McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Derivative Plots?
Shecky:
--- Quote from: neurovore on May 09, 2008, 05:15:33 PM ---Insofar as sentience as software has to run on something, yes. [ Though to loop back to the start of the thread for a moment, Permutation City does a lovely deconstruction of even that notion. ] But there is a difference of scale between that and magical thinking.
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Not being argumentative here - I honestly don't see any intrinsic difference there, just ones that are functions of the authors' choices.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Shecky on May 11, 2008, 08:03:30 PM ---Not being argumentative here - I honestly don't see any intrinsic difference there, just ones that are functions of the authors' choices.
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Well, unless you want to go all cognitive zombie apocalypse*, the scientific method suggests that human minds are actually working and running on human brains in some way of which we are only just now starting to grasp the details. The scientific method does not, as yet, support the proposition that Willing It Really Hard makes fireballs come out of your fingers. Not to say the author cannot choose to do the latter and make a good book out of it, just that it's not SF to do so. Come up with a rigorous enough take on it and it might feel like alternate science, like a lot of what Ted Chiang does.
*See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombie-movie.html for example
Shecky:
This is why I said some theories work that way. Given that they're just as valid as mind-as-emergent-phenomenon theories (i.e., nobody's got convincing data either way and there are more than enough inexplicable phenomena to support at least the possibility of a non-material mind), I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept them as reasonable possibilities; the scientific method neither excludes nor includes without sufficient data. In the absence of sufficient data, even "alternate science" is a reasonable option.
... which brings us back to the original point: mind over matter cannot be rejected out of hand.
Suilan:
--- Quote --- mind over matter cannot be rejected out of hand.
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If it were, Star Wars couldn't be considered SciFi. (Nor Star Trek or Babylon5, though the Jedi Knights are really the closest thing to wizards that scifi's got.)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Blacque Jacque Shellacque on May 12, 2008, 02:20:07 PM ---This is why I said some theories work that way. Given that they're just as valid as mind-as-emergent-phenomenon theories (i.e., nobody's got convincing data either way and there are more than enough inexplicable phenomena to support at least the possibility of a non-material mind), I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept them as reasonable possibilities; the scientific method neither excludes nor includes without sufficient data. In the absence of sufficient data, even "alternate science" is a reasonable option.
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When all else fails, though, Occam's razor feels more scientific than postulating extra-scientific agencies to me.
I suspect I find software-is-sentience more easy to believe than many people because I have seen more examples of how easy it is to program the appearance of sentient behvaiour into something.
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