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[Tilmar13]

If you read the original post, you would know that I am merely making an observation and it serves to give us the perspective of a god. Or like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.

I thought it was an interesting viewpoint to be able to experience that promotes a form of existential nihilism

[KittyTac]

If you read the original post, you would know that I am merely making an observation and it serves to give us the perspective of a god. Or like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.

I thought it was an interesting viewpoint to be able to experience that promotes a form of existential nihilism

Oh. So you're not arguing that they're alive? Then I'll back out. Now lock the thread before GoblinCookie starts spouting nonsense like a garden sprinkler.

[Fleeting Frames]

My point was that regardless whether a dwarf is more or less complex than an insect, how much I care is at least partly determined by the amount of attention and care I give to the blighters. Wasps may get more attention than many dwarves and have some fairly fascinating behaviours, but I give them negative care.

I see it elsewhere, too; a legendary armorsmith is no more complex than a peasant, but a typically a player tries to save first over second.

I'm not a pure selfish utilitarian, but I do have an ego and potential for corruption. As such, I recognize any moral-based decision that actually affects me - even if only through what I think i.e. moral repricussions - is going to be bent at an angle towards whether it benefits me and mine.

PS: One probably shouldn't snipe at other posters not present in thread, or ask the thread of the person you're quoting to be locked. Might produce ill will, those.


@Tilmar13: I do consider myself a creator of (DF) worlds, yes.

Leaving aside the technical difficulties, it does present a certain kind of chaos god perspective:

I aim to produce life and unlife - so that I may then order it snuffed out. (Snuff fortress?)
I aim to shepherd dwarves through life, better faster stronger smarter - into danger, and a preplanned tomb of rememberance.
I draw to estabilish calm and prosperity - then throw down player fort in a splash that evokes chaos and decimation.
The greater the variety, the greater the mounds of bone.

Overall, the mightier the high, the deeper the fall.

At the end, pull a lever (and cavein it all).

Thus is my benevolence.

[KittyTac]

I usually play as a god of carnage of mayhem. Using OP creatures in adv mode to destroy a pocket world's population.

[IndigoFenix]

I think that, at a bare minimum, for something to have what we would call "experiences" it must possess some form of memory of those experiences.  The purpose of memory, from a biological standpoint, is to learn from earlier experiences and extrapolate from them to modify behaviors.

By that account, in order to have an experience of pain, the organism (or program) in question must take measures to avoid the same experiences in the future.  It is not especially difficult to write a simple neural network to respond to noxious stimuli in a way that encourages avoidance of those stimuli in the future (although it would be rather CPU-intensive to run thousands of them in a single simulation).  Our own experience of pain is essentially the same concept, just more complex - we remember pain in order to avoid it in the future.

DF creatures do not have this quality though.  Every event has completely hard-coded responses and there is no true memory involved that stores the pattern of its occurrence, so no effort is made to avoid the same stimuli in the future.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it is right or wrong to abuse virtual dwarves, or neural network AIs for that matter.  To answer this we would need to answer the question of why (or if) it is wrong to abuse humans, or dogs, or cows, or insects, or plants - a question rarely addressed in these topics.  I think a lot of people just assume certain things are right and wrong and rarely give thought to the why, because questioning these assumptions can be dangerous (although, depending on one's environment, perhaps not as dangerous as not questioning them).

[GoblinCookie]

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.

You are defining sentience as simply a set of behaviors.  But actual consciousness is not needed to explain any of those behaviors, so according to Occam's Razor you are eliminated as a redundant entity, since everything you do can be explained simply a result of chance and contingency.  We don't need the mind, we don't need 'awareness', we don't need 'choice', we don't need to *ever* ascribe consciousness to anything, since everything that anything does is explainable as a result of cause-and-effect and if that does not work we can use chance.

If you read the original post, you would know that I am merely making an observation and it serves to give us the perspective of a god. Or like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.

I thought it was an interesting viewpoint to be able to experience that promotes a form of existential nihilism

Oh. So you're not arguing that they're alive? Then I'll back out. Now lock the thread before GoblinCookie starts spouting nonsense like a garden sprinkler.

Well your the one arguing against your own existence while not realizing that is what you are doing.

[KittyTac]

You sound like you do not believe in free will. I also don't.

[Fleeting Frames]

@IndigoFenix: Hm. Actually, you've got me wondering: If a dwarf goes through traumatizing events and changes from brave, reckless and angry dorf to fearful and anxious one, will they start running away from combat in fear where they used to engage with vengeance?

@GoblinCookie: Only if you presume you are consiciousness could you thus be theoretically eliminated in that premise. From outside perspective, I'm no different than Chinese room which outputs into this textbox here - but if this output is me, doing the switcheroo doesn't get rid of me at all.

That said, good demonstration of failure to account for drug-fueled artists of the imagination: Ability to be creative, no ability to verify they're being creative.

[KittyTac]

@IndigoFenix: Hm. Actually, you've got me wondering: If a dwarf goes through traumatizing events and changes from brave, reckless and angry dorf to fearful and anxious one, will they start running away from combat in fear where they used to engage with vengeance?

That's hardcoded, though.

[Fleeting Frames]

Yes, but some still run while others engage.

In addition, I know I've read smart cavern critters can have their own population behaviour depend on their experiences in worldgen as well as in-fort history - there's the tactic of killing some troglodytes, then having rest escape off-map to have them fearful (or if they kill yours, aggressive).

Haven't tested, though, so not certain of its veracity.

[KittyTac]

Yes, but some still run while others engage.

In addition, I know I've read smart cavern critters can have their own population behaviour depend on their experiences in worldgen as well as in-fort history - there's the tactic of killing some troglodytes, then having rest escape off-map to have them fearful (or if they kill yours, aggressive).

Haven't tested, though, so not certain of its veracity.

The learning and personality change itself is hardcoded.

[Fleeting Frames]

I think it being hardcoded only matters if I want to mod it?

[KittyTac]

I think it being hardcoded only matters if I want to mod it?

They can't actually learn anything.

[Tilmar13]

Aren't we also biologically "hardcoded" to seek out pleasurable experiences and avoid negative ones? We all have our own levels of resiliency, anxiety, propensity for anger, etc. Now that the dwarves can respond to negative events through personality shifts (though often nonsensical) they are becoming more lifelike. While still being far from anything that could be considered a "human" AI or passing the Turing Test, it's a pretty dang good simulation considering that no game (that I know of) has ever run anything at this level of detail before. It's amazing what Toady has been able to do. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes !FUN! finds you and sometimes you have to make your own. BUT STILL!!! That's kinda how life works, too. I think Dwarf Fortress is a very interesting reflection on our own reality. Everyone is stupid and we all die in the end.

[Schmaven]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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

That is an interesting perspective on it.  I've gotten some philosophical insights about life through my experiences playing Dwarf Fortress.  It seems like you have too!  Though it is possible to look at everything as like a book to learn from - some experiences seem more rich in potential than others.  But that potential also depends of what each person does not know, more so than the experience itself.  The relative randomness and vast array of challenges to try keep Dwarf Fortress really interesting for me.

I have on some level compared my worth to society as a single Dwarf in the Fortress, and that put things into a more realistic perspective.  My own personal wishes really aren't that important in the grand scheme of things, so I can relax about them.

Given the previous posts, I plead the 5th on matters concerning consciousness and creation.