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.