TBP and its ilk apparently oppose the inclusion of "biological essentialism" in RPGs. However, what about a race of robots programmed to be evil? Would that be "bionic essentialism" and therefore sinful? If not, why couldn't nature, or the gods, "program" a biological race to be evil?
I mean, Eclipse Phase, basically... The TITANs weren't programmed, but they're pretty much evil anti-life in the mold of, say, Skynet.
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 09, 2023, 03:44:03 PM
I mean, Eclipse Phase, basically... The TITANs weren't programmed, but they're pretty much evil anti-life in the mold of, say, Skynet.
I miss EP so much, the setting IS amazing and I love how wild humanity has become.
Sadly it's gone off the stratospher Woke since 2.0.
They always were woke, to be fair. It used to be so blatant that even on TBP you could complain about how woke they were, back before "woke" was a term in common use.
The first thing I did when I got 2.0 was to flip to the Jovians and see what they did with them.
It basically confirmed all my fears and I haven't paid attention since.
Luckily that doesn't matter, I have all the books from 1.0 and I can play them for the rest of my life.
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 09, 2023, 03:26:05 PM
TBP and its ilk apparently oppose the inclusion of "biological essentialism" in RPGs. However, what about a race of robots programmed to be evil? Would that be "bionic essentialism" and therefore sinful? If not, why couldn't nature, or the gods, "program" a biological race to be evil?
Any limitations of material reality that interferes with their impossible vision of perfect equality between all peoples and things is considered "Evil" by these people.
Quote from: Zelen on January 09, 2023, 08:29:56 PM
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 09, 2023, 03:26:05 PM
TBP and its ilk apparently oppose the inclusion of "biological essentialism" in RPGs. However, what about a race of robots programmed to be evil? Would that be "bionic essentialism" and therefore sinful? If not, why couldn't nature, or the gods, "program" a biological race to be evil?
Any limitations of material reality that interferes with their impossible vision of perfect equality between all peoples and things is considered "Evil" by these people.
Wishing woke leftists can continue to wish away reality. Their version of "pray away the gay."
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 09, 2023, 03:26:05 PM
TBP and its ilk apparently oppose the inclusion of "biological essentialism" in RPGs. However, what about a race of robots programmed to be evil? Would that be "bionic essentialism" and therefore sinful?
If the robots' actions are the result of programming they can't themselves change, they're not moral agents and therefore are not "evil". They are only tools used for evil by their programmers and controllers.
QuoteIf not, why couldn't nature, or the gods, "program" a biological race to be evil?
Same logic. Evil is by definition a moral choice. A race whose members were universally incapable of making moral choices wouldn't be much better than biological machines.
However, this is not (I think) what TBP and the Woke crowd really object to in the term "biological essentialism". They think the term means "the belief that the biology of the group determines the personality and psychology of the individual," which they believe is reified by the fact that in RPGs, a "race" is defined primarily by the game-relevant advantages and disadvantages which the vast majority of its members have in common with one another, and which work to force all PCs of that race towards certain roles in play and away from others.
It's not so much the idea of a race "programmed to be evil" as a race destined by its biology to incline towards
any behaviour pattern to a degree an individual's own choice can't wholly overcome if it wishes. The problem is that this objection misses the point of having origin template packages of any kind to begin with, which is to offer convenient shortcuts during character creation and handles during gameplay to players who have already decided what game roles they're interested in.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 09, 2023, 11:38:07 PM
Same logic. Evil is by definition a moral choice. A race whose members were universally incapable of making moral choices wouldn't be much better than biological machines.
However, this is not (I think) what TBP and the Woke crowd really object to in the term "biological essentialism". They think the term means "the belief that the biology of the group determines the personality and psychology of the individual," which they believe is reified by the fact that in RPGs, a "race" is defined primarily by the game-relevant advantages and disadvantages which the vast majority of its members have in common with one another, and which work to force all PCs of that race towards certain roles in play and away from others.
It's not so much the idea of a race "programmed to be evil" as a race destined by its biology to incline towards any behaviour pattern to a degree an individual's own choice can't wholly overcome if it wishes. The problem is that this objection misses the point of having origin template packages of any kind to begin with, which is to offer convenient shortcuts during character creation and handles during gameplay to players who have already decided what game roles they're interested in.
Neoplatonist1's original question mixes up (a) what is logical within the fiction, and (b) what lessons the fiction has for the real world. Fantasy often has morals or lessons for the real world. For example, Tolkien's ents are fictional creatures - but they convey Tolkien's real-world values of nature conservation. This isn't mind control. Someone can read Tolkien and not care about real-world forests. But some consider such morals an influence in that direction.
The concern with fantasy racial stereotypes is thinking that they can convey a lesson regarding real-world races. Tolkien's dwarves are greedy for gold, for example. In his original portrayal, he considered them like Jewish people. He explicitly said so in interviews, and based their language on Hebrew. Even though dwarves are heroic at times, their greed can still be considered an objectionable stereotype. The Jewish association was dropped in later adaptations of Tolkien, so it's not as much an issue.
Tolkien's orcs are not as clearly coded. For example, Elvish languages are based on Finnish (for Quenya) and Welsh (for Sindarin). An outside scholar connected orcish with Ancient Hurritic, but that hasn't been confirmed by any of the published letters or notes from Tolkien. Tolkien described them in letters as looking like "least lovely Mongol-types", but their English dialog was similar to cockney.
So the question with robots would be -- what lessons or themes does the robot fiction convey about the real world? Different portrayals of robots have different interpretations. For example, films like The Stepford Wives and Ex Machina had a feminist slant on robots. There are obvious parallels to anti-feminism (in the former) along with human trafficking and the sex trade (in the latter). In the Terminator movies, robots are embodiments of corporate greed and mechanization. In Star Wars, they represent lower-class servants - like their inspiration of the hapless peasants in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress.
For example, I've run several one-shot Star Wars games with droid PCs who were advocates for droids having equal rights rather than being property. That can certainly be seen as having parallels to real-world civil rights struggles, even though the droids were not coded as any particular ethnicity. Here were the pregens for a FATE game of mine, for example:
https://darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/starwars/droids/characters.html
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2023, 03:50:52 AMSo the question with robots would be -- what lessons or themes does the robot fiction convey about the real world? Different portrayals of robots have different interpretations.
For example, I've run several one-shot Star Wars games with droid PCs who were advocates for droids having equal rights rather than being property. That can certainly be seen as having parallels to real-world civil rights struggles, even though the droids were not coded as any particular ethnicity.
True enough, but I would say that the assumptions needed to make that particular situation a valid parallel -- i.e. that droids actually have real self-awareness and free will, and therefore the right to be able to exercise the latter as the former sees fit -- already entail one possible answer to Neoplatonist1's original question, which is that the nature and design of one's hardware substrate doesn't
ipso facto predetermine the outcome of one's software processes.
The objection to PC essentialism (whether biological or cybernetic) in RPGs, as I understand it, is the belief that
any formal "hard and fast" in-game definition of what specific PC backgrounds do and don't provide to characters is in itself a denial of, and message against, that principle of freedom. It doesn't matter that the player chooses the background, goes the thinking, if the message about the
character is that the character himself
didn't, and if the effect of that background is that the PC will forever after have the course of his adventures deeply influenced by that
a priori definition of who he is and what he can do.
To pick a given theme for robot PCs at all, in other words, and to structure robot PC design around manifesting and dramatizing that theme, is to take agency away from the characters and players to begin with. The objection of essentialism in PCs is not what lessons or themes a character background is intended to convey, but that a background is built to work towards conveying any themes at all other than what the player himself wants to do, and I think it likely that somebody bothered by this will find it just as bothersome for robot PCs as they would for half-orc or dwarven PCs. (After all, paradoxically, a world in which
every droid resents its service and wants its freedom could be argued to present just as "essentialist" a reading of what "droidness" is as a world in which none of them do.)
In my original writing I'm working on aliens with radically different psychology from humans as a result of their biology. One is a superorganism that considers all other life to be food and research material. They're not magically evil, but they're inherently hostile to humanity and they consider this the natural course of action. Trying to debate with them wont work because they think humans are animals who don't know whats good for them.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 08:59:32 AMOne is a superorganism that considers all other life to be food and research material. They're not magically evil, but they're inherently hostile to humanity and they consider this the natural course of action.
Out of curiosity, is this superorganism ever presented from its own POV as a dramatic protagonist? Is any given individual of its kind (assuming its kind even has individuals) theoretically capable of changing this perception and attitude, if it gained sufficiently unprecedented experiences or discoveries from its species' history?
The definition of a dramatic protagonist (which in this context includes RPG PCs, I think) is somebody whose choices make measurable differences to the outcome of whatever story they're in, and who changes or grows as a result of those choices and their outcomes. "Essentialism", I'd suggest, is what happens when the definition of who or what a character is predetermines those choices and isn't sufficiently changed by them.
I would like to see people who think "Biological Essentialism" is a bad/evil thing explain how a Giraffe and an Orca should be able to swim the same speed, or explain how a field mouse and a rhino have no significant biological differences between the two.
An Elf becomes an ADULT around the age of 100 years old (in D&D), THAT IS NOT HUMAN. How could you understand the mental/psychological aspects of an Elf character when they are a child for longer than a normal human even lives? What ethnic group of humans is this supposed to represent in their racist worldview where these optional player races are "different flavors" of human?
Different ability scores for different species/race makes sense and isn't racist, these people have taken too much kool-aid.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 09:16:30 AM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 08:59:32 AMOne is a superorganism that considers all other life to be food and research material. They're not magically evil, but they're inherently hostile to humanity and they consider this the natural course of action.
Out of curiosity, is this superorganism ever presented from its own POV as a dramatic protagonist? Is any given individual of its kind (assuming its kind even has individuals) theoretically capable of changing this perception and attitude, if it gained sufficiently unprecedented experiences or discoveries from its species' history?
I'd like to do some aliens pov, yes.
Interacting with other species actually made them even
more hostile. Initially they were willingly to meet halfway by sending emissaries to explain how amazing it would be to join them and be eaten first, because open war would be costly. This kept failing so they decided to give up and go straight for war as the first option. Turns out it's much more efficient than they thought.
Unlike other voracious hive mind species in schlock scifi, where the writers get bored with them and rewrite them as peaceful space hippie's because they think that's somehow an improvement (it's not. Writers please stop doing this), mine aren't. I already have humans to act human, so it would be redundant.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 09:16:30 AM
The definition of a dramatic protagonist (which in this context includes RPG PCs, I think) is somebody whose choices make measurable differences to the outcome of whatever story they're in, and who changes or grows as a result of those choices and their outcomes. "Essentialism", I'd suggest, is what happens when the definition of who or what a character is predetermines those choices and isn't sufficiently changed by them.
This is an interesting point. I feel an actually good example of biological essentialism is this novela
Three Worlds Collide.
https://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf
The story is a commentary on metaethics. The premise is that humanity encounters two alien species with radically different (and to us evil) ethics as a result of their different evolutionary histories. These ethical systems are incompatible with each other, so each species tries to forcibly impose its own ethics on the other two by genetically modifying them to integrate their own ethics. The idea that they could just leave each other alone and peacefully coexist with their differences intact is never presented as a viable option.
You'll see what I mean when you read the story.
This story was a key inspiration for writing my own aliens. It just feels believable that different species with wildly different evolutionary histories would have radically different psychologies and ethics. It feels believable that these would be insurmountable barriers and not something that could be trivially ignored and changed as is the case in most other scifi. In fact, the idea that you could and should genetically remake other species to suit your own arbitrary ethical calculus is quite frankly repulsive. That ethical relativism/repulsiveness is the point of my superorganism: their ethics make perfect sense to them and anything else is seen as evil/insane, while humans simply cannot comprehend why they would act this way and likewise see them as evil/insane.
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 09, 2023, 03:26:05 PM
why couldn't nature, or the gods, "program" a biological race to be evil?
They never claimed it wasn't possible. They claimed it was badwrongfun.
To them, the only correct way to play an RPG is by upholding leftwing precepts. And "live and let live" is not an option. You must submit.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 08:41:38 AM
To pick a given theme for robot PCs at all, in other words, and to structure robot PC design around manifesting and dramatizing that theme, is to take agency away from the characters and players to begin with. The objection of essentialism in PCs is not what lessons or themes a character background is intended to convey, but that a background is built to work towards conveying any themes at all other than what the player himself wants to do, and I think it likely that somebody bothered by this will find it just as bothersome for robot PCs as they would for half-orc or dwarven PCs. (After all, paradoxically, a world in which every droid resents its service and wants its freedom could be argued to present just as "essentialist" a reading of what "droidness" is as a world in which none of them do.)
I think any Star Wars game with droid PCs is going to run up against droid slavery being a theme. And in any game, the GM inherently has a ton of control over a game's themes, by who the antagonists are, as well as sympathetic PCs and other context of the adventure. Even in a Star Wars RPG campaign where players make their PCs and no one makes a droid, if a GM includes a sympathetic droid NPC who wants freedom, that will color the game's themes. Equally, if the GM makes a NPC droid villain who wants to subjugate all biological life, that also will color the themes.
In a one-shot with pregenerated PCs and a prepared adventure, the GM inherently has even more control over theme. So that game format does reduce agency - but the players still can have choices, and can influence the theme strongly over the details of that theme and how it is expressed. In one of my other Star Wars games with pregenerated PCs, I did have a PC droid whose background was being a strong loyalist to the Old Republic. Even with pregenerated PCs and scenario, I've seen players take these Star Wars games in quite different directions.
Quote from: Banjo Destructo on January 10, 2023, 09:37:30 AM
I would like to see people who think "Biological Essentialism" is a bad/evil thing explain how a Giraffe and an Orca should be able to swim the same speed, or explain how a field mouse and a rhino have no significant biological differences between the two.
An Elf becomes an ADULT around the age of 100 years old (in D&D), THAT IS NOT HUMAN. How could you understand the mental/psychological aspects of an Elf character when they are a child for longer than a normal human even lives? What ethnic group of humans is this supposed to represent in their racist worldview where these optional player races are "different flavors" of human?
By this logic, anything that is clearly NOT HUMAN in a story doesn't represent humans thematically.
But I think that doesn't work in the face of concrete examples of stories in static media. In stories where animals are characters, then animals like giraffes and rhinos generally do represent humans. Take, for example, the crows in the film Dumbo. They are birds, not humans, and have clear biological differences like wings. Still, I think it's pretty damn clear that Jim and the other crows do stand in for humans with a specific ethnicity. The same is true for lots of other classic stories with animal protagonists.
I disagree with a lot of claims regarding biological essentialism, but I don't think that this argument against them holds water.
To dismiss them, one needs to acknowledge that non-humans in stories can and often do represent humans. However, they don't
have to do so in a way that reinforces real-world stereotypes - like ones that East Asians are inherently good at math and martial arts - or that African-Americans are inherently good at dancing and sports.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 09, 2023, 11:38:07 PM
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 09, 2023, 03:26:05 PM
If not, why couldn't nature, or the gods, "program" a biological race to be evil?
Same logic. Evil is by definition a moral choice. A race whose members were universally incapable of making moral choices wouldn't be much better than biological machines.
In other words they would be animals.
I'm thinking chiefly of orcs. Tolkien's orcs appear to be both willfully evil
and universally unwilling to change. We could say that they are embodied souls who chose to be evil prior to their embodiment and, so, were confirmed in such, such that they could no longer choose otherwise, and this would make them evil, rather than animals.
Quote from: Horace on January 10, 2023, 11:53:50 AM
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 09, 2023, 03:26:05 PM
why couldn't nature, or the gods, "program" a biological race to be evil?
They never claimed it wasn't possible. They claimed it was badwrongfun.
To them, the only correct way to play an RPG is by upholding leftwing precepts. And "live and let live" is not an option. You must submit.
This is why I think stories where space orcs and humans team up against demons then sing kumbaya is such a stupid premise for stories ostensibly about warfare (especially in RTS where this same plot outline took over most campaigns after the release of Warcraft 3 popularized it). Right now in real life you have these unreasonable expansionist imperialist cultures that don't respond to diplomacy despite ostensibly having the exact same bio-psychology you do. Why would fiction be any different? Why would aliens be any different?
I think using black and white morality pointlessly confuses the issue (every real culture thinks they're the good guys regardless of whatever atrocities they commit and that any atrocity is justified in the pursuit of advancing their tribe), but my point is that two tribes can have such different ethics that war is inevitable because both see the other as evil and deserving of extermination.
I think the sorts of people arguing this sort of stuff have lived their lives in padded bubbles where they never had to experience or learn about real hardship or humanity's inhumanity to their fellow man, much less about advanced subjects like meta-ethics.
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 10, 2023, 12:15:40 PM
I'm thinking chiefly of orcs. Tolkien's orcs appear to be both willfully evil and universally unwilling to change. We could say that they are embodied souls who chose to be evil prior to their embodiment and, so, were confirmed in such, such that they could no longer choose otherwise, and this would make them evil, rather than animals.
It's a little more complicated.
"They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad (I nearly wrote "irredeemably bad"; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making - necessary to their actual existence - even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.)''-J.R.R.T
Basically, Orcs are evil by their very nature, but in theory they can find redemption... They just, well, don't. At least not that we ever see.
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 12:22:25 PM
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 10, 2023, 12:15:40 PM
I'm thinking chiefly of orcs. Tolkien's orcs appear to be both willfully evil and universally unwilling to change. We could say that they are embodied souls who chose to be evil prior to their embodiment and, so, were confirmed in such, such that they could no longer choose otherwise, and this would make them evil, rather than animals.
It's a little more complicated.
"They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad (I nearly wrote "irredeemably bad"; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making - necessary to their actual existence - even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.)''
-J.R.R.T
Basically, Orcs are evil by their very nature, but in theory they can find redemption... They just, well, don't. At least not that we ever see.
Isn't that Tolkien trying to keep his cake and eat it, too? Ought good races to kill orcs on sight or not? Wasn't there a line from Tolkien about how certain areas of Middle Earth in the Fourth Age would be given to the orcs to live in unmolested?
Tolkien was never satisfied with orcs because they contradicted the underlying themes of his work, namely that no one is born evil and beyond redemption.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 12:31:09 PM
Tolkien was never satisfied with orcs because they contradicted the underlying themes of his work, namely that no one is born evil and beyond redemption.
I don't know enough Tolkien to answer this question: Was he dissatisfied with elves as well, for the obverse reason, or were there evil elves at some point in Middle Earth?
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 10, 2023, 03:08:28 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 12:31:09 PM
Tolkien was never satisfied with orcs because they contradicted the underlying themes of his work, namely that no one is born evil and beyond redemption.
I don't know enough Tolkien to answer this question: Was he dissatisfied with elves as well, for the obverse reason, or were there evil elves at some point in Middle Earth?
Initially, that's what orcs were... corrupted elves. But he walked away from that later, and as a result orcs have a few different somewhat contradictory origins.
As for elves... Elves were just as capable of evil and selfishness as man, but it was... uncommon. Eol, Maeglin, Feanor and his sons... none of them were, like... the next Sauron, sure, but they did some bad stuff.
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 10, 2023, 03:08:28 PM
I don't know enough Tolkien to answer this question: Was he dissatisfied with elves as well, for the obverse reason, or were there evil elves at some point in Middle Earth?
Very much so, but "evil" in the "tragically proud and misguided and thinks they're justified in doing what must be done" sense rather than the "maniacally wants to destroy and/or rule everything from sheer spite" sense. Feanor and his sons basically helped bring the entire First Age crashing down in blood and grief because they swore to let
no one, not even Eru Himself, stand between them and getting the Silmarils back from Morgoth.
When the last two surviving sons of Feanor, Maedhros and Maglor, finally did steal the last two Silmarils back from the Valar after they cast down Morgoth, they had done such terrible things in the name of fulfilling their Oath that the gems' holy light burned their hands, and in agony Maedhros threw himself into a cavern in the Earth while Maglor cast his Silmaril into the sea.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2023, 11:58:31 AMI think any Star Wars game with droid PCs is going to run up against droid slavery being a theme. And in any game, the GM inherently has a ton of control over a game's themes, by who the antagonists are, as well as sympathetic PCs and other context of the adventure.
In a one-shot with pregenerated PCs and a prepared adventure, the GM inherently has even more control over theme. So that game format does reduce agency - but the players still can have choices, and can influence the theme strongly over the details of that theme and how it is expressed.
You're right, of course, and I agree. The thing with thematic control exercised through the GM's choices is that there, players who object to how they feel this "forces" their characters down particular paths have the ultimate recourse: They can directly complain to the responsible party who has the power to change it, and vote with their feet to replace him if he doesn't.
If they feel such essentialist "forcing" is baked into the structure of certain PC templates from first design, and their moral objection is to it being present at all, their only option in that context is to either not play the game at all, or to demand radical overhaul of the game itself from the designers, and the latter involves at the very least browbeating the rest of the market into not objecting to this.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 03:23:13 PM
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on January 10, 2023, 03:08:28 PM
I don't know enough Tolkien to answer this question: Was he dissatisfied with elves as well, for the obverse reason, or were there evil elves at some point in Middle Earth?
Very much so, but "evil" in the "tragically proud and misguided and thinks they're justified in doing what must be done" sense rather than the "maniacally wants to destroy and/or rule everything from sheer spite" sense. Feanor and his sons basically helped bring the entire First Age crashing down in blood and grief because they swore to let no one, not even Eru Himself, stand between them and getting the Silmarils back from Morgoth.
When the last two surviving sons of Feanor, Maedhros and Maglor, finally did steal the last two Silmarils back from the Valar after they cast down Morgoth, they had done such terrible things in the name of fulfilling their Oath that the gems' holy light burned their hands, and in agony Maedhros threw himself into a cavern in the Earth while Maglor cast his Silmaril into the sea.
Eol kidnapped and (effectively, as close as Tolkien could bring himself to write such a situation) raped Aredhel, kept her from her family for countless years, then when his son she bore wanted to see his mother's family, he forbade him from doing so as well, keeping them trapped in his woods until they finally escaped, at which point he hunted them down, demanded they return with him, and tried to kill his son for defying him - and did kill his wife, who took the spear meant for his son.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 10:47:01 AMThis is an interesting point. I feel an actually good example of biological essentialism is this novella Three Worlds Collide.
The story is a commentary on metaethics.
It's an interesting work, although I personally think it's something of a cheat, as noted by one of the key characters:
Quote"They made me study metaethics when I was a little kid, sixteen years old and still in the children's world. Just so that I would never be tempted to think that God or ontologically basic moral facts or whatever had the right to override my own scruples."
In other words, Yudkowsky fundamentally skews his scenario by sneaking in an
a priori disqualification of the founding assumption of ethics and morality to begin with: that there
are objective universal moral principles detectible by reason by
any sapient species, regardless of biology. The entire force of his story rests on the assertion that none of the species' incompatible moralities could, in any universal objective sense the others could grasp, actually be objectively determined to be "wrong" or "right", or "true" or "false"; if you reject this premise, the story's whole thematic point collapses, and it simply becomes an epic-scale version of the Trolley Problem.
QuoteThat ethical relativism/repulsiveness is the point of my superorganism: their ethics make perfect sense to them and anything else is seen as evil/insane, while humans simply cannot comprehend why they would act this way and likewise see them as evil/insane.
The "problem" there -- at least for any scenario where the superorganism is supposed to be involved in the drama -- is that this basically (or so it seems to me) reduces the interaction calculus of any other species encountering them to two options: ignore/evade if possible, exterminate if not. This seems like it would significantly reduce their dramatic potential as characters. If they aren't meant to be used as anything other than an antagonist force -- on the same level as a volcanic eruption or forest fire -- that's no problem, but a species you can talk to without making any
difference to them by talking isn't really a species you can talk to.
(In Peter Watts' novel BLINDSIGHT, First Contact reveals that in fact the vast majority of alien life in the universe is
not self-aware or sentient, and that this actually makes alien life a lot
more evolutionarily successful than conscious reason does; the problem is that once this truth hits the characters, it's basically the end of the story. Which is fine for a novel, but distinctly limiting in the context of a theoretically indefinitely ongoing RPG campaign.)
Drama lies in choice. The trick is to use the things the characters can't control to make their choices about what they can control more difficult and interesting, not to make them impossible.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 05:05:07 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 10:47:01 AMThis is an interesting point. I feel an actually good example of biological essentialism is this novella Three Worlds Collide.
The story is a commentary on metaethics.
It's an interesting work, although I personally think it's something of a cheat, as noted by one of the key characters:
Quote"They made me study metaethics when I was a little kid, sixteen years old and still in the children's world. Just so that I would never be tempted to think that God or ontologically basic moral facts or whatever had the right to override my own scruples."
In other words, Yudkowsky fundamentally skews his scenario by sneaking in an a priori disqualification of the founding assumption of ethics and morality to begin with: that there are objective universal moral principles detectible by reason by any sapient species, regardless of biology. The entire force of his story rests on the assertion that none of the species' incompatible moralities could, in any universal objective sense the others could grasp, actually be objectively determined to be "wrong" or "right", or "true" or "false"; if you reject this premise, the story's whole thematic point collapses, and it simply becomes an epic-scale version of the Trolley Problem.
QuoteThat ethical relativism/repulsiveness is the point of my superorganism: their ethics make perfect sense to them and anything else is seen as evil/insane, while humans simply cannot comprehend why they would act this way and likewise see them as evil/insane.
The "problem" there -- at least for any scenario where the superorganism is supposed to be involved in the drama -- is that this basically (or so it seems to me) reduces the interaction calculus of any other species encountering them to two options: ignore/evade if possible, exterminate if not. This seems like it would significantly reduce their dramatic potential as characters. If they aren't meant to be used as anything other than an antagonist force -- on the same level as a volcanic eruption or forest fire -- that's no problem, but a species you can talk to without making any difference to them by talking isn't really a species you can talk to.
(In Peter Watts' novel BLINDSIGHT, First Contact reveals that in fact the vast majority of alien life in the universe is not self-aware or sentient, and that this actually makes alien life a lot more evolutionarily successful than conscious reason does; the problem is that once this truth hits the characters, it's basically the end of the story. Which is fine for a novel, but distinctly limiting in the context of a theoretically indefinitely ongoing RPG campaign.)
Drama lies in choice. The trick is to use the things the characters can't control to make their choices about what they can control more difficult and interesting, not to make them impossible.
Well, yes.
Blindsight and
The Dark Forest are key inspirations too. Also, and this may sound like a non-sequitur, the
Puella Magi Madoka Magica franchise. You'd understand what I mean if you watched/read it, because to say anything else would be huge spoilers.
I'm just really annoyed by how hack writers turned the Borg and the Zerg into good guys, nevermind that everything about them is just fundamentally horrifying. The Borg saw off limbs and cut out eyeballs to replace with machine tools. The Zerg use ammunition that eats people alive in a painfully torturous manner and uses their consumed meat to make more monsters that go on to attack others. Only a complete fucking idiot would think it's a good idea to turn those monsters into good guys.
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in
Three Worlds Collide.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.
Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.
Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.
Exactly. They only prove my point.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:49:17 PM
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.
Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.
Exactly. They only prove my point.
I suppose I don't remember/never saw enough of "NuTrek" to really ever see the Borg presented as "good guys". I know Voyager occasionally bargained with them, but it was always very much shown as a "deal with the devil" type situation.
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:52:30 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:49:17 PM
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.
Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.
Exactly. They only prove my point.
I suppose I don't remember/never saw enough of "NuTrek" to really ever see the Borg presented as "good guys". I know Voyager occasionally bargained with them, but it was always very much shown as a "deal with the devil" type situation.
Voyager didn't do the Borg any favors
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PMI'm just really annoyed by how hack writers turned the Borg and the Zerg into good guys, nevermind that everything about them is just fundamentally horrifying. ...Only a complete fucking idiot would think it's a good idea to turn those monsters into good guys.
I totally understand that reaction, but I think the difficulty there arises from the nature of the medium of an ongoing, indefinitely-sustained drama. Put simply, if an individual -- or a species -- can't
change, it inevitably becomes boring. And when you start a species off at the absolute nadir of compassion, empathy or comprehensibility, there really is only one direction for it to go if it is to change at all, i.e.: up.
I wouldn't go so far as to say the
Trek writers (I don't know about the Zerg, never having played
StarCraft) were hacks. I think they just had to deal with the fact that their predecessors who created the Borg had done so to create a specific dramatic situation (the idea that sometimes even the best you can do will simply just not be good enough) and then not thought ahead to realize that now, as part of the Trek universe, fans would want to see them again in other, equally interesting but different stories. Terrifying as that first,
"Resistance is futile," is and was, you can't just repeat that forever and expect it to stay engaging.
QuoteThey're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.
Well, I will say that I appreciated how Yudkowsky actually made the morality of the aliens seem not
quite incomprehensible. The idea that life is only appreciated if it is earned by surviving a struggle, and the idea that the value of life is in the elimination of suffering, are both maxims that have turned up in human moral systems. Yudkowsky just cheats by denying his aliens any capacity to question this in themselves as part of the story arc.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 06:24:26 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PMI'm just really annoyed by how hack writers turned the Borg and the Zerg into good guys, nevermind that everything about them is just fundamentally horrifying. ...Only a complete fucking idiot would think it's a good idea to turn those monsters into good guys.
I totally understand that reaction, but I think the difficulty there arises from the nature of the medium of an ongoing, indefinitely-sustained drama. Put simply, if an individual -- or a species -- can't change, it inevitably becomes boring. And when you start a species off at the absolute nadir of compassion, empathy or comprehensibility, there really is only one direction for it to go if it is to change at all, i.e.: up.
I wouldn't go so far as to say the Trek writers (I don't know about the Zerg, never having played StarCraft) were hacks. I think they just had to deal with the fact that their predecessors who created the Borg had done so to create a specific dramatic situation (the idea that sometimes even the best you can do will simply just not be good enough) and then not thought ahead to realize that now, as part of the Trek universe, fans would want to see them again in other, equally interesting but different stories. Terrifying as that first, "Resistance is futile," is and was, you can't just repeat that forever and expect it to stay engaging.
I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period. If you can replace aliens with humans, then do it. Don't pretend otherwise.
Using the compassion/empathy comparison doesn't work in this case. My aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?
That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 07:38:18 PM
I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period.
Paging William Dean Howells, William Dean Howells to the courtesy phone, please .... ;D (For those who don't recognize the name, Howells has been called "the father of American realism"; he was part of the 19th-century Socialist movement in America and, as editor of
The Atlantic Monthly, influenced American writers across the nation for decades, and he did so firmly in the direction of dull stodgy "realist" literature. For more on this, check out this essay (https://bondwine.com/2013/02/22/why-are-dragons-afraid-of-americans/) by Tom Simon.)
I think there may be an excluded middle happening here. Nonhumans and humans being different enough that mutual understanding and coexistence is
difficult doesn't have to mean being so different that mutual understanding and coexistence is
impossible. And examples of how imaginary cultural difficulties can be overcome
can be meaningful guidance for overcoming real ones.
The "essentialist" argument I've always rejected is the idea that a group-imparted difficulty a character can't ignore amounts to an intolerable imposition on anyone who wants to play a character of that group.
QuoteMy aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?
That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.
I don't have to believe that my existence is perfect to reject the idea that anyone else has the right to change its conditions for me without my consent, especially if it's a question of
which conditions they're changing. After all, there's no guarantee that the changes someone else
thinks would improve my life actually would do so.
As Theoden said to Saruman, "Were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired."
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 08:56:52 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 07:38:18 PM
I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period.
Paging William Dean Howells, William Dean Howells to the courtesy phone, please .... ;D (For those who don't recognize the name, Howells has been called "the father of American realism"; he was part of the 19th-century Socialist movement in America and, as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, influenced American writers across the nation for decades, and he did so firmly in the direction of dull stodgy "realist" literature. For more on this, check out this essay (https://bondwine.com/2013/02/22/why-are-dragons-afraid-of-americans/) by Tom Simon.)
I think there may be an excluded middle happening here. Nonhumans and humans being different enough that mutual understanding and coexistence is difficult doesn't have to mean being so different that mutual understanding and coexistence is impossible. And examples of how imaginary cultural difficulties can be overcome can be meaningful guidance for overcoming real ones.
The "essentialist" argument I've always rejected is the idea that a group-imparted difficulty a character can't ignore amounts to an intolerable imposition on anyone who wants to play a character of that group.
QuoteMy aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?
That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.
I don't have to believe that my existence is perfect to reject the idea that anyone else has the right to change its conditions for me without my consent, especially if it's a question of which conditions they're changing. After all, there's no guarantee that the changes someone else thinks would improve my life actually would do so.
As Theoden said to Saruman, "Were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired."
Great points but, again, that's not the story I want to tell. "Why can't we all just get along?" is everywhere in scifi. It's the standard moral cliché. The moral dilemma in this story is that, sometimes, aliens cannot coexist with you and you have to kill them before they kill you or worse.
I do have a second alien species who are more personable space communists, and the moral dilemma there is "how much of your humanity do you want to relinquish in order to make your idealized utopia work out?" This is the actual social commentary part.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 07:38:18 PM
I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period. If you can replace aliens with humans, then do it. Don't pretend otherwise.
Using the compassion/empathy comparison doesn't work in this case. My aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?
That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.
Amen. And here's the thing I was thinking about. And others have said. With d&d6e and make everyone equal there truly are no "aliens" or "others". Some 6e player goes, oh I don't think it's fair my human doesn't need to eat or sleep like an android like Data. So the rules say, make your human like that. Then....you're not human anymore. I know games are supposed to be fantastical, but there's things that even I go, huh...that's stupid. Like a halfling being as strong as a half-giant.....it makes zero sense
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2023, 11:58:31 AM
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 08:41:38 AM
To pick a given theme for robot PCs at all, in other words, and to structure robot PC design around manifesting and dramatizing that theme, is to take agency away from the characters and players to begin with. The objection of essentialism in PCs is not what lessons or themes a character background is intended to convey, but that a background is built to work towards conveying any themes at all other than what the player himself wants to do, and I think it likely that somebody bothered by this will find it just as bothersome for robot PCs as they would for half-orc or dwarven PCs. (After all, paradoxically, a world in which every droid resents its service and wants its freedom could be argued to present just as "essentialist" a reading of what "droidness" is as a world in which none of them do.)
I think any Star Wars game with droid PCs is going to run up against droid slavery being a theme.
My approach, and it certainly isn't canon in a universe where it's possible to physically torture droids (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O0-dCLFadQ)*, is that droids are programmed to have personalities, to facilitate interaction with biologicals. But if you were to flip a switch to turn off their personalities, they would be blatantly machine like. C-3PO would no longer complain or have opinions. It would simply say "yes" or "no" and blindly comply with orders.
*And even then, they still might be only programmed to react this way, and Jabba just like the idea of torturing droids, whether they actually "feel" it or not.
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.
Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.
Jeri Ryan was a great actress and saved that role from being the T&A insert.
And I agree, the Borg were always shown as malevolent. First Contact started the trend of watering down the Borg by introducing an individual (The Queen) into a hive mind.
Voyager watered them down further by having multiple people escape from the collective, and having defeated the Borg or at least gotten away from their encounters without too much impact.
In the process, the Borg became less menacing, and more like a typical Star Trek faction.
Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 11, 2023, 12:51:38 PM
Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.
Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.
Jeri Ryan was a great actress and saved that role from being the T&A insert.
And I agree, the Borg were always shown as malevolent. First Contact started the trend of watering down the Borg by introducing an individual (The Queen) into a hive mind.
Voyager watered them down further by having multiple people escape from the collective, and having defeated the Borg or at least gotten away from their encounters without too much impact.
In the process, the Borg became less menacing, and more like a typical Star Trek faction.
Giving the Borg a leader was nonsensical. Giving them a leader with a romantic obsession with the hero was just stupid. The queen would've worked better as an agent of the Borg. A refinement of the Locutus concept, maybe. If they absolutely needed to, which they probably didn't.
In "I, Borg" Picard pretended to be a secret borg agent and Hugh bought it without question. The Borg could've done many things without diluting their concept.
Voyager's encounters with the Borg had the effect of making them far less menacing. I think there is an easy way to avoid that: if you can't have Voyager suffer significant consequences due to the episodic nature of the production, then tweak the Borg so that rather than being defeated all of what happens is either planned by them or benefits them in some way. Like Xanatos in Disney's Gargoyles.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 11, 2023, 07:35:42 PMIn "I, Borg" Picard pretended to be a secret borg agent and Hugh bought it without question.
I think the implication being that Borg severed from the collective don't really know how to think. They have a brain, they can "think", but any executive decisions come from the collective, and Hugh didn't have that.
I don't think Picard could have pulled that trick with normal borg.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 11, 2023, 10:20:06 AM"Why can't we all just get along?" is everywhere in scifi. It's the standard moral cliché. The moral dilemma in this story is that, sometimes, aliens cannot coexist with you and you have to kill them before they kill you or worse.
Oh, the notion that there may be no way to interact productively with an alien species short of attempted mutual extermination certainly has its place in SF, and I'm not averse to it. Lovecraft's entire oeuvre is based on the same idea, and one of my own planned SF series turns on the various conflicting species of a space-opera galaxy having to unify against exactly this kind of greater, mind-subsuming and individuality-annihilating threat, against which no diplomatic solution will ever be possible.
My complaint is simply that any alien species which fills this role is
dramatically no different, in terms of its story function, from a forest fire or volcanic eruption, and describing whatever psychological mechanisms drive their genocidal incompatibility as "morality" makes about as much sense to me as describing lava's temperature, viscosity, and flowing downhill as "moral choices". If they do what they do because they have no choice about it (and inability to imagine or understand alternatives amounts to "no choice") and the only possible resolution is one side or the other being forever annihilated or escaped, this is not the "conflict of morals" Yudkowsky clearly wants to create in his story. If Yudkowsky really wanted to examine that kind of issue, we'd have had scenes from the Babyeaters and the Superhappies where
they had arguments among themselves the same ways the humans did.
(Full disclosure should probably be noted here, in case I'm coming across as angrier or more aggressive than I mean to: I have a great deal of personal dislike for Yudkowsky based on his other writings, so I must acknowledge that I am not an unbiased critic. Feel free to take my opinions with the grains of salt felt to be merited.)
QuoteI do have a second alien species who are more personable space communists, and the moral dilemma there is "how much of your humanity do you want to relinquish in order to make your idealized utopia work out?" This is the actual social commentary part.
How much of someone's humanity
does one have to relinquish to integrate successfully into this society, out of curiosity? And can you get it back after it's relinquished, if for some reason someone decides they want out of it?
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 11, 2023, 07:35:42 PMI think there is an easy way to avoid that: if you can't have Voyager suffer significant consequences due to the episodic nature of the production, then tweak the Borg so that rather than being defeated all of what happens is either planned by them or benefits them in some way. Like Xanatos in Disney's Gargoyles.
I agree, I think that would have been an excellent way to handle it. The one problem I see there is that it would require giving the Borg some cultural objective or value besides simply "assimilate everything we encounter", which (a) is difficult to imagine based on everything established about them up till then, and (b) by definition makes them more comprehensible, rather than less, which I think would undermine their menace just as inevitably.
Part of what made the Borg so terrifying was the simple fact that they wanted nothing from anyone other than totally assimilating them, which made negotiation impossible and communication in general pointless.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 11, 2023, 10:39:51 PM
(Full disclosure should probably be noted here, in case I'm coming across as angrier or more aggressive than I mean to: I have a great deal of personal dislike for Yudkowsky based on his other writings, so I must acknowledge that I am not an unbiased critic. Feel free to take my opinions with the grains of salt felt to be merited.)
I totally get that. Yudkowsky never went to college but still thinks he has authority to write posts on high level academic subjects and has a cult of personality too. A lot of his work is overrated but I can't find much else that communicates the same point besides the works of Peter Watts and Cixin Liu, which are outright horror stories.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 11, 2023, 10:39:51 PM
How much of someone's humanity does one have to relinquish to integrate successfully into this society, out of curiosity? And can you get it back after it's relinquished, if for some reason someone decides they want out of it?
I can only speculate, but I imagine being connected to the "egalimind (https://mythcreants.com/blog/the-three-types-of-group-minds/)" would be indescribably amazing and that trying to remove oneself after being part of it would be like undergoing a lobotomy. Nowadays many people cannot live without constant connection to the internet, and this would be an more extreme version of that. Most human beings will go insane after a sufficient lack of sensory information and social contact, which would probably be a similar result to losing the egalimind. Which I think would add to the moral dilemma. Is forever surrendering part of yourself, whatever the size, worth the benefits? Is maintaining "freedom" worth the lives of those in the egalimind who cannot survive without it?
No person is an isolated island. Individuals are parts of societies, and societies are composed of individuals. You can't truly distinguish the two. This is a speculative extension of that. This isn't supposed to have an easy answer, or even a right answer.
Also, I'm still butthurt over the ridiculous ending of
StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void where the not!Na'vi casually destroy their not!Eywa because the writers equate it with slavery. jhc, even
Star Trek: Picard didn't equate voluntary group minds with slavery.
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 12, 2023, 10:22:34 AMI imagine being connected to the "egalimind (https://mythcreants.com/blog/the-three-types-of-group-minds/)" would be indescribably amazing and that trying to remove oneself after being part of it would be like undergoing a lobotomy. Nowadays many people cannot live without constant connection to the internet, and this would be an more extreme version of that.
That's compellingly plausible, but I have to admit the first thing that occurs to me in counter to that is Sartre's great remark, "Hell is other people." Every time I'm tempted to join Twitter I only have to remember the reason I eventually left Facebook, which was that I couldn't bear the constant reminders of how so many of my friends and family believed different things than I did. And even today there's a growing awareness of the costs and difficulties of screen addiction, and the destructive effects on social cohesion from the loss of in-person contact and interaction skills. "Offend one person in the group and you offend us all" is exactly how we get Twitter-shaming cancellation storms, after all.
QuoteAlso, I'm still butthurt over the ridiculous ending of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void where the not!Na'vi casually destroy their not!Eywa because the writers equate it with slavery. jhc, even Star Trek: Picard didn't equate voluntary group minds with slavery.
Well, the great thing about a group mind is that as a fictional concept it can be designed so that it meets whatever moral conditions are felt necessary to justify it. For myself the thing I've always distrusted about them is that in practice, (a) they always seem to be a heck of a lot harder to get out of than to get into, and (b) the collective always seems to exercise much more control over the individual than the individual can ever hope to exercise over the collective -- and if those two conditions don't strictly equate to slavery, they are close enough to raise my hackles all the same.
Trying to bring things back to the original topic, perhaps this is one of the things people object to about "essentialism" -- they react to it the same way I instinctively react against the notion of the group mind; they see it as a way of sneaking universal enforced group definitions of personality onto individuals. For myself I think there's a meaningful distinction between innate factors that
influence PC attitudes/decisions versus innate factors that
predetermine them, but I would be willing at least to listen to an argument about why that distinction might be less meaningful in practice than I'd want to think.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 12, 2023, 01:37:40 PM
Well, the great thing about a group mind is that as a fictional concept it can be designed so that it meets whatever moral conditions are felt necessary to justify it. For myself the thing I've always distrusted about them is that in practice, (a) they always seem to be a heck of a lot harder to get out of than to get into, and (b) the collective always seems to exercise much more control over the individual than the individual can ever hope to exercise over the collective -- and if those two conditions don't strictly equate to slavery, they are close enough to raise my hackles all the same.
Stephen, have you read Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_? I felt like the Tines there were a pretty positive portrayal of group minds, which didn't feel at all like slavery. It helped that the groups were relatively small - i.e. pack size of 4 to 12 or so.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 12, 2023, 01:37:40 PM
Trying to bring things back to the original topic, perhaps this is one of the things people object to about "essentialism" -- they react to it the same way I instinctively react against the notion of the group mind; they see it as a way of sneaking universal enforced group definitions of personality onto individuals. For myself I think there's a meaningful distinction between innate factors that influence PC attitudes/decisions versus innate factors that predetermine them, but I would be willing at least to listen to an argument about why that distinction might be less meaningful in practice than I'd want to think.
I think the most common issues with essentialism are specific to modern human history rather than being universal philosophy.
For example, it is logically plausible for there to be a fictional universe where one race is genetically coded to be especially talented at music, dancing, and sports -- while another race is genetically coded to be especially talented at logic, science, and engineering. However, as stories for modern-day humans, that aligns to a lot of false stereotypes from the 19th and early 20th century about real-life white and black people. In real life, there are differences between different human genetic groups, but most of them do not correspond to 19th century prejudices.
The problems with essentialism are specific to when they reinforce old racial beliefs, or other false differences between human groups.
For example, in my current campaign, I play up plenty of differences between the races of the Solar Empire - which is a fantasy parallel to the Incan Empire. Here, I don't think the essentialism is much of an issue - because here the essentialism actually works counter to archaic racial beliefs. The older stereotypes would lump all South American natives as being the same race with the same stereotypes -- but in my fantasy game, I'm playing up the differences between the northern cloud forest inhabitants, southern desert inhabitants, and so forth.
Quote from: jhkim on January 12, 2023, 03:05:21 PMStephen, have you read Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_? I felt like the Tines there were a pretty positive portrayal of group minds, which didn't feel at all like slavery. It helped that the groups were relatively small - i.e. pack size of 4 to 12 or so.
I was never able to get all the way through that book, but I do remember the Tines -- they were a very imaginative concept, and I quite liked them once I grasped their nature, but I wouldn't call them an example of the same conflict. The whole point of the Tines was that they
only became a sapient mind and self-aware personality as a group; individual members were no more than animals if separated out alone. So the moral dilemma between individual freedom and collective community didn't exist for them.
ETA: Now I am remembering that it was possible for extant packs to combine into larger packs, up to a certain maximum number, and the resulting group personality would be a new and separate identity built out of the existing ones, but I don't remember the Tines themselves ever treating this as an inherently appealing option -- if I recall correctly, this was basically seen as being as good as dying, as far as loss of identity went.
QuoteThe problems with essentialism are specific to when they reinforce old racial beliefs, or other false differences between human groups.
I'd buy that argument if that was what the people objecting to it were honestly claiming, but if that truly were the case, they shouldn't have any objection to "essentialism" concerning explicitly non-human races with no human analogue, where no extant stereotypes are being reinforced -- or, to go back to the original post of the thread, any objection to "evil" machine/android characters, who could quite logically have been designed explicitly for certain roles and purposes in ways they had no choice about.
Yet people quite clearly do still object even to that kind of background definition, which suggests to me it's the basic concept they find intolerable: character design based on anything other than the
tabula rasa is taking away player agency, and reinforces prejudice in and of itself by demonstrating that stereotypes can sometimes be accurate. Or so goes the argument as I understand it.
Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 12, 2023, 07:57:43 PM
Quote from: jhkim on January 12, 2023, 03:05:21 PMStephen, have you read Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_? I felt like the Tines there were a pretty positive portrayal of group minds, which didn't feel at all like slavery. It helped that the groups were relatively small - i.e. pack size of 4 to 12 or so.
I was never able to get all the way through that book, but I do remember the Tines -- they were a very imaginative concept, and I quite liked them once I grasped their nature, but I wouldn't call them an example of the same conflict. The whole point of the Tines was that they only became a sapient mind and self-aware personality as a group; individual members were no more than animals if separated out alone. So the moral dilemma between individual freedom and collective community didn't exist for them.
ETA: Now I am remembering that it was possible for extant packs to combine into larger packs, up to a certain maximum number, and the resulting group personality would be a new and separate identity built out of the existing ones, but I don't remember the Tines themselves ever treating this as an inherently appealing option -- if I recall correctly, this was basically seen as being as good as dying, as far as loss of identity went.
QuoteThe problems with essentialism are specific to when they reinforce old racial beliefs, or other false differences between human groups.
I'd buy that argument if that was what the people objecting to it were honestly claiming, but if that truly were the case, they shouldn't have any objection to "essentialism" concerning explicitly non-human races with no human analogue, where no extant stereotypes are being reinforced -- or, to go back to the original post of the thread, any objection to "evil" machine/android characters, who could quite logically have been designed explicitly for certain roles and purposes in ways they had no choice about.
Yet people quite clearly do still object even to that kind of background definition, which suggests to me it's the basic concept they find intolerable: character design based on anything other than the tabula rasa is taking away player agency, and reinforces prejudice in and of itself by demonstrating that stereotypes can sometimes be accurate. Or so goes the argument as I understand it.
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ynvuBXX-7v8/maxresdefault.jpg)