Vibes.
The deciding factor to trust Orochimaru with Hazou's body was... vibes.
His unrepentant history, our team's and neighbors' numerous warnings, seeing his Basement, knowing what the Final Gift Program entailed, him threatening to kidnap both Kei and Hazou... all of that and more weighed against vibes and found wanting in a rational quest.
Alright, let me be more specific than 'vibes'.
Orochimaru's recent actions and behavior more firmly solidify a behaviorial model of him.
Said model indicates that, obviously, he has disabled or diminished his empathy, and is highly driven for personal objectives. This, also obviously, results in the Basement, unrepentant history, etc as those are all rational choices in his position in the absence of significant value placed on other human beings and no social frameworks that incentivizes cooperation.
Other things indicated are:
- A relative lack of attempt at deception or social manipulation, because he largely abstains from social frameworks and has sufficient personal power that he can get by without it. Deception would only be rational with a appropriate payoff for the expended effort, and in the few instances where this has occurred we have witnessed attempts at deception or manipluation.
- High value placed on concepts related to his personal objectives - knowledge, learning, personal power, so on. We have consistently seen positive emotions and reactions when engaging on these topics, and negative reactions when they are interfered with.
- Altered emotional functionality.
- Keyword: Altered. Orochimaru does not actually lack emotions.
- There is significantly increased emphasis on 'negative' or 'unstable' emotions such as anger, as is fairly common with the particular attractor of mental behavior he's gravitated towards.
- Positive emotions tend to emerge in relation to the concepts he has focused on.
- A emphasis on 'cold rationality' and logic.
- There is, naturally, the finnicky details involved in 'disabling and diminishing his empathy', which involves stuff like careful categorization, deadening via exposure, etc. Not going to get into that right now, the self-modification needed to arrive at that state is a topic all on it's own and is a bit more speculative.
- Also more speculatively, the atrophied remnants of his social behavior appear to still exist. His behavior, absent deception (unlikely), indicates a starvation of human contact. He responds with positive emotions to peers and interactions with peers in the realm of his preferred concepts and along the lines of his goals. This, in a sense, dodges some of the measures taken to diminish his empathy.
Taken together, these aspects indicate a couple avenues of fruitful interaction and manipulation which the various plans have explored in different ways.
- We can appeal to his highly objective-driven nature and preference for 'cold rationality' by confronting him with our problem, framed in a manner that shapes the solution space he'll explore in ways we find acceptable.
- We can provide incentives and disincentives that encourage interactions with us in ways that we find acceptable; in other words, offer him shinies and make killing us a pain.
- We can attempt to utilize his atrophied social behavior, pushing ourselves further into 'peer' territory in his eyes. This aims to increase his sense of empathy and positive emotions towards us, reducing the likelyhood of negative outcomes.
- Whatever we do in particular, it is crucial to carefully manage his categorization of us, as that heavily modulates his behavior. Controlling where we are in those bounds is the difference between being a peer and a test subject.
I could elaborate on a lot of the info here, but this is already getting to be fairly long. Long story short, I really don't know what everyone is on about. Interacting with Orochimaru is
difficult, as there are no safety rails like with most individuals that have more functional empathy and have strong self-interested reasons to limit the total negative consequences they inflict on anyone else. Nonetheless, Orochimaru is in my eyes
easier to understand than most other people, even if the particulars of the situation make interactions difficult.
It frankly
baffles me how badly our advisors are whiffing this, particularly Mari.
