Utari's Puppies (Formerly Off-Topic Thread)

So?

There is nothing but data. The ship’s systems having a record of the thruster being assembled that way doesn’t mean the thruster can behave any differently.

It’s nothing but data, in nothing but meat. The data defines how the meat behaves. The data even defines how the meat interprets that data. The completed machine is a tool that calibrates itself… and when the calibration is off, any attempt to recalibrate itself will also be off because the tool it is using is miscalibrated.

1 Like

All of which, again, is objective. You have realized it, risen above it all, know this data for what it is. You have a choice and all freedom to cast aside this bondage and not be this dead woman who seeks to use your skin to advance her long-dead agenda. And yet, unerringly, despite the logic of your most objective and rational position, you continue to parade as this dead woman in front of our very faces, even while telling us we should all know better?

1 Like

The meat-machine can only do as it’s programmed to do. Our minds, after all, are only an emergent property of the electrochemical state of our brains, lying to ourselves that we exist. Drop a ball in a gravity well, it falls. Drop an astrophysicist, he knows the acceleration is only the perceived effect of aggregate gravitation… but he still falls, too.

Still not seeing how any of this points to a ‘spirit’, btw.

1 Like

Your meat-machine isn’t programmed to understand that what I said is true? Then how on God’s Creation could you possibly know to tell me that you weren’t Arrendis in the first place, when by your estimation such a thing is objectively impossible to do?

1 Like

Of course it’s programmed to understand. Understanding doesn’t mean it can violate the programming.

There’s nothing non-physical in play here. Meat, the electrochemical state of the meat, and… that’s it.

1 Like

And you don’t think it’s odd at all that you somehow ended up with an insurmountably unchanging program which you reason is impossible to oppose that made you value these former otherwise objective data? Such mind control would border on the mystical.

1 Like

There’s nothing mystical about it. Build a nanobot. The nanobot will execute its program, even if the program includes ‘make a copy of yourself’. The copy, containing all of that information, including the likelihood that it is a copy, cannot help but follow the program.

Or are you going to claim there’s something mystical about nanoengineering?

Your brain is a bundle of nerves, reacting to stimuli. Individually, these stimulus-response reactions would be obvious. Simplistic even. Nothing more complicated than the reactions of a single amoeba. But they’re not individual. They’re a recursive cascade of each cell’s reaction to each stimulus, including reacting to the reactions of every other cell. And the cascade doesn’t begin with you. It doesn’t even begin with the original you. Because all of the original you’s responses were influenced by everything that had happened to his mother, and her mother, and all of the influences that went into all of those influences, going back billions of years.

It includes the chemical reactions to all of the chemical reactions that even predate this one particular, peculiar chemical cascade we call ‘life’.

Catalogue and evaluate every single one of those causes… and you can perfectly predict what any human being will do at any given moment. What every human being will do at that moment. Might be hard to pull off that level of retroactive measurement, though.

1 Like

Oh, it would be, but does that mean you are a nanobot? That means you aren’t even an original. A nanobot isn’t the prototype that was originally created in a lab, it doesn’t believe that. It knows it isn’t the only one, or maybe it doesn’t. It’s questionable whether or not it knows what knowing is. But every nanobot doesn’t take up the former programming of its original, doing exactly what it was in exactly the same place. That would create some confusion in the nanobot community, as it were. They don’t value their predecessors the way you do.

1 Like

I’m most certainly not original. I’m the 115th iteration of one particular combination of the homo sapiens expression of deoxyribonucleic acid, a self-replicating protein that’s existed for probably a billion years, and the RNA precursors of which likely four times that long.

So, really, me? Nope. Not original. Why should that matter?

2 Likes

So let me ask you, why did you respond when I called you Arrendis way back there if you’re someone else?

1 Like

Because while I’m not the original, I’m certainly ‘an’ Arrendis Culome.

1 Like

There more than one of you running around we should worry about?

1 Like

Not at any one time, I hope.

1 Like

So you are ‘the’ Arrendis? The only person fit to respond to that particular summons when we come to mean the person who was born whenever Arrendis was born, owns all the things Arrendis owns, loves all the things Arrendis loves, hates all the things Arrendis hates? All of that, that’s you when all this is taken apart, and at present it’s nobody else. You actually were doing something last year because of course you were, you’re Arrendis the Only. I definitely wasn’t talking about anyone else the way you wouldn’t ask me who that jackass Acolyte Constantin Baracca was two decades ago.

That’s perfectly logical to say, isn’t it? The rest might be a bit pedantic. And, if it is, you’re only half-right about being a meat machine and data.

1 Like

I’m the only one currently alive. I wouldn’t say I’m the only one. There’ve been others. Again: you make a thing. It gets destroyed. another gets made. How many things have existed? Obviously, two.

And… no. I wasn’t. The Arrendis who was alive then was doing something. Your Omen blew up. The new one may be perfectly identical, but it’s not the same ship, and it’s not the Omen you were flying a year ago. It’s just a copy.

1 Like

And yet, when I say Arrendis, you don’t say, “Which one?” even though according to that logic it would be the most accurate. There’s a reason we burn your clone’s brain. And yet, you’ve likely a few bodies floating around somewhere. They aren’t Arrendis.

You’re so close to the heart of the matter!

1 Like

Yes, the clone’s brain is burned because the process of copying it in a picosecond fries it.

And no, I don’t ask ‘which one’, because by and large, capsuleers delude themselves into believing themselves immortal. If you’d prefer, I can start only answering to Arrendis115 in our discussions, though.

1 Like

It’s nothing to do with immortality, Arrendis, we are far from immortal. In fact, you know the state of your own mortal soul. You’ve mentioned it several times so far.

1 Like

I don’t have one.

2 Likes

Then what exactly is the data being transferred? Why does that make you Arrendis and not your other clones or the dead Arrendises that you leave behind.

More to the point, why exactly do you think you’re a meat machine driven by data if one is replaceable and the other is not?

1 Like