946 réponses à ce sujet

[AlexMBrennan]

Conveniently enough, it is canon that the Cipher does not exist ( according to the Gensis comics)

[KaiserShep]

Conveniently enough, it is canon that the Cipher does not exist ( according to the Gensis comics)

 

Canon in the MEU seems to be some kind of zany free-for-all.

[Aimi]

Why?

It's just as ridiculous as the space magic, but it's applied to something that I actually kinda understand (anthropology and psychology) instead of something I don't really understand (fizziqs!).

In other words, it is a plot device that, going by our understanding of the universe, should not work, but does; it only works intermittently, when convenient to the plot; and the full consequences of the device are not explored because to do so would expose just how slapdash an idea it actually is.

[Steelcan]

It's just as ridiculous as the space magic, but it's applied to something that I actually kinda understand (anthropology and psychology) instead of something I don't really understand (fizziqs!).

In other words, it is a plot device that, going by our understanding of the universe, should not work, but does; it only works intermittently, when convenient to the plot; and the full consequences of the device are not explored because to do so would expose just how slapdash an idea it actually is.

Well that sums up a lot of fiction in general, hardly just limited to sci-fi or Mass Effect in particular

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

Canon in the MEU seems to be some kind of zany free-for-all.

 

May I quote you on this?

[KaiserShep]

May I quote you on this?

 

I always welcome the sharing of truth.

[Aimi]

Well that sums up a lot of fiction in general, hardly just limited to sci-fi or Mass Effect in particular

Didn't say it was limited to sci-fi or Mass Effect in particular. It's just an example of a specific thing about the Mass Effect setting and plot that annoyed me. Which is, y'know, what the thread's OP asked for.

[Bob from Accounting]

If you don't understand the physics, you probably shouldn't be calling it 'space magic,' should you?

[Steelcan]

If you don't understand the physics, you probably shouldn't be calling it 'space magic,' should you?

There's a line between what you know is probably explainable by someone smarter than you and flat out can't happen.

 

I know your own arrogance and self-delusion prevents you from accepting this, but it holds true for everyone with the capacity to reason.

[MassivelyEffective0730]

If you don't understand the physics, you probably shouldn't be calling it 'space magic,' should you?

 

There are no physics to many of the make-believe elements cobbled into the series, especially the ending. Of course, your understanding of physics has been shown to be irreconcilably warped as well. I don't think you know more about physics than what you got from some one-hundred level course and wikipedia.

[KaiserShep]

If you don't understand the physics, you probably shouldn't be calling it 'space magic,' should you?

 

The physics of what, though? This seems like something you could apply to just about anything in science fiction then. If I call light sabers "space magic", does that mean that I simply don't understand the physics? Until such time that light sabers can feasibly be built, I think it's a rather apt term to serve as shorthand for fantastical technology.

[Bob from Accounting]

The physics of what, though? This seems like something you could apply to just about anything in science fiction then. If I call light sabers "space magic", does that mean that I simply don't understand the physics? Until such time that light sabers can feasibly be built, I think it's a rather apt term to serve as shorthand for fantastical technology.

 

For plenty of technologies, yes. It means exactly that. You don't understand science. Things like FTL travel are absolutely still on the table for modern science. Now, if you're foolish enough to deride any portrayed technology in science fiction, you'll of course get lucky and be right about some of them.

[Steelcan]

For plenty of technologies, yes. It means exactly that. You don't understand science. Things like FTL travel are absolutely still on the table for modern science. Now, if you're foolish enough to deride any portrayed technology in science fiction, you'll of course get lucky and be right about some of them.

You lost the right to talk about science when you were utterly baffled by the phrase "Calcium ion gradient" or "permanent brain damage"

[KaiserShep]

You don't understand science.

I apparently don't understand the value of being an insufferable git either.

[CrutchCricket]

It's just as ridiculous as the space magic, but it's applied to something that I actually kinda understand (anthropology and psychology) instead of something I don't really understand (fizziqs!).

In other words, it is a plot device that, going by our understanding of the universe, should not work, but does; it only works intermittently, when convenient to the plot; and the full consequences of the device are not explored because to do so would expose just how slapdash an idea it actually is.

 

Anthropology? Psychology I can sort of understand but anthropology?

 

At its base, the Cipher is just a transfer of information, a decryption key to understanding the Prothean language. The concept involved is just direct mind download of information. Not new, been done in plenty of works and not something I have a problem with. I'm no neuroscientist but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible, only currently unattainable.

 

The inconsistency and shelving have no excuse. But it's hardly the last time something like that happens in ME.

[Aimi]

Anthropology? Psychology I can sort of understand but anthropology?
 
At its base, the Cipher is just a transfer of information, a decryption key to understanding the Prothean language. The concept involved is just direct mind download of information. Not new, been done in plenty of works and not something I have a problem with. I'm no neuroscientist but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible, only currently unattainable.
 
The inconsistency and shelving have no excuse. But it's hardly the last time something like that happens in ME.

A "mind download" isn't really the issue. That's more of a science thing, again. My problem is with the Cipher itself.

Apparently, the Cipher consists of some sort of Prothean experience or worldview without which the information in the beacons cannot be interpreted. It was acquired by the Thorian after absorbing dead Prothean bodies, because everybody knows that when you eat somebody, you get all their powers. (Cannibal science in Mass Effect!) The Cipher is not required because Protheans were anatomically different: the "sensory" powers and the four eyes that the writers hadn't given to them yet would presumably make their perception of the world around them different, but these issues are never addressed in the game and it seems clear that Shepard doesn't figure out how to see with four eyes as part of her absorption of the Cipher.

So the difference between Prothean experience and the experience of, uh, non-Protheans is a nonphysiological thing that nevertheless is a: generalizable across all Protheans and b: unique to Protheans such that nobody else could have that reference point unless they c: "learn it" somehow. This is a bizarre sort of cultural primordialism that the likes of Okamura or Barth would laugh at. (That's the anthropology angle.) What does this universal Prothean reference point even consist of, then? Epic poems? Well-known vids? Memes? Jokes about vankshers and tulomorians? Could any of those things possibly be universal across Prothean society in the first place?

One thing that does get sent over is what seems to be a subconscious understanding of Prothean language. I can accept that a different language implies a different understanding of the world: that sort of claim is at the heart of the "linguistic turn", a historiographical development from several decades ago of which I am somewhat enamored. I can also accept that, if we agree that this direct dissemination of information into Shepard's brain is possible, the Prothean language could be directly transferred as well. There are, however, problems with this, too. For one thing, Citadel academia seem to know about the Prothean language already; Liara makes explicit reference to translating Prothean records at multiple points in the games. And she, despite her knowledge of Prothean, was unable to fully understand Shepard's vision. Clearly, then, there's something else there, which brings us back to square one.

And what of the effect of the Cipher on Shepard's mind? Say we accept the premise that thinking like a Prothean is different than thinking like any other species, except without reference to the only things that could plausibly make Protheans different than other species. Even if that's the case, how does "thinking like a Prothean" affect Shepard's analysis of events? Psychologically, you would expect a broader perspective on her part to, y'know, actually show up in some way. Or even drive her insane. If thinking like a Prothean is so different than thinking like anything else, why does Shepard still end up thinking like anything else after she absorbs the Cipher?

Instead, all the Cipher ends up being is like some sort of hidden translation subroutine. It doesn't actually provide Shepard with more information about the Protheans: she still knows exactly nothing of their anatomy, their culture, their politics, their language. All it does is allow her to understand some aspects of Prothean communications technology - aspects which vary as the plot demands (a rapid succession of confusing sounds and images? video records of ancient battles?). It might be tendentious to point this out, but that's not really how your brain works.

EDIT: Stupid stupid internet connection.

[Iakus]

A "mind download" isn't really the issue. That's more of a science thing, again. My problem is with the Cipher itself.

Apparently, the Cipher consists of some sort of Prothean experience or worldview without which the information in the beacons cannot be interprete

 

O always imagined the Cipher as being something more sensory-oriented.  It would make sense that Protheans perceive their surroundings differently than humans, turians, etc (for one thing, they have four pupils and object reading capabilities) The Cipher wouldn't give Shepard these senses, but could give the "memory" of them.   Enough to perceive the message on a basic level.  To know what is language and what is noise, so to speak.

[CrutchCricket]

Apparently, the Cipher consists of some sort of Prothean experience or worldview without which the information in the beacons cannot be interprete

 

That's to be expected. We're talking about a 50,000 year old civilization of a fundamentally different species. It's impossible to ensure continuity of information and context for 50,000 years with just our species.

 

There was a report written for the US Nuclear Commission on how to create warnings for nuclear dump sites that would endure in the case of sudden civilization collapse and would be decipherable by future generations. I think the span they were looking at was also around the 50k year mark (basically the time it would take for the nuclear waste to stop being deadly).

 

The best they could come up with? Essentially create a religion and/or superstition about the place to keep people away. No method of communication could survive that long with its context intact.

 

So yeah, you're definitely going to need to explain how people 50,000 into the future and from another species to boot could decipher and understand your language and thus your information. Making the Protheans pseudo-psychic is probably the easiest way to do it.

 

Edit: Whoa I didn't see your giant edit. Reading... OK, see second post below.

[CrutchCricket]

Apparently, the Cipher consists of some sort of Prothean experience or worldview without which the information in the beacons cannot be interpreted. It was acquired by the Thorian after absorbing dead Prothean bodies, because everybody knows that when you eat somebody, you get all their powers. (Cannibal science in Mass Effect!) The Cipher is not required because Protheans were anatomically different: the "sensory" powers and the four eyes that the writers hadn't given to them yet would presumably make their perception of the world around them different, but these issues are never addressed in the game and it seems clear that Shepard doesn't figure out how to see with four eyes as part of her absorption of the Cipher.

So the difference between Prothean experience and the experience of, uh, non-Protheans is a nonphysiological thing that nevertheless is a: generalizable across all Protheans and b: unique to Protheans such that nobody else could have that reference point unless they c: "learn it" somehow. This is a bizarre sort of cultural primordialism that the likes of Okamura or Barth would laugh at. (That's the anthropology angle.) What does this universal Prothean reference point even consist of, then? Epic poems? Well-known vids? Memes? Jokes about vankshers and tulomorians? Could any of those things possibly be universal across Prothean society in the first place?

One thing that does get sent over is what seems to be a subconscious understanding of Prothean language. I can accept that a different language implies a different understanding of the world: that sort of claim is at the heart of the "linguistic turn", a historiographical development from several decades ago of which I am somewhat enamored. I can also accept that, if we agree that this direct dissemination of information into Shepard's brain is possible, the Prothean language could be directly transferred as well. There are, however, problems with this, too. For one thing, Citadel academia seem to know about the Prothean language already; Liara makes explicit reference to translating Prothean records at multiple points in the games. And she, despite her knowledge of Prothean, was unable to fully understand Shepard's vision. Clearly, then, there's something else there, which brings us back to square one.

And what of the effect of the Cipher on Shepard's mind? Say we accept the premise that thinking like a Prothean is different than thinking like any other species, except without reference to the only things that could plausibly make Protheans different than other species. Even if that's the case, how does "thinking like a Prothean" affect Shepard's analysis of events? Psychologically, you would expect a broader perspective on her part to, y'know, actually show up in some way. Or even drive her insane. If thinking like a Prothean is so different than thinking like anything else, why does Shepard still end up thinking like anything else after she absorbs the Cipher?

Instead, all the Cipher ends up being is like some sort of hidden translation subroutine. It doesn't actually provide Shepard with more information about the Protheans: she still knows exactly nothing of their anatomy, their culture, their politics, their language. All it does is allow her to understand some aspects of Prothean communications technology - aspects which vary as the plot demands (a rapid succession of confusing sounds and images? video records of ancient battles?). It might be tendentious to point this out, but that's not really how your brain works.

EDIT: Stupid stupid internet connection.

If you adopt a purely materialist perspective about the composition of beings and allow for perfect assimilation and analysis of every cell in a person's body, then you should be able to extract all information including the mental: memories, thoughts, culture imprints and so on. Thus if the Thorian is capable of such complete and detailed assimilation (which is hinted with the asari clones) then yes it is possible that it could extract the Cipher from dead Protheans. The meat of the problem then is what the Cipher actually is.

 

I see your point about physiological perspective. The Cipher could not make Shepard perceive like a Prothean literally because he doesn't have four eyes, the pseudo-clairvoyant touch sense thing etc. Unless it simulated that somehow, virtualized a Prothean perspective if you will. It's pure technobabble of course but it's the kind that could be made plausible with enough planning I think. It would also need to be targeted. If I think of it in terms of software, it's not enough to know the system you're trying to emulate, you also need to know the system you're emulating on. That can be easily explained as the Protheans were already studying humans,  had uplifted the asari and knew of turians, salarians, krogan and so on. Of course the brains of any of those races could've evolved enough in 50,000 years to throw all that to hell. But maybe that's accounted for in all the trouble we have in understanding the damn thing even after the Cipher.

 

It's also possible that first and foremost the Cipher was meant to be what it sounds like- a key to decrypting sensitive information for the right people. I think it wasn't just a matter of communicating the information across the huge species and temporal gap like we've been discussing it was also a matter of authorizing it to the right people. We know only organics can access the beacons. Maybe the Cipher was created because the data was encrypted against indoctrinated agents as well and thus you wouldn't need just a translator program, you'd need an actual decryption key as well. Maybe that whole chain of Shiala-Saren, Shiala-Shepard got a degraded version of the Cipher because the transmission vector was already indoctrinated. Clearly it wasn't foolproof as Saren got the info in the end. But that could be an element.

 

Ultimately I can agree the idea of the Cipher was poorly explained and shelving the effects it'd have on Shepard is inexcusable. But I don't think the idea itself is theoretically bad.

[Aimi]

If the Cipher were some sort of planned method of transmitting information deliberately created by the Protheans for use by uplifted species/slaves/whatever, that might be a profitable line of discussion, I agree. Problematically, though, the Cipher is explicitly described by Shiala in entirely different terms. So we'd also have to say that she was lying about that, or that she was misinformed somehow.

Which doesn't really solve my problem; extensive headcanon for the Cipher to make it even kind of work means that the idea as presented in the game was stupid and poorly explained, and that I am perfectly within my rights to have been annoyed by it.

[CrutchCricket]

I can't recall how Shiala describes it exactly but on the ME Wiki it seems to be defined as cultural context, knowledge and experience of the Prothean race.

 

Which blows my decryption key theory out of the water. But it does seem to specifically refer to concepts like the ones discussed in that nuclear waste report. Namely providing the cultural context to understand that a particular image is supposed to convey message x. For example if I wanted to convey that stepping in nuclear waste would kill you I might draw a stickman besides a green pool, then a stickman in the green pool, then a stickman on its side with the skull and crossbones above him.

 

But if you're a random person 50,000 years in the future how could you possibly know what that means without knowing what the skull and crossbones meant? And how could you know that skull and crossbones meant death without the cultural connotations of it and the reasons we collectively decided that a skull and crossbones were the symbol of death? An even more basic challenge- how could I convey to you that the images are sequential and not simultaneous, that they denote a series of events and not a single picture? The short of it is I can't- and you would never get it on your own without the context of my cultural experiences.

 

So I think they had the right idea in what the Cipher was supposed to be, even without all our speculations that would've admittedly made it more interesting. Now the vector of transmission may be questionable but again, that's a problem of exposition and poor explanations, not of fundamental application.

 

And of course you can be pissed at it. It's a mistake that keeps getting repeated. More and more I see Bioware trying to paint broad strokes to go one way when the details of their creation point the complete opposite way.

[ImaginaryMatter]

A "mind download" isn't really the issue. That's more of a science thing, again. My problem is with the Cipher itself.

Apparently, the Cipher consists of some sort of Prothean experience or worldview without which the information in the beacons cannot be interpreted. It was acquired by the Thorian after absorbing dead Prothean bodies, because everybody knows that when you eat somebody, you get all their powers. (Cannibal science in Mass Effect!) The Cipher is not required because Protheans were anatomically different: the "sensory" powers and the four eyes that the writers hadn't given to them yet would presumably make their perception of the world around them different, but these issues are never addressed in the game and it seems clear that Shepard doesn't figure out how to see with four eyes as part of her absorption of the Cipher.

So the difference between Prothean experience and the experience of, uh, non-Protheans is a nonphysiological thing that nevertheless is a: generalizable across all Protheans and b: unique to Protheans such that nobody else could have that reference point unless they c: "learn it" somehow. This is a bizarre sort of cultural primordialism that the likes of Okamura or Barth would laugh at. (That's the anthropology angle.) What does this universal Prothean reference point even consist of, then? Epic poems? Well-known vids? Memes? Jokes about vankshers and tulomorians? Could any of those things possibly be universal across Prothean society in the first place?

One thing that does get sent over is what seems to be a subconscious understanding of Prothean language. I can accept that a different language implies a different understanding of the world: that sort of claim is at the heart of the "linguistic turn", a historiographical development from several decades ago of which I am somewhat enamored. I can also accept that, if we agree that this direct dissemination of information into Shepard's brain is possible, the Prothean language could be directly transferred as well. There are, however, problems with this, too. For one thing, Citadel academia seem to know about the Prothean language already; Liara makes explicit reference to translating Prothean records at multiple points in the games. And she, despite her knowledge of Prothean, was unable to fully understand Shepard's vision. Clearly, then, there's something else there, which brings us back to square one.

And what of the effect of the Cipher on Shepard's mind? Say we accept the premise that thinking like a Prothean is different than thinking like any other species, except without reference to the only things that could plausibly make Protheans different than other species. Even if that's the case, how does "thinking like a Prothean" affect Shepard's analysis of events? Psychologically, you would expect a broader perspective on her part to, y'know, actually show up in some way. Or even drive her insane. If thinking like a Prothean is so different than thinking like anything else, why does Shepard still end up thinking like anything else after she absorbs the Cipher?

Instead, all the Cipher ends up being is like some sort of hidden translation subroutine. It doesn't actually provide Shepard with more information about the Protheans: she still knows exactly nothing of their anatomy, their culture, their politics, their language. All it does is allow her to understand some aspects of Prothean communications technology - aspects which vary as the plot demands (a rapid succession of confusing sounds and images? video records of ancient battles?). It might be tendentious to point this out, but that's not really how your brain works.

EDIT: Stupid stupid internet connection.

 

I think the Cipher was supposed to be an application of this idea; I don't think it was well explained or implemented, but it helps me deal with the Cipher. Unfortunately, because of that it feels very much like a plot device (which is further cemented by the later installments) that they threw in at the end of Feros to retroactively justify Shepard visiting the planet in the first place. That's why I'm a fan of merging Liara and Shiala into a single character and make Feros the recruitment mission, with Liara 2.0's new roll serving as a mix between her old role in ME1 and the current Cipher or something entirely new.