The Mass Effect 3/BioWare Thread

So was he...

 

There were various tweets, many contradicting others, you cannot trust a word they said. There's no reason for which EDI and Geths shouldn't die in the destroy ending, as much as I like Geths.

 

Theres no reason why they should either, there is no reason why anything that we are shown should happen, Fuck, if you can make some sense of this you are welcome to try. The ending defies any logic, unless its indoctrination, with which most stuff can be handwaved away in a way that actually kinda makes sense and not in a forced way.
Which is the very reason i chose to believe it and move on, not like im coming back to the franchise or like im ever going to play any other biowhore game again, not with the colossal waste of time DA2 and ME3 ended up being.

 

Joking aside, I agree with you, Spectacle. When a robot's intelligence and emotions become so much like a human being that you can't tell the difference, is it not alive then? EDI for example is basically a human who knows she's a robot.

We humans really aren't that special in the long run, we're a lump of cells connected to sensory organs that perceive the world around us. We've already built machines that, while only capable of performing in a few areas, are much more effective than us in those areas. I have no doubt that in the distant future (the key word being distant), we will not only be able to build robots with the same intelligence and emotions as humans, we will probably be able to construct human life and design it however we want as well.

Also,

DalekFlay, mah boi, my main man - I never got the feeling the Geth and EDI were supposed to represent homosexuals. The vampires in True Blood, sure, but the AI's in Mass Effect? The Geth are presented as mindless and faceless killing machines in the first game, while the sequels introduce the idea that the Quarians started the whole war because they were afraid the Geth had become too alive, and the Geth retaliated to survive.
If anything, I'd say the Geth-Quarian conflict is closer to the Israel-Palestine conflict than persecution of homosexuals, as in "Who's right?", "Which side do I support?" and "How do I solve this peacefully?".

And the fear of AI in general is the good old fear of technology (see: Skynet), sometimes well placed as when a rogue Virtual Intelligence took over the Moon in ME1, sometimes not as in the case of EDI who rebelled against her crazy developer the Illusive Man and remained loyal to Shepard, flooding TIM's servers with porn in the progress.

 

Actually you could raise that point in ME1. So that subplot was one of the few bright things in that game also. The only difference between ME1 and ME2 in that regard is that in the first game every geth you meet don't make a good impression about their race.

 

I didn't say Geth = gays, I am speaking in generalities. Sci-fi often tends to insert AI and robots into minority social justice shaped holes.

 

It's probably because it's the closest analog that we can really get to the concept of the rights of sentient beings we have created. It's a simple way to get the audience to sympathize with it because it parallels real life rights movements that have occured throughout history.

 

EVERYONE IS SPECIAL!!11

 

Nobody knows how human sentience work... It might be very likely that it is only an illusion - us being just very sophisticated "robots". From the perspective of the mind (function of the mind- your experience) is impossible to determine anything about brain structure and how it works. That said, future AI might actually also experience something really unique despite being just a pile of circuits... .

I don't have problems with sentient AI, but it really turns me off when it's too much human-like. In this regard, I quite like reapers and their extreme philosophy in case of morals.

 

What a sad way to waste such a great opportunity for an excellent "you're actually amnesiac Shepard" plot twist.

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Dis.
What's the difference between mimicking sentience using organic and inorganic circutry?
For what any single person can tell they are the only one who's certainly sentient, anything else is mere conjecture based on behavioral cues.

This too.
I don't really see it as technically impossible, but since the AIs are generally built for purpose why would anyone make them human-like?

 

There's also those experiments showing that people 'answer' simple questions (by pressing the right button) marginally before they consciously make the choice. I.e. at least when it comes to simple questions (it's too hard to replicate the tests with questions that have open or complex answers) we seem to work like machines, with our consciousness of our choice only arriving after we've actually acted on it.

Learning about those tests is still probably the single most offensive thing to my intrinsic experience and philosphy of the world - having your beliefs challenged and tested around the edges is good fun, but man it fucking sucks when something pops up and shows your most central goddamn assumptions don't even approximate the truth.

 

So that when your country suffers from disproportionate population aging you can have robots take care of your elderly instead of letting filthy foreigners into your country to take care of them and be paid with government money. That's why Japan is so eagerly exploring robotics: better to build your own servants who listen to you than to import them and have them not be exactly what you want them to be.

 

Except if you build them human like, they will want to be paid too. Or might get unhappy. And rebelious.

You don't build an artificial human unless you want just another, very expensive type of human for some reason.
And I find any legitimate reason hard to come up with.

 

"Human like", doesn't mean identical to humans. Do it "right" and you can have a machine with the human traits you need and none of those you don't want. Intelligent creatures tailor-made to serve does raise some interesting ethical questions, though. As Chairman Yang argues:

 

The same reason Apple makes a phone that talks to you.o

Humans like other humans and constantly personify non-humans. So it makes sense that AIs would be designed to act like humans at least superficially.

Also, AIs are almost always used for a God metaphor and then you have the whole created in His image aspect.

 

Escape from Population Citadel is about a bro named Shepard forced into homelessness and he knows why.
He must travel often which is in conflict with his agoraphobia . He must learn the proper way to embrace total abandonment so he may solve biological frailty and synthetic threat.
Shepard the bro cautiously invents his own secret ship to safely reintegrate himself into the very Council most hope squash his kind.
Later insights gained from hallucinations and imagination will be his weapon against the instinctive need of shelter.
If Escape from Population Citadel is successfully funded you can play as Shepard through Earth, through Vermire, and large number other planets.

 

That might be just a habit. We are able to learn certain patterns with such a perfection, that we don't have to actually pay any/much attention to those actions. That is of course double-edged weapon. But this doesn't contradict high cognitive functions, free will, etc. But if we find out that what happens with EVERY information between input/output is just mechanical (even though very complex with huge amount of variables), we will be sure that humans are "nothing more" than remarkably complex machines... But come to think of it, it probably won't be much of a deal; average Joe won't give a fuck and religious people will come up with some excuses...

Since we are in ME thread, Japs are doing something that could be compare to VI at best... Speaking even hypothetically about difference between something like VI and AI would require really nerdy and geeky dirty talk. And that, for me, doesn't fit this thread or even this site...

Those themes/topics are something really close to my heart and it pisses me off that basically only story-based RPG that deal with them (at tolerable level at least) is Mass Effect series. I would kill for some hardcore sci-fi without any juvenille shit. At least some part of ME are interesting in this regard...

 

The mechanical thing isn't really a problem - in fact, addressing the fact of humans being mechanical objects while experiencing the world as conscious beings (i.e. consciousness mattering to us, but not having any place in the mechanical universe) was the centrepiece of Kant's major works. It's a problem that predates neurology by centuries - modern neurology and psychiatry just fills in the 'how' of it, but for Kant and similarly inclined philosophers the problem was apparent as soon as Newtonian physics emerged. I.e. if the universe is constructed out of causal chains, then regardless of how the neurology and psychiatry of it play out, we're part of those same causal chains both in terms of external forces and - more importantly - in terms of our brain function.

But Kant pretty much nails that one - he's hardly the only view on the subject, but this is basically what made him the 'big man' in enlightenment-era European philosophy. Part of being a rational agent ('rational' here doesn't mean perfectly logical - just someone that gives and interprets reasons for acting) is that you can step back and realise that you're just a mechanical object, subject to the same laws that govern everything else around you ('pure reason'), but you're simultaneously compelled to construct a self and a narrative and view your actions as choices - you know that it's not how things actually work, but it isn't something you can switch off, it's a basic feature of how you experience the world ('practical reason'). Because you can't help but transcend your knowledge of the material world and attribute a 'self' to yourself, there's a logic to the idea that you've got to give the same status to others who share your capacities (respect for persons - 'respect' here doesn't mean being nice, though that might follow from it, it just means allowing them the same attribution of reason, choice and consciousness that you give to yourself, even though both physics and psychology give causal explanations for their and your actions).

Switching from Newtonian to modern physics doesn't really alter the situation - inserting the possibility of randomness into our view of the universe does nothing to assist actual free will. It might even make it worse - when the world works in causal chains, you can at least attribute blame for events, but if our actions are random then free will is impossible.

Consciousness and free will actually REQUIRE causation - they require that WE do the causing. The problem is that there's nothing in the material world that sets out what this 'we' is, that's somehow separate from the rest of the universe's causal chains (not to mention our genes, psychology, neurology etc).

But I'm fine with all of that - I'm quite happy to go along with Kant and say that morality, free will, consciousness etc have no basis in the material world and instead are just products of the way we experience things. Because as he argues pretty convincingly, the fact that we experience the world as rational beings is sufficiently basic to our existence that it can act as the foundation for everything else about free will, morality and consciousness.

Basic humanism, in other words.

Where the neurology experiments become troubling for humanists like myself, is that they imply that our 'practical viewpoint' has no basis in the material world of physics (which is fine), but that the material world of physics directly contradicts it - which is not so fine. Kant's point was that it doesn't matter that the 'self' has no material existence, because it's still a basic feature of our experience. But here, material existence isn't just staying silent on self and consciousness - it's contradicting it in a way where it looks like you can no longer separate your thinking into pure v practical reasoning, because the 'pure' perspective is now directly ruling the practical one out (instead of just having no place for it).

 

Maybe you philosofags could recommend a few good introductory books on the matter of free will; for the less educated, such as myself?

 

A few sips of Ayahuasca is all you need...

 

Just a fun fact, that rogue Moon VI was EDI.

You can continue with philosophy now.

 

You were fine with Kant's conclusions? I always thought of him as someone who pretty much nailed how things are in case of dispute between rationalists and empirists, but I certainly haven't found his Critique satisfactory. Sure, we humans experience things in a certain way (through peculiar forms of time, space, categories), thus never experiencing world as it "really is". For "us", this is how things are (and I certainly undrestand why was he skeptic about real space, time or laws of the universe as being possibly experienced by us). This is enough for you? Are you really comfortable with very probable interpretation of Kant's conclusion? That our experience of the outside world is simply delusive... I mean, those "illusions" are remarkable, but I find little comfort in idea that what I feel and call Love is in fact just a camuflaged instinct for example.

 

Of course. I'm just saying I'm tired of it.

 

Most intelligent life is also horny.

The robots won't pass off as living things until they want to have sex with other things. Wake me up when A.I is making porn.