Post by silicondream on Mar 11, 2024 16:57:12 GMT
Oh, absolutely. I'm not claiming to have a grand unified theory of psychology or anything! But I'm a functionalist and a physicalist myself, so I think that a real-world mind is basically a set of activities conducted by a physical system. Any system that demonstrates typical behavior for a mind, such as self-conscious speech or actions, actually has one. This would include Searle's Chinese Room.
Kat's robot bodies are probably an extension of her protein crystal growth experiments and while they provide an end result that's comparable to humans they must be radically different in chemical structure,
Not that different, if they use proteins in the first place. The most obvious difference is that Robot's prototype arm had no rigid bones, but of course lots of organic critters don't either.
Did we ever find out whether "New People food" is substantially different from human food?
Some components aren't grown but manufactured
True, though as far as we know they're all capable of further growth once assembled. Robot didn't need a replacement bone for his broken finger, for instance.
Additionally they'd lack the plethora of micro-organisms that humans host.
Unless Kat built them their own symbiotic nano-flora. In her spare time.
I think it's an intellectually defensible position to claim that organic bodies are necessary for having a soul in the Gunnerverse but in order to hold it with consistency I also think one would have to adopt some other views that redefine stuff in the comic...
I just meant "organic bodies" as opposed to inorganic yet material bodies, such as the robots' and golems'. Certainly, there are also ensouled beings of pure ether like the ghosts.
The way I see it, organic nervous systems are uniquely capable of exchanging information with the ether, which can then store and process that information on its own. Ensouled beings are either 1) organic critters who will upload their minds into the ether upon death, 2) the already-uploaded minds of said dead critters, or 3) living concepts/stories that spawned from those dead minds when they were broken down and consumed by the ether. Or some combination of these.
Golem hearts and robot CPUs can't communicate with the ether in the same way. In fact, I'm not sure there are any inorganic objects that can. Elementals are traditionally "made" of inorganic elements, but Annie's flame obviously isn't made of real fire. I think GC elementals may all be etheric intelligences that temporarily animate a mass of nonliving material, as Renard does with the wolf toy. They don't actually use that material to think, which is why the Ashray didn't much care whether it was splattered, sliced in half or vaporized.
Beings that have organic structures too simple to support human-like behavior yet behave like humans, like the talking octopus or Zeta's spooders, would have to be frauds dependent on the ether or another entity for their appearance of personhood.
I dunno about "frauds;" I'd just say their minds are distributed over both organic nervous tissue and the ether. They don't do all their thinking with their meat brains, just some of it. Kind of the same way Lindsey's brain extends into another dimension.
I think they fell in love for the same reason they are fascinated by the portrait of Jeanne... because they were modeled on Diego.
Sure, but Diego was presumably a human with a subjective viewpoint, and I would expect robots with sufficiently similar behavior to have the relevant mental capacities. Also, some of them seem to have much healthier romantic styles than Diego. Arthur with Juliette, for instance, or Robot with Shadow.
The first golem to be revived certainly made it sound like their own choice. His discussion of them is filled with intentional and emotive language: "chose," "intended," "wished," "yearned", "vexed," "love," "enjoyment." He refers to "our minds." And by describing the bullfight as a "puppet show, nothing more", the revenant implies that he and his colleagues were not mere puppets when alive. They had subjectivity and free will like the rest of us—or at least they behaved like they did, and external behavior's all we ever really have to go on.
As for following Diego's orders: certainly the golems were built to love and be loyal to him, but nothing in the revenant's story suggests that Diego actually scripted their behavior. In fact, the revenant doesn't even mention Diego's posthumous wishes, let alone say that the golems were following them. Their attempts to replicate their own design, their creation of the robots, their building of the tomb and their mass deactivation are all described purely as what they wanted to do. Likewise, the golems don't seem to follow built-in orders when working with another Creator like Kat; one of them chose to die again, but the others chose (under different circumstances) to live and work with her.
Diego may have been arrogant, but I don't think he was lying when he called the golems his "children." Indeed, he probably didn't even instruct them to serve the Court, since there is no official record or popular memory of their existence. He designed and instructed the golems to share his values, then allowed them to make their own choices. They chose to create a descendant species to serve other humans as they had served Diego and Jeanne, and then followed their human "parents" into death.
*We've seen a bunch of entities that did not appear to have physical bodies but the best example is probably Hetty. Hetty's real form did not appear to leave matter behind when it was destroyed.
Well, Hetty's closest equivalent appears to be Renard, so like Renard she may have had a physical body that she abandoned before being summoned into the doll. Her etheric appearance certainly suggests that she was once some sort of shrimpy critter.
**There is an example of that in the comic in Paz, as it was formsprung that it was Paz's mind that was enabling the animals to speak.
Enabling them to understand Spanish and read her thoughts, specifically. But they also talk to her with their own native languages, and there are "non-sentient" animals such as the fish Ysengrin caught, as well as animals Paz can't talk to such as ants and spiders. (The "non-sentient" category and the "Paz can't talk to" category may or may not be identical.) So I don't think the animals she talks to have "fraudulent" minds. Paz just provides the translation skills; they already have the knowledge, desires and emotions.