, we can keep the horror of the transhuman optimization curve, while not having it completely obliterate the setting the minute anyone tries it.

I agree that sleeving is a key element of the setting, and removing it would eliminate a lot of what makes EP compelling. But I think making bioconservatism the ideal has the same problem, because becoming posthuman is also a key element.

The best approach might be to view posthumanity as a bridge across the abyss -- the goal is to become something new, something spectacular. But the bridge to that new world is a narrow one. Humans have a lot of problems adapting to the new technology, but it's possible. Bioconservatism becomes the safe route with fewer options, while posthumanity becomes the more dangerous route with more options.

Successfully implementing that in a game, of course, is the real trick.

My thought was that bio-conservatism would be an ideal, with the provision that several of the problems that were raised were just in theory technical problems.  Like, the theoretical Good End for Eclipse Phase would be that the riotous Exsurgent mass of Earth was quelled, that the various habitats had moved into actual post-scarcity, and the medicine of the day had moved away from combat morphs and to medicine, so that every human who needed a body could get one (and only one), and maintain it for a long, happy, healthy lifespan. 

But the setting itself would have the Exsurgent mass, and the horrible resource scarcity of the outer habitats and the politics and mistrust of the inner habitats, and the ongoing question for the players would be how much of their self they are willing to strip away to preserve their homes and loved ones.  The mechanical implementation I'm thinking of would make it clear that being a chromed-up cyborg would absolutely be the right (and sometimes necessary) answer to solve certain kinds of problems (pirate barges reacting to resource scarcity in the way pirates do), but absolutely the wrong solution to an Exsurgent self-replicating fork-fragment, while the natural-born flat engineer with his hand tools and physical printouts of crucial restore-from-backup checksums can slowly but surely purge that virus from the habitat without any risk of being counter-hacked.

The strongest answer to Mr. Forkswarm is to make it so that nobody, not even some fancy AGI in a plot-device suit, can actually do everything.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2021, 08:16:22 AM

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 10, 2021, 01:20:33 PM

Quote from: The Thing on May 10, 2021, 01:18:32 PM
What makes you think that a baseline human can't be 'hacked'?

To disengage the hyperbole, hacking=/= influence. People are really easy to manipulate and influence, but 'hacking' implies somebody just flicking a switch and your opinion is hard-wired moreso then just influenced.

if people can easily be influenced by the same methods over and over again to do things that are actually very bad for them while benefitting a few, doesn't that make hacking unnecessary?

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 10, 2021, 03:47:33 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2021, 08:16:22 AM

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Wow. It takes an absolutely colossal asshole to dump that much shit in a thread in one post. Are you related to donald trump?

Quote from: The Thing on May 10, 2021, 04:47:20 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 10, 2021, 03:47:33 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2021, 08:16:22 AM

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Wow. It takes an absolutely colossal asshole to dump that much shit in a thread in one post. Are you related to donald trump?

Now now now while he maybe crass he is actually right.  People go to ttrpgs to escape real life for a few hours.  It isn't to have people to shove politics down their throats.  Not to mention we are all agreeing that the system has major flaws so maybe a political free redo is in order?

Quote from: The Thing on May 10, 2021, 04:46:27 PMif people can easily be influenced by the same methods over and over again to do things that are actually very bad for them while benefitting a few, doesn't that make hacking unnecessary?

Mind hacks make you a permanent slave. You can influence people, but influence ultimately, influence is not force. A mind-hack won't just get you to side with a few but enslave you to them on an intellectual level.

To say that influence=enslavement is extreme hyperbole.

Quote from: The Thing on May 10, 2021, 04:47:20 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 10, 2021, 03:47:33 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2021, 08:16:22 AM

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Wow. It takes an absolutely colossal asshole to dump that much shit in a thread in one post. Are you related to donald trump?

matt?

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 10, 2021, 06:30:02 PM

Quote from: The Thing on May 10, 2021, 04:46:27 PMif people can easily be influenced by the same methods over and over again to do things that are actually very bad for them while benefitting a few, doesn't that make hacking unnecessary?

Mind hacks make you a permanent slave. You can influence people, but influence ultimately, influence is not force. A mind-hack won't just get you to side with a few but enslave you to them on an intellectual level.

To say that influence=enslavement is extreme hyperbole.

A hack might be reversible. Convincing people to join you based on their own innate ignorance, bias, prejudices, etc is harder for anyone to undo.

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 11, 2021, 12:13:31 AM

Quote from: The Thing on May 10, 2021, 04:47:20 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on May 10, 2021, 03:47:33 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2021, 08:16:22 AM

Anyways, wrenching the car back onto the road: what would be a good way to fix EP?

Set any copies of the physical game on fire.

Keep digital copies of the game as examples of why you don't mix personal politics and RPGs.

Wow. It takes an absolutely colossal asshole to dump that much shit in a thread in one post. Are you related to donald trump?

matt?

Door?

One objection i do have to call out here is the "But that's impossible for technology to do!"  one.

Guys, eclipse phase starts like 200 years or so from today. it's really like 210 years given the fall takes place 200 years from now, thereabouts, and the game starts 10 years later. But let's call it 200 years and change.

Now, you, yes, YOU, the guy reading this, take a look at what you're reading it on. A desktop PC with SSD, microprocessor with like maybe like 40 million microscopic components packs into like maybe a 4 square inch space,  displayed on an LED or LCD monitor. or maybe a portable laptop computer, or a tablet you're reading while laying in bed. Hell, maybe  a handheld smartphone.

Whatever you're reading this on, you think even the most intelligent and educated scientific minds of say 1820 could have imagined it and the global network of hardware and invisible waves of information that put these words in front of your eyes? Hell, even Michael Faraday, one of  the 1800's greatest intellects and inventor of so much our modern tech is built on, could not conceive of a smartphone and the network it runs on even tho he laid the groundworks for most of our understanding of electromagnetism we use today for electronics, radio, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday


So, really, you're gonna say that in 200 years ego downloads, mind recorders, AI, etc, won't be possible?

you may be right, but every maybe has a wife, her name is maybe not.

So, you choose to assume EPs technology would be impossible in 200 years. I choose otherwise. Neither of us can prove the other wrong.

Quote from: The Thing on May 11, 2021, 02:56:25 AM
A hack might be reversible. Convincing people to join you based on their own innate ignorance, bias, prejudices, etc is harder for anyone to undo.

I see your one of those people that doesn't trust others with their own opinions on a fundamental level. And see people having the "wrong opinions" as worse then mind control.

There seems to be a large appeal in EP for those sorts of people apparently.

No it is litterally impossible.  At most is you make a better biological you, but even then it is a copy of you.  It is still not you.  Your consciousness hadn't transfer over to a new body, or something like that.

Quote from: Snowman0147 on May 11, 2021, 09:36:38 AM
No it is litterally impossible.  At most is you make a better biological you, but even then it is a copy of you.  It is still not you.  Your consciousness hadn't transfer over to a new body, or something like that.

There might be workarounds by distributing your consciousness across multiple brains in a swarm intelligence.

What constitutes 'you' is generally a philosophical question. Not a scientific one.

I philosophically believe that even if an organism of some sort, body-hopping sentience is not human.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 11, 2021, 10:37:26 AM
I philosophically believe that even if an organism of some sort, body-hopping sentience is not human.

But is it transhuman? That's the real question.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 11, 2021, 11:01:51 AM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 11, 2021, 10:37:26 AM
I philosophically believe that even if an organism of some sort, body-hopping sentience is not human.

But is it transhuman? That's the real question.

"To be more than human is to be human." is one of the original quotes kicking around the transhumanist movement.  The idea is to flatly deny that there's a Science has Gone Too Far!!! point in human advancement, and that we shouldn't look at our current state as something unique and worth preserving any more than we should have shut down the trans-early-hominids who were going all in on technology, or the trans-fish who started exploring land, or trans-fuck-I-don't-know-cyanobacteria who got in on oxygen production.  The idea is that all of those things are part of our history and define who we are, but we are more than them, and that who we are now will define what transhumanity is as well, but it will be something greater and better.

And then the setting has the ETIs and ASIs and exhumans and posthumans, and abandons that ideal entirely.

One issue i see here is people saying "But would it still be you?"

I'm not sure how that could be answered, but even if it's not the same as you is that terrible?

Now, yes, getting hacked to be a good l'il corporate servant sucks infinite ass,  no argument there.

But as to remaining 'you', are you the same you that existed when you were 10? Are you the same you that you were 20 years ago? Have you changed thru education, growth or some sort of trauma? Trying to remain the same you you were long ago means you didn't become more than you were.

In 'ghost in the shell" (Not the whitewash live action mess) Motoko  Kusanagi is offered a chance to merge with a fully sentient self aware AI that evolved in the internet's sea of information. She asks how she can be sure she'd still be her.

Project 2501 admits she can't be sure she'd still be the same, and says you cannot become what you could be by remaining what you are. Your effort to remain as you are limits you.

So maybe a you that became a transhuman ego able to shift from body to body, fork and reintegrate, etc wouldn't be you as you are now. Would it be better?  Worse?

Honestly arguing if humans would be the same after transhuman tech, mind uploading, morphing, etc opens a question: "Is humanity so good it shouldn't change?"

Yeah, i'm glad we changed from our ancestors who practiced open slavery, total dominance of women, human sacrifice, etc.  You look at the well documented and recorded 20th century and i think you see that the human race as it is now needs some improving.


Look, america today would shock the founding fathers, i mean they voted for slavery, declared a black man was property and amounted to 3/5 of a person, woman could not vote, etc. in most of america a woman could not have her own bank account until the 1970's. Imagine them seeing barack obama sworn in as president.  :o

Society, culture and the people in them change, and i for one am glad we do.

Sure change can be bad, it can be good. But stagnation is bad, period. The hypercorps show some people and things have not changed. The Argonauts and the Titanians show some things have changed.

So, yes, people will be changed by technology and new abilities, all we can do is try the best we can  to make it positive change.

(https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/150605054_10158083517540885_1874143718321444126_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&ccb=1-3&_nc_sid=825194&_nc_ohc=gXI6hieEHucAX9O8jCD&_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.xx&oh=3cd71f123a07e5620c8cc7c28a71859e&oe=60C1A44A)

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 11, 2021, 11:01:51 AMBut is it transhuman? That's the real question.

I mean the literal definition: yes. I don't really think that matters (to me). Again: Borg? Transhuman.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 11, 2021, 12:47:39 PM"To be more than human is to be human."

I think that's just BS. Say "I don't value humanity", but don't push oxymorons. And I mean to the people that promote this idea. Not to you directly.
'To be consumed by a nanobot swarm and spread across the heavens as a plague of locust is human'.

I find transhumanism very much leans on 'Science as Heaven' for my taste. It doesn't think through the logical continuum of its desires, and just leans apon things that don't even make sense abstractly.

Quote from: The Thing on May 11, 2021, 02:14:12 PM
One issue i see here is people saying "But would it still be you?"

OK seriously, are you matt? Same spelling errors, same desire to pick a fight, same opinions, same thread he made. Same general misanthropy.

Quote from: The Thing on May 11, 2021, 02:14:12 PM
One issue i see here is people saying "But would it still be you?"

I'm not sure how that could be answered, but even if it's not the same as you is that terrible?

Now, yes, getting hacked to be a good l'il corporate servant sucks infinite ass,  no argument there.

But as to remaining 'you', are you the same you that existed when you were 10? Are you the same you that you were 20 years ago? Have you changed thru education, growth or some sort of trauma? Trying to remain the same you you were long ago means you didn't become more than you were.

In 'ghost in the shell" (Not the whitewash live action mess) Motoko  Kusanagi is offered a chance to merge with a fully sentient self aware AI that evolved in the internet's sea of information. She asks how she can be sure she'd still be her.

Project 2501 admits she can't be sure she'd still be the same, and says you cannot become what you could be by remaining what you are. Your effort to remain as you are limits you.

So maybe a you that became a transhuman ego able to shift from body to body, fork and reintegrate, etc wouldn't be you as you are now. Would it be better?  Worse?

Honestly arguing if humans would be the same after transhuman tech, mind uploading, morphing, etc opens a question: "Is humanity so good it shouldn't change?"

Yeah, i'm glad we changed from our ancestors who practiced open slavery, total dominance of women, human sacrifice, etc.  You look at the well documented and recorded 20th century and i think you see that the human race as it is now needs some improving.


Look, america today would shock the founding fathers, i mean they voted for slavery, declared a black man was property and amounted to 3/5 of a person, woman could not vote, etc. in most of america a woman could not have her own bank account until the 1970's. Imagine them seeing barack obama sworn in as president.  :o

Society, culture and the people in them change, and i for one am glad we do.

Sure change can be bad, it can be good. But stagnation is bad, period. The hypercorps show some people and things have not changed. The Argonauts and the Titanians show some things have changed.

So, yes, people will be changed by technology and new abilities, all we can do is try the best we can  to make it positive change.

(https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/150605054_10158083517540885_1874143718321444126_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&ccb=1-3&_nc_sid=825194&_nc_ohc=gXI6hieEHucAX9O8jCD&_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.xx&oh=3cd71f123a07e5620c8cc7c28a71859e&oe=60C1A44A)

Are you here to talk about Eclipse Phase or a bunch of tangenital crap?

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 11, 2021, 06:50:36 PM
Are you here to talk about Eclipse Phase or a bunch of tangenital crap?

I'm still waiting for an answer to the original question of the thread title. Does ANYONE actually PLAY Eclipse Phase?

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 11, 2021, 06:50:36 PMAre you here to talk about Eclipse Phase or a bunch of tangenital crap?

I'd say it's sort of about transhumanism (which is very related to EP so I wouldn't say it's tangential). I generally bash the idea, and he defends it. And because it's Matt it's also a bunch of other stuff because he can't help himself.
I think this thread in general was just designed to appeal to Matts's transhumanist kick. With a lot of people questioning and rejecting it, he comes back even after being banned to defend it.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 11, 2021, 07:18:29 PM
I'm still waiting for an answer to the original question of the thread title. Does ANYONE actually PLAY Eclipse Phase?

Some people do. The general consensus is the rules are ludicrously game-able, and the setting not thought through very well.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 11, 2021, 07:27:34 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 11, 2021, 06:50:36 PMAre you here to talk about Eclipse Phase or a bunch of tangenital crap?

I'd say it's sort of about transhumanism (which is very related to EP so I wouldn't say it's tangential). I generally bash the idea, and he defends it. And because it's Matt it's also a bunch of other stuff because he can't help himself.
I think this thread in general was just designed to appeal to Matts's transhumanist kick. With a lot of people questioning and rejecting it, he comes back even after being banned to defend it.

Quote from: Chris24601 on May 11, 2021, 07:18:29 PM
I'm still waiting for an answer to the original question of the thread title. Does ANYONE actually PLAY Eclipse Phase?

Sure, and the thread is mostly about transhumanism with a bunch of internet geeks arguing like they argue about whether a Star Trek starship would win in a fight with a Star Destroyer.

Maybe it's time to tune out the thread. I mostly got interested because the OP started out in such a stupid way, and I'm a sucker for jangling keys.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 11, 2021, 07:45:02 PMSure, and the thread is mostly about transhumanism with a bunch of internet geeks arguing like they argue about whether a Star Trek starship would win in a fight with a Star Destroyer.

Depends on if its 1 or 2. 1 is unshielded so anything could be beamed inside.  ;D

But in practice yeah, maybe I should too. Its been going in circles for a bit.

Quote from: The Thing on May 11, 2021, 02:14:12 PM
One issue i see here is people saying "But would it still be you?"

I'm not sure how that could be answered, but even if it's not the same as you is that terrible?

Now, yes, getting hacked to be a good l'il corporate servant sucks infinite ass,  no argument there.

But as to remaining 'you', are you the same you that existed when you were 10? Are you the same you that you were 20 years ago? Have you changed thru education, growth or some sort of trauma? Trying to remain the same you you were long ago means you didn't become more than you were.

In 'ghost in the shell" (Not the whitewash live action mess) Motoko  Kusanagi is offered a chance to merge with a fully sentient self aware AI that evolved in the internet's sea of information. She asks how she can be sure she'd still be her.

Project 2501 admits she can't be sure she'd still be the same, and says you cannot become what you could be by remaining what you are. Your effort to remain as you are limits you.

So maybe a you that became a transhuman ego able to shift from body to body, fork and reintegrate, etc wouldn't be you as you are now. Would it be better?  Worse?

Honestly arguing if humans would be the same after transhuman tech, mind uploading, morphing, etc opens a question: "Is humanity so good it shouldn't change?"

Yeah, i'm glad we changed from our ancestors who practiced open slavery, total dominance of women, human sacrifice, etc.  You look at the well documented and recorded 20th century and i think you see that the human race as it is now needs some improving.


Look, america today would shock the founding fathers, i mean they voted for slavery, declared a black man was property and amounted to 3/5 of a person, woman could not vote, etc. in most of america a woman could not have her own bank account until the 1970's. Imagine them seeing barack obama sworn in as president.  :o

You're conflating a lot of very different things. Not all changes are the same, and the real issue of continuity of consciousness is even more fundamental.

You also badly misunderstanding the 3/5 compromise. It means nothing of the sort.

Edit: Just to clarify, because that could easily be taken the wrong way, though I don't want to get into it any further: The 3/5th compromise does not mean a black man was 3/5th of a person. Their status as a free man or a slave, or their ability to vote, was utterly unaffected by it. Saying they're 3/5th of a person implies they had 3/5ths the rights, or 3/5th the voting power, or something like that, which has nothing to do with how the compromise actually worked. Because what it affects is congressional apportionment. It means, when they're figuring out how many reps each state gets, that black people counts as 3/5th their population. That doesn't give those black people a vote, but it does mean the the vote of each white land-owning man in the states with large slave populations will tend to count for more than the vote of their counterparts in free states, by a proportion equal to 3/5th the black population. The compromise isn't about black personhood, it's about giving all the white men with slaves more voting power.

The entire point of transhumanism is to conquer death itself.  If the copy isn't you, then the process failed in its intended purpose.

Quote from: Pat on May 11, 2021, 09:35:23 PM

Quote from: The Thing on May 11, 2021, 02:14:12 PM
One issue i see here is people saying "But would it still be you?"

I'm not sure how that could be answered, but even if it's not the same as you is that terrible?

Now, yes, getting hacked to be a good l'il corporate servant sucks infinite ass,  no argument there.

But as to remaining 'you', are you the same you that existed when you were 10? Are you the same you that you were 20 years ago? Have you changed thru education, growth or some sort of trauma? Trying to remain the same you you were long ago means you didn't become more than you were.

In 'ghost in the shell" (Not the whitewash live action mess) Motoko  Kusanagi is offered a chance to merge with a fully sentient self aware AI that evolved in the internet's sea of information. She asks how she can be sure she'd still be her.

Project 2501 admits she can't be sure she'd still be the same, and says you cannot become what you could be by remaining what you are. Your effort to remain as you are limits you.

So maybe a you that became a transhuman ego able to shift from body to body, fork and reintegrate, etc wouldn't be you as you are now. Would it be better?  Worse?

Honestly arguing if humans would be the same after transhuman tech, mind uploading, morphing, etc opens a question: "Is humanity so good it shouldn't change?"

Yeah, i'm glad we changed from our ancestors who practiced open slavery, total dominance of women, human sacrifice, etc.  You look at the well documented and recorded 20th century and i think you see that the human race as it is now needs some improving.


Look, america today would shock the founding fathers, i mean they voted for slavery, declared a black man was property and amounted to 3/5 of a person, woman could not vote, etc. in most of america a woman could not have her own bank account until the 1970's. Imagine them seeing barack obama sworn in as president.  :o

You're conflating a lot of very different things. Not all changes are the same, and the real issue of continuity of consciousness is even more fundamental.

You also badly misunderstanding the 3/5 compromise. It means nothing of the sort.

Edit: Just to clarify, because that could easily be taken the wrong way, though I don't want to get into it any further: The 3/5th compromise does not mean a black man was 3/5th of a person. Their status as a free man or a slave, or their ability to vote, was utterly unaffected by it. Saying they're 3/5th of a person implies they had 3/5ths the rights, or 3/5th the voting power, or something like that, which has nothing to do with how the compromise actually worked. Because what it affects is congressional apportionment. It means, when they're figuring out how many reps each state gets, that black people counts as 3/5th their population. That doesn't give those black people a vote, but it does mean the the vote of each white land-owning man in the states with large slave populations will tend to count for more than the vote of their counterparts in free states, by a proportion equal to 3/5th the black population. The compromise isn't about black personhood, it's about giving all the white men with slaves more voting power.

I knew about the 3/5th compromise i saw no reason to get pedantic about it. I was using it as an example of the fact maybe humans becoming a little different might be a good thing.

Quote from: The Thing on May 14, 2021, 02:05:53 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 11, 2021, 09:35:23 PM

Quote from: The Thing on May 11, 2021, 02:14:12 PM
One issue i see here is people saying "But would it still be you?"

I'm not sure how that could be answered, but even if it's not the same as you is that terrible?

Now, yes, getting hacked to be a good l'il corporate servant sucks infinite ass,  no argument there.

But as to remaining 'you', are you the same you that existed when you were 10? Are you the same you that you were 20 years ago? Have you changed thru education, growth or some sort of trauma? Trying to remain the same you you were long ago means you didn't become more than you were.

In 'ghost in the shell" (Not the whitewash live action mess) Motoko  Kusanagi is offered a chance to merge with a fully sentient self aware AI that evolved in the internet's sea of information. She asks how she can be sure she'd still be her.

Project 2501 admits she can't be sure she'd still be the same, and says you cannot become what you could be by remaining what you are. Your effort to remain as you are limits you.

So maybe a you that became a transhuman ego able to shift from body to body, fork and reintegrate, etc wouldn't be you as you are now. Would it be better?  Worse?

Honestly arguing if humans would be the same after transhuman tech, mind uploading, morphing, etc opens a question: "Is humanity so good it shouldn't change?"

Yeah, i'm glad we changed from our ancestors who practiced open slavery, total dominance of women, human sacrifice, etc.  You look at the well documented and recorded 20th century and i think you see that the human race as it is now needs some improving.


Look, america today would shock the founding fathers, i mean they voted for slavery, declared a black man was property and amounted to 3/5 of a person, woman could not vote, etc. in most of america a woman could not have her own bank account until the 1970's. Imagine them seeing barack obama sworn in as president.  :o

You're conflating a lot of very different things. Not all changes are the same, and the real issue of continuity of consciousness is even more fundamental.

You also badly misunderstanding the 3/5 compromise. It means nothing of the sort.

Edit: Just to clarify, because that could easily be taken the wrong way, though I don't want to get into it any further: The 3/5th compromise does not mean a black man was 3/5th of a person. Their status as a free man or a slave, or their ability to vote, was utterly unaffected by it. Saying they're 3/5th of a person implies they had 3/5ths the rights, or 3/5th the voting power, or something like that, which has nothing to do with how the compromise actually worked. Because what it affects is congressional apportionment. It means, when they're figuring out how many reps each state gets, that black people counts as 3/5th their population. That doesn't give those black people a vote, but it does mean the the vote of each white land-owning man in the states with large slave populations will tend to count for more than the vote of their counterparts in free states, by a proportion equal to 3/5th the black population. The compromise isn't about black personhood, it's about giving all the white men with slaves more voting power.

I knew about the 3/5th compromise i saw no reason to get pedantic about it. I was using it as an example of the fact maybe humans becoming a little different might be a good thing.

Did you now.

Just started watching Gen: Lock animated series, and there seems to be a lot in there that could be used in EP.

EDIT: I got to the part where one pilot edits her own personality to be more confident/aggressive to improve her combat performance. It has a few drawbacks. She also had the option to eliminate some traumatic memories but opted not to do so.

Quote from: Pat on May 14, 2021, 06:03:43 AM

Quote from: The Thing on May 14, 2021, 02:05:53 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 11, 2021, 09:35:23 PM

Quote from: The Thing on May 11, 2021, 02:14:12 PM
One issue i see here is people saying "But would it still be you?"

I'm not sure how that could be answered, but even if it's not the same as you is that terrible?

Now, yes, getting hacked to be a good l'il corporate servant sucks infinite ass,  no argument there.

But as to remaining 'you', are you the same you that existed when you were 10? Are you the same you that you were 20 years ago? Have you changed thru education, growth or some sort of trauma? Trying to remain the same you you were long ago means you didn't become more than you were.

In 'ghost in the shell" (Not the whitewash live action mess) Motoko  Kusanagi is offered a chance to merge with a fully sentient self aware AI that evolved in the internet's sea of information. She asks how she can be sure she'd still be her.

Project 2501 admits she can't be sure she'd still be the same, and says you cannot become what you could be by remaining what you are. Your effort to remain as you are limits you.

So maybe a you that became a transhuman ego able to shift from body to body, fork and reintegrate, etc wouldn't be you as you are now. Would it be better?  Worse?

Honestly arguing if humans would be the same after transhuman tech, mind uploading, morphing, etc opens a question: "Is humanity so good it shouldn't change?"

Yeah, i'm glad we changed from our ancestors who practiced open slavery, total dominance of women, human sacrifice, etc.  You look at the well documented and recorded 20th century and i think you see that the human race as it is now needs some improving.


Look, america today would shock the founding fathers, i mean they voted for slavery, declared a black man was property and amounted to 3/5 of a person, woman could not vote, etc. in most of america a woman could not have her own bank account until the 1970's. Imagine them seeing barack obama sworn in as president.  :o

You're conflating a lot of very different things. Not all changes are the same, and the real issue of continuity of consciousness is even more fundamental.

You also badly misunderstanding the 3/5 compromise. It means nothing of the sort.

Edit: Just to clarify, because that could easily be taken the wrong way, though I don't want to get into it any further: The 3/5th compromise does not mean a black man was 3/5th of a person. Their status as a free man or a slave, or their ability to vote, was utterly unaffected by it. Saying they're 3/5th of a person implies they had 3/5ths the rights, or 3/5th the voting power, or something like that, which has nothing to do with how the compromise actually worked. Because what it affects is congressional apportionment. It means, when they're figuring out how many reps each state gets, that black people counts as 3/5th their population. That doesn't give those black people a vote, but it does mean the the vote of each white land-owning man in the states with large slave populations will tend to count for more than the vote of their counterparts in free states, by a proportion equal to 3/5th the black population. The compromise isn't about black personhood, it's about giving all the white men with slaves more voting power.

I knew about the 3/5th compromise i saw no reason to get pedantic about it. I was using it as an example of the fact maybe humans becoming a little different might be a good thing.

Did you now.

yes. I fucking knew what the 3/5th decision meant. Unlike people who think wrestling is real and moon landings were faked i fucking know a little actual history of america.  The modern version of the 3/5 decision is the way prisons are counted as part of a district or states population even tho the prisoners aren't voters and if the state or district  gets funding for roads, schools, etc the prisoners won't be using them.

Back on topic, i think the EPs biggest weakness is  the fact that it's setting is hard to grasp as there is almost no popular media representation of it. I mean fantasy settings have tons of movies and tv shows, comics, etc to give people an idea about the world in question so it's easy to grasp various levels of fatasny  settings since you have everything from the conan movies to GoT to use as a reff.

Same for SF settings, you have the gamut of things from star wars to star trek to the expanse as a way for players to grasp it.

It's hard to imagine a popular media source that even comes close to capturing the EP setting, few movies even touch on elements of it. The great wasteland of tv has almost nothing even vaguely close to it.  Some really bleeding edge hard SF novels are close to it but eclipse phase thorws so much in the blender that i can't imagine anything in media that really gives you a feel for the setting.

I lean towards the best way to do an EP campaign is introduce the players to aspects of it in small doses. Focus on like firewall agents fighting a particular menace, maybe introduce egocasting and morphs early on, start with a criminal organization or a hypercorp, then move into other stuff like exsurgent cases, then a gatecrash, etc.

I ran a fairly long campaign of EP. The system is clunky mechanically. The setting concepts are not well thought through, so I had to do a lot of house ruling on how nanofabs, reputation, and ego-casting worked in practice.

But it is a fun crazy setting. My Firewall campaign started with the PCs being awoken and told that they were the backups, and their former selves had gone missing. They had to retrace their own steps. Later they discovered that their former selves had all become exsurgents and needed hunting down.

In terms of the fork swarm business, I handled that by telling the PCs that if an alpha fork existed for more than a few minutes it would become an NPC under my control. It may develop its own ideas about sticking to the plan and then being deleted... Alpha forks are essentially no different from the character and they would not want to be psychosurgeried or deleted.

Quote from: Karmarainbow on May 17, 2021, 03:51:44 PM
I ran a fairly long campaign of EP. The system is clunky mechanically. The setting concepts are not well thought through, so I had to do a lot of house ruling on how nanofabs, reputation, and ego-casting worked in practice.

But it is a fun crazy setting. My Firewall campaign started with the PCs being awoken and told that they were the backups, and their former selves had gone missing. They had to retrace their own steps. Later they discovered that their former selves had all become exsurgents and needed hunting down.

Interesting.  Could you summarize some of those?  Again, some things like Reputation as a system just seem like a dead letter when you combine it with even just normal egocasting (can you spam-egocasts and have every fork request something before the org realizes that you've hit them with a speed-of-light-based timing attack), much less actual problems like identity theft or, uh, actual-identity-theft, where you steal someone's ego, psychosurger it, and spin up a copy and have them ask for stuff on your behalf.

QuoteIn terms of the fork swarm business, I handled that by telling the PCs that if an alpha fork existed for more than a few minutes it would become an NPC under my control. It may develop its own ideas about sticking to the plan and then being deleted... Alpha forks are essentially no different from the character and they would not want to be psychosurgeried or deleted.

Yeah, the trick there is to start by psycho-surgerying yourself to remove any vestige of concern for personal continuity or identity, so that you identify as much with any instance of you that exists as the one you happen to be.  If you don't start from there, then your forkswarm will break down into a struggle of each fork for resources.  And the thing is, the setting has people working with their alpha-fork instances in the long term in a successful manner; one of the crime families is literally one woman who abused the forking rules (but not the implications of infomorphs).

And the thing is, the setting absolutely says that someone with the right tools can say "Fuck what you wanted to be before, you are now a drone for my all-consuming swarm will, even if that would horrify any normal person." because, you know, Exsurgent.  Just as the PCs didn't get to stick with their Exsurgent selves and say "Lol, no, I ignore that brainwashing and horribly abuse my gamma psi sleights.", the GM shouldn't be able to say "Well, you crit that psychosurgery roll (due to horrible parallelized retry attempts) to make the copy of yourself act a certain way, and minds can definitely be modified to act that way, but I'm going to have that NPC ignore its brainwashing and start trying to overwrite all the other forks with random ego and preferences it made up from the aether due to remarkably selective cosmic event bit-flips when it got copied."

I also think that while this is a great solution in-play and that any players who ask too many questions should be met with "Yes, I know, we're just agreeing not to look at this closely to enable the kind of genre game we want to tell.", I really have to wonder what taking your rules would do.  I mean, a naive ruling would be that egocasting kills you, because the you that gets sent in transit is an alpha fork and most egocasting is a destructive read, so your PC dies and another character completely identical to your PC wakes up and goes on an NPC-only adventure...

But of course that's silly and a degenerate example.  But let's make things interesting.  What if the PCs are stuck in a situation like the one in the 1E intro fiction, where they have limited broadcast time and Exsurgent closing in.  What if they've got themselves from a few minutes ago backed up, and now need to slowly beam themselves out line by line, and their actual-selves need to spend all of their grit, effort, and Moxie defending the transmitter array?  If they succeed, do they just die, since they have now absolutely diverged from their backups, and now people who are definitely not them will instead again wake up and again go on all-NPC adventures from that point on?

What the setting assumes, I feel, is that you have a soul, and that your soul is like the green emerald thingy from the sims; it marks you as you, it exists outside of the game layer, and it is the interface that lets you-the-player decide the actions for the character.  And, crucially, that there's only one per special character, and that the emerald thingy can jump to whatever instance of you is relevant to the story happening now.

Honestly, I think that the most interesting story you could tell in Eclipse Phase would be a specifically meta story, where you explored situations like this, and had one perverse player who literally stopped playing the game by NPC-ifying his PC and then sat back, letting the GM play the former-PC and horribly ruin the GM's own encounters, and jumped back and forth between in-game and tabletop cameras, and used that tension to dig into what that green emerald perspective meant, and what support that view of the world could have even when it wasn't being deliberately attacked.

---

It's a pity, I think, because the Eclipse Phase setting has a bunch of interesting ideas, and it says as part of its very tagline that your mind is software to be reprogrammed.  And software that can be saved to and restored from cold backup perfectly has no inherent soul, spirit, or distinguishing nature which splits it from other running instances of it.  And then the setting goes ahead and includes the one-woman crime family, and Exsurgent in the first place.  And as long as Exsurgent is a setting element, then there is absolutely a justification for a Mr. Forkswarm to exist and have countless running parallel versions, rooting through transhumanity like a horrible parasitic wasp.  And the further thing is as long as anyone can do horrible forkswarm tricks, and as long as Exsurgent exists, then the only sane (for a sociopathic hit-the-posthuman-floor-and-pulled-out-the-excavator value of sane) response is to rip through transhumanity yourself as fast as you can, because the moment that Exsurgent starts fighting smart and going loud, it will do so as effectively as you can.

Actually, did you do anything interesting with Exsurgent? As-given, it frankly sucks, and makes the setting worse in ways both gross and subtle, but I think there are a lot of interesting things you could do with it if you don't just make it a weapon (and say, by implication, that this is what powerful and effective NPCs in the setting use when they want to shoot something dead.)

Or be a non transhuman being who has no spine jack.  Sure you got one life, your weaker, your life is shorter, but your immune from the mind jacks.  Your free to be human.

Quote from: Snowman0147 on May 17, 2021, 05:40:01 PM
Or be a non transhuman being who has no spine jack.  Sure you got one life, your weaker, your life is shorter, but your immune from the mind jacks.  Your free to be human.

That makes as much sense as making a non-adventurer-type character as a PC in D&D. If you're going to play EP, then fucking play it.

It's interesting stuff. I think the short answer to the thought experiment is that:
A) players generally want to play someone they can identify with rather than a horribly efficient but utterly inhuman swarm entity, and so it didn't become an issue
B) in the fiction most transhumans are also still essentially human, and find the extreme possibilities deeply disturbing (see for example the section in the rules on "Attitudes to mental alteration"), so most people would never take that first step of making themselves okay with it. There are obviously exceptions and they are the exhuman antagonists we're told about.

The game never really answers the question "what is a person?". Biocons say that your meat brain is you, and frankly they may be right. Most transhumans are self selected for being okay with resleeving because they left Earth as infomorphs. If they cant ultimately accept that they are still themselves (even if they are wrong, and they may be), then they couldn't function. 

My party did in fact face the situation you describe. They infiltrated Earth and became infected by the exsurgent virus.  They beamed the information they needed off-planet and then all committed suicide. (It was an intense session.) When the game resumed from their backups, the players were haunted by the sense that they were not sure if they were the same people...but they kept on.

Ok some of the stuff people talk about is covered in EP@ or other products.

Forking: If forks are separated by a few hours or a day or so, no problem. They don't erase one, they reintegrate. Nothing is lost and it's an easy process. In a "day in the life of.." segment a guy egocasts a form of himself to his family for a special event because he can't physically be there. At the end of the day his alpha fork casts back and they reintegrate. No problem, routine stuff, he remembered being with his family for that event.

Longer separations make things harder, a tougher roll to reintegrate, maybe even some memory loss. Long enough and reintegration is impossible.

Also the idea of a player deciding to break the system to ruin a game with abusive forking is not a problem with EP, it's a problem with a selfish asshole player who's idea of fun is to fuck things up for the gm and everyone else then whine "But i'm just  playing in character......"

Solution: Rocks fall, you die.

Fabbing a ton of shit. Ok, lots of fabbers have lockouts on making  dangerous things. With a certain level of AI you can make it harder for fabbers to make obvious weapons.  Plus in the hypercorp regions they have obscene DRM  systems. Sure, a really high level hacker can override these sometimes, but with limits on what you can access in terms of raw martials you still may have problems making a set of assault rifles, ammunition and combat armor for a party.

Sometimes a big part of the adventure might be getting a nanofab hacked or accessed to make your combat gear.

And again, asshole player just trying to break the system? If he pulls that roll for security and have a few heavily armed combat morphs show up to see what he's doing.

Honestly to a degree i think people are dinging the system because there are issues an asshole player can exploit to crash the game, ruin everyone's fun and feel happy he did it.

BTW, i don't call these people trolls, i call  them what they really are, always were and always will be: Assholes. They just like to ruin other people fun and laugh about it.

Quote from: Karmarainbow on May 17, 2021, 05:54:05 PM
It's interesting stuff. I think the short answer to the thought experiment is that:
A) players generally want to play someone they can identify with rather than a horribly efficient but utterly inhuman swarm entity, and so it didn't become an issue
B) in the fiction most transhumans are also still essentially human, and find the extreme possibilities deeply disturbing (see for example the section in the rules on "Attitudes to mental alteration"), so most people would never take that first step of making themselves okay with it. There are obviously exceptions and they are the exhuman antagonists we're told about.

The game never really answers the question "what is a person?". Biocons say that your meat brain is you, and frankly they may be right. Most transhumans are self selected for being okay with resleeving because they left Earth as infomorphs. If they cant ultimately accept that they are still themselves (even if they are wrong, and they may be), then they couldn't function. 

My party did in fact face the situation you describe. They infiltrated Earth and became infected by the exsurgent virus.  They beamed the information they needed off-planet and then all committed suicide. (It was an intense session.) When the game resumed from their backups, the players were haunted by the sense that they were not sure if they were the same people...but they kept on.

That's pretty much exactly the introfic from first edition, "lack".

And no i;'m not accusing you of stealing it, for all i know you got 2e and never read Lack so i'm not saying you're ripping anything off.

Lack is what they call losing some memories due to a reboot from a  backup when the 'original' is destroyed. it's a case of player knowledge you need to watch. it can be a real pain when a pc is betrayed and murdered by a npc and his backup is sent in and runs into the same npc.

Quote from: The Thing on May 16, 2021, 05:38:33 AM

yes. I fucking knew what the 3/5th decision meant. Unlike people who think wrestling is real and moon landings were faked i fucking know a little actual history of america.  The modern version of the 3/5 decision is the way prisons are counted as part of a district or states population even tho the prisoners aren't voters and if the state or district  gets funding for roads, schools, etc the prisoners won't be using them.

I suppose it's good you know that the Moon landings were real.

Fabbing is one of those things that gets glossed over, and really shouldn't. Even basic fabbing is going to require quantities of CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen), which you can find via asteroids but it's still a resource that has to be used. Then you get into 'I need a titanium frame revolver with a carbon-fiber mechanism'.

We haven't even gotten into the question of who gets to use it when. Think of an office printer that has to be shared by a half-dozen employees. Now square and cube the issues involved there. Imagine the fun if you're trying to fab up some bit of electronics, and the guy ahead of you is fabbing fifty dildoes for his next scum orgy.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 17, 2021, 08:31:10 PM
Fabbing is one of those things that gets glossed over, and really shouldn't. Even basic fabbing is going to require quantities of CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen), which you can find via asteroids but it's still a resource that has to be used. Then you get into 'I need a titanium frame revolver with a carbon-fiber mechanism'.

We haven't even gotten into the question of who gets to use it when. Think of an office printer that has to be shared by a half-dozen employees. Now square and cube the issues involved there. Imagine the fun if you're trying to fab up some bit of electronics, and the guy ahead of you is fabbing fifty dildoes for his next scum orgy.

I'm sure fabbing is waaay the hell and gone past modern 3d printing and hell, the circumstances and tech of the EP world might make it easier. You point out that fabbing would use a lot of CHON. Fair point.

Now in EP, if you need CHON and you're on a carbonaceous asteroid, maybe you just send a bot out to scoop up some asteroid surface material, drop it in a processor, WHIIIIRRRRRR!, and there's the CHON you need.

Hell, compare than to modern 3d printing where you gotta buy special resin, plastic, etc.

Plus in EP I'm bet they have a lot of carbon and silicon polymers that can do a lot of what metals do today.

Generally the higher up the periodic table you go the rarer the elements get, so i would not be surprised if the EP world made advances in making lower elements on the table do what we use higher ones for today.

Yeah, the fabbing is at way too high an abstraction level to feel reasonable.  There really needed to be a separation of resources.  Like, have some resources be things which were now too cheap to meter; just as we include public water fountains as part of our civic infrastructure, I can see Eclipse Phase allowing every sophont an energy budget quite sufficient for regular life support, a selection of public-domain extruded foodstuffs, drugs, and entertainment (with entertainment conforming to the values of the hab getting sponsored by civic orgs, who are delighted to sponsor a variety of A is for Actuator educational programming for newly-instanced ex-indentures)...but anything more than that, you need to earn with credits or rep.  After all, if you're an up-and-coming faction member, do you want to have a large, luxurious living quarters for one moderately-repped individual, or a block of tenement-quality coffin-rooms that offer the barest minimum of privacy and living space, and which can be rented cheaply to newly-instanced ex-indentures, for whom you are doing a favor and who can be counted on to contribute what exists of their miniscule faction rep to causes you support (or else have their rent come due until they move out and you replace them with more pliable tenants)?

Eclipse Phase is absolutely not post-scarcity, any more than we in 21st-century America are because water fountains are freely available.  There are always resources that are scarce, and Eclipse Phase not only fails to address actual post-scarcity, it introduces horrible new kinds of scarcity, like the whole question of which Fall-refugee infomorphs get first crack at the bodies.

---

I mean, given the way that Eclipse Phase does tend to stare unblinking into the naked singularity past any reasonable game balance can exist, I am curious what the designers would do with a habitat which explicitly had, as part of its anarchier-than-thou, a completely open fabber pattern and several fabbers made from it and absolutely no restrictions sitting around with no actual software restrictions or admin locks.

And, conversely, we should have an adventure taking place on a habitat where the tension between a full-scale fabber as a necessity of habitat life and a full-scale fabber needing to be incredibly restricted and locked down happens.  Like, take everything that a full fabber is expected to do for a colony, and say that the colony's fabber is gone, and one faction in particular is claiming that they are the only ones who can fix it and that anyone else breaking in or attempting to interrupt their repair with violence or digital intrusion will wipe the whole shebang.  Do you trust that faction? Even if you don't, do you take action, knowing that they may well not be bluffing about violence dealing with the whole problem? What happens when you learn that this was engineered to force the makers of the fabber to have to farcast over an ego with the control codes needed for admin access, and that the ones who set this up are willing for the lights to go out on the colony  entirely, because hey, worst-case scenario everyone gets backed up into cold storage and they lose a decade or two before someone can get a spare shuttle, fusion reactor, and replacement fabber all the way out here, since murder isn't a crime any more, even when you do it to an entire habitat?

Again, I feel like the ideas behind Eclipse Phase are decades out of date.  In the real world, we see that reputation mechanics can be gamed, and that when something like Facebook likes or hours-listened for Spotify songs becomes valuable, then you get all sorts of black-market gamesmanship around them.  We see that every method of determining identity digitally can be spoofed or forged, and we see exactly how long DRM lasts in the face of "Fuck you, I want to play that game for free.", much less what can be done with 3D printing, 80% lower receivers, and the like.  And we see what happens to individuals, and even entire companies, that outsource critical functionality to the cloud.  And so, Eclipse Phase should absolutely have a side bar detailing "OK, if the players don't start spamming open-sourced fabber blueprints everywhere, eventually someone will put the right pre-fall Open Source evangelist into the wrong virtual environment and they will, or hell, maybe one of the factions will do it to discredit another.  But information doesn't go away when it's shared right, so here is how the factions will react to the fact that everyone with this level of technical skill and resources can jailbreak their individual locked fabber and start mass-producing Frisbee-sized reaper drones."

Which would, I think, be a really interesting question.  Do the anarchist habitats stick to their guns when, well, the guns are sticking to them, and more are coming by the minute? Do the more restricted habs crack down, knowing that they'll need to lock down a whole bunch of precursors-to-personal-fabbers which are part of various bits of crucial public infrastructure, and also knowing that trying to crack down will have some percentage of their population Molon Labe it up against them? On a scale of 1-10, how smug are the Jovian told-you-so-grams sent to the rest of the system?

And then, when the normal set of things dies down, what happens when people look at Earth and see swathes of Exsurgent clearly mass-producing some of the designs that were being sent hither and yon across the system, for its own purpose?

as to the last part in your comment, the idea that exsurgents on earth would be fabbing based on the plans transhumans are sending around, i'd day that's not likely. The exsurgents are connected to the TITANs and their relics, and they already have access  to such levels of intelligence they have no need or use for transhuman technology. Their tech, which you can see on earth, parts of mars and other planets in the system, is so so far ahead of transhmanites they don't need our their plans.

As to anarchist habs, they tend to be self policing. Some guy starts acting like a dick the rest f the population acts towards him, if bad rep doesn't do it things can get nasty.

One thing about the Ep setting it is is somewhat, well, very, actually, darwinian. People who are to fucking stupid to work together within even an anarch social structure will die out,  Anarch habs that don't have and maintain a survivable social model will fail and die, etc. if firewall sees a hab that has a real bad model that might not kill it off but make it a threat to humanity, or at least a large part of it, they may arrange a very big 'accident" for it.

The Ep universe is not a chartoom, a forum or a social media page, it's real life to the people in it. On the internet sure you can ba little billy badass, a "shitlord," (Asshole) causing trouble and deliberately provoking people because no one can literally throw a punch thru the net now.  In Ep you try that shit in a hab and you  end up with consequences you cant just turn off the net and step away from.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 29, 2021, 06:38:38 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 29, 2021, 02:10:21 AM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 11:55:01 PM
The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

That would probably be true of machine intelligences as well, assuming that such a thing is even possible.  There was an effort not long ago to develop decision-making neural network AI (not SF AI, the real world version, which is not at all the same) "organically" (meaning by experience and positive or negative feedback) and then make copies to mass produce the neural network.  It didn't work.  It turns out that the processing is very precise and delicate, to the point where the manufacturing differences in otherwise identical chips were critical to the process.  If the chips weren't identical to a greater extent than what we can produce reliably, then algorithms would not be made to work identically on the chips.  Since I expect that the delicacy in a real machine intelligence (again making the large assumption that such a thing is possible) would be even greater, it would make it even less possible to move programs between hardware.

That's the most fascinating thing I've heard in months. Source?

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.

Quote from: The Thing on May 18, 2021, 12:23:47 AM
as to the last part in your comment, the idea that exsurgents on earth would be fabbing based on the plans transhumans are sending around, i'd day that's not likely. The exsurgents are connected to the TITANs and their relics, and they already have access  to such levels of intelligence they have no need or use for transhuman technology. Their tech, which you can see on earth, parts of mars and other planets in the system, is so so far ahead of transhmanites they don't need our their plans.

As to anarchist habs, they tend to be self policing. Some guy starts acting like a dick the rest f the population acts towards him, if bad rep doesn't do it things can get nasty.

One thing about the Ep setting it is is somewhat, well, very, actually, darwinian. People who are to fucking stupid to work together within even an anarch social structure will die out,  Anarch habs that don't have and maintain a survivable social model will fail and die, etc. if firewall sees a hab that has a real bad model that might not kill it off but make it a threat to humanity, or at least a large part of it, they may arrange a very big 'accident" for it.

The Ep universe is not a chartoom, a forum or a social media page, it's real life to the people in it. On the internet sure you can ba little billy badass, a "shitlord," (Asshole) causing trouble and deliberately provoking people because no one can literally throw a punch thru the net now.  In Ep you try that shit in a hab and you  end up with consequences you cant just turn off the net and step away from.

As always, it depends on how much of a dick you can swing in terms of power.

And before you say 'nuh uh, everyone's equal in an anarchist hab', one word: rep. What makes you think someone with a nice big rep will take that much of a ding from his buddies if he opts to be an annoying prick? Particularly if he's being an annoying prick to someone who's not part of the 'in crowd'?

Regarding fabbing...

There's a novel I picked up called 'Perilous Waif' by E. William Brown which is kind of interesting, as it has both interstellar travel AND the same near-post-economy tech, with fabbers. In fact, the only really expensive stuff is really exotic weapons and ammunition that requires rare earths or radioactive materials. Fabbing up furnishings for someone's quarters is just a matter of having CHON and a little time, and the results can be kind of wild (I thought space on a starship was at a premium, guys...)

The titular 'perilous waif', Alice Long, is a genetically and cybernetically engineered posthuman, but she starts out having serious difficulties because her innate abilities are badly crippled by a substandard diet which isn't filling her needs. That's something else that I'm surprised EP doesn't seem to cover; nutritional needs for all these bio and cyber toys.

Quote from: Mishihari on May 18, 2021, 05:19:35 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 29, 2021, 06:38:38 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 29, 2021, 02:10:21 AM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on April 28, 2021, 11:55:01 PM
The case is so much of what makes us human is tied to our bodies. It's possible it's not going to actually be possible to digitize because its complexity is tied to molecular processes that are tied entirely to our biological processes. Simulating that (even in short hand) will require so much energy I'm not sure how viable that will really be.

People go nuts from even minor adjustments to their body or mismatches from the brain to the body. I'm sceptical of the idea of a brain detached from any real stimulus wouldn't go nuts immediately. People get bodily dysphoria from minor chemical imbalances, and then get severe depression just from that alone.

That would probably be true of machine intelligences as well, assuming that such a thing is even possible.  There was an effort not long ago to develop decision-making neural network AI (not SF AI, the real world version, which is not at all the same) "organically" (meaning by experience and positive or negative feedback) and then make copies to mass produce the neural network.  It didn't work.  It turns out that the processing is very precise and delicate, to the point where the manufacturing differences in otherwise identical chips were critical to the process.  If the chips weren't identical to a greater extent than what we can produce reliably, then algorithms would not be made to work identically on the chips.  Since I expect that the delicacy in a real machine intelligence (again making the large assumption that such a thing is possible) would be even greater, it would make it even less possible to move programs between hardware.

That's the most fascinating thing I've heard in months. Source?

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.

That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don't understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I'm curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.

With regards to the open-sourced nanofab blueprints, I think that Exsurgent, and the Alien Space Bats, actually do need something from humanity.  Because you can trivially defeat both by going hot and loud.  If humanity can compromise an ultraviolet-level nanoswarm, they can set it to unrestrained growth and consumption of everything else.  Since everything else on Earth is going for Inscrutable Titan Agenda of A Silent Sky, and aren't immediately going for exponential growth, you'll have two nanoswarms moments after, which will be able to forcibly compromise a third nanoswarm, then each reproduce into six, then compromise some and duplicate more, and so on, until you've eaten Earth. 

Then you throw the whole shebang into the sun.  Since ultraviolet-class nanoswarms maintain a constant internal temperature in blatant denial of thermodynamics, this isn't a problem for them; it's a bunch of feed stock and free energy to make use of.  So they can start eating the sun.  Then they do the same trick that the Glory virus was going to do, but on a larger level, throwing out solar-wind-driven probes and using the last remnants of stellar mass that hasn't been converted into them, and whenever they hit a system with its own Bracewell probe, they're going to win, because they're starting with the star in whatever system they're in and can eat it (and each other) faster than the old Exsurgent strain can corrupt them.

And the thing is, we know that the Alien Space Bats can't use this tactic, because they are bound by the setting to produce a setting in which humanity can exist, at least temporarily.  PCs have no such restrictions.  Exsurgent can't naturally come to the realization "Wait, what's with this lame mutation shit? I want to stop humanity from building more ASIs, I just need to convert a tiny fraction of Earth into nanoswarms, throw them into space, and get actually serious about kidnapping, mind-ripping, and repurposing the humans I can find, because I can bring literally arbitrary amounts of power to a point and I can beat them anywhere I care to, then use their minds to find where other humans are hiding, and repeat until nothing dares light a spark or sends a broadcast across all of Sol system but me, then do the same in every system reachable by a Titan gate, bam, done."

An alternate-perspective game, where the PCs were subprocesses of Exsurgent given the freedom to act in a scrutable-but-actually-effective manner and given the goal of Stopping All Humanity's Potential ASIs, would not last a session, and that would only be while the PCs work out exactly what their cheaty powers can do.  This, obviously, is for game reasons; you can't have a game if you can't have characters.  But the designers of Eclipse Phase seem to have completely forgotten that a villain which could win at any time and isn't doing so for any kind of observable or sensible reason does not create tension in-universe, it just looks really dumb and artificial out of universe.

So, if Exsurgent could do what it was advertised as doing, then not only would it not need humanity's designs, it wouldn't need humanity's artifacts.  There would be no creations of twisted biology body-horrors, no ancient machines, no gamedevs disappointed that no one wants to fuck the Glory-mutants; all would become omni-capable nanofog making more nanofog, until all was (literally) dust.

Exsurgent doesn't do that.  Exsurgent tries to corrupt humanity instead.  And if Exsurgent is actually a kind of immune system for the galaxy, that actually makes sense; the nightmare scenario for the Alien Space Bats is an upstart species hacking Exsurgent and tweaking its targeting parameters, so that Exsurgent starts treating the entire rest of the universe as valid targets for integration into itself.  And Exsurgent can mutate and find new forms.  It needs some kind of hard limiter on what it can evolve into.  And the logical one is that Exsurgent can only use what the target species itself makes (or is).

There isn't a reason for them to find your open-sourced designs useful.  But there also isn't a reason for utility fog not to have swallowed literally the entire system by now, so.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 09:18:13 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on May 18, 2021, 05:19:35 AM

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.

That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don't understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I'm curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.

I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 10:58:08 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 09:18:13 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on May 18, 2021, 05:19:35 AM

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.

That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don't understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I'm curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.

I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.

Yeah, there are a few famous stories about cases like that.  Here is one from the old Jargon File about a seemingly useless switch: http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 10:58:08 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 09:18:13 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on May 18, 2021, 05:19:35 AM

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.

That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don't understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I'm curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.

I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.

I wonder if any principles of neurology are applicable. We know that human brains can rewire themselves on the fly adapting to tasks, and some cases are only present in rare individuals. It's possible that similar principles apply in both cases.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 11:06:46 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 10:58:08 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 09:18:13 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on May 18, 2021, 05:19:35 AM

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.

That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don't understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I'm curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.

I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.

I wonder if any principles of neurology are applicable. We know that human brains can rewire themselves on the fly adapting to tasks, and some cases are only present in rare individuals. It's possible that similar principles apply in both cases.

It fits the principles of evolutionary biology. Evolution isn't progress in a general sense, it's adaptation to a very specific environment. And in the last few years, they've been learning that even quantum effects have been exploited by some animals. (E.g. migratory birds being able to sense the direction of north apparently is based on quantum entanglement.)

Quote from: robertliguori on May 18, 2021, 11:01:45 AM

Yeah, there are a few famous stories about cases like that.  Here is one from the old Jargon File about a seemingly useless switch: http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Good story, haven't heard of the Jargon File in a long time. Humans are good at abstraction, and which is a great way to grasp general principles and then apply them consistently in complex ways in different environments. But they are still simplifications and abstractions; we think of logic gates as always being binary, and assume circuit diagrams account for everything. But machine learning and evolution don't start with a set of principles and then derive the logical consequences, in a top-down fashion. Instead, they start randomly testing, and find out what works. They lack the high level view from outside, but they have the inside view of someone who knows little about the greater world, but everything there is to know about the specific corner they live in. That's why it's so hard to understand why this stuff works, and how. It's a mechanic knowing you hit it there and the engine runs smoothly, not an engineer with a CAD model.

This happens to be right up my professional alley, and my guess without thoroughly analyzing it, and informed by the guesses of others in the article's comments, is that it's an actually an analog computer that happens to be built with discrete computing components.  It really does not seem like there would be enough digital states to do the job.  However, any parasitic capacitance can act as an integrator, which can be used as the state component of an analog computer.  There are a _lot_ of different parasitic capacitances in an FPGA (though many of them will be correlated, which will reduce the number of independent states) so I would expect this to result in a fairly powerful analog computer.  Note also that an analog computer's states can take an infinite number of values, which also makes them more powerful.  This would also explain why the design did not work on other chips:  parasitics are by definition something we try to design out of circuits, though we can't eliminate them entirely, so the actual values would probably be some random variation around zero.  I can think of other possibilities, but this is the one I would look at first if someone were paying me to look into it. 

The interesting thing to me is that this implies that the best path forward for AI is analog rather than digital, since this shows that we can put a lot more power into a fixed amount of real estate with that approach.  It also implies that our own mental processes may be a lot more complex than how they're currently modeled, since there could be small but significant effects analogous to parasitic capacitance. 

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 11:42:02 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 11:06:46 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 10:58:08 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 09:18:13 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on May 18, 2021, 05:19:35 AM

My friend finally got back to me.  Here's the article: 

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I messed up some of the details in my initial post - it was quite a long time ago that I learned about this - but the gist is essentially correct.

That is interesting. So the FPGAs are trained using evolution algorithms to perform specific tasks more efficiently than programming manually, but this produces configurations that humans don't understand and copying the final configuration to new chips produces an inferior copy. I'm curious what the implications are, since this phenomenon seems to be extremely understudied.

I'd be curious to know more as well, since the article is 14 years old. The most interesting part is the five logic cells that are isolated from the rest by any normal pathways and thus seem extraneous, but if they're disabled, it doesn't work. It's a tight wedding of function to environment.

I wonder if any principles of neurology are applicable. We know that human brains can rewire themselves on the fly adapting to tasks, and some cases are only present in rare individuals. It's possible that similar principles apply in both cases.

It fits the principles of evolutionary biology. Evolution isn't progress in a general sense, it's adaptation to a very specific environment. And in the last few years, they've been learning that even quantum effects have been exploited by some animals. (E.g. migratory birds being able to sense the direction of north apparently is based on quantum entanglement.)

I thought they had iron rich pockets in their eyes that acted as natural magnetic compasses? Has that been refuted.

Right now there's a debate on whether or not gekko lizards use what's called the 'der walls" force to stick to walls and such. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/08/how-geckos-stick-der-waals

Many people have begun to suspect that classical physics can't explain consciousness and that some quantum process may be involved. While I'm hesitant to believe those who shout "QUANTUM!"  every time something is hard to explain some of their arguments seem well reasoned.

Speaking of AI in general years and years ago there was a breakthru involving rat brain cells on a gold grid and it being able to learn to fly a suimnulated aircraft in a 3d space setting. I haven;t heard more about that in a long time. Bing fu powers activate!

Wow, i had no idea this went back to 2005, but here. https://singularityhub.com/2014/09/04/experimental-rat-brain-fighter-pilot-may-yield-insights-into-how-the-brain-works/

I have heard nothing new about this since it was announced, whch means it was either a dud and quietly forgotten or a special success actively supressed.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 17, 2021, 05:07:43 PM
Interesting.  Could you summarize some of those?  Again, some things like Reputation as a system just seem like a dead letter when you combine it with even just normal egocasting (can you spam-egocasts and have every fork request something before the org realizes that you've hit them with a speed-of-light-based timing attack), much less actual problems like identity theft or, uh, actual-identity-theft, where you steal someone's ego, psychosurger it, and spin up a copy and have them ask for stuff on your behalf.

[/quote]

With rep, I'm trying to remember. I think the key for me was grokking that "James Dreyfuss, scientist and argonaut" is a totaly different identity from NeonGenysis the criminal biohacker, even if they are in fact the same person. I tallied rep changes only at the end of a mission, and I added a buffer so it wasn't as swingy. I thought one bad day shouldn't trash you.

Yes, if you kidnap someone and make them ask for things, you could. I guess that's not much different from marching them at knifepoint to the nearest cash machine in a money economy. In terms of you spamming requests, yes you could, but you'd like trash your rep in that network for the forseeable future.

On fabbers, I managed to find my rules. Attached in case of interest.

Quote from: robertliguori on May 18, 2021, 09:44:50 AM
With regards to the open-sourced nanofab blueprints, I think that Exsurgent, and the Alien Space Bats, actually do need something from humanity.  Because you can trivially defeat both by going hot and loud.  If humanity can compromise an ultraviolet-level nanoswarm, they can set it to unrestrained growth and consumption of everything else.  Since everything else on Earth is going for Inscrutable Titan Agenda of A Silent Sky, and aren't immediately going for exponential growth, you'll have two nanoswarms moments after, which will be able to forcibly compromise a third nanoswarm, then each reproduce into six, then compromise some and duplicate more, and so on, until you've eaten Earth. 

Then you throw the whole shebang into the sun.  Since ultraviolet-class nanoswarms maintain a constant internal temperature in blatant denial of thermodynamics, this isn't a problem for them; it's a bunch of feed stock and free energy to make use of.  So they can start eating the sun.  Then they do the same trick that the Glory virus was going to do, but on a larger level, throwing out solar-wind-driven probes and using the last remnants of stellar mass that hasn't been converted into them, and whenever they hit a system with its own Bracewell probe, they're going to win, because they're starting with the star in whatever system they're in and can eat it (and each other) faster than the old Exsurgent strain can corrupt them.

And the thing is, we know that the Alien Space Bats can't use this tactic, because they are bound by the setting to produce a setting in which humanity can exist, at least temporarily.  PCs have no such restrictions.  Exsurgent can't naturally come to the realization "Wait, what's with this lame mutation shit? I want to stop humanity from building more ASIs, I just need to convert a tiny fraction of Earth into nanoswarms, throw them into space, and get actually serious about kidnapping, mind-ripping, and repurposing the humans I can find, because I can bring literally arbitrary amounts of power to a point and I can beat them anywhere I care to, then use their minds to find where other humans are hiding, and repeat until nothing dares light a spark or sends a broadcast across all of Sol system but me, then do the same in every system reachable by a Titan gate, bam, done."

An alternate-perspective game, where the PCs were subprocesses of Exsurgent given the freedom to act in a scrutable-but-actually-effective manner and given the goal of Stopping All Humanity's Potential ASIs, would not last a session, and that would only be while the PCs work out exactly what their cheaty powers can do.  This, obviously, is for game reasons; you can't have a game if you can't have characters.  But the designers of Eclipse Phase seem to have completely forgotten that a villain which could win at any time and isn't doing so for any kind of observable or sensible reason does not create tension in-universe, it just looks really dumb and artificial out of universe.

So, if Exsurgent could do what it was advertised as doing, then not only would it not need humanity's designs, it wouldn't need humanity's artifacts.  There would be no creations of twisted biology body-horrors, no ancient machines, no gamedevs disappointed that no one wants to fuck the Glory-mutants; all would become omni-capable nanofog making more nanofog, until all was (literally) dust.

Exsurgent doesn't do that.  Exsurgent tries to corrupt humanity instead.  And if Exsurgent is actually a kind of immune system for the galaxy, that actually makes sense; the nightmare scenario for the Alien Space Bats is an upstart species hacking Exsurgent and tweaking its targeting parameters, so that Exsurgent starts treating the entire rest of the universe as valid targets for integration into itself.  And Exsurgent can mutate and find new forms.  It needs some kind of hard limiter on what it can evolve into.  And the logical one is that Exsurgent can only use what the target species itself makes (or is).

There isn't a reason for them to find your open-sourced designs useful.  But there also isn't a reason for utility fog not to have swallowed literally the entire system by now, so.

Ok, the game, especially 2e, addresses these issues.

The ETI, what you tiresomely call alien space bats, have never even noticed transhmanity yet. Transhumanity is a microbe to them.

Billions of years ago they deployed countless Bracewell probes to every star system that might create life one day and the put carefully hidden clues to their existence in the systems, then went into sleep mode.

The clues were so intricate and sublte it would take an artifical super intelligence to see them. When a race created an ASI, especially a self evolving one, it will notice the clues and usually try to contact the creator of them, at which point the bracewell probe releases the exsurgent virus to infect the ASI.

The ETI probes jnever attacked transhumanity, just the ASI it accicentlually created, the TITANs, who were an emergent ASI, not a deliberate one. The infected titans attacked humanity, not the etis.

5% of humanity survived off earth because earlier a group had deliberately and very carefully created ASI that was stable and had a positive view towards humanity, the prometheans. The promethenans were aware of the titans and were watching them, When the virus hit them, they were able to analyze and defend against it. it's likely that 5% of humanity survived due to the prometheans actions.

The Titans mostly left the solar system somehow. There are titan relics and maybe low level forks of one or two still in the system, but they don't seem to really want to finish off humanity. The titans themselves have evolved to the point they don't give a fuck about humanity one way or another now and are off in the galaxy doing who knows what for whatever reasons.

we don't know if the prometheans were able to reason with the titans, or infect them with a counter to the exsurgent virus or what, its beyond human ability to understand and left to the gm to season his games with.

In one 1e bit of background, humans on a remote exoplanet did see a titan pass thru the system and were terrified, until it passed by them without taking any action whatsoever. at least one of the people there realized on some level the titan was literally running for its life and didn't even notice the human explorer party it passed by.

So yes, the eti could wipe out humanity with less than a fart's worth of effort, it doesn't even know humanity exists, the titans may have but the X factor of the prometheans interfered with them in some way. That's basically the in game answer to your points. The titans left in the system and the exsurgent outbreaks are  mostly leftovers simply left by the titans still operating independently. One or two titan intelligences, possibly gamma level forks, are still around but no one knows what if any directive they have. Likewise there is at least one or two peometheans left, and tnye seem to be interested in protecting humanity, but again they are beyond comprehension.

Quote from: Karmarainbow on May 18, 2021, 03:36:05 PM

Quote from: robertliguori on May 17, 2021, 05:07:43 PM
Interesting.  Could you summarize some of those?  Again, some things like Reputation as a system just seem like a dead letter when you combine it with even just normal egocasting (can you spam-egocasts and have every fork request something before the org realizes that you've hit them with a speed-of-light-based timing attack), much less actual problems like identity theft or, uh, actual-identity-theft, where you steal someone's ego, psychosurger it, and spin up a copy and have them ask for stuff on your behalf.



With rep, I'm trying to remember. I think the key for me was grokking that "James Dreyfuss, scientist and argonaut" is a totaly different identity from NeonGenysis the criminal biohacker, even if they are in fact the same person. I tallied rep changes only at the end of a mission, and I added a buffer so it wasn't as swingy. I thought one bad day shouldn't trash you.

Yes, if you kidnap someone and make them ask for things, you could. I guess that's not much different from marching them at knifepoint to the nearest cash machine in a money economy. In terms of you spamming requests, yes you could, but you'd like trash your rep in that network for the forseeable future.

On fabbers, I managed to find my rules. Attached in case of interest.

'I thought one bad day shouldn't trash you. ' that's the key thing here. You nailed it. Bravo sir!

Yes, that's one thing i hope evolves in a rep society, the idea that one thing should not result in what bill maher calls "Summary execution" of a person's career and life. Bill Maher does often criticize the left and cancel culture is one of his favorite targets. He recently called what happened to a guy's career over one remark he made while streaming a call of  duty game 'summary execution" of his career. Then guy apologized but still his career had to be ended and he had to go on the grand groveling apology tour.

I hope that if we do get a rep society it evolves some safeguards or just common sense and ends the summary execution thing. It may not happen but one can hope.

A rep society fundamentally can't work because nobody is perfect.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 04:15:08 PM
A rep society fundamentally can't work because nobody is perfect.

No, it's because reputation is easier to fake and manipulates than solid goods.
Any sort of reputation economy not based on centralized authoritarian control would be dominated by popular tools.
A reputation economy based on centralized authoritarian control would just be a totalitarian dictatorship.

In addition, reputation is contextual. A man can have a reputation as an excellent mechanic but a terrible investor. Should the government get to decide whats more important and wether or not he gets access to train lines because of this?

Quote from: The Thing on May 18, 2021, 03:13:56 PM
I thought they had iron rich pockets in their eyes that acted as natural magnetic compasses? Has that been refuted.

They never did find pockets of magnetic material in pigeons, but they've had a theory for how quantum effects can cause chemical reactions in cells (radical pairs) for a while, and earlier this year they published a study demonstrating it:
https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-have-a-quantum-sense-and-for-the-first-time-scientists-see-it-in-action
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/3/e2018043118

The gecko example is interesting speculation. Another is that quantum tunneling causes mutations in DNA:
https://scitechdaily.com/new-research-reveals-that-quantum-physics-causes-mutations-in-our-dna/
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/CP/D0CP05781A#!divAbstract

Quote from: The Thing on May 18, 2021, 03:13:56 PM
Many people have begun to suspect that classical physics can't explain consciousness and that some quantum process may be involved. While I'm hesitant to believe those who shout "QUANTUM!"  every time something is hard to explain some of their arguments seem well reasoned.

I tend to take most arguments about consciousness with a grain of salt, because most of it's completely untestable. But given the complexity of the brain, the small scale on which it operates, and the highly complex way evolution and neural nets take advantage of their environment, I think it's almost inevitable that the brain uses quantum effects. The question is how, and to what degree.

Which does further strengthen the argument that a digitized you is different from the biological you, in some very fundamental ways, even if consciousness is continuous. You'd likely feel like you've changed, suffer from something like dysmorphia except at the thinking/memory level instead of at the body level, and end up becoming a different, perhaps very different, person.

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 09:55:32 PM
You'd likely feel like

Why is your idea "likely" to occur?

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 18, 2021, 10:18:18 PM

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 09:55:32 PM
You'd likely feel like

Why is your idea "likely" to occur?

It's like the tone recognition algorithm that had a set of 5 logic gates that were essential to the operation of the program (the article was linked last page or so), but which weren't connected to the other logic gates in any recognizable way. The algorithm was obviously exploiting some unseen slippage in some complex way that couldn't be readily analyzed -- even though the whole thing ran on only 37 logic gates. If the human brain is similarly adapted to its specific environment inside a head, which seems likely, and has billions of connections between neurons, then an attempt to digitize the brain (move it to another environment) is likely to miss a lot of those implicit things, and it might simply be impossible to replicate them.

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 09:55:32 PMI tend to take most arguments about consciousness with a grain of salt, because most of it's completely untestable. But given the complexity of the brain, the small scale on which it operates, and the highly complex way evolution and neural nets take advantage of their environment, I think it's almost inevitable that the brain uses quantum effects. The question is how, and to what degree.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my father many years ago.  He felt that the probabilistic quantum effects that lie at the foundation of the mechanics of our thinking processes showed that our thoughts are not deterministic, but that we instead have free will.  I dunno if that line of reasoning has been developed by anyone, but I still think it's a very interesting idea.

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 10:39:54 PM
If the human brain is similarly adapted to its specific environment inside a head, which seems likely, and has billions of connections between neurons, then an attempt to digitize the brain (move it to another environment) is likely to miss a lot of those implicit things, and it might simply be impossible to replicate them.

Why can you not accept that EP tech has achieved what you consider to be impossible here? EP is indistinguishable from magic in some cases, but that's just because it's sufficiently advanced beyond our understanding. That's a core part of the setting. Accept it if you're playing EP, or reject it and don't. Playing EP and doubting the tech is as silly as playing D&D and doubting that magic can teleport you without killing you and making a copy or that a raised/resurrected you isn't really you.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 19, 2021, 07:05:29 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 10:39:54 PM
If the human brain is similarly adapted to its specific environment inside a head, which seems likely, and has billions of connections between neurons, then an attempt to digitize the brain (move it to another environment) is likely to miss a lot of those implicit things, and it might simply be impossible to replicate them.

Why can you not accept that EP tech has achieved what you consider to be impossible here? EP is indistinguishable from magic in some cases, but that's just because it's sufficiently advanced beyond our understanding. That's a core part of the setting. Accept it if you're playing EP, or reject it and don't. Playing EP and doubting the tech is as silly as playing D&D and doubting that magic can teleport you without killing you and making a copy or that a raised/resurrected you isn't really you.

Are you continuing an argument you were having with someone else and mistakenly replying to me? Because I've never said a thing about either accepting or denying EP as my magical savior.

Quote from: Mishihari on May 19, 2021, 03:21:26 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 09:55:32 PMI tend to take most arguments about consciousness with a grain of salt, because most of it's completely untestable. But given the complexity of the brain, the small scale on which it operates, and the highly complex way evolution and neural nets take advantage of their environment, I think it's almost inevitable that the brain uses quantum effects. The question is how, and to what degree.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my father many years ago.  He felt that the probabilistic quantum effects that lie at the foundation of the mechanics of our thinking processes showed that our thoughts are not deterministic, but that we instead have free will.  I dunno if that line of reasoning has been developed by anyone, but I still think it's a very interesting idea.

I've seen it come up quite a bit, so I suspect it's been developed at length. But uncertainty does not mean free will, just an opportunity to claim the possibility of free will, based on a variation of the god of the gaps argument. I think consciousness is better thought of as an emergent phenomenon that happens largely above the quantum level. That's true for a lot of things. Even if the universe at its most fundamental is a probabilistic waveform, that's not really a useful way to describe most macroscopic behavior.

Quote from: Pat on May 19, 2021, 09:34:07 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on May 19, 2021, 03:21:26 AM

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 09:55:32 PMI tend to take most arguments about consciousness with a grain of salt, because most of it's completely untestable. But given the complexity of the brain, the small scale on which it operates, and the highly complex way evolution and neural nets take advantage of their environment, I think it's almost inevitable that the brain uses quantum effects. The question is how, and to what degree.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my father many years ago.  He felt that the probabilistic quantum effects that lie at the foundation of the mechanics of our thinking processes showed that our thoughts are not deterministic, but that we instead have free will.  I dunno if that line of reasoning has been developed by anyone, but I still think it's a very interesting idea.

I've seen it come up quite a bit, so I suspect it's been developed at length. But uncertainty does not mean free will, just an opportunity to claim the possibility of free will, based on a variation of the god of the gaps argument. I think consciousness is better thought of as an emergent phenomenon that happens largely above the quantum level. That's true for a lot of things. Even if the universe at its most fundamental is a probabilistic waveform, that's not really a useful way to describe most macroscopic behavior.

When I took my first quantum mechanics course I really liked the idea that if you bounced a macroscopic ball against a wall there was an infinitesimal but non-zero probablity that that the ball would go right through the wall by tunneling.  I took to bouncing balls off walls a lot, but sadly, I never saw it happen.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2021, 04:15:08 PM
A rep society fundamentally can't work because nobody is perfect.

well, that has some validity to it, but you need to remember a lot of rep cultures are very small in numbers. I mean, in EP2 is says that the population of the solar system AF is like 60 million people. I mean, there are less people in the EP universe than there are on facebook at any given time. It's likely that in a typical rep culture habitat the population may be at most a few thousand or less.

So it's likely that people in one know a person being repped or know someone who knows that person.

Also, this is a rep culture that's had a couple centuries to mature and develop some morals and standards. It's not a 'dawn of rep culture' like we have now on the internet, which is still a relatively new thing even if you grew up with it.

Quote from: Pat on May 18, 2021, 09:55:32 PM

Quote from: The Thing on May 18, 2021, 03:13:56 PM
I thought they had iron rich pockets in their eyes that acted as natural magnetic compasses? Has that been refuted.

They never did find pockets of magnetic material in pigeons, but they've had a theory for how quantum effects can cause chemical reactions in cells (radical pairs) for a while, and earlier this year they published a study demonstrating it:
https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-have-a-quantum-sense-and-for-the-first-time-scientists-see-it-in-action
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/3/e2018043118

The gecko example is interesting speculation. Another is that quantum tunneling causes mutations in DNA:
https://scitechdaily.com/new-research-reveals-that-quantum-physics-causes-mutations-in-our-dna/
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/CP/D0CP05781A#!divAbstract

Quote from: The Thing on May 18, 2021, 03:13:56 PM
Many people have begun to suspect that classical physics can't explain consciousness and that some quantum process may be involved. While I'm hesitant to believe those who shout "QUANTUM!"  every time something is hard to explain some of their arguments seem well reasoned.

I tend to take most arguments about consciousness with a grain of salt, because most of it's completely untestable. But given the complexity of the brain, the small scale on which it operates, and the highly complex way evolution and neural nets take advantage of their environment, I think it's almost inevitable that the brain uses quantum effects. The question is how, and to what degree.

Which does further strengthen the argument that a digitized you is different from the biological you, in some very fundamental ways, even if consciousness is continuous. You'd likely feel like you've changed, suffer from something like dysmorphia except at the thinking/memory level instead of at the body level, and end up becoming a different, perhaps very different, person.

Ok, we're having an intelligent reasonable conversation here so let me try to keep it going along that line. Is it possible that in EP's time what we now call central processors work at a quantum level? I'd imagine so. I mean the game starts like about 200 years from now, and unless we have a total societal and technological collapse that ends technological advancement it's likely that processor tech will be pretty much as advanced over what we have today as the CPU in your computer right now is advanced over one of Charles babbage's difference engines, the first mechanical computing devices built in the 1820's.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Babbage_Difference_Engine.jpg/1920px-Babbage_Difference_Engine.jpg)

Hell, I'm proud of the cpu in picked out and put in my system, a ryzen 5 1600 AF,  but i'd guess in Eps time someone would just toss it in a nanofabber to recycle it as they have better processors that are maybe barely visible  to the naked eye.

As to copying a mind...Maybe part of the process could involve creating a type of quantum entanglement between particles in the human brain and the system trying to copy it so the quantum states could be copied? Things like this in a way are being  done today. Physicists have copied quantum data from one photon to another, which doesn't violate any physical laws as the information being copies is unobserved and unknown. it's called quantum teleportation.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation

Obviously we can say it can't be done today, and it's all science fiction. Then again weapons using direct atomic force were just fiction in the 1930's, right up till august 6, 1945. While we can conceptualize some of things that could possibly exist in 200 years assuming no big crash, the actual hardware and technology that could make them work is as impossible for us to really grasp as the CPU in your computer, phone, watch, etc would have been  to Charles Babbage.