It wouldn't help in this particular case; I'm just thinking about some time in the future (one where we are better at armoring soul gems) where a meguca's body gets vaporized, leaving behind only a soul gem. We wouldn't be able to help the second problem, where the meguca herself will have to slowly, painfully restore her own neurological structure from the soul gem backup, but we'd at least be able to heal up a body blank for it to start from, rather than having it subsume a cadaver or something.
I figured it was more that the soul gem was a constantly-updating backup copy of the meguca's body and brain, so it can be restored if it was damaged. I'm not sure an emotionless species would put much stock in immortal souls.
That would be a really bad idea for keeping up the masquerade, as you just noted. It's not like EEGs are that uncommon, and given that megucas are prone to being injured it's highly likely that CAT scans and MRIs/fMRIs/etc are over-represented in that population.
It would be hell for the players too, since it turns all our future, and for that matter current, recruits into potential sleeper agents, and every meguca group we run into a potential Simurgh.
This is, actually, exactly what they do in the far-future world of To The Stars, on which this quest is loosely based. That the sort of crazy sh*t you can get up to when you no longer have to worry about a human-looking masquerade and instead have to worry about technologically superior alien invaders.
I think it's obvious that Incubators don't believe in souls because they know souls exist. It's not faith. Souls are something they can actually extract from humans and encase in gems. That's kind of like rejecting the idea of air because you can't see it. Incubators have technology for directly interacting with souls. It's not a belief as such. Though I suspect their understanding of souls is radically different from human beliefs about souls.
Well number one, megucas are prone to being injured, but very much not prone to going to the hospital about it. Their injuries are 1: unexplainable, 2: often immediately lethal, 3: they have their own healing services, 4: they're much less susceptible to actual mundane injury and sickness. They actually are much less likely to go see a doctor about something which would result in a brain scan. And there are countermeasures for the rare occasions they do.
For one, standard meguca bodies are somewhat superhuman. For two, Incubators benefit from a steady state of meguca deaths, they wouldn't want to make meguca too strong. They're also somewhat limited in the modifications they can make without something analogous (though simultaneously quite different) to organ rejection resulting.
There won't be any really Simurgh shenanigans in this story. I found the whole EVERYTHING is the result of one precog or another aspect of Worm probably the most annoying part of it (I know it's not necessarily a problem with the story itself, but I personally hated it, so won't be going that route).
We have research projects (that we will eventually get around to) that probably use this type of thing to enhance the body.
Well, the Simurgh problems I was referring to in this case had less to do with precog shenanigans and more the idea that if you can arbitrarily program a human brain then you can create perfect Manchurian Candidates: people who act like they have a certain personality, even fully believe that they are that person, and at some arbitrary signal they suddenly become someone completely different. It would mean the end of trusting anyone, even Mami herself, let alone our potential neighbors. It makes me tired even contemplating the possibility.
Well I suppose, but in that case we'd be the ones having to take responsibility for the potential masquerade damage that would result. We could certainly do that, but it's a decision for another time I think.
Now we're getting into the "What is a soul?" question. The thing is, unless you start involving gods, afterlives and other religious iconography, the mundane definition of "soul" is no different from "the exact ingredient list and conformational structure of a brain and body". In other words, "extracting a soul" from someone, once you divorce the idea of any religious connotations, is nothing more or less than creating an exact atom-perfect backup copy of that person and designating the backup as the primary, with the actual physical body being designated as secondary.
See I don't think that's the case in PMMM. I mean we see when girls contract. Kyuubey pulls something out of their bodies. The soul also seems critical to energy production free from entropy constraints, it is something beyond human understanding of our reality. It seems pretty clear that the soul is something more than just a copy of that person. You're hewing too closely to the perceived constraints of our own world I think.
Yeah it would be real annoying. I wouldn't ever take it that far.
They do have countermeasures that make it much more secure than you seem to think. Keep in mind that in PMMM it's canon that without Incubator intervention humans would still be living in caves and have exerted a huge amount of control over human societal development.
Hm. Okay, point conceded. I'm not sure I particularly care for the idea of completely replaceable bodies, brains included, but I can't deny that a universe where they exist is compatible with quest and PMMM canon.
I thought you were a transhumanist, isn't accepting the body as replaceable kind of core to that?
Mami is aware, Kyuubey mentioned it offhandedly a while back in the story. Mami didn't tell anyone else about it though. (I didn't think that Mami here would have any critical failure like she might have in canon, she's much more grounded than in canon and this isn't the witch-bomb after all.)
This if anything seems to support my conclusion that souls are a distinct thing. He's saying humans can't sense the difference.
Incubators aren't infallible, and I'm not portraying them as such. They are very good though, and so it takes something commensurately hard and difficult to predict to throw them off. Rebellion (which didn't happen here, because that plot was short circuited by an event that never really made sense to me in the first place not happening), and the ending of the anime are really big surprises for them, they're the sort of things that no one would rationally predict in advance. Understanding human technology is a lot easier.
Except the Incubators didn't leave and come back. They've been there the whole time. They were there for all the intermediate steps.
I am; that's why this whole "soul" thing rubs me the wrong way actually. If the human body is just a suit that the soul is wearing, then upgrading it is no different fundamentally than changing your wardrobe: largely a vanity project, a waste of time. If souls are what's important then we'd need to be spending our time in Ascension, or Human Instrumentality or whatever, and the whole transhumanist ideology is less of a fundamental re-imagining of what it means to be human and more of a delaying action against Death until we can get around to doing the real work that needs doing.
That 21 grams thing? That is based on a single very shaky study done back in 1907 that has never been properly replicated in over 100 years. At this point we can discard the whole thing as an urban legend, much like the long-debunked myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains, incidentally also popularized back at the turn of the 20th century before brain imaging was invented (incidentally by a stage magician who used it to justify where his magical powers came from), and also enshrined as truth by Hollywood alone, and by nobody in the actual scientific community.
Agreed. It's a horrible situation, one I really, really hope is just some random nuts attacking us, and doesn't have its roots in the huge mistake we made back when we greedily annexed Iwata rather than doing things properly.
Hmm this is fundamentally a different way of thinking about transhumanism than my own thoughts on it. I always thought that transhumanism only makes sense in that it's the mind that defines the person rather than the body. If the body is the entirety of you then doesn't changing it mean that something other than you is surviving under the same name?
I don't know that I agree entirely. Something that's difficult to keep in mind is that the Asgard weren't at a technological dead end in general. They were still advancing even to the very end with more powerful ships over the course of the SG1 series. It seemed like they were at a dead end since the Ancients had died out thousands of years ago and their tech was still more advanced than Asgard, but the Ancients were actually a much older race than even the Asgard. Their tech was more advanced because even compared to the Asgard they'd been developing a long time.
This one generated a lot of confusion and I suppose I wasn't clear enough about it. Sure everyone has googled "Magical Girls" at some point. But part of the way the Incubators manipulated things was towards a proliferation of magical girl anime; it serves two goals: making girls more likely to accept the contract, and making the masquerade much much easier to maintain. When you have 50 million results when you do an internet search for magical girls, how do you possibly sift through them for the ones relevant to you instead of the fictional ones?
This one I ran by one of the players in PM and I guess I've come to accept that it was one of those things obvious to the GM but incredibly opaque to players so I'll just give it to you outright. (I'm real terrible at calibrating stuff that isn't numerical.)
I'm aware of that. But no one ever asked: what's in the opposite direction. Which is a question that I thought should have been asked when you had been poked from that direction.
This is likely a habit that most of your players have carried over from tabletop games -- if the GM has a map, then that's what he's worked on, and asking about stuff that's not on it means the GM will either have no worthwhile answer, or they'll need to put a bunch of work in and be annoyed if that work goes to waste.
That's not really what I mean. What I'm getting at is that if the soul is what's important to identity, and the body and brain are not, then working on improving or transcending our human limitations must start with the soul, and not doing so is very dangerous because you may well end up creating a p-zombie apocalypse. The lack of evidence for a soul is very comforting for a transhumanist in that regard: if souls don't exist you're much less likely to exterminate all of them by accident.
But, um, we have been, off and on. Example, October 2014:
Now, we haven't brought it up much specifically, because frankly there's not much we can do about the larger cities when we're barely dealing with internal issues and our own borders, but we're not completely unaware it's out there so much as we're unable to do anything about it. Are you saying these raiders are from Nagoya?
Yeah, haven't many clues there, other than the fact that Mami herself seems to be intermittently "special", sniffing out things that she by all rights shouldn't be able to, like how there's something weird with our two "sisters" who really aren't sisters. So far my two possible theories is that she has some psychological echoes of her past life with Madoka, sort of like how Homura remembers Madoka in canon, or she has latent Legendary potential.
Personally, I have been more interested in Tokyo because of the Class 3 demons. I had assumed (until we received indication otherwise) that Nagoya was a standard Japanese metropolitan area like Mitakihara in many ways, though more dense in terms of population. Obviously it would have its own share of unique meguca and issues, but the area that we know is different is Tokyo due to all of the Class 3 demons there.
Heh, it's been awhile, but I was re-reading this quest and realized I forgot to continue this argument. From what I remember of SG-1, the Asgard remarked on a few occasions that they were unable to Ascend, despite being far more intelligent than humanity, who are relatively close to being able to Ascend. They also state that they have undergone numerous procedures to extend their lives, including backup clone bodies and mind transfers, which have eventually resulted in their bodies steadily decaying and becoming weaker, and being unable to have children, despite the fact that they are using cloned bodies which should be completely identical.
