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  • Locked thread
Tiggum
Oct 24, 2007

Your life and your quest end here.


Hammerstein posted:

And if they do believe in a soul, then why even bother ? If someone is that religious/spiritual then he would happily transcend into the afterlife - the show explains how devout believers are against "unnatural" life extension, so the only reason to prolong one's life in such a way is if they knew they went to their religion's version of hell. At the same time damning themselves for using said technology to extend their stay in the material world.
It's only one branch of one religion that bans resleeving. Besides, why do people who believe in heaven want to extend their lives in real life? If you think you and everyone you love is going to live forever in heaven, why not forego medical treatment and accept that you'll die sooner than you otherwise might? I honestly don't know the answer to this question and suspect that people who claim to believe in the afterlife secretly aren't so sure.

Zaphod42 posted:

It is a solution only to "we will stop being around" but that's not the "problem". The problem is people on the bottom of the ocean are going to die. And they are. There's no solving that problem. The "solution" isn't a solution. They still die. Period. There's no arguing this.

Zaphod42 posted:

the problem was going to be dying/suffering, not stopping to be.

Zaphod42 posted:

Because most people would define immortality as "I don't have to ever experience dying"
Serious question: what does death mean to you? What is your actual definition of what it means to die?

Because to me "ceasing to be" is an exact description of death. You can't "experience dying" because dying is the transition from existing to not existing. If you're about to die and you make a copy of yourself and that copy lives then you didn't die because you still exist.

Zaphod42 posted:

This gets a lot more interesting if you do it Ship of Theseus style as slow upgrades into a computer instead of one transaction "scan" or copy or upload.
It really doesn't make any difference at all. If you replace each part of the ship separately over time but still call it the same ship in the end then there's no reason you can't replace the entire ship all at once and still call it the same ship.

Hammerstein posted:

Well in my proposal there are no DHF stacks or anything in play.
It really makes no difference. If you can make a perfect copy you can make a perfect copy, whether it's by means of some implanted computer thing or a Star Trek transporter or whatever other means.

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General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Zaphod42 posted:

That's what I was sayin, this is what most people consider immortality to mean.

Then just have the meat fork euthanized when you upload. This is exactly what happens in your day to day life - new self overwrites old in a linear progression.

Rinkles
Oct 24, 2010

What I'm getting at is...
Do you feel the same way?

General Battuta posted:

Then just have the meat fork euthanized when you upload. This is exactly what happens in your day to day life - new self overwrites old in a linear progression.

Doesn't this kind of analogy require a much better understanding of the functioning of our consciousness, and a comprehensive description of the mechanism by which mind transfer would occur? I don't think it's at all self-evident that sleep is analogous to whatever that would involve.

Avasculous
Aug 30, 2008

404notfound posted:

Seriously, I just finished episode 10 and started reading more about the series on the internet (doing so before finishing is just asking to get spoiled), and it seems like this thread has already reached off-season status.

1 week after release = off-season seems about right for a 10-episode Netflix series.

Pompous Rhombus
Mar 11, 2007

esperterra posted:

oh also lol at how many Canadian actors are in this. It's probably extra noticable for me b/c I see them in stuff other than the SyFy/CW fare they're constantly appearing in due to being filmed in this fine city I call home.

I started a rewatch of The Magicians and the police chief winds up in the background of some Brakebills scenes.

esperterra
Mar 24, 2010

SHINee's back




He was also in iZombie and The 100. And probably Caprica. I know I saw him in Bates Motel.

navyjack
Jul 15, 2006



A couple of quotes from a Guardian piece that might be relevant to this thread’s interest:

quote:

Morgan is a consultant on the show which, if all goes well, will run for five seasons.

And:

quote:

He has said in the past that he is done with Kovacs, but the adaptation has “kind of woken it all up again”, so he might reconsider

Torquemada
Oct 21, 2010

Drei Gläser
Well, Kovacs appears as a 100 million year old ghost god in his fantasy trilogy, so given that he appears in 75% of Morgan’s output it’s safe to say he’ll be writing more of him.

numptyboy
Sep 6, 2004
somewhat pleasant

Neddy Seagoon posted:

Kovacs is also pretty sure Kovacs-SECONDARY threw the last game.

I thought it was Kovac's copy that went on the suicide mission and was also the one that walked away at the end. When he speaks to Ortega and says that he was the one she said goodbye to. It seemed that the primary one you spent time watching in the series spent the last episode on the island and opted to be the one to die as the other had more important memories.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

numptyboy posted:

I thought it was Kovac's copy that went on the suicide mission and was also the one that walked away at the end. When he speaks to Ortega and says that he was the one she said goodbye to. It seemed that the primary one you spent time watching in the series spent the last episode on the island and opted to be the one to die as the other had more important memories.

Nope. Kovacs explicitly says the clone went off to 'orgy island', remarking "he's never technically had sex before". Kovacs died in the crash, but the clone body was still around and the two Rock-Paper-Scissor'ed for who got to walk out of VR in it.

OB_Juan
Nov 24, 2004

Not every day is a good day.


Dinosaur Gum
It's probably different in a world where stacks exist, you just grow up used to these concepts.

Especially if you've got crazy Quellcrist cult training and a personal history of downloading your mind across the galaxy to go be a murder machine.

Zzulu
May 15, 2009

(▰˘v˘▰)

Noctone posted:

Came into this thread to say the show owned, and uhh what the hell is going on in here

:yikes:

Blisster
Mar 10, 2010

What you are listening to are musicians performing psychedelic music under the influence of a mind altering chemical called...
I really don't know how to feel about this show. I want to like it because I remember enjoying the book, I love cyberpunk to death, and I'm pretty sure this is the biggest budget TV show ever made in Canada? Which is pretty cool.

Some of the missteps are just killing it for me though. Everything with Quell is terrible. Why does she dress like an alien from Stargate? Why is her dialogue so terrible? Why does she appear every 5 minutes in certain episodes to say the exact same stuff she said 5 minutes ago. "GET TO THE NEXT SCREEN" Yeah ok we got that the first 7 times.

All of the overly dramatic stuff in Kovac's past is just making me roll my eyes.

And some parts of the show look really cheap in comparison to other parts. Ortega's apartment bothers me for some reason, it just seems like it's almost entirely empty. I don't feel like I'm getting a good sense of this future world, it just looks like budget Blade Runner without it's own sense of style. The fight scenes aren't great, and the acting is pretty hit or miss.

Maybe I'm just frustrated because I just watched episode 7, which everyone seems to agree is the worst. I actually laughed out loud when Kovacs is like "You didn't get her. You'll never get her" followed immediately by the shuttle being destroyed with perfect comedic timing by lasers that look like they're out of an Asylum movie.

Ugh I don't know. I hate being negative because it's not the worst show. But it just feels like missed opportunity, the interesting stuff from the start of the series is discarded for awful melodrama and cliche.

Noctone
Oct 25, 2005

XO til we overdose..
I feel like maybe you’re bad at watching the show because there are important reasons why Ortega’s apartment is the way it is.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Rinkles posted:

Doesn't this kind of analogy require a much better understanding of the functioning of our consciousness, and a comprehensive description of the mechanism by which mind transfer would occur? I don't think it's at all self-evident that sleep is analogous to whatever that would involve.

Exactly, but Battuta is convinced he's already right and not even willing to discuss this issue it seems.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Blisster posted:

And some parts of the show look really cheap in comparison to other parts. Ortega's apartment bothers me for some reason, it just seems like it's almost entirely empty. I don't feel like I'm getting a good sense of this future world, it just looks like budget Blade Runner without it's own sense of style.

Agreed. When its fully ripping off Blade Runner it looks good but it doesn't seem to have as much substance behind the style.

The AVClub review called out the scenes as being kinda hollow and similar. Where in Blade Runner each scene had a distinct tone that really sold you on its purpose, lots of details and clutter.

Still, its a TV show and I'm surprised the budget was as high as it apparently was. We're lucky that it didn't look more like Farscape.

Noctone posted:

I feel like maybe you’re bad at watching the show because there are important reasons why Ortega’s apartment is the way it is.

God drat nerds love :jerkbag: over how good they are at watching TV. Its loving TV dude its not a skill, its not something to brag about or wave your dick around over.

Its actually a valid point. Yeah, yeah, her apartment is underground because everything is "overcrowded" and space is "hard to come by". Except Poe's empty hotel that hasn't had guests in years has no problem paying rent? How does that work.

The fact is lots of the sets feel kinda same-y, I think its the lighting.

Hammerstein
May 6, 2005

YOU DON'T KNOW A DAMN THING ABOUT RACING !

General Battuta posted:

Why? What about the deal is different than course of your ordinary day to day life? What divides 'current you' from 'fresh you'?

These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely asking what would cause these differences.

The simple drive of self-preservation for example. If my heart stops and as a consequence my brain dies, then I cease to exist (no one knows if there is an after-life or an immortal soul). I don't want my current existence to end and if I die then it's not comforting to me that a clone of myself gets activated with the same memories.

Sure, the clone, once he awakens, will think that he is the real me. But if he is the real me, then he also knows that I don't believe in any metaphysical soul-jumping and he will realize that the original me just met a very real end. In the same way the current me will not view the creation of a 1:1 copy as an extension of my own life.

I find it really interesting that 2 human beings, can have such a different outlook on what is immortality and what is not.

Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Feb 13, 2018

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Hammerstein posted:

The simple drive of self-preservation for example. If my heart stops and as a consequence my brain dies, then I cease to exist (no one knows if there is an after-life or an immortal soul). I don't want my current existence to end and if I die then it's not comforting to me that a clone of myself gets activated with the same memories.

Why does your heart stop and your brain dying cause you to cease to exist? There's a right answer to this question: because it leads to the breakdown of the information stored in the physical structure of my brain. But if that information isn't lost, then it's not death; nor is it a matter of a 'clone of myself' activating with the same memories. My chain of existence is going on unbroken just as it would on any other day, but one of the links in the chain uses digital sensors instead of nerve tissue.

The 'clone' does not 'think he is the real me'. Metaphysical soul-jumping does not exist, nor do souls; therefore all criteria for selfness are physical. If the Shannon entropy of your self hasn't been lost, then you have not died. The creation of a 1:1 copy is an extension of your life, because it is exactly the same way you live from day to day. You are constantly copying yourself forward into new but slightly different bodies.

quote:

I find it really interesting that 2 human beings, can have such a different outlook on what is immortality and what is not.

There are two different outlooks, but only one objectively correct answer in a physical universe. If you bring in dualism and souls all bets are off.

Rinkles posted:

Doesn't this kind of analogy require a much better understanding of the functioning of our consciousness, and a comprehensive description of the mechanism by which mind transfer would occur? I don't think it's at all self-evident that sleep is analogous to whatever that would involve.

We don't need any more information than we already have, except for the possibility that some part of consciousness depends on quantum information (which is extraordinarily unlikely given the evidence we have right now.) We can draw a box around what consciousness might be. It is physical. It does not depend on the substrate (because individual atoms have a known set of traits and none of them are 'I belong to a given consciousness). It obeys causal closure.

Given these parameters we can make correct deductions about how consciousness can be copied, backed up, and reinstantiated. One of them is 'consciousness exists in the brain, and it is a result of physical operations carried out by a substrate.' If we can replicate those operations, we can replicate any possible product of consciousness, including the True First-Person I. Philosophy is not admitted. Which is why:

Zaphod42 posted:

Exactly, but Battuta is convinced he's already right and not even willing to discuss this issue it seems.

There is no discussion required. We can 'discuss' whether time dilation is a real effect or a mathematical artifact all day, but the truth is it's real, and no amount of unintuitiveness or disbelief alters that.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

General Battuta posted:

Why does your heart stop and your brain dying cause you to cease to exist? There's a right answer to this question: because it leads to the breakdown of the information stored in the physical structure of my brain. But if that information isn't lost, then it's not death

This isn't right and you saying it is over and over proves nothing. WHY? If you can't prove it, you can't assume it.

You are the only person who defines life as "information". Everybody else defines it as homeostasis of consciousness.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Battuta's argument is because we don't understand consciousness we can just ignore it. That's not right.

You can post "but Shannon Entropy!" Every page; that doesn't itself make consciousness stop existing. You can't ignore it.

Its silly too because in altered carbon information IS lost sometimes, like with backups or double sleeves. So even by your own logic, information is lost, so something "died".

But thats not even right. That isn't how you define life.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Zaphod42 posted:

This isn't right and you saying it is over and over proves nothing. WHY? If you can't prove it, you can't assume it.

I've said why quite a few times, but I'm happy to do it again.

What is death? Well, we know it's not loss of raw material. You could swap out all the protons and electrons in your brain for new ones and you'd never notice a change, because physics makes it clear one proton is as good as any other. There's no label on an atom which says "I belong to Zaphod42."

So if death isn't loss of raw material, what is it? Why does a bullet to the head kill us? Or a heart attack? It can't be because of gross loss of matter. If you were hit by a ghost bullet which replaced every atom it touched with an identical atom, you would not be harmed: we know this because atoms are interchangeable. If you suffered a heart attack and your nerves began to die, but emergency nanomachines stepped in and repaired the damage, you wouldn't die. We know this because neurons are interchangeable as long as their structure is preserved.

So we need to look for death in the loss of structure. Not the loss of atoms or neurons, but the relationships between them. Why is this structure important? Because it encodes physical information, Shannon entropy - it encodes 'circuits' and 'connections' (forgive the use of computer metaphors in nerves) which define how we think and respond to the world. A bullet or a heart attack can kill us because it destroys information in our brain - the record of our self in a material substrate. There is no mental process to "undo a bullet" the way there is to "awaken from sleep." You can't retrieve what you just lost. It doesn't matter if the missing matter pushed out by the bullet is immediately replaced by fresh atoms if those atoms aren't arranged the same way - if the encoded information is lost.

Death is the loss of Shannon entropy, physical information, from our selves into the world. We cease to be self-regulating, self-modifying systems. An external force - a bullet, a lack of oxygen, severe cold - degrades the rules by which the brain changes itself. This is how we die.

Once we know this, we can look at situations in which our brain might be destroyed but we don't die. These are all situations in which Shannon entropy is preserved: the structure of our brain persists in a new substrate.

We suffer a stroke and go in for immediate repairs. 1% of our brain is rebuilt by nanomachines to match a scan taken yesterday, when the stroke was predicted. I doubt anyone here would claim we died. Now imagine the stroke kills 2% of your brain. Now 30%, 50%, 90%...in each case all the damage is repaired. There is obviously no threshold at which we can say 'below this is just fixes, above this is death': if we claimed that, we would need to locate our identity in the delta that threshold crosses. But it's obviously not there. Since no information is lost in any of these situations, we don't die.

Imagine that you decide to convert your brain into an immortal machine. You introduce a nanite which, neuron by neuron, over the course of years, gradually replaces aging cells with nanites. Eventually, your entire brain is made of nanites. All function has been preserved. Did you die the first time the nanite upgraded a neuron? Nope. Did you die when it had upgraded 25%? Nope. 50%? Why would you have died there? Nope. 100%? Nope. Information is preserved, though all the matter has changed.

Now imagine that nanite completes its work in an instant. There is no loss of function or information (redundant to say both, but hey). Does this kill you? Obviously not. Yet this case is identical to being brain scanned and then euthanized: you have replaced all your physical neurons with simulated equivalents.

There are a few more thought experiments that get at this, but I feel like that's a good primer. Does that help make it clear why death only occurs due to loss of information and structure, not loss of substrate?

quote:

Battuta's argument is because we don't understand consciousness we can just ignore it. That's not right.

Consciousness is as well understood as anything else. It is physical. It is the product of operations in the brain. There is nothing in the universe but physics, since it is causally closed. Therefore consciousness must be the result of physics. Therefore wherever the physical process of consciousness occurs, consciousness occurs. It is demonstrated.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

General Battuta posted:

Given these parameters we can make correct deductions about how consciousness can be copied, backed up, and reinstantiated. One of them is 'consciousness exists in the brain, and it is a result of physical operations carried out by a substrate.' If we can replicate those operations, we can replicate any possible product of consciousness, including the True First-Person I. Philosophy is not admitted.

Replication isn't the same entity!! I can replicate data but it isn't the same data, it just has identical state. That's the whole point! Move vs copy! You CAN replicate any product of consciousness but that doesn't change the original consciousness entity! It just makes ANOTHER one. You live on, but you ALSO die.

Dying still sucks. Both Kovacs wanted to live on, but only one can. How do you not see this?

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Please read the above post. You are confused again: you think I am saying that after a backup operation, the meat fork would somehow migrate to the digital fork when it died.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Dude, you just went from "death isn't matter" (I agree) to "death is shannon information", thats a leap. You haven't considered everything. I disagree there.

Death is a halting of a self-sustaining cycle. Its NOT information.

If you get alzheimer's, information is lost. Are you dead?

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Dude I referenced the ship of theseus earlier in this thread, why are you talking down to me like I'm a 5 year old? You don't need to write 50 pages about "10% then 20%..." I obviously get that concept. Are you even reading what I post?

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

General Battuta posted:

Please read the above post. You are confused again: you think I am saying that after a backup operation, the meat fork would somehow migrate to the digital fork when it died.

No I'm saying you know it doesn't migrate, which means death.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
You are obviously losing information to the Alzheimers plaques - your identity is being destroyed. The rules your brain uses to modify itself are seriously degraded. You are dying. One of the worst parts of Alzheimers is knowing that a living relative is no longer the same person.

Do you have a third alternative to introduce between "matter" and "information encoded by matter?" A neuroliferous aether, perhaps? Is there something else we should consider? A step between two adjacent concepts isn't a leap.

I don't think you are disagreeing with anything I'm saying.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
You said it yourself, a process. Life is a process, not information. You can't just tack on information.

It is possible to upgrade or "move" consciousness in theory with some future tech, who knows.

SOMA and Altered Carbon both go out of their way to tell us that things don't work that way with their tech. You die, and then you are "spun up" later, or you double-sleeve and then one of you dies. There is still death, even if you can simultaneously live on. You haven't stopped death, you've just prevented not having a version of you that is alive. That's not quite the same. Death still happens.

Also like someone said before, even if you have a perfect clone or scan, they would instantly diverge into different people as their experiences would no longer be identical. (Assuming the original is still alive)

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Look at it this way battuta, if I scan you to carbon and your sleeve is "empty" and you're not spun up, are you currently alive?

A live version of you could be created by spinning you up, but at the moment you are not. So you don't exist, you're dead.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
It's weird that you have these disagreements, because I thought we got on the same page yesterday.

Saying that 'life is a process' or 'life is homeostasis' is just a way of saying that life is Shannon information. Structure matters. A Brownian soup of randomly moving atoms is in homeostasis: add more matter and it'll gradually settle to equal temperature and equally random, meaningless motion. But it's not alive. It encodes no information. Similarly, a pendulum is a process and a cycle: it ticks back and forth. But it encodes nothing.

What sets life (and the brain) apart is the extraordinary density of Shannon information. We constantly eat up energy to preserve this information. Cells have DNA, a coding structure which not only replicates itself but contains instructions on how to build proteins which in turn build our bodies. The brain is full of neurons, which not only metabolize and exist on their own, but connect to other neurons and stimulate or suppress activity in patterns which compute our brains and personalities. Again, a field of a billion neurons might exist in perfect homeostasis, firing a signal around in a ring. But there is very little information encoded here. Nothing is being done.

The definition of life as information is fundamental to understanding what we are. The only distinction between a human being and several piles of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and so on is the way those elements are organized — an organization which we quantify as Shannon entropy.

We know how to upgrade or move consciousness right now. We just can't do it do to engineering constraints.

SOMA and Altered Carbon both present technology which works Correctly, i.e. according to the laws of physics by which minds are constrained. Consciousness can be scanned (its Shannon information replicated), copied to a new substrate (by physical replacement of the brain or transcription of information), paused, accelerated, fed artificial inputs, and destroyed. This destruction is death.

Death occurs when a brainstate cannot propagate its information forward. One example would be having your stack blown out.

Death does not occur when your brainstate can propagate its information forward. One example would be needlecasting a copy of your brainstate to a new sleeve just before your stack is blown out. Any information not caught by that needlecast is lost to death.

If you are about to get RD'd (in Altered Carbon's parlance), you might needlecast a backup, then look up at your assassin in defiance and say "gently caress you." All your experiences between the needlecast and the assassin's gunshot will be lost. Is this death? This brainstate cannot copy itself forward in its entirety...but it only differs from the needlecasted state by a few seconds, so not much is lost. It's probably some fraction of death, at least.

You might also order your brain to halt all functions, then needlecast a backup to a new sleeve. This is objectively not death. No information in your brainstate has been lost. You have effectively teleported your consciousness without any loss.

If you made your backup 48 hours ago like Bancroft, you are going to lose everything you did in those 48 hours when your stack gets slagged. This is Real Death for that fork, but he may take comfort in knowing he's barely diverged from his backup...unless he did anything really life-altering in those hours. :tinfoil:

Zaphod42 posted:

Look at it this way battuta, if I scan you to carbon and your sleeve is "empty" and you're not spun up, are you currently alive?

A live version of you could be created by spinning you up, but at the moment you are not. So you don't exist, you're dead.

I am alive when my brain state can propagate itself forward without major loss. I am dead when it cannot. Neither criteria is satisfied here. If I'm started up again, my subjective life will continue exactly where it left off with no break. If the storage medium is destroyed, I die.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Planets have high entropy compared to space, are planets alive?

Information density alone isn't sufficient.

My hard drive has very high information density and order. It is NOT alive.

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Saying that organization of brain neurons == shannon entropy is basically incorrect. There is information there but there is more to it than that, the structure and self maintainability are key. Density alone does not life make.

esperterra
Mar 24, 2010

SHINee's back




I keep clicking on new posts hoping it's people actually talking about the show, but y'all still bitching about what is death and immortality smdh

Zaphod42
Sep 13, 2012

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

General Battuta posted:

If you made your backup 48 hours ago like Bancroft, you are going to lose everything you did in those 48 hours when your stack gets slagged. This is Real Death for that fork, but he may take comfort in knowing he's barely diverged from his backup...unless he did anything really life-altering in those hours. :tinfoil:


I am alive when my brain state can propagate itself forward without major loss. I am dead when it cannot. Neither criteria is satisfied here. If I'm started up again, my subjective life will continue exactly where it left off with no break. If the storage medium is destroyed, I die.

We're so close :)

The fork is real dead and has to take solace, aka, death still happens. See?

Also key is that as carbon you cannot spin yourself back to life. You're dead. Someone else has to bring you back. You have no processes or agency. There is no movement or change of state whatsoever.

Bust Rodd
Oct 21, 2008

by VideoGames
I’ve never heard of the books and really enjoyed his show quite a bit.

Lizzie didn’t quite make sense to me and I don’t understand what they were going for with her weird disaffected avenging angel thing, but her parents were great.

Poe was the best character and the only meaningful death in the show.

I thought Rei was a great villain and I appreciate how divorced from humanity she became. Tak isn’t the best main character ever but I think the small flourishes in the script did wonders for him.

The Quell stuff, exactly like the Star Wars rebellion, makes no goddam sense. Why is a tribe of dubstep hippies in the middle of the woods a threat to an intergalactic police state? What impact could such a small team have? The twin plot devices of “100-year limit” and “all Stack codes go through this arbitrary relay station” were so transparently dumb I kept waiting for someone to bring it up.

The Double-Sleeving ending was dumb and didn’t add anything that I could see.

Aside from those warts I loved it and think it’s plenty punk enough for me. Ortega is the hottest woman I have ever seen naked on TV, and it’s not particularly close.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Zaphod42 posted:

Planets have high entropy compared to space, are planets alive?

Information density alone isn't sufficient.

My hard drive has very high information density and order. It is NOT alive.

Information density alone is sufficient — there's no need to look for a binary threshold. Everything is ultimately made of matter. 'Alive' versus 'not alive' is a human concept; to the universe there are just swarms of particles interacting according to laws. Life is the ability to pump energy to preserve and replicate a particular pattern of information. If you wanted to claim a planet was alive, you probably could, but it would be very hard to argue it's anywhere near as alive as a person.

Zaphod42 posted:

We're so close :)

The fork is real dead and has to take solace, aka, death still happens. See?

You agreed with this yesterday. Why has it taken you so long to get back here today?

You opened this conversation today by saying we didn't understand consciousness and that the identity-safety of a brain upload was a matter of opinion. Are you still holding to those points?

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

This was a good show. This thread is debating semantics.

404notfound
Mar 5, 2006

stop staring at me

Poe was great, but I think I liked the abuela actor just as much. And just when I thought we were done with him, he came back again as Dimi the Twin. He's right up there with Victor from Dollhouse (coincidentally, another show about personalities being slotted into bodies that featured Dichen Lachman playing a main character)

esperterra
Mar 24, 2010

SHINee's back




Dietrich posted:

This was a good show. This thread is debating semantics.

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Bust Rodd
Oct 21, 2008

by VideoGames
Dollhouse was when I fully ejected myself from the Joss Whedon bandwagon. I was in high school fo Buffy/Angel/Firefly and enjoyed them, but a few years more of life experience and Dollhouse was so transparently written and directed with one hand that I had to tap out.

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