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[Tilmar13]

I looked at my little dwarven buddies' profiles, and it struck me. They are individuals. Unique creations with independent motivations and dreams and fears that are united by the common threads of drink and industry. And so are we. If supposedly we are Armok, creating and destroying worlds and lives for fun, then what if all of us have an Armok looking down on us? If we look at the dwarves as silly puppets designed for our entertainment, then how does God (or whatever you wanna call him/her/it) look at us?? Our dwarves could be fully sentient and we'd have no way of knowing because we see them as stupid randomly-generated toys...

You could argue that God does view us the same way and that he cares about us as much as we care about the dwarves. Not much.
You could also think I'm reading too much into this and that it's just a game.

But...

When you stop to think that we are the Creators of each of our worlds, it makes you wonder how similar the Creator of our world is to us. Does it have similar motivations? Does it eat and drink and sleep and age and die? The mortal cannot comprehend the eternal, but in the eyes of the dwarves we ARE eternal, and thus able to see the world through the eyes of God. Opens up new philosophical viewpoints.

Is our god the only god? Are there more like Him each with their own worlds and projects?
Is "divine inspiration" simply God hitting b-s?
This would mean Heaven is a separate dimension that we can't comprehend as existing, yet when our dwarves die, where do they go? Their bodies are left behind, and their "souls" get recycled back into the memory. Is that all that waits for us?
Are all the amazing things that happened throughout human history stored in the Creator's legend browser, never to be explored?
Does anything we do matter? Or are we just stupid little dwarves running around making foolish demands and mandates?

Just a thought

[Halnoth]

Toady has done an amazing job with the personality rewrite if just looking at one of your dwarves personalities caused you to question existence.

[KittyTac]

No. We have a way of knowing (source code). Analysis of the source shows that they are not actually sentient. They're the same dumb machines that they were before the rewrite. Also, I'm an atheist. We could be an extremely complex simulation, but said simulation would need to be literally trillions of times more complex than DF.

They're about as intelligent as bacteria, really. So slaughter without remorse. You kill millions of bacteria with each step.

[GoblinCookie]

I looked at my little dwarven buddies' profiles, and it struck me. They are individuals. Unique creations with independent motivations and dreams and fears that are united by the common threads of drink and industry. And so are we. If supposedly we are Armok, creating and destroying worlds and lives for fun, then what if all of us have an Armok looking down on us? If we look at the dwarves as silly puppets designed for our entertainment, then how does God (or whatever you wanna call him/her/it) look at us?? Our dwarves could be fully sentient and we'd have no way of knowing because we see them as stupid randomly-generated toys...

The chair you are sitting on could also be sentient.  There really isn't any means to detect sentience, since it is not something that exists as part of the observable material universe.

No. We have a way of knowing (source code). Analysis of the source shows that they are not actually sentient. They're the same dumb machines that they were before the rewrite. Also, I'm an atheist. We could be an extremely complex simulation, but said simulation would need to be literally trillions of times more complex than DF.

They're about as intelligent as bacteria, really. So slaughter without remorse. You kill millions of bacteria with each step.

The 'source code' needed to make sentience is actually not known.  Bacteria could well be sentient and intelligence has nothing to do with sentience necessarily. 

[KittyTac]

I looked at my little dwarven buddies' profiles, and it struck me. They are individuals. Unique creations with independent motivations and dreams and fears that are united by the common threads of drink and industry. And so are we. If supposedly we are Armok, creating and destroying worlds and lives for fun, then what if all of us have an Armok looking down on us? If we look at the dwarves as silly puppets designed for our entertainment, then how does God (or whatever you wanna call him/her/it) look at us?? Our dwarves could be fully sentient and we'd have no way of knowing because we see them as stupid randomly-generated toys...

The chair you are sitting on could also be sentient.  There really isn't any means to detect sentience, since it is not something that exists as part of the observable material universe.

No. We have a way of knowing (source code). Analysis of the source shows that they are not actually sentient. They're the same dumb machines that they were before the rewrite. Also, I'm an atheist. We could be an extremely complex simulation, but said simulation would need to be literally trillions of times more complex than DF.

They're about as intelligent as bacteria, really. So slaughter without remorse. You kill millions of bacteria with each step.

The 'source code' needed to make sentience is actually not known.  Bacteria could well be sentient and intelligence has nothing to do with sentience necessarily.

We have no evidence of it. So there's no point in believing that claim if it would inconvenience you.

Dwarves are not alive. They're less intelligent than bacteria and can be killed freely. As a materialist, I define "sentience" as the ability to be creative with overall human or higher-level intelligence, nothing to do with free will. DF dwarves have neither.

[Tilmar13]

The point I was trying to make was that compared to a higher power (if one exists), we could be simple programs. They could be saying of us "it's just a simulation game, look at the dumb humans" the same way we say that of the dwarves. The primary differences "in my mind" are just terms of scale. We have no way of knowing that we aren't just a simulation being run by a bunch of aliens.

[KittyTac]

The point I was trying to make was that compared to a higher power (if one exists), we could be simple programs. They could be saying of us "it's just a simulation game, look at the dumb humans" the same way we say that of the dwarves. The primary differences "in my mind" are just terms of scale. We have no way of knowing that we aren't just a simulation being run by a bunch of aliens.

That's what I said. We could be a simulation, but that simulation would be billions or trillions of times more complex than DF. Dwarves can be abused without repercussions.

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, some of them may go 'insane' or 'die', if you will. The repricussions are all contained in the savefile, but they are there.

[KittyTac]

Well, some of them may go 'insane' or 'die', if you will. The repricussions are all contained in the savefile, but they are there.

I meant IRL moral repercussions.

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, some might be upset if you tell them what you've been doing with DF cats or children.

What, do you mean like self-conscience repricussions? Do you still have one of those?

[KittyTac]

Well, some might be upset if you tell them what you've been doing with DF cats or children.

What, do you mean like self-conscience repricussions? Do you still have one of those?

Yes. Yes I do. Those who care about DF children are people who think that they are alive.

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, they would have been right once....But I clearly jest.

More seriously, I follow the viewpoint of Tilmar13 - after all, our valuation depends on relative complexity. Dog is more valuable than a wasp, which is more valuable than a Ladybug, which is more valuable than a dwarf....

Wait, no, for me it's more like Dog>dwarf≃ladybug>wasp. Clearly I don't follow it.

[KittyTac]

Dwarves are less complex than insects.

[Tilmar13]

From our perspective they are less than insects. In the same way that the dwarves' intelligence is far beneath ours to the point that we do not consider them sentient, our intelligence would be far below the being(s) that may or may not be playing with us the way we play with the dwarves.

I would argue a dwarf is more complex than a microorganism or insect. They eat, drink, sleep, develop, influence their world around them, reproduce etc. but that isn't the point.

We're sitting here saying the dwarves are unintelligent and that they don't matter, while it's entirely possible we are all inside a grand simulation and there are a bunch of aliens saying that we aren't sentient either. Like at the end of the Men in Black movies when they zoom out.

[KittyTac]

From our perspective they are less than insects. In the same way that the dwarves' intelligence is far beneath ours to the point that we do not consider them sentient, our intelligence would be far below the being(s) that may or may not be playing with us the way we play with the dwarves.

I would argue a dwarf is more complex than a microorganism or insect. They eat, drink, sleep, develop, influence their world around them, reproduce etc. but that isn't the point.

We're sitting here saying the dwarves are unintelligent and that they don't matter, while it's entirely possible we are all inside a grand simulation and there are a bunch of aliens saying that we aren't sentient either. Like at the end of the Men in Black movies when they zoom out.

Us being a simulation does not matter. It does NOT affect our world in any sense. Why should we care about that? It doesn't make sense to care.

Their processes and functions are much less complex than even the simplest bacteria. Their mood is a few variables. Their hunger is a single variable. They cannot learn to do new things, they can only improve their ability to produce things quicker.

What are you even arguing for with your simulation hypothesis? That we should treat dwarves as living beings because higher powers might treat us as nonliving machines? They're definitely NOT alive by our definition of the word. Keyword: "our". That's the only thing that matters in our treatment of them.