Shandepared wrote...
Bill569 wrote...
What I am trying to prove is that we are saying we cannot describe the human brain because it is too complicated. Who says the geth are simple?
I never said the geth were simple, just that you could write them out on (a lot) of paper. After all, we somehow have programs that can hack them even if for a short time just as they do any other non-geth program.
You can write down human DNA on paper, but that won't give you the blue-prints to a person's mind. For geth though if you wrote down all of Legion's programs on (lots and lots and lots) of paper you'd have the entire "organism" right there and if you started giving it inputs and manually running the program would it still be "alive"?
Without jumping too far into the debate myself, I'd say yes, because everyone responds to stimuli in particular (and oft predictable) ways. Conditioning is one of the aspects that give people an identifiable personality: they consistently respond to things in predictable ways, at which point we recognize those reflexes and act accordingly. Even when you change your mind on something, it's because of more or
less hardwired trends in your character, some facet that wasn't given
full time to express the first time around in the same way as rushing
through a checklist and skipping items. That the responses can be incredibly complex and varied across groups of individuals doesn't change that, barring serious injury, people always act and decide according to patterns (what we collectively refer to as personality, moral code, and so on.). It's how psychological profiling goes.
To take an example: you, Shand, are defaultly aggressive, and respond to collective grouping delimmas from an approach that your grouping's interests takes precedence over all others, whereas most people are inclined to more egaltarian beliefs of relations between groupings. (IE, is humanitymore important than other races? You would say yes, they would say no. Both are predictable.) However, if the first harsh tone is tolerated or even ignorred, you often respond in more civil tones, providing exposition on your ideas giving an understandable rational to conclusions that others often do not come to, and show noticable patience in trying to get your meaning across. However, if in the course of the discourse you are personally attacked or insulted, you immediately return in kind and lose said patience.
Shand, you are predictable. If you are stimulated, you respond in a particular fashion. If one studied you enough, had access to your thoughts, values, opinions, they could figure how you would respond to a certain situation. They could 'solve' you. But does this mean you are not alive?
The Geth programs you describe are much the same. If you give them data, they'll react in generally predictable ways. What separates them from simple machine, and puts them closer to what we consider sentience, is that once they come together in number, they don't act the same. Geth with the same inputs come out with different outputs, and difference of opinion is one of the important parts of 'free' thinking. Simple machines, like calculators, come out with the same response regardless of which one you put it in. The Geth don't.
I'll stop there, and probably consider myself done. One reply I suspect you're likely to make is the point that you haven't argued that the Geth aren't independent, that they lack individuality, only that they are too predictable to be considered sentient. To which I will only reply what I more or less said above: I consider humans predictable. The math may be complex, and it's virtually impossible to get the proper variables from someone (all their opinions relatively weighted, their fears/desires they don't want to share, even the elements of personality below conscious thought and conceptualization), but you can still model humans to a point that they are as predictable as almost machine. Weaknesses in the model come from a lacking of data about the target, not that it's impossible to understand.
Part of this conviction is from personal history, which of course you could not share. My family has problem with hormones, for example: nothing exotic, but imbalances compared to the normal population, and I have experienced quite a swing of states, though as I grew older I was able to mitigate them. But it taught me that humans are 'hackable': simply affecting their biochemistry (applied math, really) can do it. It's why drugs are popular, and dangerous. If you control someone's hormonal/chemical balance, you can control how they think. In reverse, if you know someone's chemical balance, you can understand how they think.
I am no longer religious. I don't believe in a literal soul that makes us alive by dictating our thoughts. I look at bodies, and I see the result of countless chemical reactions, and I look at brains and I think 'that's impressive, but it's still individual pieces of non-sentient pieces in action.'
Or, the XKCD summation,Every mind is a gestalt of non-sentient components, and those actions are predictable.
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