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The Cold Iron Champion

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We Just Write said:
T: Yes, mental alterations fundamentally change a person. It's kind of the definition. If what you have at the end can't reasonably be considered the same person... Well.
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Precisely!

The human mind is extremely delicate, and what constitutes "the same person" is a line so very thin that any alteration at all could reasonably be stated to have resulted in a different person. Even fairly minor TBIs can result in entirely different personalities overnight.

It's the same concept with memory uploading. There is no objective continuity, the upload isn't you. They may be a person, and perhaps may even believe they are you, but they aren't; You are still stuck in the meatsuit. They're a copy, You_(1).exe, perhaps a descendant or child if you want to get philosophical.

The game SOMA explores this from both perspectives very well.
 
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RavenWolffe77 said:
Precisely!

The human mind is extremely delicate, and what constitutes "the same person" is a line so very thin that any alteration at all could reasonably be stated to have resulted in a different person. Even fairly minor TBIs can result in entirely different personalities overnight.

It's the same concept with memory uploading. There is no objective continuity, the upload isn't you. They may be a person, and perhaps may even believe they are you, but they aren't; You are still stuck in the meatsuit. They're a copy, You_(1).exe, perhaps a descendant or child if you want to get philosophical.

The game SOMA explores this from both perspectives very well.
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Z: Going to disagree on the uploading point; it depends on the methodology, and both instances could be considered equally valid continuations of the starting person.
 
I obviously moved my brainframe to one such interdicted city; while my sub-selves were competent, losing my main self would still be a massive setback.
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Huh, not decentralized. Like a Planetary Annihilation Commander but probably without a mobile body.
I knew exactly where my enemies were gathering their forces thanks to the surveillance micro-satellites I'd already managed to launch, and I also had a rough idea of when they'd be attacking. Plenty of time to get some ballistic missiles ready, tip them with anti-magic warheads, and launch them directly into the rallying Wild Hunts.
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...this just makes me think even more this could considered a PA/Terminator/Folklore Crossover with Skynet being Pro-Humanity.

Wonder how long till Knight develops the Helios Invasion Titan? Won't the Fae be confused by the random smitings and the spontaneous teleportation of an entire army at them. Although can't really Orbital Drop an Atlas since that would violate half of its Principals by causing an Extinction Event.

The Fae responded by immediately attacking on Earth with their remaining forces, aiming to abduct as many humans as possible.
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It's like they can't do anything else.

Australia was lost to the fae almost immediately, their sparse population and failure to heed the warnings I'd provided dooming them. To prevent the Fae from making use of their victims, I launched the nuclear missiles I'd based in Indonesia. The island continent died in nuclear fire, but that was far preferable to the works of horror the Fae could commit with that many captives.
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This is just asking the Nations that ignored Knight to complicate things by thinking Knight has gone Full Evil AI.

Upon reviewing records and sensor data, there seemed to be at least a bit of truth to Shinto, as some sort of magical being had woven a protective effect over the Japanese Home Islands long ago, preventing the Fae from arriving directly there.
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And Japan is the special little snowflake yet again. Wait till the Fae call upon their Youkai counterparts.

As for the many cities I'd wholly evacuated? Well, Fae certainly showed up there. All that awaited them was a brutal death as the many and various booby traps I'd set up did their work.
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I'm just Imaging that Knight made the place into the city version of The Cube. Buildings keep moving and new traps keep popping up in rooms of buildings they just left rendering even known paths to be as treacherous as they are in The Nameless Forest they like to trap their victims in. They're getting a taste of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a Faerytale for once.

That wasn't even touching on the exotic effects higher-ranked Fae could perform.
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Yes and that's not even close to the Tuatha De Danann with their ability to through an arrow through seven layers of leather shields.

Every single Paladin was a fully informed volunteer who fully knew and accepted what was going to be done to them. This meant they had much less inner conflict than Lesser Fae, and that in turn translated into significantly more magical ability once such was unlocked.
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Surprise surprise using willing volunteers rather then slave troops means your quality overcomes their quantity. Zerg Rushing Tactics only really work when your target isn't a walking tank in comparison to your Cannon Fodder and perfectly capable of being subject to the same Upgrades.
 
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We Just Write said:
Z: Going to disagree on the uploading point; it depends on the methodology, and both instances could be considered equally valid continuations of the starting person.
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That's what I was referring to with the last part; they're still equally valid as a person, but the aren't the same instance of that person. Consciousness isn't truly transferred, but rather duplicated.

You_(Prime) would remain behind in your organic body, whereas You_(1) continues as an upload, and is free to be their own person unbeholden to You_(Prime). They'd soon become their own person entirely, as they would experientially diverge very rapidly, especially in the case of an infomorph who experiences the world so differently.

You_(Prime) could go on to fork a You_(2), You_(3), and so on.

Those uploaded intelligences could themselves fork again, eg. You_(27) could create a copy of themselves, eg. You_(27)_(1).
This is an imperfect way of notating this branching effect, a visual diagram would be better.

Obviously, at this point each of these entities would have long since diverged enough to be reasonably considered a new person, being several degrees removed from You_(Prime).
 
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RavenWolffe77 said:
That's what I was referring to with the last part; they're still equally valid as a person, but the aren't the same instance of that person. Consciousness isn't truly transferred, but rather duplicated.

You_(Prime) would remain behind in your organic body, whereas You_(1) continues as an upload, and is free to be their own person unbeholden to You_(Prime). They'd become their own person, as they would experientially diverge very rapidly, especially in the case of an infomorph who experiences the world so differently.

You_(Prime) could go on to fork a You_(2), You_(3), and so on.

Those uploaded intelligences could themselves fork again, eg. You_(27) could create a copy of themselves, eg. You_(27)_(1).
This is an imperfect way of notating this branching effect, a visual diagram would be better.

Obviously, at this point each of these entities would have long since diverged enough to be reasonably considered a new person, being several degrees removed from You_(Prime).
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Z: Consciousness is a process that ceases during sleep, among other times. If the original brain is destructively scanned and the person is re-instantiated on a new one, then they have been transferred.
 
We Just Write said:
Z: Consciousness is a process that ceases during sleep, among other times. If the original brain is destructively scanned and the person is re-instantiated on a new one, then they have been transferred.
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Incorrect. At no point other than brain death does consciousness cease.

Even unconscious, you are still processing information, and particularly active processing results in dreaming. You just drop into standby, you never actually shut down. To continue the computer analogy, the human personality is stored in electrochemical RAM.
 
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RavenWolffe77 said:
Incorrect. At no point other than brain death does consciousness cease.

Even unconscious, you are still processing information, and particularly active processing results in dreaming. You just drop into standby, you never actually shut down.
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Z: Brain activity is not consciousness. It's required of course, but according to the theory of consciousness we view as most likely to be correct, there are very definitely times at which the brain is not doing that.
 
We Just Write said:
Z: Brain activity is not consciousness. It's required of course, but according to the theory of consciousness we view as most likely to be correct, there are very definitely times at which the brain is not doing that.
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After reading that documentation, there's... A lot of holes in that theory.

It's also not supported by nearly enough credible evidence to reasonably challenge existing theories. In fact, the majority of it comes from the author himself.

The Internet now links up millions of computers in a gigantic superbrain that will soon rival our own organic version in computational capability. But does anyone seriously believe that, like HAL, driven by its digital consciousness, the Internet may soon turn on us its creators? The plain fact is that nothing rendered in silicon remotely resembles a conscious mind.
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This is patently false, we've been making more and more accurate replications of the human mind since before the invention of software complex enough to even make the attempt. This absurd claim ignores more than three decades of work across dozens of fields.

However, all electrical circuits – and that's basically all neurones are generate an associated energy field, known as an electromagnetic field or em field. This field contains precisely the same information as the circuitry that generated it. However, unlike neuronal information, which is localised in single or groups of neurons, the brain's em field will bind the neuronal information into a single integrated whole.

This consciousness electromagnetic information field (cemi field) theory may sound far-fetched, but it rests on just three propositions. The first is that the brain generates its own em field, a fact that is well known and utilised in brain scanning techniques such as EEG. The second is that the brain's em field is indeed the seat of consciousness. This is far harder to prove but there is plenty of evidence that is at least consistent with this hypothesis. Em fields are waves that tend to cancel out when the peaks and troughs from many unsynchronised waves combine. But if neurones fire together, then the peaks and troughs of their em fields will reinforce each other to generate a large disturbance to the overall em field.
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This isn't how the brain works! Or how brain scanning technology would feasibly work! The brain is an electrochemical computer, electrical impulses are only half of the equation. There's so much information carried by neurotransmitters that a simple EEG can't detect.

Furthermore, it provides no specific sources to support any of this! Actual quotations of papers it references are lacking, trusting the reader to assume and draw their own connections where there are none.

In recent years neuroscientists in many laboratories across the world have become interested in the phenomenon of neuronal synchrony. Experiments from Paris' Laboratoire de Neurosciences demonstrated synchronous firing in distinct regions of the brain when a subject's attention is aroused by a pattern that resembled a face. When the subject saw only lines then his neurones fired randomly but when the subject realised he was looking at a face, his neurones snapped into step to fire synchronously. In this, and in many similar experiments, neurone firing alone does not correlate with awareness but the em field disturbance generated by synchronous firing, does. The simplest explanation is that the brain's em field is conscious awareness – the cemi field.
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I first described my theory that integrated neuronal information in the brain's EM field is the seat of consciousness in my 2000 book, Quantum Evolution, proposing that "the brain's 'EM field … integrate information from all of the calculations … performed by … [its] logic gates". However, in its first incarnation it was called the conscious electromagnetic field (cem) theory.
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I... That's not how the brain works. This is "5G will fuck with your mind" type pseudoscience. This reads like someone trying to use an incomplete understanding of neuroscience to prove the existence of the soul. Or to trick people into buying his books.

There are typos and grammatical errors all over this paper―and I hesitate to call it one―and what factual evidence it does present seems to contradict its own claims that the personality is somehow not an emergent property of the brains mechanical workings, as is the accepted model of consciousness today. The rest is literally pulled out of his ass.

I've worked with radio equipment and other unshielded EM sources, and if the human brain was as reliant on stable EM fields as this theory would require, to be capable of this... internal radio-esque system, then I would be dead a hundred times over. Also, the skull is not that good of a faraday cage.

This is not a credible theory on human consciousness. I hold extreme doubts to the veracity of any of these claims, and indeed it appears so does the author, as it is listed under the "Popular Science" catagory, not the "Hard Science" catagory.

I... I'm done. I'm out of energy for this. I've run dry. Just... In conclusion:

Untested theories that spontaneously challenge all modern science are no basis for a credible belief system.

Edit: Spelling
 
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... personally I just go with the Idea that Consciousness is merely a simulation created to maximize survival by identifying a "self" in order to designate an "other". There is no "You" merely the Belief that there is a "You" till that version is murderized by the next version in a few seconds from now. In other words taking the Phrase "I think therefore I am" as literal.

Piles of differentiated organic nanites specifically made to facilitate exclusive operations in order to ensure collective survival and reproduction forming a gestalt whose collective survival and reproduction is based wholly upon the efficiency of ability to identify and interact with the world thus creating a simulation of a singular entity known as the "Self" ensures a maximization of these capabilities and immediately and adapting response within the Organic Computer to the "other" of an ever changing world. The brain (not just human) is the most powerful Super Computer and it uses all that power to eat hot chip and simulate being dead for 8-12 hours everyday (15 minutes to 20 hours depending on animal). The augmentation of such falls heavily within the realm of Philosophy and the interpretation of "Continuity of Consciousness".
 
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RavenWolffe77 said:
I love how Knight's view on mind control is "I'm gonna kill them anyways, might as well kill just the mind and recycle the meat".

Mind control is near-universally squick to me, so seeing it used as a weapon rather than be romanticized as anything other than Identity Death... Well, it's refreshing to say the least.
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Sorry did I miss something or are you talking about the paladins that get magic or the part about Australia being defeated so he destroyed it to stop the fae part
 
sonzofzsea said:
Sorry did I miss something or are you talking about the paladins that get magic or the part about Australia being defeated so he destroyed it to stop the fae part
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The Fae Court and the first infiltrator both got bodysnatched by nanotech hijacking the brain.
 
Hunh…
Personally I dunno. Like…
I trust the Knight and don't trust him?
Like…
Real talk I think if I lived under his system I could see a world where I volunteer to be a Paladin.
Barring that because of cold feet, I see myself being happy to work with him and his Paladins in a support function that keeps me off the front lines.

But simultaneously, IF I understand his axioms correctly? He cannot exterminate the hostile Fae. He CAN bend them into a new configuration and I may have not realized some surprisingly expedient ways of dealing with their need for the emotions harvested by torture but…
 
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