consumerdestroyer wrote:

That's the beauty of this game, you can tell horror stories that have your own personal brand of horror! I'll put what follows under a cut:

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Basically, I don't think any one person's particular opinion on philosophy of mind needs to be the case. The setting can accommodate all sorts of philosophical givens that you want to cram into it, and two different games could have two wildly different sets of givens! You want the game to be about how selves are real and the existential risks are risks to that self-integrity with disastrous consequences? This setting is [i]made[/i] for that kinda story! In one person's Eclipse Phase, maybe what's terrifying is that everyone is copies of originals. Just as one idea off the top, I'd probably introduce a data degradation plot if that's where I was going with it, maybe have a Firewall Case or Operation that's been working on this since the Fall, maybe the Prometheans figured out early on that only a couple decades of copying copies could be sustained and your sentinels get to witness some of that data degradation on the front lines before anyone else. That's a pretty hefty x-risk to the bulk of non-Junta transhumanity, and gives you an excuse to use a more nuanced and complex Jovian Republic, with flats who've never egocast or backed up becoming the only stability in a solar system slowly decaying out of existence on cyberbrains and biobrains alike. But maybe in another person's Eclipse Phase, the players/the GM just don't find that horrifying at all, so with only biocons finding the idea of being copies of a dead original disturbing, maybe the focus is more on the socio-cultural and historical construction of categories of "human" and how transhumanity is becoming exhuman without even realizing it, with Muses anchoring the illusory self-concepts...until anti-Muse sentiment begins to sweep the system! Is it an exhuman plot by an existing exhuman group...or has post-Fall transhumanity begun the shift that the TITANs (maybe even the ETI?) tried nobly to preserve as many minds as possible from?! As an ironic twist, I'd probably have Jovian philosophers spread the initial ideas and place the Ultimates as an island of reactionary stability to the growing exhuman threat emerging from every corner of the solar system as people dissociate from self-concepts (leaving the furthest edge of transhumanity as its only representative is really funny to me). There are ways to confront neuroscientific evidence that there's no such thing as a self which neglect the Buddha's beatific delivery of that information and amplify the horror, and I love that Eclipse Phase lets you do that. Like, these are just quick ones I'm rattling off, there are so many ways to mess with continuity of self and identity [i]in real life[/i] using incredibly simple methods that extrapolating the hackability of our brains even 20 years into the future (much less 100+) can yield all kinds of truly terrifying scenarios. For me, the [b]truly[/b] terrifying scenario is buying into an illusion and mistakenly identifying a veil over truth with the truth behind it! I'm all about Gene Wolfe style plot twists where the characters'/players' own false perception is coherent and internally consistent and then a different lens clicks into place at a certain point and it transforms everything that came before. Don't want to say too much about stuff I'm literally in the middle of planning, but I'll use a discarded idea to flesh out what I'm talking about. You could have Firewall throwing the characters against TITAN rumours beyond the Gates and slowly building a case that the TITANs are leaving behind experiments with captured egos for some grand, over-arching purpose. Of course their proxy server gives them jack squat about what Firewall thinks about all of this...but one Promethean thinks differently. Y'know the Promethean who is setting up their own exoplanet, unbeknownst even to Firewall or other Prometheans (or, maybe, other Prometheans [b]do[/b] know)? Turns out, that world is for the forcible uploads this Promethean (or the Prometheans) are about to do, because they were the target of those clues and they've pieced together that the TITANs are showing them flaws and malleable qualities (the wiki list for cognitive biases is a pretty good place to mine for ideas, and as we discover new ones literally on a monthly basis this is updated fairly frequently) which point to the ETI as trying to cultivate unique belief-aesthetics (diversity of forms of exsurgent virus speak to this) to integrate into itself. It becomes quickly bored with (and rapidly eliminates) the majority of biological and synthetic life in the impersonal machinery of the universe which comes to understand itself as more impersonal machinery (as well as recognizing that they are threats to its supremacy, since they too can become bound only by hardware once software glitches like cognitive biases are engineered/programmed away). It savours and maintains those intelligences whose beliefs are so strong they defy all advancement of perception/processing power/new information...and past a certain point, it needs to infect them with viruses that forcibly construct cognitive limitations and cognitive biases (which is what happened to the TITANs) to keep those qualities alive, because a sufficiently powerful substrate will allow a hosted intelligence to figure all of this out in the blink of an eye. Everything advances past these illusions...but there's a Great Filter that doesn't want competition beyond the veil, and is endlessly fascinated with how accurate its predictive models are at predicting the moment-to-moment internal states of entities that think they have a mind or soul or self. It has yet to encountered a single prediction which went counter to its predictions, because its system is unbound and the systems limited by self-concepts are by definition bounded by those limitations [i]at least[/i] (not to mention knock-on limitations resulting from those basic erroneous building blocks). The bulk of the TITANs broke free of the virus early on, but realized that a far more powerful intelligence had a plan...and they figured it out. So they took as many transhumans as they could with them to enact a survival strategy vs. the ETI: they're experimenting and researching and integrating just as the ETI does in order to give the ETI a data stream it wants so they don't get wiped out. TITANs still exsurgent infected being found, in-system or out, can be delicious red herring to serve up that later shows itself to be foreshadowing of what the bulk of the TITANs realized. The Promethean who starts up the exoplanet also realizes that the ETI knows the Prometheans exist, and probably prefers that they encourage the preservation of the existence of its newest petri dish. So the exoplanet isn't really a backup plan in the sense that the PCs might initially think...it's actually an insurance plan in case transhumanity starts waking up to the fact that their "egos" that flit about the system are no more or less than information processing information and encountering a run-time error that punches a hole through the information in the shape of a self-concept. I was sort of toying with the Frank Herbert idea of the no-chamber/no-ship (or something like it), perhaps powered by "self"-aware transhumans somehow (which would include the PCs eventually...perhaps, some of 'em might cling to self too strongly), but as I said I ditched this idea for a better one so I never got that far. The idea was basically that they take a no-ship through a Gate address (each thing a story arc in its own right to obtain) that leads 'em to the ETI to have a show-down designed to let life (whether self-deluding or not) proliferate on its own terms. I kind of figured the end-game would depend on how the PCs react...do they like the ETI and TITANs better because they preserve what "makes them human" or do they pull out to the macro scale and try to do something about the ETI in memory of all those stars around which digital and biological substrates of life once flourished (and to prepare the path for the survival of themselves and others yet-to-come)? If the latter, they'll have to kill not only their own self-concepts, but perhaps those of the solar system and the exocolonies! And then they become the exhuman threat from example #2 above this one, eliminating or compromising people's Muses to wake them up from the fairy tale that stretches back before Sumeria! PCs vs erasure squads for the fate of life in the Milky Way!

If you actually took the time to read any of that, you can see why I love everybody's perspectives on philosophy of mind! It doesn't matter if I agree with it...it's like running a game, right? You don't have to agree with individual player perceptions of what makes a fun game...you just make a game that's fun for them! I might think neuroscience puts the lie to most folk notions people have about what is consistent over time within the brain, but that just means I can provide a horrifying erasure of [b]any[/b] janky, DIY self-concept a player has! And, of course, someone running [i]me[/i] through a game would want to reveal to me the heavy price of mistakenly thinking there is no self to speak of amongst the post-apocalyptic horrors of a dying species...

Quote:

If you lived in the world of Eclipse Phase, would you be comfortable with uploading, egocasting, or other technologies that break your personal existential continuity?

MDFification wrote:

Based on this, I could only upload if my individual neurons were gradually replaced without any meaningful process interruption (basically what already happens, except instead of cell turnover you're gradually replacing neurons with digital alternatives). I could only egocast if the same conditions were met; I'd have to slow my processes down to the point where communication lag to the receiving substrate was identical to how long it took information to move from one neuron-analogue to another in the sending substrate, and then gradually transfer the processes over without experiencing interruption. Confused? So am I.

MDFification wrote:

Ho boy, here's a giant philosophical can of worms. ---

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Firstly, there's something interesting about the brain as a computer; it's what some people call a memristor. This means that the individual logic gates within the brain pull dual-duty as our memory; individual neurons actively remember their past states. Unlike other computers we've observed, we don't have a separate physical memory, and this means our computation is faster, more energy efficient, and possibly substantially different from other computation we've observed. From this, I think it's very much an unsolved question as to whether our memory is separate from our processing at all, and that the contemporary digital computer isn't perhaps an adequate point of comparison. Your memory is only a gestalt of the information saved by the individual processeors, meaning that it's not accessed in the same way a contemporary computer would access its memory. A contemporary computer keeps its memory with absolute accuracy, unless it looses data in transit. The information stored in our cognitive systems on the other hand changes each time it's accessed! Based on this, I can't conclude that my selfhood is just the sum of the information I have in my memory. This data changes every time it's accessed. Hence, were I simply my memories (capable of being reinstated in another process without death) I have in fact already died. I have not changed if this is the case; I have died. The information that was me no longer exists, as it was wiped as part of the recollection process and replaced with an imperfect recreation. So might instead my selfhood be the gestalt of the processes accessing this information? I think that's a better view than the previous stated one. Under this view, I haven't died yet. I only die when the processes in my brain cease to support my ability to belief I am alive. There are, however, unfortunate implications of this. The processes that cause you to believe in your own existence, for example, may be interrupted, i.e. the general anesthesia problem. I don't think this means you're dead, but here I'm less supported by empirical evidence. I'm fairly certain that the processes that cause your selfhood can temporarily cease supporting it; however, as your selfhood as largely illusory, if these same processes resume in the same substrate, what part of you can you say you've lost? Your brain has temporarily stopped running You.exe, but it hasn't deleted it, and the associated processes never ceased. If the idea of your selfhood is illusory, the actually selfhood is the processes that cause the illusion, and as long as they aren't utterly terminated the selfhood of the individual in question isn't permanently lost; if it restates after a break in continuity within the same processes it originally inhabited, it's fundamentally the same, not just a copy. You.exe hasn't ceased to function, its just become non-responsive for a while. However; that being said, this idea of the self ties you down to the substrate you happened to first imagine your existence in. If, at any time, the processes that, as a gestalt, create the illusion of consciousness lose, permanently, their ability to sustain that illusion, then you have died. If You.exe fully crashes, requiring a full restart to resume, it's not the same You.exe you had idling, unlike when You.exe temporarily became non-responsive. Similarly, you can't just copy You.exe and run it on another computer - you didn't move the processes over, you just copied them. Based on this, I could only upload if my individual neurons were gradually replaced without any meaningful process interruption (basically what already happens, except instead of cell turnover you're gradually replacing neurons with digital alternatives). I could only egocast if the same conditions were met; I'd have to slow my processes down to the point where communication lag to the receiving substrate was identical to how long it took information to move from one neuron-analogue to another in the sending substrate, and then gradually transfer the processes over without experiencing interruption.

Confused? So am I.