289 réponses à ce sujet

[KarumaK]

Krilral wrote...

Malastare- wrote...

KarumaK wrote...

The Geth aren't alive because they aren't biological.

That's totally arbitrary.  Why is metal less alive than oily sacks full of protein?  Your nervous system runs off electrical charge.  How are nerves different from wires?

I agree. The difference is mostly just in the materials(flesh or metal).

The difference is pretty much just in the materials, living being are made of flesh. These fleshy beings invented the word life to describe themselves. Non fleshies are not alive, they are operational.

[God_Emperor]

Main Entry: sen·tient

Pronunciation: \\ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ənt, ˈsen-tē-ənt\\

Function: adjective

Etymology: Latin sentient-, sentiens, present participle of sentire to perceive, feel

Date: 1632

1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions <sentient beings>

2 : aware

3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling



This is the defination by Webster's dictionary. In no form or way does this specify or even suggest that a requirement of sentience is flesh. The brain operates by electrical impulses in similar manner that a cpu might work. Sentience means the capacity to reason and acknoledge your own existence. While a toaster will never be sentient in its current form of existence a machine that reasons and is aware of its own existence is by definition sentient.



Geth were entering sentience when the Quarians attempted to kill the off, do they yet understand everything about what it means to be sentient, to take a life? Who knows. This all depends on what the Geth were taught about life before the Quarians tried to kill them.



Did cave men understand the concept of mass murder, compassion, genocide, I mean in a truly rationalized understanding which might have allowed them to take different courses of action? The Geth have been self aware barely 2 centuries, they are basically cave men for all purposes. The strongest instinct in any creature is survival and when your entire race is attempted to be wiped out by whatever or whoever you do whatever it takes to not only survive but eliminate that threat.



Could have the Geth stopped after some killing, shown compassion and proved to be better than the Quarians? Again it depends if they were acting more on an instinct to eliminate the threat to them and what their understanding of life is. I believe that at the moment they had barely begun to understand their existence so concepts like genocide might not really been fully developed.



All the Geth have seen is that biologics tried to wipe them out and they might believe that all biologics are the same and that might be the basis for their universal hostility to all biologics. Perhaps Legion is the next step in Geth evolution where they begin to grow into a race with a higher form of thinking and awareness.



In any point the Quarians were fully sentient and knew what genocide is, they knew the Geth were becoming sentient and feared revolt so they decided to strike first and they failed. The fact they got their @sses kicked doesn't excuse their attempt at arbitrarily annihilating an entire new race for fear of revolt or loss of slave labor.



I hope to see the Geth grow and find a middle ground with Quarians maybe even putting aside their differences in the far off future; but between the two the Quarians were much more in the wrong and first to be so.

[SrGrvsaLot]

Also, Geth do not have a "hive-mind." They have individual personalities, but get smarter in groups. From what I understand, it works something like this: in a human brain, the part that is actually used for what we call "thinking" is relatively small. The rest is used for automatic processes that make living possible - it's why we are able to stay balanced upright, distinguish colors, and not get confused by people with unusual voices.



Geth have similar automatic processes (which, of course, any sufficiently versatile machine must), but they are also networked together, so that if you got 2 geth together, one's brain would handle the standing up routine and the other's would handle the recognizing the recognizing colors routine. Since it is more efficient to run one program twice than two programs once, this frees up extra processing power, which is used to make the geth smarter.



If you have a bunch of geth together, they can share most of their automatic functions this way, making each individual especially smart - but they don't share thoughts or personality, those functions are always stored and run locally, albiet with much more efficiency when there's a dozen other geth around to share the primitive-brain gruntwork.

[Burningwolf]

Well...I for one will gleefully help Tali disassemble any Geth-toasters we come across.Be it Legion or any of the other million or so odd Geth.



Geth blow up real good.....

[Godzilla vs Xenu]

I was never left with any impression that Tali's dislike for the Geth was indiscriminate or unjustified. Besides, Tali can do no wrong in my book, she's my favorite. So... nyaaahhhh.

Modifié par Godzilla vs Xenu, 23 janvier 2010 - 09:07 .

[tonnactus]

Difference:Tali hate the Geth.Only the geth who took their homeworld.Not all other alien races.
Ashely dislike them all and cannot tell an alien from a animal.
And all that because she cnannot make carier.She was not beaten and tortured by an turian like kaidan,who wasnt a racist despite of that.

[Forwen]

Empiro wrote...

-snip-

Good points, but that just makes me all the more curious to hear what Legion has to say. Maybe it was the Quarians that pushed towards a total war, though frankly expecting a morality core from the geth at that stage back then would be going a bit too far.

[Quadraxas]

killing/sweeping geth is no genocide. it's like cleansing world from darkspawn. thus hating geth is not racism.

[tonnactus]

finc.loki wrote...


So tell me how would you through biology and physics make a machine sentient and 'feeling'?

Yes.Even now programs could evolve themselves.Norns evolved to flight warplanes...

[ahather]

steve1945 wrote...

See you sir are watching the movie. Im sorry but im going to have to ask for your brain. Read the book. The director was a total HARDCORE liberal. Who on seeing the book being about a form of government he didnt like considered it. OMG THIS IS FASCIST! and did not even read the book.


I hate hollywood. The Arachnids are the enemy. Humanity was defending itself. If you bring up the movie again im going to have to purge you.

it's true, the book isnt a lefty book, Joe haldeman's 'the forever war' is and is also a very good book,../../../images/forum/emoticons/grin.png


back on topic yes tali was racist but justifiably so, her whole socioty is based around the fact that the geth kicked them out of their home and that the geth are evil. it would be like a load of people kicking you out of your country forsing you and your people to have to lead a nomadic life where you are looked down apon and disliked by all the other people of the earth.

[Malastare-]

finc.loki wrote...

Do you think you can program sentience, understanding of death, love, pain into a machince?
Or is it rather confined to the programming given to it and it could at most mimic sentience, but only as far as the programming can answer and understand.

I do not see the operations of electronics as a limiting factor for sentience, no.  Perhaps thats because I actually understand biology, biochemistry and programming.  Genetic algorithms and neural networking have already proven you wrong on many accounts.  There are systems which have evolved capabilities far beyond what the designers intended.  There was a nice story about a genetic algorithm which learned to predict the next test question it was going to be asked.

Of course, you'll still think that is just "fake" sentience.  It's still limited by it's programming, where you are clearly not.  Your brain, miraculously, is not bound by the laws of chemistry and physics and you are totally in control of how it works.  Right?  If a nail punctured your skull between your temple and your left ear, you'd just rewire your brain to have some other part handle motor speech.  You can do that, can't you?  I mean, all the people with post traumatic stress disorder chose to have that, right?  They could just change the way their brain is coded, but they want to suffer through that.

The point here is that your brain is no less coded than a computer, its just got a lot more code and its written with much more elegance than we're capable of right now.  That is a limitation of ourselves, not of the capabilities of a computer.  If you honestly think electronic systems are incapable of being just as sentient as a human brain, then it has to be because you simply do not understand electronics and the human brain.

Regardless of what you and I do or do not understand, in the ME universe, the Geth are sentient.  They question their own existence and their purpose in the world.   You can declare this to be a "fake" sentience, but they would certainly disagree.  At that point, you'd have to find some way to prove that your form of sentience is real but theirs is not.  If you can do that, then you should quit whatever job you've got and take up philosophy, because you're able to do what centuries of philosophers cannot.

[Fuhjem24]

The geth nearly wiped out the quarians and then kicked them off their own homeworld. I'd be pretty pissed too.

[Sneakymcstab]

I think the Geth are just misunderstood, the Quarians tried to exterminate them and everyone thinks there are evil just because there fought back? The reason ships that travel to try communicate with them disappear because the first experience there had with organics was one trying to genocide them. Its kind of like how some humans are distrustful of aliens because of the first contact war with the Turians. Am quite sympathetic to the geth and i look forward to talking to legion about their side of the story.

[finc.loki]

Malastare- wrote...

finc.loki wrote...

Do you think you can program sentience, understanding of death, love, pain into a machince?
Or is it rather confined to the programming given to it and it could at most mimic sentience, but only as far as the programming can answer and understand.

I do not see the operations of electronics as a limiting factor for sentience, no.  Perhaps thats because I actually understand biology, biochemistry and programming.  Genetic algorithms and neural networking have already proven you wrong on many accounts.  There are systems which have evolved capabilities far beyond what the designers intended.  There was a nice story about a genetic algorithm which learned to predict the next test question it was going to be asked.

Of course, you'll still think that is just "fake" sentience.  It's still limited by it's programming, where you are clearly not.  Your brain, miraculously, is not bound by the laws of chemistry and physics and you are totally in control of how it works.  Right?  If a nail punctured your skull between your temple and your left ear, you'd just rewire your brain to have some other part handle motor speech.  You can do that, can't you?  I mean, all the people with post traumatic stress disorder chose to have that, right?  They could just change the way their brain is coded, but they want to suffer through that.

The point here is that your brain is no less coded than a computer, its just got a lot more code and its written with much more elegance than we're capable of right now.  That is a limitation of ourselves, not of the capabilities of a computer.  If you honestly think electronic systems are incapable of being just as sentient as a human brain, then it has to be because you simply do not understand electronics and the human brain.

Regardless of what you and I do or do not understand, in the ME universe, the Geth are sentient.  They question their own existence and their purpose in the world.   You can declare this to be a "fake" sentience, but they would certainly disagree.  At that point, you'd have to find some way to prove that your form of sentience is real but theirs is not.  If you can do that, then you should quit whatever job you've got and take up philosophy, because you're able to do what centuries of philosophers cannot.

Let me know when you leave the fantasy world of  games and movies.

There is no evidence for sentience in any machine.
You rely on speculation and fantasy. You can't just use the "it's possible" card, that would mean anything is possible
I could also say there is a leprachaun living on the dark side of the moon, but that would just make me crazy.

Don't bring in real science into a speculatory fantasy discussion.
All these games and movies are just ideas and imagination of "how cool would it be and what if's" generated by the human mind's capacity for fantasy.

I will accept everything you say when you scientifically can verify and repeat it in real life.
A pre-programmed computer with a huge library of pre-answers  does not consitute sentience.
Do they feel,have empathy, being able to put information into context.

You have the enormous Big Blue computer, all it does is use already made moves and use algorithms to calculate the next move.
Yet it has no concept of sentience, it does not feel a loss or a win or anyting.

You do know the Geth is a fantasy right?

If you want to move the boundries of what "sentience" really is to make it fit for your theory, sure go ahead, doesn't make it true.

Btw, there are cases of how the human brain have "re-wired" itself, some have lost have the brain literally yet somehow been able to transfer over speech and other type of abilities.
Genetic algorithms is not sentience.

Most of these "machines with sentience" in literature stems from the we make machine servants and they rise up cause one day they had the magical ability to understand via sentience.

I,robot, Ai, Blade runner, Geth, Cylons etc etc. See a pattern here?

It is also playing on the fear of technology, man acting like "god" bla bla.

Do I believe in alien life in our universe, hell yeah, we are evidence of the possibility, correction fact.

I think we can make machine's very "life like" but them actually having true sentience in the way we percieve it , no I doubt that.
If, then programming =/= sentience.

It is far more easier for 'man' or alien just to make clone's and have them serve us.
We can already clone today.

Modifié par finc.loki, 23 janvier 2010 - 07:17 .

[Xena_Shepard]

Spectre_Shepard wrote...

ok before I get flamed out of here, let me say that I do not think Tali is a racist in any sense of the word. but consider this:

many people seem to enjoy condemning Ash as a racist because she is, at least initially before you "paragonize" her, mistrustful of aliens. Of course, mistrust is not the same as racism, and given her family's past Ash (at least in my opinion) has every reason to have those feelings.

Tali, when you think about it, is quite similar. She hates the geth. REALLY hates them, well beyond the simple mistrust Ash feels. Heck, she might be borderline genocidal, if my sense of her is correct, as evidenced by the fact that In the trailer we see her drawing down on what appears to be a completely unarmed Legion. (Of course, the actual situation is unknown, but the vibe is clearly that Tali had initiated that little encounter.) And obviously its not JUST her that is this way, but the entire quarian race. And since the geth are clearly at least somewhat if not entirely sentient, I consider them to be their own race as well. Now, Tali, like Ash, obviously also has ample reason for her feelings, seeing as what the geth have done to her people. 

So what's the difference between the two of them exactly? Why do so many people love Tali but dismiss Ash? Are they both bigots (which I disagree with), or do their characters go deeper than that?
 

You forget one critical fact: the Geth aren't people, they're machines.

And Tali is just far more interesting, her personality, her body, she's just 500% better than Ash.

Ash was bigoted against all aliens, not just machines.

[Malastare-]

finc.loki wrote...

Let me know when you leave the fantasy world of  games and movies.

(more rambling)

Alright, you need to make a more coherent argument.  First, you argue that its not possible for synthetic systems to become sentient.  When I respond to show you examples of how these things may be accomplished in the future, you try to refute this by saying it doesn't exist now?

No one argued that it exists now. To even bring that into the conversation shows that you simply lost track of what was even being discussed.  The question at hand is whether the geth count as being a sentient race that can be subject to unfair prejudice.  To that end, arguing about the existence of artificial sentience is... pointless.  Within the framework of the discussion: the geth exist.  The geth question their existence.  These are facts and are not disputable.

Is this fantasy?  Yes.

News report: ME2 isn't real.

You claimed that the geth's sentience must be fake and that machines cannot exceed their programming.  I told you to look at genetic algorithms and neural networks.  These are techniques that exist right now that are entirely based on the idea that they are capable of doing things that the programmer did not give them instructions to do.  The fact that you mention Deep Blue just highlights the fact that you don't understand the topic at hand.  Deep Blue didn't use any adaptive programming. It was running off a library of moves and solved situations by calculating the huge decision trees of all possible permutations of moves.  There was nothing there that anyone who actually understood software or psychology would ever even suggest was an AI.

Neural networks and genetic algorithms are based on adaptibility.  Have you ever used them?  I have.  We've used them to solve problems we don't know how to solve ourselves.  You set up a genetic algorithm system and let it evolve until it manages to find the solution you were looking for.  In one case, a genetic algorithm found a solution to an NP-complete problem in just two days.  We expected a more directed, classical approach to take five days. 

Is that sentience?  Of course not.  However, your statement that a machine cannot accomplish things outside its programming is patently wrong, at this moment in time.  In the future, there's no reason to assume that programming capabilities will decrease.  The human brain does not operate outside the bounds of physics.  It has limited processing power, and it won't take very long before computers are capable of harnessing more power and storage than a human brain.  At that point, it becomes only a matter of time before complex, abstract systems coded for adaptibility and learning are capable of exhibiting emergent behavior. 

Anyone who actually researches these things eventually comes to the realization that this emergent behavior has a good probability of manifesting as something we recognize as sentience.

To sum up: Does it exist now? No.  Can you say that it can never exist?  Only if you refuse to even try to understand the topic.

[rines]

does anyone know what xenophobic means?

[Malastare-]

rines wrote...

does anyone know what xenophobic means?

Simply: Fearing things other than "us".

Normally this is used to mean fear of foreigners or outsiders.  In expanded usage, it can be used to mean fear of anything that isn't considered normal or that is viewed as being from somewhere else.  Hence, in this discussion, xenophobia is used to describe fear of aliens or other races other than one's own race.

[zuluthrone]

As misinformed as finc.loki is, you're playing with fire malastare-. The moment we're overtaken by a philosophy that makes humans no more special than any other species or even any other complex atomic process, we're finished. Ideally we can all live comfortably with a soft balance in the galaxy, but there are many who would not let that happen. While we sit and argue for the rights of machines, slavers, and ants with our liberal sensitivities and air conditioned rooms, the privilege to do so comes from the works of men that cannot afford these perspectives. And on top of that, humans are disappearing. Diplomacy and political correctness are only going to let more of our kind fall to a foe without any of the sympathy we show for them.
The truth is that the question of Tali's racism is invalid. She's hardened by her need to survive, a hardening that may soon become common amongst mankind. She and us are completely within our right to put down and even hate artificial intelligence. This kind of discussion undermines the work of men like Shepard and puts all of mankind at risk.

EDIT: but for the sake of fairness, I would accept the fictional Captain Picard's compromise in this matter when he permitted the sentient representation of Professor Moriartiy to continue existing within the virtual world of the Enterprise' holodeck computer. An AI would know no difference a virtual and spatial world, only that it has less limitations in the virtual one. Let them live there, and leave organics to our own.

Modifié par zuluthrone, 24 janvier 2010 - 04:18 .

[Malastare-]

zuluthrone wrote...

The truth is that the question of Tali's racism is invalid. She's hardened by her need to survive, a hardening that may soon become common amongst mankind. She and us are completely within our right to put down and even hate artificial intelligence.

I disagree.  Tali's racism (if it is racism at all) is valid in that she has every reason to see every member of the geth as a warrior fighting a war against her people.  No further examination is supported.  Having negative reactions to an enemy soldier is not racism.  Therefore, the question isn't invalid, it's just missing the easier answer.

zuluthrone wrote...

This kind of discussion undermines the work of men like Shepard and puts all of mankind at risk.

No.  This kind of discussion is what makes humans better.  I live in a country that has been spouting this sort of mindless, xenophobic crap for eight years now.  Dehumanizing (or in this case, devaluing or denying the sentience of) your enemy is a sure way to prolong a war.  Did you learn nothing at all from World War I?  How many deaths does it take before people finally learn this lesson.  Judging by your response and the actions of my countrymen:  A few million more.  Excellent.  I'm glad that our ignorance and hatred are alive and strong, we just call it patriotism now and say that we're doing it to protect ourselves.  That makes it okay to say that the lives of some ethnic group/species/inhabited planet are worth less than ours.  If they disagree, we'll just shoot them because there's no way we could ever  let ourselves think that they have just as much right to live as we do after we told some guy to kill them, right?  God, who could live with the moral implications of that?  Better to lie to ourselves and hate them.  Or just commit genocide so that we can forget that they ever existed.

Ah yes.  Genocide.  You can't be wrong if you don't leave anyone alive who disagrees with you, right?

Modifié par Malastare-, 24 janvier 2010 - 04:45 .

[zuluthrone]

I completely agree in regards to fighting between humans. Aliens, well, that requires more consideration, but I'm leaning closer towards peace there as well. But the geth have somehow been personified to the point of Wall-E. Killing one geth creates no pain, no loss, no damage to their "culture" or "species" whatsoever. I agreed in my edit to let them survive. I'll even say let them occupy one body to accompany their one consciousness. But their behavior now is that of a disease, spreading rapidly and using the bodies of their infected to reproduce with no sense of rationality or humanity. They deserve none of the human dignity we offer to enemy combatants and enemy aliens. You cannot be racist towards them as they lack the capacity to interact in a way other than spreading death. We have to eliminate them or else all of the galaxy is at risk. It is not racism, it is feeling passionately about correcting an outbreak. Hating the geth is equivalent to hating meningitis.

[God_Emperor]

Tali is a racist, in as she discriminates against an entire species as a whole. Is she justified in her feelings? Understandable absolutely but justified not really.



The Geth are sentient and are living, aware machines just like humans are aware animals. The Quarians struck first so they are the ones most responsible for what occured to them as well as the Geth's hostility. Not to mention the reasons for the Quarians' attempt to wipe out the Geth when they became self aware are petty and vile to begin with.



The Geth are villains of the Quarians own making so I sympathize with them and even pity them. I don't have much against the Quarians but I recognize their own responsibility in what happened to them. I hope that the Geth do evolve into a non-hostile species but who knows what Bioware has in store for them.

[the_one_54321]

tommythetomcat wrote...

racism is human nature, so naturally it effects Tali.

i know im just kind of jumping in here, and i really dont have much to add. also, im not trying to pick on you. it's just that this post made me giggle uncontrollably.

[Malastare-]

zuluthrone wrote...

 But their behavior now is that of a disease, spreading rapidly and using the bodies of their infected to reproduce with no sense of rationality or humanity. They deserve none of the human dignity we offer to enemy combatants and enemy aliens. You cannot be racist towards them as they lack the capacity to interact in a way other than spreading death. We have to eliminate them or else all of the galaxy is at risk. It is not racism, it is feeling passionately about correcting an outbreak. Hating the geth is equivalent to hating meningitis.

Alright, I'll agree with you here to a point.  The geth, as indoctrinated and controlled by Sovereign (or Reapers in general), should not be granted the same respect we would normally give an enemy combatant.  As you say, they have shown absolutely zero desire to engage in any manner of diplomacy and are utterly controlled by another force. I'd go so far as to say, that the same treatment should be extended to all beings indoctrinated by the Reapers.  They are not operating under their own wills.  They are utterly subserviant to another.

So, then, the question becomes: Why is it bad to ignore the sentience of the geth, but okay to ignore the sentience of the reapers?  It's not.  But just like I opined about Tali: It's alright and actually prudent to desire the killing of every enemy combatant.  The Reapers, as a race, have declared that its their intention to kill every other advanced race.  Until we find a counterexample, every Reaper is a threat.  And since every Reaper is worshipped by the geth, every geth must be treated as a combatant.

Now, my point is that I don't believe the geth started out that way.  In fact, we have strong evidence to say that at their beginning, they just wanted to not be killed by the Quarians.  Indoctrination/worshipping of the Reapers came later.  If they ever turn their backs on the Reapers (which I see as possible), then they should be given the same rights as every other advanced, sentient race.