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Author Topic: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?  (Read 48089 times)

KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #75 on: January 09, 2018, 09:15:38 pm »

I would feel something if I wasn't told it was a game. If I WAS informed that it was a game, apathy, as always.

You are now choosing whether to care rather than actually caring.  Your ability to choose whether or not to care in a particular context based solely on what you know in the abstract can equally be employed in real-life.

When you look at all genocidal mass-murderers, they do something similar to what you are doing.  Despite the appearance being identical they are able to choose not to care based upon what they *know* in the abstract, in your case that PIG's people don't really exist.  Genocidal murderers make similar abstract distinctions and are able to use it to category bracket particular appearances of murder from others despite their identicality.

If they don't actually exist there's no ethical dilemma-they're not sophonts, and no moral actor aware of that fact is obliged to pretend that they are. You're equating the ability to discern the difference between fiction and reality to justifying mass-murder.

Are you partially culpable for murder if you watch a slasher film?

Agreed.
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angelious

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #76 on: January 10, 2018, 07:47:24 am »

humans feel empathy even for  inanimated objects. but one must always remember that inanimated objects arent really people. the dwarves are just ones and zeroes,they arent real.  as long as you dont get some weird sick kicks out of doing nasty things to them (outside of some lulz and role playing) then there is no real moral ambiguity to playing df..

and if someone does get some sick kics from df  then they have some real underlying problems that have nothing to do with the game itself and has everything to do with the person in question needing some professional help and some happy pills.


like goblin said; killers make all sorts of justifications for killing people and often  use same sort of logic gamers use on why its okay to kill bots inside a game. the difference therefore between a killer and a sane person is the fact that we have the mental capacity to separate fiction from fact aswell as inanimated objects from real sentient beings.
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #77 on: January 10, 2018, 11:50:47 am »

What's preventing me from killing simulated people but being nice to real, living people? Yes, that's kinda racist, but still. Also, your arguments are irrelevant no matter your answer because DF doesn't have a perfect appearance of a human.

Indeed, one of things that turns up every time someone murders some people is all the people who are perplexed that Mr. Murderer was 'such a nice boy' or 'just a normal guy'.  Being a murderer in your thinking is not necessarily going around in a constant state of psychotic rage lashing out at random people.  Mostly it is applying some criteria that excludes the would-be victims from being 'proper people' and an exception is made for them which allows the murderer to actually override the emotional horror of what they are doing.  Towards normal people murderers can be quite kind and loving, which is unfortunate because it allows them to rise to positions of power where they can do more damage.  While the criteria "they are not actually real" may be correct, the mechanics of what is being done is completely identical. 

I never said that the perfect appearance of a human was needed, it is just that this question is an ambiguity in my argument which I eliminated by making a sci-fi future in which the perfectly immersive game exists.  I simply do not claim to know how much 'weight' graphics holds in this whole setup, as against things like setting and interactivity.  Probably dwarf fortress ethical 'potency' as it were is somewhere between a book (no interactivity, no graphics, a setting) and a movie (no interactivity, good graphics, a setting) but it all hinges on exactly how important the various elements are, which may also depend upon the person and culture as well.

The main problem here is that of abstraction.  We do not just kill actual physical people ourselves in their presence, we also kill folks that are remote and we are only aware of as an abstract concept.  The phrase "one man's death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic" is why we cannot simply dismiss media that does not have good enough graphics to literally depict the atrocities that you are committing (this includes stuff like books, pamphlets and so).  In happily killing the appearance of folks because they aren't real, what we are doing is kicking the question upstairs by asking in effect "to determine if a man's death is a tragedy, consult the statistics".

If they don't actually exist there's no ethical dilemma-they're not sophonts, and no moral actor aware of that fact is obliged to pretend that they are. You're equating the ability to discern the difference between fiction and reality to justifying mass-murder.

Are you partially culpable for murder if you watch a slasher film?

Yes, the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality is at the core of it essential to mass-murder.  The more we become adapt at not drawing the obvious conclusions from an fictional image, the more adept we obviously become at not drawing the same conclusions from a real image.

We are not talking about folks watching films (or murderering fictional characters by the way in games) because culpable for anything.  What we are in effect talking about is rather more like the ethics of a situation where I have some kind of sci-fi/fantasy concoction that makes people more like murderers and I decide to put it into the water supply. 
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Pvt. Pirate

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #78 on: January 10, 2018, 12:49:04 pm »

This comicstrip immediately reminded me of this discussion :D
http://www.blastwave-comic.com/index.php?p=comic&nro=79
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KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #79 on: January 10, 2018, 08:41:17 pm »

I will not give up on my standpoint. So, you're comparing me to a mass murderer because I, unlike you, can discern between fiction and reality? And simulated characters are OK to be cruel to because they're inferior to humans in every way. Maybe by your terms, I'm a mass murderer, but I'm a harmless one because I kill simulated characters only.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2018, 08:43:43 pm by KittyTac »
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #80 on: January 11, 2018, 07:02:40 am »

I will not give up on my standpoint. So, you're comparing me to a mass murderer because I, unlike you, can discern between fiction and reality? And simulated characters are OK to be cruel to because they're inferior to humans in every way. Maybe by your terms, I'm a mass murderer, but I'm a harmless one because I kill simulated characters only.

I never said you were a mass-murderer.  :) :)
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jecowa

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #81 on: January 11, 2018, 03:05:59 pm »

This comicstrip immediately reminded me of this discussion :D
http://www.blastwave-comic.com/index.php?p=comic&nro=79

That comic strip reminds me of a bunch of rocks from xkcd.
https://xkcd.com/505/
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Pvt. Pirate

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #82 on: January 12, 2018, 12:49:17 am »

This comicstrip immediately reminded me of this discussion :D
http://www.blastwave-comic.com/index.php?p=comic&nro=79

That comic strip reminds me of a bunch of rocks from xkcd.
https://xkcd.com/505/
thank you for reminding me of this nice comic from xkcd :)
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KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #83 on: January 12, 2018, 01:09:34 am »

This comicstrip immediately reminded me of this discussion :D
http://www.blastwave-comic.com/index.php?p=comic&nro=79

That comic strip reminds me of a bunch of rocks from xkcd.
https://xkcd.com/505/
thank you for reminding me of this nice comic from xkcd :)

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34. (I bet someone did this already).
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IndigoFenix

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #84 on: January 12, 2018, 05:17:49 am »

This is a fun argument that may at some point in the future become relevant, once we create real AI.

That being said, let me pose the following suggestion: The quality of being an entity that experiences existence (for the sake of brevity, this concept will be referred to as "conscious") cannot be tied to any particular degree of complexity.  Otherwise, any particular point of complexity you choose to "draw the line" will be completely arbitrary.  Is an ape conscious?  A human infant?  A dog?  A lizard?  A plant?  A bacterium?  An atom?  All are entities that respond to their environment in some sense, the only difference is the complexity with which they do so.

Therefore, I suggest the following: Everything is conscious.  Consciousness is a fundamental property of reality itself; the degree of an entity's experiential consciousness is reliant on how much information it is capable of storing.  An electron "stores" only a few bits of data - its own energy state - and its responses to input are extremely simple - it can absorb or emits a photon.  A human being is considerably more complex.  But there is no qualitative difference between them.

This suggestion will be rejected, since it flies in the face of certain things we take for granted.  For example, that the killing of conscious entities is wrong.  But the entire idea of right and wrong are non-physical in nature.  These are human concepts.

The reason why we consider some things to be right and others to be wrong is because these beliefs work.  Societies that consider wanton murder of other humans unacceptable outlive those that do not, and so the taboo against murder is nearly universal.  It is risky to uproot traditional morality for the same reason it is risky to perform invasive surgery on someone - these systems evolved over many generations of trial and error as we as a species worked out which beliefs work and which ones don't.  Sometimes the reasons are obvious, other times, less so.  Sometimes a better system may exist, and so societies evolve and refine their views on morality; other times a society may think it is advancing forward when it is in fact a non-viable mutant; history weeds these out as they come.  It is impossible to be certain until after the fact.

Why do most societies consider the murder of a human wrong, while killing animals is typically less looked down on?  It isn't because of any intrinsic quality that makes it "wrong" to kill a human; it is because a human can be reasoned with.  If we both agree not to kill each other, we can work together and build a society instead of fighting.  Therefore societies where people agree not to kill each other are more successful than those which do not.  For the same reasons, it has often been considered acceptable to put people to death who refuse to follow this "agreement".

Of course, humans being creatures of pattern-making and metaphor, it is only logical that we should draw analogy between members of our own society which follows our own laws and foreigners or criminals, or even species that in some way resemble us.  Exactly where we draw the line is, again, arbitrary; it is a quirk of human thought, or perhaps motivated by other, more complex systems - killing criminals, foreigners, or animals can train a person to be less empathetic, which can be detrimental to a society, so perhaps certain societies have "learned" that it is better not to kill.

Back to the ethics of DF and AI in general:

Whether it is wrong to kill a vaguely simulated dwarf, or a complex "real" AI, or hit backspace and delete a letter in a post, has nothing to do with whether or not the destroyed entity is "conscious".  What matters is what are the ramifications of doing so on the society that considers it to be ethical or non-ethical?

Does playing a realistic FPS, or fighting game, or slowly mutilating an elf in Adventure Mode make a person less empathetic?  Will this lack of empathy cause detrimental effects on society?  Or does it serve as catharsis and make people less likely to go out and perform such actions in reality?  I would argue it does both, but at any rate the effects on society seem to be pretty negligible, so for now our society seems to go with [KILL_VIRTUAL:ACCEPTABLE][TORTURE_VIRTUAL:MISGUIDED]

And what about when we make real, practical AI that is on par with ourselves intellectually and (most importantly) doesn't want to be killed (this is an important clarifier; I do not believe a desire to live is intrinsic to life or even intelligence; we simply evolved that way because it allowed our ancestors to survive).   Well in that case, a society that decides that abusing robots is OK is probably less likely to survive than one which grants them equal rights.  So in that case, we will probably decide that destroying such an AI is wrong.

But we aren't there yet, and it certainly doesn't matter for DF, so by all means, kill all the virtual dwarves you like.

KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #85 on: January 12, 2018, 05:38:30 am »

I have [TORTURE_VIRTUAL:ACCEPTABLE] too, so I can torture them.
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Whatsifsowhatsit

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #86 on: January 12, 2018, 09:09:46 am »

Mind you, I have not read the whole discussion, so it's possible I missed important posts in which the points I am going to address have already been addressed... sorry.

As far as we can determine we can think and have free will, as well as feel pain (unless, of course, "Zaphod" is just a bot). I know there are some religious/philosophical schools that claim this is an illusion (at least the free will part), and everything is predetermined and time an illusion. You can then make two choices: assume everything is pre determined, and you can act as despicably as you want, because it's not your fault, or make the opposite decision to assume that you actually do have a free will and (try to) act like a civilized creature. If your assumption is wrong in the first case you *are* a despicable creature worthy of the punishment you receive for your actions, while if you're wrong in the second case you didn't actually have any choice but to behave in a civilized manner.

I think "assume everything is pre determined, and you can act as despicably as you want, because it's not your fault" in particular is a slight mistake here, because the assumption that things are predetermined takes place diegetically, so to speak, that is, in the world itself that is (in this scenario) predetermined. So it is your decision (predetermined though it may be) inside the world to act in this despicable manner. You can only make this kind of statement as an outside observer, or after the fact: I could not have acted otherwise. It doesn't hold up when you make it ahead of time: I won't be able to act otherwise. You're still to make the decision, that is, the acting you insofar as that entity is able to make a 'decision' (depends on when you call it a decision) does. And the behavior following from that decision is a part of the system, and so it does influence things in that sense.

If Toady hasn't programmed them to be sentient, they aren't. It can't be otherwise.

Well, they're clearly not sentient (imo), but I wouldn't say this is quite correct. It's very very easy to get an AI to do something you didn't explicitly program them to do. That's what machine learning is all about. In fact, that's how evolution works: things arise not because they are planned that way, but because circumstances steer them in that direction. That's presumably how intelligence, sentience, and consciousness arose as well.

The amount of navel-gazing in this thread melted my notebook's processor.

Spot of fun, innit.
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KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #87 on: January 12, 2018, 09:17:54 am »

Except DF characters don't use machine learning. They aren't sentient. I can torture them all I want.
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jecowa

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #88 on: January 12, 2018, 10:15:08 am »

Dwarves feel joy and pain. You shouldn't torture them.
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KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #89 on: January 12, 2018, 10:27:12 am »

Dwarves feel joy and pain. You shouldn't torture them.

Their mood is controlled by just 2 numbers. I can torture a few zeroes and ones however I want.
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