The "nature vs nurture" debate does use some different input values when discussing Iris... but Amanda (and Mary) do bear a significant responsibility for who Iris is.
The Secrets' Crusade
- Thread starter Snowfire
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1) Amanda was head of state at the time and approved the project and command takes responsibility the buck stops here dammit.
2) Separately and additionally, apparently her mama raised her to cheat at dice, and there are only two suspect mamas and only one of them is a powerful not!sorceress, so clearly we know who to blame.
So there.
We can blame both. Amanda is a powerful non!sorceress, but Mary is a physicist, and everyone knows they cheat at dice so God doesn't have to. It goes back to Einstein.
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Except as I've been trying to point out, this isn't a good analogy. Torture may possibly be worse than murder, but corporal punishment isn't worse than genocide. It's heavily influenced by what moral framework you're bringing to the discussion. If you believe that the continuance of life is the biggest moral imperative, then ongoing pain is correspondingly less evil than ending a life.
It's also questionable if what the Shiplords do can be accurately defined as "torture." From our perspective, sure. But we don't consider it to be torture when you take away a child's toys when they misbehave, no matter how much the kid screams that it's not fair and that it's awful. And on a galactic scale, it's only in the last few decades that we've started crossing the cusp into adolescence. We aren't adults yet -- we're teenagers with heavy artillery.
It's always been Hjivin, but even Snowfire misspells it fairly often and has to be corrected. (I think it's prononunced "HYAI-vin"?)
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[X] Who are you, really?
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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Interesting story. To be fair to the Shiplords though (lol), they do at least appear to attempt questioning their own actions before doing them anyway. Then again, they have the liberty to do so. They have successfully annihilated all direct competition, and have had hundreds of millennia to solidify their mechanisms of control. The Compact are children by comparison.
Considerably more than that. Heavy artillery, I mean. Humanity is absolutely a relative galactic adolescent, though.
How is it "questionable" that turning people en masse into building materials while still aware of their fate, is torture?
Snowfire
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You're not....actually sure that the Shiplord nanobiological goop is even close to self-aware. It feels like an abomination to Mending, because it's a twisting of life into something that it shouldn't be - strange isn't it that Amanda hasn't encountered a similar reaction to the two Regular Fleet dreadnoughts in system, or to most Regular Fleet craft in general. At the same time, to apply a horribly mutilated form of calculus to the issue...what else should the Shiplords do with all that biomass?
I think I'm on record saying this before, but if I wasn't, I'll give you this. Every member of humanity taken by the Collectors died completely painlessly and without any awareness of their fate.
The Shiplords can most certainly be (and arguably are) monsters on a scale that is difficult to even describe. But they don't indulge in their cruelties.
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This taking away a child's toys metaphor seems pretty questionable to me considering that the Shiplords have not in the present acting as an elder mentor chastising those who misbehave but have been aggressively placing the directives on species and forcing tributes upon them as soon as they even detect they have the secrets. It's like if an adult went around taking the dangerous toys of random children rather violently without explanation, and forces them into periodic and rather extreme blood donations. This is not even acknowledging the species that they have killed for being unprepared to face them. While there are good reasons to restrict secrets and while looking at things at scale might change the perspective a bit it still feels hard to justify as a result the near total lack of communication and the fact that even after escaping the tribute cycle the interference of the Shiplords doesn't seem to ever end. Not even the uninvolved can escape their watchful eye and while that is somewhat an understandable response, it just makes the whole situation seem well less justified. Not to mention some of the things that make the Shiplords leery of humanity were developed in response to their interference. Not everything of course, but some things. Then there is the Zlathbu situation in which it seems to me that the Shiplords would have had a better result by not interfering at all.
Ah, no. The prevailing assumption, as I recall, was that it was at least somewhat aware, because of how in our 6th Secret project try to duplicate its capabilities, there was something soul-based in its nature.
So, they're not torturing the people they kidnap and murder. It's still arguably torture to anyone who finds out what happens to them, to know that their families are being used to assist in the kidnap and murder of others.
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Sure, that's entirely fair. It wasn't meant to be an accurate metaphor; it was meant to be sufficiently contrastive to show an extreme opposite viewpoint.
As far as we can tell, souls aren't enough by themselves to be self-aware -- or even aware at all. A soul detached from its body appears to be as dead as a body detached from its soul; it seems to be the case that sapient life (and... possibly non-sapient? more research required) depends on the combination of the two, just as the brain and the body depend on each other.
So it's more like "house built out of corpses" horror than "forced to kill your family" horror.
Starman4308
(Unverified Human Being)
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[X] On many levels: who, what, when, where, why, and how to pretty much the entirety of current Shiplord culture and affairs. We're here because we know there is a way to end the war without burnt-out stars across the galaxy. But, we can start with:
[X] Who are you, really?
On the discussion about the relative age of this memorial: I'd fall into the camp of "this is probably the second or third": there are hints to a prior trauma, to earlier enemies, but at the same time, this is clearly a much more idealistic Shiplord culture, and the Shiplords of this era would likely be horrified at the Tribute System.
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This is exactly what I'm talking about. You spend a pile of time and words laying out the various factors that would get weighed, and then your core point is just "Does someone actually value X,Y,Z over A,B,C? I don't think so, therefore they probably don't actually hold those values and are just pretending they do because trauma." There's no logic there, you're just flatly refuting that people would hold a given set of values that you don't.
Also, you've fundamentally misunderstood (or are wildly mischaracterizing) the point I was making, which is that every species that comes into contact with the Shiplords and their abuses by necessity must have had a previous period in which they had not been in contact with the Shiplords. Which means that the situation becomes "Is it better to exist and then suffer - or to never exist at all?", which is a direct parallel to the classic philosophical conundrum "Is it better to have loved and then lost or to have never loved at all?".
Massive cultural trauma is not required in order to lean one way or another, which is clearly in evidence by the way Humanity 1.0 (which hasn't experienced massive cultural trauma of the sort you posit) is split on the matter.
Amanda was doing it well before Iris existed
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The thing is that literally every sapient species, including the Shiplords themselves, seems to view it very much not this way.
It's not just us.
The Group of Six races agree with us. And they include a longitudinal slice of age profiles all the way up to "will probably go Uninvolved any century now." I forget which of them is the oldest save that it's neither the Nileans nor the Luminaries, but the oldest race among them is about as 'mature' as any still-living species is allowed to become in the Shiplords' Milky Way. And they agree that what the Shiplords are doing is bad, with the only disagreement being whether to resist the Shiplords or flee the Shiplords.
The Uninvolved agree with us. Even with each individual Uninvolved having millennia as a racial collective consciousness to process what has been done with them, they still seem to agree on this. As far as we can tell, the main political division within their ranks is not over whether what the Shiplords did was necessary to their maturity. It's that they all agree the Shiplords were horribly abusive precursors to them for as long as they can remember, and disagree about whether the correct response is to resist the Shiplords or stay out of the Shiplords' way for fear of being targeted.
Nobody knows what happens to Uninvolved when they eventually evaporate or transcend or whatever it is they do, so everyone we've polled agrees that what the Shiplords are doing is wrong.
Furthermore, the Shiplords themselves even agree with us! We know this. Because when you take a child's toys away for misbehaving, you don't build memorial shrines to your regrets and spend the rest of your life angsting about whether there was a better way. The Shiplords do that.
This suggests that on some level they share with and understand the human perspective on why what they're doing is wrong, and have decided to do it anyway. That they don't actually believe, not all the way down, that all this violence and torment and destruction and exterminations for being insufficiently badass but also for being TOO badass, is just the equivalent of a child crying because they don't want to take their medicine.
Because when a child cries and refuses to take their medicine, you don't build a temple to the question of whether it was right to tell them to do so.
...
It is easy to let the depth of time for which the Shiplords have existed lead us to conclude that their age has conferred some kind of unique and superior wisdom. That there is some higher galaxy-brained perspective from which it all makes sense as a matter of simple objective fact, that they really must do what they do and that it's not even really that bad.
I don't agree.
I think the Shiplords have long since lost the ability as a culture, if not as individuals, to seriously reconsider their actions. Whatever cosmic wisdom they have gained as a civilization from having lived through aeons of time and seen hundreds if not thousands of intelligent species make their way from infancy to ashes... They don't really bring it to bear on the question "should we be doing this anymore?"
I'm... gonna wait on @Snowfire before I start reversing the letter and calling them "Hjivin" instead of "Hijvin, but I don't mean to say that to be rude or anything, I'm just a very inertial person.
There's two reasons for that.
If you're right, then the Shiplords really ought to view any other civilization discovering the Secrets as a tragic, horrifying loss of innocence, because it means the Shiplords have to start their vigorous program of torturemurderdeath. They could get the same results with less risk by installing killsats over every lifebearing world in the galaxy to spot nascent industrial civilizations and bomb them into the Stone Age, so that the galaxy becomes full of "innocent" civilizations incapable of ever discovering the Secrets (at least I assume so, I could be wrong and it might be possible to master the Secrets in a cave with a box of scraps on long enough timescales).
We've seen that the Shiplords are clearly willing to inflict nearly unlimited horror and suffering on other intelligent species in the name of their system. We've seen that they do not care one whit for consent or what those other species think of the system. Notably, they never, never try to explain themselves in the normal course of things, and as far as we can tell they never even ask whether other species would have preferred to risk extermination than to reach maturity and be tortured like this.
...
With all of this in mind, if they were really doing this as a clear-eyed attempt to preserve as much innocent, nonthreatening sapient life as possible, and had really mathed this out? I'm pretty sure they'd be preventing anyone from ever getting into space or developing a technological post-industrial civilization to begin with. They could "farm" the galaxy to cultivate Iron Age primitives rather than do this. The scale of the atrocities involved would be no greater, probably lesser over the realistic lifespan of a sapient species.
But they don't, and I suspect that's because of what amounts to ideology.
Given that the species isn't entirely sociopathic, they would not have started doing this unless they believed that they were between a rock and a hard place, possibly more than one of each. And I'm pretty sure that some of the hard places involved are things they are ideologically convinced "must" be true or "cannot" be done.
Because they don't act the way I would expect a bunch of purely rational "diverse number of sapient species getting to exist without any of them getting to destroy all life in the galaxy" maximizers to act.
...
The other reason I don't think this is a purely rational calculation on their part is Doylist.
I don't think @Snowfire is telling that kind of story. I don't think this is the story of how if you have all the technology in the world and do the math the only way to preserve the galaxy is to torture every species in it forever until and unless inexplicable outside-context space magic provides a better way. I don't think Snowfire is going to give the Shiplords the dignity of building the setting so that they are objectively correct, even within their own context of knowledge, history, and calculation.
I think that this is going to be the story of how the Shiplords believe themselves to be correct, informed by certain assumptions about the galaxy and how it works, assumptions that they made and then poured concrete over and never revisited.
Almost every cue Snowfire has given us suggests that this is going to be the story of how the Shiplords became so fallen, committed such a gigantic sin, after blinding THEMSELVES to alternative paths and then following the only remaining path visible to them anymore.
Not that this is going to be the story of how the Shiplords are vindicated by having been mathematically correct all along, or at least mathematically correct in the context of what this setting was before Practice.
Except that the Shiplords aren't optimizing for 'existence,' they're forcing species along a specific constrained development path that always ends in the same four places:
1) Stalled out on homeworld, unable to discover Secrets.
2) Exterminated by the Shiplords for the crime of discovering Secrets and not using them dangerously enough.
3) Exterminated by the Shiplords for the crime of discovering Secrets and using them too dangerously.
4) Giving up in disgust and becoming Uninvolved, and then ultimately fading from reality after some hundreds of millennia.
...
My point here is that the nature of this path indicates that the Shiplords are not merely attempting to preserve "the galaxy" or even "the diversity of sapience in the galaxy" or something like that which we can view as essentially a neutral thing.
They have an agenda. There is a point to all this. They want sapient species to go on existing, but there's more to it than that. The Shiplords want species to get a chance to discover the Secrets, and to 'graduate' through the genocidal hazing process of the Tribute Cycle, and at the logical endpoint of it to become Uninvolved. If they did not want this sequence to keep playing out, they would have taken steps to ensure that it plays out differently or not at all.
And the more complex the Shiplords' agenda, the more different elements of their worldview they see as telling them they "must" do things a certain way...
...The more likely it is that at least some of the things they see as constraints on their action are in reality just their own ideology and culture, probably informed by historic traumas, telling them what they must do, rather than simply informing them of facts that they are free to seek a novel rational response to.
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They've got so much history, and they've moved past none of it. They've got so much history of pain and violence that they're choking on it, that the possibility of anything ever changing is painful, because of the weight of their history, the trauma of it, the sheer relentless inertia of their culture forming an undertow dragging the whole galaxy into an inescapable spiral of horror. They don't move past anything that hurts them - almost literally, they relive it and memorialize it, and replay it on repeat forever.
The most transgressive thought a Shiplord can have is probably 'it doesn't have to be this way'.
The most transgressive thought a Shiplord can have is probably 'it doesn't have to be this way'.
Ekzentric Lohner
I miss Wildstar...
Did you forget to close some formatting tags in there, or did you really mean for everything to be italicized after a certain point and for everything after a second point to be bolded?
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After all the atrocities they commited - would they even accept any other solution? Because if there is another solution, they have to cope with the fact that they didn't find/implement it millenia ago, and that all of that suffering they caused was unnecessary. If they really do accept this, I expect a lot of switches being flipped.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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Can you stop posting a wall of text in bold italics before my eyes bleed for the love of god
Like you had some good points, but your choices in formatting are actually painful.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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Coda is quite correct. I just mess up the spelling sometimes because it's super easy to do so.
I have to amend this at least a little. They never try anymore.
Been working on the next human actions interlude, we'll see how far I get through it before the vote closes.
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That wasn't choices, that was a formatting hiccup. Shit happens sometimes.
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
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Indeed it does. Is it fixable?
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- Mid-Atlantic
Somehow a chunk of text got deleted just before I posted, including some formatting tags that I had closed. Just performed some rough surgery to fix it.
It's fixed; hopefully @SaltyWaffles can apply more salt to waffles and less to my 'choice' of formatting now.