Roleplaying Higher (posthuman?) Beings

[M. J. Young]

I think we may be so far from the original topic that Dev isn't getting anything else of use from this; Dev, do you want to end the thread, or refocus us, or is this useful?

Regarding Heisenberg, a physicist recently told me that it might be possible to get around the limitation using a technique called quantum non-locality. In essence, there's a way for a particle to exist in two places at once, and if we could induce that, we could measure where it is in one place and what its energy level is in the other, and so know both. He suggested that this might be a first step toward real teleporters.

That means maybe some more intelligent being knows how to do that already.

Dauntless has brought an interesting notion to my mind. It may be that superior intelligence is less about what one can understand when it is explained and more about what one can understand without explanation. Einstein was a genius who devised a very complex theory of reality, but now that it's been devised many physicists understand most of it. Newton was a genius who determined an entire system of the laws of gravity and motion that held for a couple hundred years, but we teach it to school children now, and they get it.

The thing about Sherlock Holmes was always that once he explained what it was he saw and what he concluded from it, it seemed so simple, but it was his genius to see it and draw the conclusions, which even Watson never mastered.

So it might not be whether we could understand the thinking of such a more intelligent being, but whether we could think of it ourselves.

--M. J. Young

[simon_hibbs]

Many posts here, too many to respond to individualy but  think this one is generaly representative.

1) A transcendant being is one that is spiritually or intellectually advanced beyond the scope of humans that there is no longer a common frame of reference for exchange of ideas.

This is exactly the wooly thinking I'm talking about. If you define transcendence as being incomprehensible, then there's no debate. However is such a definition realy useful? Does it actualy describe an achievable or viable state of conciousness? Other than incomprehensiblility what are it's other characteristics and how do they make it incomprehensible? Wat limitatons in ourselves prevent comprehension? You're completely ducking the issues.

I suspect from your summary of my arguments that you're not reading them very carefully.

Actually no, we haven't developed anything close to a good psychology of animals. Sure we can map behaviours but that not the same thing. The problem of course is that we can't exchange ideas.

You don't need to be able to exchange ideas in order to be able to model behaviour. Communication can be usefull in building a model, but isn't necessery.

I agree with you that we amazingly flexible beings with regards to our thinking... at times. The thing to remember is that there is a good chance that most of our understanding of physics, chemistry, etc, is incorrect.

It's as correct as we need it to be - it works and maked valid predictions about the worlds around us. Which is what it's for, science isn't like religion. Even Newton and Einstein knew that their theories would be extended or superceded so so in that sence we already know it's 'incorrect' (not perfect) in the absolute sense you seem to mean. That's by the by...


Simon Hibbs

[DevP]

I've sorta dropped of, but please do continue this thread!

I let this thread sit on "to read!" because I'm trying really, really hard to graduate. Ugh.

I'll chime in soon, or if it's too late, I'll start a new thread again. But I'm definitely like this. (And there are, certainly, cool Play + Design considerations to come from this...)

[Callan S.]

Just a side note then: Why is it believed that 'higher beings' could avoid gross physical reactions or such. For instance, if they touch a hot surface they reflex back, or if you throw a punch at them when they have a impenitrable glass barrier so they can't get hit and know it, they still flinch. In other words, still wrapped in the reflexes of an animal? It's just as likely a higher being couldn't stand chinese water torture, its the creature their tied too.

Sure, such a race could edit such things genetically (big job) so they don't occur. But then again, the philosophy/politics of such would be generated by themselves before the change. It still has the weaknesses of the past creature embedded in the new, because it relied on the past to create the new.

Is there such a thing as higher intelligence, or merely specialisation in thinking? Doing what you've already done, but more so?

[M. J. Young]

When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, a friend of mine and I practiced falling on our faces on a bed without raising our arms to catch ourselves. We also practiced not blinking when something is coming out our faces.

I've worn glasses with plastic lenses since I was in fourth grade, and I have been poked in the eye by twigs and such that get around the lenses, because I have to a degree been trained by the glasses to expect such things to be blocked. I'm not saying I never blink, but I don't blink as often as most people in such situations, and I can to a significant degree supress the reflex.

I'm not arguing that creatures of higher whatever will of necessity have supressed the reflex; but I think it's not unreasonable to suggest that such creatures are less dependent upon reflex.

To a large degree, reflexes in creatures are physical responses which our body does automatically because we couldn't think to do them ourselves quickly enough. Your leg shifts when the tendon in your knee is struck because this reduces the impact to your knee; if you had to think to move your leg, you couldn't do it quickly enough to matter. But if you could think faster, you would not necessarily need the reflex.

It seems to me relevant here that the brontosaurus and similar large dinosaurs are believed to have had a secondary brain in their hips. The belief is that the creature was so large it could not have kept its balance by mental commands from the brain--nerve impulses could not have reached the brain informing it of the rear end tipping and had a correction fed back to the legs and tail before the creature fell over. Thus the second brain kept the creature balanced by issuing instructions to the hindquarters to maintain stability. Our reflexes are similar to that in some ways--actions that our nervous system imposes on us without reaching our conscious mind.

Would a higher being--

[*]Have no such reflexes, but be able to think fast enough to do consciously what lower creatures such as ourselves do unconsciously?[*]Have more reflexes, enabling them to do without thought many of the things which for us require thought?[*]Have programmable reflexes, such that by conscious thought the being could determine what he will do unconsciously or automatically in any defined situation?[/list:u]I think all of those are possibilities, and might be worth exploring.

--M. J. Young

[Ben O'Neal]

I think that the first possibility you listed is implausible if this higher being came from earth. The reason is that on earth, higher intelligences have more instincts and more reflexes than lower creatures. The more we progress the more things being automatic. It's kinda like programming languages. No-one codes in machine anymore, but more and more languages are being made which are just another abstraction layer on top of other languages. So a higher being from earth would be doing things that we require conscious effort to do completely automatically. Like calculus. They wouldn't have to consciously think about that, it would be like consciously thinking of what words to use and how they fit together for us.

Programmable reflexes are certainly something which we already do. Think about driving a car. If you are about to crash, you most likely step on the brake and maybe turn the wheel. But that was a programmed response which you no longer need to think about. I think higher beings would be no different here, only much faster and possibly more accurate in their responses. For example, maybe instead of slamming on the brakes and turning the wheel drastically, their reflexes are more fine-tuned and they only apply the brakes enough to slow the car without skidding and turn the wheel enough to get out of the way without spinning.

But having no reflexes? I think that would be a significant step backwards for any creature from earth. It would be like programming in machine just because you can. Perhaps the ability to override their plethora of reflexes, but not the absence of any reflexes.

-Ben

[Callan S.]

Reflexes are micromanagement. Its a delegation of power thats part of the body your in. It doesn't matter if your mind can handle info quick enough to handle all reflexes, if you don't have an overide to those reflexes you don't get a say. And 'work arounds' aren't the same as getting control of these reflexes directly.

An analogy is that it doesn't matter how powerful a computer gets if it has a simple on/off switch. Being powerful doesn't overcome that it can be switched off as simply as a basic comp. An upgrade in information handling doesn't mean basic hardware configurations/limmitations are bypassed.

So a higher processor is still going to be constrained by the hardware it exists in, miraculous trancendance doesn't get you past that. Best you can do is use 'work around' thoughts and training, and it seems rediculous that once you gain more processing power, you sink it into fighting your own bodies micromanagement

Which makes predicting the behaviour of a high processor much easier and less 'oh, no one knows so any portrayal is beyond critique'

(And on the flip side, if you did have a modified body where you can use an override on reflexes, why do that and waste all that run time on stuff that was delegated before? It seems a bit of male fantasy of perfect self control for no practical reason except to show off how in control one is).

[contracycle]

Just a side note then: Why is it believed that 'higher beings' could avoid gross physical reactions or such. For instance, if they touch a hot surface they reflex back...

As MJ remarks, a surprising quantity of this stuff is manipulable by individual training and experience.  Under certain circumstances you may need to - and people have - over-ride the hot surface reflex in pursuit of a larger  goal.

It still has the weaknesses of the past creature embedded in the new, because it relied on the past to create the new.

Depends on how you go from one to another.  If we are talking a high-tech being, possibly the physical body could have been designed with certain reflexes and without others.

[DevP]

And I return to post. Huzzah.

I don't think we can really play anything too remote from our own experience; we lose the capacity to identify with the
character IMO.

I think this is largely true. Like Ravien said, if it was something truly 100% unknowlably alien, we'd just "humanize" it in roleplay, which would hardly be the point. Moreover, I think playing life on the edge between humanity or trascendence (either going up or down) is where the fun part is, either as Exploration or Premise. (Premise particularly, the thematic point would probably be the challenge the human/posthuman line again and again.)

A side note about "humanizing" the alien; I could see parallel between this tendency and that with Demons (which is why I could see Sorcerer as a good engine for posthuman roleplay). When you're dealing with Demons, you might cast malevolence/wickedness/innocense, but the truth is that they are Something Else, and that you are dangerously deceiving yourself with this fiction of humanization.

One fun way to play this is to start with a basically human chaacter, and then add, one by one, capabilities that touch on the core issues of self and identity until you're playing a character who isn't very human at all.

I think Neel's suggestion here is really awesome, and hits on how I think one should tie the posthuman questions to actual play. I don' think I mentioned this, but Ted Chiang's story "Understand" discusses someone approaching near-singularity levels, and although Chiang takes some artistic liberties, the experience he describes is novel, of the ascended human being able to almost "look down" on his normal human impulses and edit them, as Neel suggests. The OA-specific vocabulary makes a difference between "transcend" and "ascend", and clearly we're talking about the latter case:

ascend - the act of ascension, from a lower to a higher toposophic, while still retaining one's earlier characteristics - e.g. man is an ascended animal - e has all the animal instincts but e also possesses ratiocintation.
transcend - to become vastly superhuman or superbaseline and incomprehensible to unaugmented (or even lower hyperturing) beings. To breach a singularity barrier

The "singularity barrier/levels" themselves may be of interest.

SI:1 - the classic "First Singularity" or basic transapient state. At this level intelligence, cognative and problem-solving abilities and information processing work thousands of times faster than in the case of standard sapients. An entity of this nature is usually able to coordinate a nanocyborg or a living metal body, as well as solve problems of physics, mathematics, economics, programming, etc that no nearbaseline could solve
SI:2 - the second singularity, which stands in the same relation to SI:1 and SI:1 does to ordinary sapient cognition. Also enables existence as a basic pico-tech cyborg.
SI:3 - confers an even higher grade of toposophical intelligence; pretty much incomprehensible and indescribable to anything below this level. For this reason this is called the Beyond (although the term is also used by baselines and other SI:<1 sophonts to refer to any SI: level of 1 or higher). Enables existence as a basic Femtotech and advanced Picotech. Even a basic seraiph is generally of this grade or higher.

(To some extent, the OA worldview does assume that there are singularity levels that are unknowable to lesser beings; that shouldn't impact the more general argument about if that's a reliable worldview.)

So, having read muchly, I'm moving toward two directions in playing higher beings. Firstly, the truly transcendent more-wierd-than-you-can't-imagine will be background. The roleplay may explore the ways that sentients deal with wierd, powerful "AI-gods" shambling about their universe, but they are the vague, easily-archetyped/humanized but frustratingly unknowable beings that remind you that it's a posthuman universe. To some extent I'd settle for a purely phenomenalogical view of truly transcendent beings; I'm not going to try to pierce the "what are they REALLY thinking?" stuff, except for noting that Transcendent's needs do not align with Human needs. (A phrase copped from HeroQuest. I believe.)

Secondly, if you want to bring the question of humanity/posthumanity to the forefront, then I'd say keeping in mind the ascendence half, and trying out Neel gradual shifting into posthumanity / self-editing. I feel that, as a player, I could get a grip on how to play the human dealing with new power, alienation, a loosen of the grip on one's own "self", ontological shock, and so on, especially if I got to begin with at least the archetype of a human character.

[simon_hibbs]

When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, a friend of mine and I practiced falling on our faces on a bed without raising our arms to catch ourselves. We also practiced not blinking when something is coming out our faces.

As the father of an 8 month old baby, this is rather amusing. I can confirm that human beings are born with almost no sense of personal preservation, or non-tactile reflexes for the same, whatsoever. She has absolutely no concept of danger, so we have to watch her like hawks especialy as she's just learning how to crawl. Watching her encounter 'hot' and 'cold' for the first time was very amusing.

Simon Hibbs

[Ben O'Neal]

Actually Simon, babies are born with instincts and reflexes, but they aren't activated until they would be useful in the childs life (human development is absolutely fascinating). For example, babies have absolutely no fear of heights until they are able to walk (sometimes crawl), and then suddenly, without prior exposure to heights, they become fearful of them. Things like stairs are actually pretty dangerous because from a baby's perspective, the next step isn't that far down, so babies aren't afraid of them, because they don't take in the overall height of all the stairs.

I'd be willing to bet that as soon as your kid starts to walk, that "catching yourself" reflex will just appear out of nowhere the first time the baby falls forward (which is rare cos they are usually bum-heavy).

But in short, my point is that your baby has all the right reflexes ready to go, but they won't become active until they are needed ("needed" as defined in evolutionary terms).

-Ben

P.S., the reason your baby has "no sense of personal presevation" is because it still doesn't have a sense of self. As hard as it is to comprehend, your baby is it's mum and in the baby's mind it's mum is the baby. I can't wrap my mind around not having a sense of self but there it is.

[simon_hibbs]

Actually Simon, babies are born with instincts and reflexes, but they aren't activated until they would be useful in the childs life (human development is absolutely fascinating). For example, babies have absolutely no fear of heights until they are able to walk (sometimes crawl), and then suddenly, without prior exposure to heights, they become fearful of them.

I'm watching the process of learning to stand and eventualy walk right now. She can climb up things and lean on them to stand, but can only shuffle her feet a little without help. It seems to me she's gradualy learning about fallig and balance as she learns to climb, stand and walk. She's not 'suddenly' becoming afraid of falling. Rather the process of learning to stand involves a lot of falling over and she's learning that this is not a good thing by direct experience.

P.S., the reason your baby has "no sense of personal presevation" is because it still doesn't have a sense of self. As hard as it is to comprehend, your baby is it's mum and in the baby's mind it's mum is the baby. I can't wrap my mind around not having a sense of self but there it is.

Again I beg to differ. She's got a very well developed sense of self, the distinction between herself and others, and spacial relationships. I know this from watching her learn from the large mirror in our living room. She's been able to recogniser her own reflection, and photographs of herself for several months now. When I photograph her with my digital camera she grabs for it to look at the LCD display, but isn't realy bothered when I photograph other people. Since she was 5 months old she's been able to see a reflection of her mother in the mirror, and then immediately turn in the right direction to look at mum behind her without sound cues. Since 6.5 months we've been playing ball-throwing games passing the ball back and forth between us (though frankly the direction she sent the ball in was pretty random untill about 7 months) showing that she understands the concept of 'you' and 'me' as being distinct.

I suppose it depends on how young you're talking about. Up to 3 or 4 months she was much less 'interactive'. She's always loved mirrors though. Also I'm apparently 'mama' along with my wife, but I'm working on it!


Simon Hibbs