Cornflakes_91 wrote:how do you relate to something that is not really bound to a single body, a single time, a single way of thinking, being completely different than a human, different than any lifeform?

But that's not what I'm proposing at all. If you upload your mind, you wouldn't necessarily think any differently at all. Why would you be bound to a single way of thinking? It's your consciousness, only hosted on a different substrate. I would be able to psychologically anchor to a hardware unit hosting a digital version of my consciousness and I'm having trouble trying to understand why other people can't, unless they share these kinds of misconceptions about the idea.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:why do they still behave human, they arent anymore.
They are not bound to this mortal shell of flesh, why do they still behave as if they were?

But they don't. People don't behave in games like they do in real-life; they behave a lot more recklessly. They rush into combat in their ships not with fear so much as excitement, because in the game they know if they die then they could just reload or respawn. By advocating for a diegetic means of respawn in Limit Theory, it greatly improves the plausibility of the player character's behaviour, since it makes sense for characters in Limit Theory to behave differently in the world of Limit Theory if death is not permanent in that world.

Consider EVE Online, which accounts for what would class as erratic and reckless behaviour of the characters that players in EVE Online control with its lore, in which the inhabitants of the EVE Online world view capsuleers as amoral, unpredictable demigods - EVE Online handles respawning diegetically, so it makes complete sense that player-controlled characters in EVE Online behave as recklessly as they do, and other (non-immortal) inhabitants of the world regard these people in a plausible manner.

This is less a point about representing AI as organics/inorganics as much as it is about whether they can respawn indefinitely or not, but that's because the former doesn't really matter. If death were permanent, then individuals would act very much like humans do today whether they're organic or inorganic. And if death weren't permanent, people wouldn't act very much like humans do today whether they were organic or inorganic.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:Many questions that would come up and would be so completely different from the questions that usually arise from sci-fi.
and LT isnt a game to explore the consequences of this questions, even less to answer those questions.

Which questions, and why can't it be?

Cornflakes_91 wrote:Questions that can be averted if we leave the crew human (biological, alive), as it always were.

I haven't heard it stated canonically that the crew has to be organic let alone human, except a while back in March. Later on in April, however, Josh writes:

JoshParnell wrote:The exact nature of workers is, in my mind, an open question. I have no desire to get into ethical issues with my game design decisions, but being able to throw around and generally send workers to their deaths when and how you please does beg the question "are they human?" Part of the point of a worker is that, once under your control, it does as you desire. It does not have a high-level thinking process that would allow it to reject your orders in favor of some other course of action. What if we considered the low-LOD lifeforms to all be advanced robots / androids / whatever? Maybe even partial clones? You see, we could get creative here to help explain and further characterize the thinker-worker separation

To be fair, though, Josh is talking about worker NPCs here, and we can imagine that worker NPCs and executive NPCs are different, as others have proposed. Executives could be human and the worker NPCs that function as your crew could be something else entirely. I'll give it more thought.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:It would also produce less questions when we can get out of the ships in LT2.

Personally I'd like if my avatar was a robot that my consciousness is given control over, as McDuff has stated should be possible for worker NPCs here.

Exactly what the player is seems to be soled relatively simply by going back to human/npc parity. The player is an executive program. This program can exist in pure electronic or in electrochemical substrates with equal measure, and is primarily defined by its genetically limited ability to process multiple sources of information, find correlations and patterns from its memories, and execute tasks in an attempt to satisfy various demands placed upon it or semi-arbitrary goals of its own.

An additional thought I had on death was that of distance to clone point affecting the time it takes for reconstruction. Assuming that players are all programs, they can be transmitted at the point of death. If their clone point is in the same system as their death, they will return fairly rapidly, not instantly, but not the equivalent of a year either. If it is a system away, it jumps to say an order of magnitude higher and 2 jumps after that, it is 3 orders of magnitude higher, so if you die very far from your nearest clone point, you will eventually be reconstructed, but it will take ages.

Another Idea I had was that if you destroy a ship, supposing your scanner capable, you could read off the name and distance of the clone point they were sent to, enabling the killer to hunt it down and destroy it, assuming that the target was valuable enough to warrant the effort.

Hyperion wrote: An additional thought I had on death was that of distance to clone point affecting the time it takes for reconstruction. Assuming that players are all programs, they can be transmitted at the point of death. If their clone point is in the same system as their death, they will return fairly rapidly, not instantly, but not the equivalent of a year either. If it is a system away, it jumps to say an order of magnitude higher and 2 jumps after that, it is 3 orders of magnitude higher, so if you die very far from your nearest clone point, you will eventually be reconstructed, but it will take ages.

The problem with this is that it surely won't take 1 year for you to transmit other types of information - I suspect not even Flatfingers wants to give orders to NPCs and have to wait a year to get feedback on their progress.

I think information travels around LT at a finite rate, but faster than what you're proposing here.

ThymineC wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:why do they still behave human, they arent anymore.
They are not bound to this mortal shell of flesh, why do they still behave as if they were?

But they don't. People don't behave in games like they do in real-life; they behave a lot more recklessly. They rush into combat in their ships not with fear so much as excitement, because in the game they know if they die then they could just reload or respawn. By advocating for a diegetic means of respawn in Limit Theory, it greatly improves the plausibility of the player character's behaviour, since it makes sense for characters in Limit Theory to behave differently in the world of Limit Theory if death is not permanent in that world.

Consider EVE Online, which accounts for what would class as erratic and reckless behaviour of the characters that players in EVE Online control with its lore, in which the inhabitants of the EVE Online world view capsuleers as amoral, unpredictable demigods - EVE Online handles respawning diegetically, so it makes complete sense that player-controlled characters in EVE Online behave as recklessly as they do, and other (non-immortal) inhabitants of the world regard these people in a plausible manner.

This is less a point about representing AI as organics/inorganics as much as it is about whether they can respawn indefinitely or not, but that's because the former doesn't really matter. If death were permanent, then individuals would act very much like humans do today whether they're organic or inorganic. And if death weren't permanent, people wouldn't act very much like humans do today whether they were organic or inorganic.

its not that humans become scumbags once they know they have nothing to lose.
its that humans would stop being human after a time being the mind of an spaceship.

as per body-shapes-mind (i sadly did not find any publicy available complete source)

at first you would maybe stay human, but over time you would more and more become "spaceship".
you may remember your old ways of thinking, but would regard them as complete nonsense and grounded in the needs of a mere meatbag, and not the thoughts of an independent mind

Cornflakes wrote:as per body-shapes-mind (i sadly did not find any publicy available complete source)

Got you covered.

Cornflakes wrote:at first you would maybe stay human, but over time you would more and more become "spaceship".
you may remember your old ways of thinking, but would regard them as complete nonsense and grounded in the needs of a mere meatbag, and not the thoughts of an independent mind

My idea is actually that people might still retain a computer simulated version of their bodies in which they control their ship by using "metaphorical" controls in virtual reality. This is similar to Permutation City, where most of my thoughts on the matter draw inspiration from; a lot of people choose to maintain a human semblance after they upload themselves.

That being said, I'm starting to move away from the idea of players and executives being AI.

ThymineC wrote: My idea is actually that people might still retain a computer simulated version of their bodies in which they control their ship by using "metaphorical" controls in virtual reality. This is similar to Permutation City, where most of my thoughts on the matter draw inspiration from; a lot of people choose to maintain a human semblance after they upload themselves.

so more or less like matrix, but without retaining a physical body?
it could work for maintaining human thought processes.
(and i dont see any reason why it woulldnt work)

although it would be a big waste of control capacity to maintain human thought processes in this way.
as one could become much more effective in controlling a ship by becoming the ship

Cornflakes_91 wrote:although it would be a big waste of control capacity to maintain human thought processes in this way.
as one could become much more effective in controlling a ship by becoming the ship

Indeed, but if you're right and it caused people to stop thinking like people (and therefore stop being people), then it would be regarded as a slow and silent form of execution and not many would opt for that. In order to give some incentive for workers to upload their minds and work in space, they're granted access to a simulated reality in which to pass their free time. They could also use such a reality to do their work as well, and if the workers can do this, then mind-uploaded executives may also choose to work from within this simulated reality. But it's becoming a moot point since I don't know if executives will need to be mind-uploaded anymore.

Incidentally, since we're moving back to viewing players and other executives as flesh-and-blood, I would be pretty happy with Hyperion's original reconstruction proposal - it's plausible to imagine that reconstructing a flesh-and-blood individual as a clone could take a year or more.

Edit: Woo! 3000 posts.

we could also put it in a way that has the features of both sides, uploaded and non-uploaded.

everyone is uploaded BUT you are not opting out of humanity by keeping your "mind core" inside an android casing (preferably looking like the person who is loaded into it)
aboard a ship one "disconnects" his android body from direct control and switches into an digital world, like you explained.
removing all meatbag needs but retaining humanity.
you'd still look like you, behave like you, be you.

the player would still have an "human" to identify with, and getting out of the ship is also solved by staying in a mobile frame with all physical features of an human.
except that his physis is not human anymore.


edit:

ThymineC wrote:Edit: Woo! 3000 posts.

congrats

Cornflakes_91 wrote:we could also put it in a way that has the features of both sides, uploaded and non-uploaded.

everyone is uploaded BUT you are not opting out of humanity by keeping your "mind core" inside an android casing (preferably looking like the person who is loaded into it)
aboard a ship one "disconnects" his android body from direct control and switches into an digital world, like you explained.
removing all meatbag needs but retaining humanity.
you'd still look like you, behave like you, be you.

the player would still have an "human" to identify with, and getting out of the ship is also solved by staying in a mobile frame with all physical features of an human.
except that his physis is not human anymore.

Sure, but I mean I don't know if people will complain about not being able to identify with the character if they're a mind-uploaded computer program inside an android body and not strictly flesh-and-blood. If people are okay with being androids then yeah.

ThymineC wrote: Sure, but I mean I don't know if people will complain about not being able to identify with the character if they're a mind-uploaded computer program inside an android body and not strictly flesh-and-blood. If people are okay with being androids then yeah.

they will complain less than being an disembodied sentient computer program without any "humanness" left
as we wont have faces in LT1 i think its important that the player can at least imagine a face being in there, somewhere.
even if its just an android.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

ThymineC wrote: Sure, but I mean I don't know if people will complain about not being able to identify with the character if they're a mind-uploaded computer program inside an android body and not strictly flesh-and-blood. If people are okay with being androids then yeah.

they will complain less than being an disembodied sentient computer program without any "humanness" left
as we wont have faces in LT1 i think its important that the player can at least imagine a face being in there, somewhere.
even if its just an android.

Concerning the earlier idea I mentioned about the individual interacting with metaphorical controls to direct a spaceship from within VR, and you saying it was wasteful - I think it would work if executives "became" the ship when they were actively controlling it but regained a human form within a virtual reality environment during their off-time or breaks. This would give them highly-efficient and highly-responsive control of the vessel when necessary and allow them to retain their humanity; assuming the role of androids and maintaining physical environments for them to live in would be wasteful when a virtual reality world could be shaped to the person's whim and perform the same role.

That being said, I don't know if people would identify well enough with a computer program that could assume human form (with a face) in virtual reality as if it could assume control of an android (with a face) in the real world. This is just one of those cases where we may simply need to concede to what's implausible just because people today aren't comfortable with thinking like those from the future would when all of this technology would exist.

ThymineC wrote: Concerning the earlier idea I mentioned about the individual interacting with metaphorical controls to direct a spaceship from within VR, and you saying it was wasteful - I think it would work if executives "became" the ship when they were actively controlling it but regained a human form within a virtual reality environment during their off-time or breaks. This would give them highly-efficient and highly-responsive control of the vessel when necessary and allow them to retain their humanity; assuming the role of androids and maintaining physical environments for them to live in would be wasteful when a virtual reality world could be shaped to the person's whim and perform the same role.

i'd just leave the Android in a "coffin" as long as they are on the spaceship, using it only when going off the ship.
the rest of the time they'd stay in the VR simulation, not even touching the controls for their android body.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:i'd just leave the Android in a "coffin" as long as they are on the spaceship, using it only when going off the ship.
the rest of the time they'd stay in the VR simulation, not even touching the controls for their android body.

That seems most plausible. Oh bother, I'll need to flip this back again haha. I'll wait to see how happy people are with the idea of being computer programs given that they can still assume human forms within a VR world or assume the role of an android, and only need to "become" the ship as their "job".

I voted save/load, but I like the idea of being given the chance to start as a completely new character in the universe if you die. You'd be able to watch events unfold in what was once your mighty empire, from the perspective of an outsider. Maybe your death would create a power vacuum and your empire would crumble, or maybe someone would replace you and your legacy would continue.

ThymineC wrote:If you upload your mind, you wouldn't necessarily think any differently at all.

Which "you" do you mean?

The original you in the meat-suit?

Or the copy you in some other physical form?

Which one is the "real" you?

I really recommend The Mind's I for more fun with this kind of thing.

ThymineC wrote:Personally I'd like if my avatar was a robot that my consciousness is given control over

You might enjoy playing the classic Infocom text game "Suspended."

In this game you're in suspended animation on a planet where things have started to go very wrong indeed. The only way you can save yourself is to work through the minds of the handful of robots still (more or less) functioning.

Each robot sees the world in a very different way, so it's necessary to understand each of their perspectives to optimize their help.

It was a very clever game design. You can actually play it here if you're willing to have Java turned on in your browser.