Alright then. I’m hearing a lot of “we don’t know exactly how it works, because we can’t get a closer look without being shot”. So please, stop me if I sound utterly insane, but has anyone considered attempting to lock down an isolated Drifter? I do not mean in combat situations, those are different circumstances.
Do capacitor neuts and nosferatus work on Drifters? I am suggesting someone completely - or as much as they can - neuter its mobility, and take advanced analysis of the ship and its functions, subject it to every manner of scan and investigation possible without completely destroying it. And if at all possible, rip the pilot from its seat, and disable the ship.
If such could be done, “live” samples could be taken to study, and certainly the benefits of such data retrieved would be immeasurable.
On Trireme, it’s a fascinating piece, but it’s worth noting that it was done under the aegis of Arek’jaalan. Some late-stage A’J hasn’t been properly peer reviewed.
I have found the results of Operation Trireme, the Collaborative Research Report written by Uriel Paradisi Anteovnuecci, Trii Seo, Frenjo Borkstar, and darkezero.
There was also a video log of the event, but there was a questionable foreword before anything else began. I couldn’t make sense of it so I ignored it.
Not precisely, but they appear to follow the same basic principles ours do.
Given that they’ve communicated through our comm systems, I’d say we know how to communicate, we don’t know how to make them listen to, or care about, anything we have to say.
Not for certain, no.
As an infomorph, are you really human, or are you an ‘artificial’ construct that thinks it’s human? Can you ever be sure?
“Human” - a word meaning, practically, “a creature like me,” a status often informally denied to members of the “human” species who vary from the speaker in some way the speaker considers important.
Like all words, it lacks set meaning. We set its boundaries on an ongoing basis, and it’s probably not a good idea to set those boundaries narrowly, lest we find ourselves outside them at some point.
One of the other practical meanings of “human” is, “a person it’s not okay to kill.”
You really do need to remember that you’re talking to a mechanic and an engineer before diving into the useless frippery that philosophy always twists itself into.
Human: an individual who is within the bounds of the species designated Homo Sapiens. Until such time as there’s an actual, accepted taxonomic classification of the Jove and the Drifters as some other species, the Jove were human, and the Drifters’ meat, like ours, is human.
A Drifter’s mind, like ours, is where the question lies. The human mind is an emergent property of the electrochemical activity in the brain. Ours are superimposed on our brains when the neural pathways are flash-grown, artificially. Are we, then, truly an emergent process? Are we really a continuation of the original emergent process that developed over the course of our original bodies’ lives? Or are we just wetware, artificial, biochemical software installed on a blank human meat-drive? The very fact that CONCORD has to police infomorph-forking indicates the latter is more likely. Ego and clinging to sanity, on the other hand, beg, desperately, for the former.
Because context matters. If you’re going to try to make a statement that has weight to it, you have to work in a frame of reference your intended listener cares about. In this case, the individual you’re responding to operates in a framework that doesn’t rely on your philosophical ambiguities, but rather one that calls for precision and accuracy.
And then you question why requiring accuracy, rather than seeking to muddle everything with ambiguities, makes someone more qualified to provide the actual meaning of a term than someone else who insists the word can have no true meaning.
If it can’t truly have a meaning, Aria, don’t use it. Otherwise, you’re just verglaschmenzing all quiblik brin proon.
You seem to have this idea, Arrendis, that “philosophers” deal somehow in the domain of the abstract and unreal. Maybe that’s true of some, but my tradition deals with the world at its least abstract. To me, to us, the universe is real; it’s the mind that tells lies.
In a sense, we don’t differ at all. Just, you seem to keep thinking of me as dealing in domains of spirit and ideal. (Both are a little foreign to me, actually. I don’t particularly believe in spirits and ideals are artifacts of mind that tend to conflict with reality by their nature-- sometimes beneficially, usually not.)
In a way, I’m like you (claim to be this week): I seek precision. I seek insight. I seek clarity. … Part of that, mind, is understanding that (1) words are a symbolic method of communication that cannot possibly communicate everything we might want it to; and (2) the reality I’m seeking to understand is in fact fractal in its complexity; it’s impossible to be precise enough.
We already understood that centuries ago. The universe has grown so much larger since then.
The world I want to perceive is the world at its most utterly concrete-- but, more concrete than the array of functional illusions (abstraction; names!-- the tradition of calling and thinking of things according to their uses) we stretch over it and then treat as the true reality.
I’m not interested in refuting your points.
You think you’re being more precise than I. In terms of what is routinely useful, that’s probably true. In terms of understanding the world beyond such terms … there’s no way it could be.
There’s a reason you don’t tend to see engineers in positions that require strong understanding of how people, or truly complex systems, really work.
You know, for someone who keeps talking about understanding reality - truly complex systems and how people work - you never really seem to be able to communicate that understanding to anyone else. Only the claim that you have this capability. When faced with arguments that should be easily refuted by such, you retreat to explaining that your opponent sees things in one way or another, and you see it in yet another… and this means you don’t have to back up your side of the argument, somehow.
You know it’s okay to say “I don’t know” or “I’ll have to think about this”, right?
Sure I do. And … actually I think I say that pretty often, Miz.
One of the problems of my sect’s practice is that the kind of perception we aim to develop in ourselves is something that isn’t possible to put into words. The reason’s as simple as it is frustrating: the idea is to get beyond the illusions our minds overlay on the world. Those illusions, when they’re closest-matched to reality, are highly functional, carving the Totality into useful chunks. “Tree.” “Rock.” “Salmon.” “Salmonella.”
Language is deeply tied into this way of seeing the world. There’s no word for “tree” that doesn’t link into shared mental concepts of “tree,” concepts that draw borders between what is “a tree” and what is not-- borders that are, to some degree, artificial and misleading. What’s more, it only works perfectly if the concept communicated is shared by both parties exactly the same. This is rarely true, which causes trouble all the time, usually in the form of miscommunications, where words are taken differently by the speaker and the listener. That doesn’t mean language is bad or should be discarded or anything silly like that; it’s just a permanent limitation on language as a medium of communication.
So how do you use words, symbolic representations of concepts that are themselves symbolic representations of stuff that exists in the real world in a much more complicated state than any layer of symbolic representation could possibly convey, to communicate the idea of the world without symbols?
It’s kind of a head-breaker. Which is why, instead of trying to describe it the way I’ve just inevitably failed to, we tend to try to riddle and hint our way towards it.
Oh-- and by the way, this is something I understand in the abstract to be a truth, and I can talk about it that way. I’m not really “there” yet, myself, though-- I’m a practitioner, a “seeker,” but not a master by any stretch.
The philosophers I am a fan of have a habit of refuting, debating, proving, debate some more until every ambiguity can be clarified and the ideas backed and agreed on. They believe that there is an objective truth, but their, and by extension, our understanding of the truth is obscured by individual perception and bias, thus requiring the need to debate over it to determine and clarify what is indeed true and what is just our perception of the truth.
Note the importance of debates and clarification. They believe that there is no point in philosophy if nothing can be made clear enough that even the common man can grasp it.
I’m sorry, aren’t you the one who just claimed that a species designation has no set meaning, because it can be misapplied in all these relative and subjective ways by people with agendas to promote?
Relativism, subjectivity, and agendas are all abstracts, Aria.
People aren’t complicated. They’re just complex. And ‘truly complex systems’ are comprised of less complex systems. The reason you don’t see engineers in positions of societal authority is we tend to not devote time to playing the nonsense social games that lead to political advancement—not because we don’t understand them, but because we do.
As for your reply to Miz… wow, Aria. All that, just to defend saying there’s no set definition for a noun. We’re not talking about advanced linguistic constructions here, we’re literally talking about a concept as simple and basic as ‘a rock’. ‘A tree’ isn’t exactly something you’re going to get a lot of disagreement over. Some people will misuse it for giant ferns, or towering mushrooms, or basically any plant that grows high enough to stand under, but ‘a tree’ without additional qualifiers or context, has a meaning.
And this bit…
Your mind doesn’t overlay illusions on the world. Your mind is the illusion. You’re just an incredibly complex chemical cascade of stimulated responses. Just like the rest of us. The mind is a side-effect, and it’s one we haven’t actually found any reason to believe has any effect. Placed in the exact (important word) same conditions, any identical chain of chemical reactions at the same point in its cascade would have the same reactions to surrounding stimuli. Which includes this statement. And you’re going to respond to it, or not, exactly the same way any other identical cascade chain in your conditions would.
You say you don’t deal with the ‘domain of the abstract and unreal’. The mind is abstract and unreal. It’s a lie that it tells itself. Nothing more.