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Author Topic: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?  (Read 48101 times)

Egan_BW

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #210 on: January 29, 2018, 03:37:09 am »

"No no, they're not cool at all."
*Proceeds to describe how cool they are*

:P
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KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #211 on: January 29, 2018, 09:27:48 pm »

I mean, they're really powerful. They're just not that interesting from a... whatever the hell my standpoint is, standpoint.

You probably meant "the neural networks we have don't have the potential for sentience".
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Paxiecrunchle

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #212 on: January 30, 2018, 09:11:47 am »

Oh boy, posting to watch where this flustercluck flies.

Xyon

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #213 on: February 05, 2018, 07:49:32 am »

Quite a lot of discussion going on right now, when a simple "yes, playing dwarf fortress is ethical" would have answered the OP.
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strainer

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #214 on: February 05, 2018, 09:29:12 am »

A cool mathematician gives a little talk here about his position that data can never truly represent reality.

If numbers can represent reality in the respects which are important to result in conciousness, then the "simulation hypotheisis" can be more than pop-science cool aid - and peoples actual conciousness will be measurable in units, similar to 'heat'. Dwarves will have a relatively tiny quantity of it, but none of it will be of any import other than how your individual processes react to it. This idea that the things we understand as computers can be expected to generate sentience, has always been absurd.
« Last Edit: February 05, 2018, 05:08:48 pm by strainer »
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SmileyMan

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #215 on: February 06, 2018, 08:39:28 am »

And so it went, along that strange assumption.
For a scientific debate, there was an awful lot of bad logic going on (or in the report at least):

"But the argument strikes Tegmark as flawed. For one, he asked, what would prevent an infinite chain of universes each simulating another below it?"

Nothing, but that doesn't preclude a finite chain either. Just because I had a father and a grandfather, it doesn't mean that history is infinite.
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In a fat-fingered moment while setting up another military squad I accidentally created a captain of the guard rather than a militia captain.  His squad of near-legendary hammerdwarves equipped with high quality silver hammers then took it upon themselves to dispense justice to all the mandate breakers in the fortress.  It was quite messy.

Reelya

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #216 on: February 06, 2018, 08:48:38 am »

A cool mathematician gives a little talk here about his position that data can never truly represent reality.

I'm not really sold on this. Two objections come to mind:

1) First, the "can all this really be represented by numbers?" argument is basically the "argument from incredulity", and has an in-built emotional appeal. It's also nearly identical to a classic argument about why "souls" exists: "are you really just physical matter or is there something more that mere matter?" is basically the same as saying "numbers cannot represent the ineffable nature of consciousness". "Mere matter" in one case, "mere numbers" in the other case. In both cases there's an emotional value judgement about what "mere" physical matter or "mere" numbers can do.

2) Second, his argument is that two numbers cannot truly represent a vector, since it would be ambiguous. However, if you specify six numbers instead of two, then you can fully represent a 2D vector along with the coordinate system that it's embedded in. So, that example is misleading about "what numbers can't do" because he specified a situation where merely omitting some of the salient numbers caused an ambiguity. So that example fails to be convincing. He then says "numbers cannot represent this, so how can they represent a human being" which is back to the "argument from incredulity" and appeal to emotion, along with being a flawed scenario in itself. In fact, 6 numbers can represent any 2D vector in a coordinate-agnostic format, but there are in fact an infinite number of possible representations of the same vector. That makes numbers more expressive, not less expressive: in other words, the same set of numbers can carry multiple levels of context along with them, which means you have explicit meaning and implicit meaning, an infinite variety of ways to convey the same information with numbers, but each way of saying it carries different meta-knowledge about contextualization, that you can choose to decode or ignore.
« Last Edit: February 06, 2018, 08:54:34 am by Reelya »
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SmileyMan

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #217 on: February 06, 2018, 08:56:53 am »

Even irrational and transcendent numbers can be represented by their properties. For instance it's impossible to write down π, but that doesn't mean I can't do accurate calculations with it
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In a fat-fingered moment while setting up another military squad I accidentally created a captain of the guard rather than a militia captain.  His squad of near-legendary hammerdwarves equipped with high quality silver hammers then took it upon themselves to dispense justice to all the mandate breakers in the fortress.  It was quite messy.

MCreeper

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #218 on: February 06, 2018, 10:18:41 am »

This thread moved from yet another troll topic from professional trolls to arguing about existence of humanity and possibility of creating multiple Matrixes inside each other. It's still for the best.  :P
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Pvt. Pirate

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #219 on: May 19, 2018, 09:43:02 am »

honestly i can't think why it should be unethical.
because if it were, then you should start a big campaign forbidding children to phantasize any creatures, because those creatures would cease to exist once they stop thinking of them.
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"dwarves are by definition alcohol powered parasitic beards, which will cling to small caveadapt humanoids." (Chaia)

KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #220 on: May 19, 2018, 09:45:43 am »

Do not revive the thread. Let it rot. :P
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Pvt. Pirate

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #221 on: May 19, 2018, 09:52:22 am »

Do not revive the thread. Let it rot. :P
well, it was too tempting, because i cannot delete it from my list of updated topics...
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"dwarves are by definition alcohol powered parasitic beards, which will cling to small caveadapt humanoids." (Chaia)

KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #222 on: May 19, 2018, 10:09:15 am »

Do not revive the thread. Let it rot. :P
well, it was too tempting, because i cannot delete it from my list of updated topics...
Let it bury itself until GoblinCookie notices.
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #223 on: May 19, 2018, 10:22:28 am »

Let it bury itself until GoblinCookie notices.

Here is me noticing this little exercise in thread necromancy.....  :)
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KittyTac

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Re: Is playing dwarf fortress ethical?
« Reply #224 on: May 19, 2018, 11:00:25 am »

You noticed. ;D Don't fully resuscitate it, though.
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