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Post by hp on May 31, 2019 23:01:08 GMT
It's not that contracts of ownership exist because Saslamel says so, it's that Saslemel exists because humans have imagined the concept of ownership and associated it with him. It makes sense. If humans shape the ether, bourgeoisie cultural hegemony (and the narratives they push into society to legitimize their rule, such as redefining any human exchange as "capitalism", treating private property as an expression of human nature and the foundation of human endeavors, etc) might be able to make people shape ether into an ahistorical divinization of the historically-localized concept of private property.
Time for some ethereal communism with Kat as Ethereal Lenin.
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jun 1, 2019 0:39:03 GMT
To make things a little more complicated, Saslamel may have existed as a god or similar being who was responsible for rules or justice or something but was forgotten over time, and morphed into the arbitrator/migrated to the bureaucracy later... like an amphibian moving from a tidal pool that was drying up to a larger lake. There was probably a loss of status in the move, or at least relative status; before he may have been a whale in a bathtub but now he's a bureaucrat and at least sometimes a field agent.
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Post by jda on Jun 1, 2019 2:57:32 GMT
These "ownership" rules bring up a lot of interesting stuff (arrow, Rye, Jones, my laser pointer), but nothing more fascinating than the AI-ownership question. Asimov has a lot to say to that, especially on the Bicentennial Man, for example, Sure, the trick lies, then, in first defining the CPU_and_else as a mind, but you see the point... |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Jun 1, 2019 9:18:40 GMT
Sure, the trick lies, then, in first defining the CPU_and_else as a mind, but you see the point... I think the Gunnerverse can completely bypass the whole "is a mind any different from a very advanced detector" question. As long as its close enough that people can't tell the difference then they'll believe Art has a mind, interact with him like he has a mind, and if he has enough support in that department then thanks to the ether he'll have a mind even if it has to be retcon'd, and then there'll be a path blazed for similar beings that follow... But an official stamp of approval from an etheric bureaucracy could cut some time off the process, probably a lot of time. |
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Post by DonDueed on Jun 1, 2019 12:31:16 GMT
Sure, the trick lies, then, in first defining the CPU_and_else as a mind, but you see the point... I think the Gunnerverse can completely bypass the whole "is a mind any different from a very advanced detector" question. As long as its close enough that people can't tell the difference then they'll believe Art has a mind, interact with him like he has a mind, and if he has enough support in that department then thanks to the ether he'll have a mind even if it has to be retcon'd, and then there'll be a path blazed for similar beings that follow... But an official stamp of approval from an etheric bureaucracy could cut some time off the process, probably a lot of time. So basically, give the Turing test the force of law? |
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