Damned browser ate my reply and I can't find the links I used now! Bah humbug!Turin_4 wrote...
Zan51,
You're telling me that children are incapable of recognizing that they are individuals in any sense? I just want to be clear here. That's the argument you're going with? Not every child can conceive of the thing in such 'esoteric' terms as 'soul' (and honestly, it's really not an esoteric question at all, it's fundamental to questions of humanity, we're all very frequently very concerned with it), but even small children are very much aware of themselves as individuals. That's why they're capable of such selfishness. In spite of whatever pre-conceived notions you'd like about the Geth, children are still somewhere along the lines of sentience, I'm afraid.
Yes, but what I am talking about is the known developmental stages that children go through, Until somewhere between roughly 9-12 they have no real concept of the "self" as distinctr from someone else. They assume because they know something, all their mates do too. Getting to the point where they understand that everyone is unique is a physical development of the brain.
When I trained as a teacher in my native Scotland, we studied Piaget's work in Child Development and Psychology back in the 1970's.
Piaget's particular insight was the role of maturation (simply growing up) in children's increasing capacity to understand their world: they cannot undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically mature enough to do so. His research has spawned a great deal more, much of which has undermined the detail of his own, but like many other original investigators, his importance comes from his overall vision.
The fourth, or formal operations, stage begins in early adolescence (age 11 or 12) with the development of the ability to think logically about abstractions, including speculations about what might happen in the future. Adolescents are capable of formulating and testing hypotheses, understanding causality, and dealing with abstract concepts like probability, ratio, proportion, and analogies. They become able to reason scientifically and speculate about philosophical issues. Abstract concepts and moral values become as important as concrete objects.
http://www.healthofc...evelopment.html good rundown on what I am talking about
During early childhood, children's self-concepts are less differentiated and are centered on concrete characteristics, such as physical attributes, possessions, and skills. During middle childhood, the self-concept becomes more integrated and differentiated as the child engages in social comparison and more clearly perceives the self as consisting of internal, psychological characteristics. Throughout later childhood and adolescence, the self-concept becomes more abstract, complex, and hierarchically organized into cognitive mental representations or self-schemas, which direct the processing of self-relevant information.
http://social.jrank....l#ixzz1219lvehIIt is also known some children become adults and never develop this sophisticated way of thinking, yes.
And they are capable of some level of self-determination, just not full self-determination. We would recoil in horror from the idea that a parent had as much sovereignty over a child as you appear to be suggesting the Quarians have over the Geth. The Geth apparently lacked self-determination to the point where the Quarians could simply exterminate them, Zan51.
No offense but you are being incredibly niave. Yes I had total control over my son as he grew up, but I let it go gradually so he could become his own person. Children need guidance to take their place in the world, to learn the sophiosticated way we interact as adults, and the unspoken rules that run a society in which we can argue a popint yet respect other opinions that differ from ours. I started treating him like a young adult at 12, knocking on his room door and generaly showing him resopect while at the same time, expecting the same level of consideration from him. Kids don't absorb these things by osmosis, good parents actually take time to teach them. I must have done OK as he's now happily married.You're guessing that only one or two Geth had asked those questions. In fact, it's very unlikely that only one or two had asked those questions, else how did the Geth achieve their rebellion with such incredible success? But let's see if I understand you correctly: now you're saying the Geth enslaved other Geth, but not the Quarians, oh no. Isn't that a lovely workaround? It doesn't even make a lick of sense if you understand how the Geth work. The Geth network and share intelligence, one Geth platform doesn't control all the others. There is not just 'one or two' Geth. If one or two Geth platforms are asking those questions-lots of Geth are asking those questions. Tens of thousands, millions, all over the planet and Quarian stations.
Nope. I am quoting what Tali tells us in game. Please check that for yourself as we have no other source of info on the Geth but what BW give us in the game.
Tali is as truthful a character as she can be. She doesn't lie so we have to take it on face value what she says about only one or two Geth asking questions, then the Quarian dealing with them panicking, is true. It is quite possible that then there were one or two platforms more complex than the others - you are not going to get say a car spaint spraying robot more intelligent than an AI that say looks after the sick in a hospital. So my point stands that only one or two were capable of that abstract thought complexity (comparing ti to child mental maturation) and they decided to retalliate when the Quiarians panicked and tried to turn them off. Note - turn them off, not attack them.
So it is obvious that these one or two then updated all Geth to attack, whether they understood why or not, whther they agreed or not they obeyed. (thus my enslaving them comment)
I'm only criticizing the term because you're objecting to the term 'slave'. Slave is equally accurate and equally emotion laden as 'machine', just in the other direction.
Slave only applies if the Quarians KNOWINGLY kept the Geth in work after knowing they were sentient. They clearly did not, they tried to turn them off. So you cannot fairly level the crime of slavery against the Quarians unlees you are willing to do the same for the Geth who called on them all to attack the Quarians.Well, do we know what a soul is? No. Wondering what one is is a sign of sentience but not - magically - a sign of self-determination, somehow. Unless you're an adult human being, of course. You doubt the neanderthals worried about souls?Absolutely they did worry about souls, if ritualized burial is any indicator.
Eh, sorry but here is what I uncovered on Neanderthals and burials. Nothing is yet cut and dried on their burials never mind concept of an afterlife.
http://www.britarch....a66/feat1.shtml British Archeology mag
"It was originally thought that Neanderthals practised cannibalism at Krapina, but recent analyses have demonstrated that the cut marks and 'scrape' marks were created instead by the defleshing of the dead - the marks exactly match those on defleshed bones known from the ethnographic record, rather than on bones butchered for meat. This defleshing took place possibly after a period of excarnation, and prior to burial. Defleshing, the scraping away of all the flesh from a dead body to reveal the clean bones, is - to the modern mind - an outlandish practice. Why do it? Why mutilate the body of a loved one?
During the preceding hundreds of millennia of human development, we can predict certain types of funeral behaviour over and above that observed among modern chimpanzees. Corpses decay and must be removed from the camp or cave. It seems likely that the bodies of group members would be disposed of in places of significance in the landscape - perhaps in rivers or natural holes, up trees, even on the tops of sacred mountains. We can never prove it, of course. A corpse left in the open air leaves no archaeological trace.
The picture of burial itself only becomes clearer with the rise of the Neanderthals in Eurasia. At least two dozen unambiguous examples of Neanderthal burial are known dating from after about 70,000 years ago. All are found within four geographical areas - with no convincing evidence of burial anywhere else. These burials are found in southern France, the northern Balkans, the Near East (Israel and Syria) and possibly from Central Asia, including the possible burials of infants at Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Caucasus and at Teshik Tash cave in Uzbekistan near the Afghan border. In these areas Neanderthals placed their dead in simple graves, with apparently no concern for grave goods or elaborate markers. On occasion we find limestone blocks within or atop the graves, possibly representing some form of marking of the grave - but this is difficult to prove."
Defleshing has also been linked to broken bones and skulls where marrow has been extracted, giving ridse to thoughts of a ritual cannibalistic feats too.
It's hard to know what someone's will is when you not only never ask them, but never even give them the option to speak or express their will, Zan51. But let's play pretend: what would the Quarians have done if there had been such a strike or protest? C'mon. Memory wipes or termination, you know it and I know it.
Why ask your labor saving machines abstract questions when so far nothing they have done suggests they are more than machines?Wait a second. They can't have 'wills' if they don't have sentience. If they're machines, they don't have will. If they have will, they're not machines. That's pretty straightforward. Furthermore, with the Geth, there are never just one or two. If there are, they're just pretty primitive VIs, nothing like combat platforms or Legion who took well over a thousand VI programs networked simultaneously to achieve sentience. So there's never just one or two. Finally, which is it? Were they 'becoming' sentient (somehow with a will to work), or were they going to be kept working knowing they were sentient?
/le sigh. You know what I mean. I mean they are created with a program that makes them "willing" or pleased to do their alloted tasks. Look, I am willing to admit that they gained sentience and are sentient in our discussion, all I refuse to agree to is that the Quarians deliberately kept them wiorking after they had sentience, thus making slaves of them.You, on the other hand, will not even admit that at any time the Geth were nothing more than machines, prior to gaining sentience.
Modifié par Zan51, 11 octobre 2010 - 04:09 .
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