Are Solaris “people?”

[Misgenesis]

Motoko Kusanagi would like to have word with you

[LarryYourWaiter]

55 minutes ago, Blakrana said:

Sake of curiosity, if one were to create an artificial intelligence and grant it an organic body, would that body entitle it to personhood without reservation? Even if it were incapable of passing the Turing Test?

 

I don’t really think this is at all possible but for the sake of the hypothetical, no, I would not grant it personhood.  The problem with AI or a digitised copy of someone’s mind is the question “is it really self-aware and conscious or is it just programmed to act like it is?”

[LarryYourWaiter]

But for the sake of my opening post, all of you here have convinced me that yes, the Solaris are people and their brains are... somewhere... as living flesh.  That all sits well with me.  

[evilChair]

Just now, LarryYourWaiter said:

I don’t really think this is at all possible but for the sake of the hypothetical, no, I would not grant it personhood.  The problem with AI or a digitised copy of someone’s mind is the question “is it really self-aware and conscious or is it just programmed to act like it is?”

personhood is, legally, axiomatic. it can not be "granted" or "taken away" depending on matters of conscious, non-double-blind personal perception. no uncompromised legal system would ever even touch the question of personhood, unless it's become so politically compromised that it's become a hunting lodge during permanent undesirables season. (and let's face it, not even kangaroo-court soviet satellites would have ever dared to pull this sort of thing)

if A fulfils the minimum criteria for "personhood" in the eyes of a significant number of members inside a double-blind group, then A has permanently fulfilled them, pro- and retro-actively.

[LarryYourWaiter]

2 hours ago, evilChair said:

personhood is, legally, axiomatic. it can not be "granted" or "taken away" depending on matters of conscious, non-double-blind personal perception. no uncompromised legal system would ever even touch the question of personhood, unless it's become so politically compromised that it's become a hunting lodge during permanent undesirables season. (and let's face it, not even kangaroo-court soviet satellites would have ever dared to pull this sort of thing)

if A fulfils the minimum criteria for "personhood" in the eyes of a significant number of members inside a double-blind group, then A has permanently fulfilled them, pro- and retro-actively.

I suppose I’m granting or not granting that status to the way I think of them rather than seeing myself as the grand poobah of everything.  So yes, I can’t grant or take away that legal status, but I can grant or take away how I think of them.

and I reckon this would absolutely be a real legal issue if our real world technologies ever approach what’s going on here in the sci-fi world.  If a person could digitise their mind and keep backup copies, and be granted legal status as a person, that person would likely already be tremendously wealthy to afford such a procedure, and now has aeons to accumulate wealth.  We already live in a world where this balance is tipped.  Imagine if the rich elite just kept accumulating wealth infinitely... we would end up with Nef Anyo and debt slavery.  This technology would be astronomically expensive as the people who could afford would have thousands of years of savings and could get loans payable back over thousands of year terms.  This is an unsustainable model.  The working class would try to rise up against the elite bourgeois - who have the wealth to afford space lasers and atomic weapons to defend themselves.  

 

 

Edited November 16, 2018 by LarryYourWaiter

[Spectre-8]

22 hours ago, LarryYourWaiter said:

When their heads get replaced with machines, are they not, at that point, robots with living tissue bodies?  Or are they still “people” with robot heads?

cyborgs ? Nah more like talking trashcans that extort us for MR fodder.

[Rayden_Tenno]

19 hours ago, renleech said:

I wonder why people haven't made the connection when the game lines mention "repossession". Haven't you read "Repossesion Mambo"? i highly recommend it.

This book (and movie) portrays a society where artificial organs(artiforgs) are a common product. And how laws were changed to keep people forever in debt. Told from de perspective of a collector. His job was to take back the artiforgs of people who stopped paying. And subsequent death was an acceptable outcome, since they decided to extend their lives artificially and law only protected people during their natural lifespan.

In warframe universe is even scarier, because even brains can be converted and not even natural bodies are protected from debt collectors.

 About if they are people or not, that's very subjective. Let's have an example.
Imagine a Solaris family of individuals A, the man, B the lady and C, the child. Consider A and B having the child while their bodies were full flesh. Probably C was made early, considering the reality of debt slavery where A and B would fatally be brain-shelved and have most of their bodies replaced by augment and cyberparts, some of them voluntary(anyone remembers the social dillema shown in Deus Ex: Human Revolution) because they have debts to pay and better jobs require augs.

 If i were a corpus plutocrat, i would consider them people, not because i have a good heart, far from that. People can take debts and be my debt-slaves, machines are just proxies and are not consumers and customers. In real life, this was one of the reasons slavery was considered obsolete. Well, if you see things by another perspective, slavery never ended, just changed. How many of us are slaves to debt today?

 I could be another type of plutocrat, who decided to exploit this ambiguity, consider solaris machines and do a hostile takeover, branding them machines and putting obedience safeguards on them just like proxies have (obey me or i'ill zap you). Doing this, the rest of the society would call me monster, some fellow plutocrats would attack me for denying them their precious customers, but who cares? I have my true slaves and they don't.

Am i being unreasonable?

Kinda shocked no one's talking about this. Holy muck. I always loved to see the source from where games inspired. At least part of games.

[Rayden_Tenno]

8 hours ago, LarryYourWaiter said:

But for the sake of my opening post, all of you here have convinced me that yes, the Solaris are people and their brains are... somewhere... as living flesh.  That all sits well with me.  

But does it have a flesh brain tho? With the actual tech (warframe universe ofc) is it actually impossible for them to put all the brain in a hard drive or something similar and just install it in a robotic head? It would still be the same person with the same thoughts, feelings and passions but his brain would be now living in a tech case rather than in a flesh case. I mean, some of the heads there in fortuna are too small for hosting a brain. 

Think about it:

We need conversion. We need to transform the information we get from the outside into energy for our brain to work on and process the information. We have things like eyes and nerves that do that but they are both organical, like the brain itself.

If we are changing from a natural eye to an artificial one, we need some kind of conversions mechanism. Like a converter from light to energy (which does exist irl). But converters for skin, eyes and nose (not mouth cuz i dont think they eat). 

They need space to host all of that. At least the eyes and nose part. While converters tend to be small af, this would still not explain the fact that there are solaris people with too narrow robotic heads. 

Also, brain shelving for X time and brain manipulation would be easier if the brain is actually a computer.

[Altagraive]

Does this clear it up?

 

[rapt0rman]

28 minutes ago, Altagraive said:

Does this clear it up?

 

I KNEW IT!

[Loza03]

1 hour ago, Altagraive said:

Does this clear it up?

 

I've seen this and to be honest, quite sad it gets rid of the autotuned on their voices. I quite like that much. Though I also quite like a bunch of the pre-rank 3 lines the Ostrons have so I'm sure I'll get used to it. Plus it's quite neat this actually gets saved for level 5 instead of level 3 like in Cetus. You actually do have to be super trusted to reveal this. I wonder if they're canonically aware of our equivalent secret too (the Operators) Little Duck is of course, and I assume Legs, Biz and Eudico are since they're in the same place, but I wonder if Smokefinger, Zuud and Ticker are too.

[HugintheCrow]

How is this even an issue?

A ROBOT is a machine built from scratch and programmed to do a specific task.

A CYBORG is a person (human or otherwise) that replaced some of their body with machinery.

Which description do the Solaris fall into, hmmm?

[HugintheCrow]

On 2018-11-15 at 2:44 PM, Erytroxylin said:

I don't consider them people anymore. They are objects, machines, to me now. When you replace so much of yourself with circuits and machinery(take a look at legs), you're really just a robot with a programmed personality. 

The only human Solaris are the vent kids imo.

This kind of thinking leads to Hitler and Stalin, not even joking.

[LarryYourWaiter]

10 minutes ago, HugintheCrow said:

How is this even an issue?

A ROBOT is a machine built from scratch and programmed to do a specific task.

A CYBORG is a person (human or otherwise) that replaced some of their body with machinery.

Which description do the Solaris fall into, hmmm?

It’s an issue because how far can they go?  Until it’s all machine?  At what point does one thing become another thing?  You would be ok with being overruled by effectively immortal digitised personalities who replaced their last human part hundreds or thousands of years ago?

 A program acting like a personality isn’t a self-aware conscious being.  No matter how much it’s programmed to act like it is.

[HugintheCrow]

3 minutes ago, LarryYourWaiter said:

It’s an issue because how far can they go?  Until it’s all machine?  At what point does one thing become another thing?  You would be ok with being overruled by effectively immortal digitised personalities who replaced their last human part hundreds or thousands of years ago?

 A program acting like a personality isn’t a self-aware conscious being.  No matter how much it’s programmed to act like it is.

See, a Solaris isn't made. They are born fully organic. If their origin is organic, normal "breeding" as we humans do, they ARE at least animals, and since they also talk and seem to act like people, they ARE people.

Quote

You would be ok with being overruled by effectively immortal digitised personalities who replaced their last human part hundreds or thousands of years ago?

Yes. It might seem strange to some people, but my opinion on what exactly makes a "human" is even more relaxed than that. I would consider a fully synthetic AI a human, if they acted like one.

My body is fully organic only because we don't have the tech yet. I would be the first one in line to digitize myself.

Edited November 17, 2018 by HugintheCrow

[Loza03]

4 minutes ago, LarryYourWaiter said:

It’s an issue because how far can they go?  Until it’s all machine?  At what point does one thing become another thing?  You would be ok with being overruled by effectively immortal digitised personalities who replaced their last human part hundreds or thousands of years ago?

 A program acting like a personality isn’t a self-aware conscious being.  No matter how much it’s programmed to act like it is.

You've been asleep, haven't you? Your consciousness stopped. You've dreamed some of the time, but other times you've not. Perhaps you've even been under Anaesthetic, and had everything just cut out for a few hours. Very few of your cells are the same as when you were born - some of your heart cells and your brain cells. Psychologically, you're entirely separate being now than you were when you were born. You're probably unrecognisable to your five year old self, most likely share only the basics with your ten year old self and would probably view your fifteen year old self as a completely naïve jerk. Are you the same person as them?

At what point does 'you' stop being 'you'?

I'd say it's the same for the Solaris. Just because all their parts might be different (aside from their head and brain, as we now know for sure - so their personalities aren't simulated), how different is that from having your body parts replaced naturally?

Even if they didn't have their brains, what defines self-aware that a program, sufficiently advanced, couldn't replicate? If a program can make decisions for itself, form its own beliefs and hold relationships with other programs or with humans, who's to say that's not self-aware? Because it can be altered? So can 'organic software'. Brainwashing, mental health problems, even just being hit too hard can dramatically alter an individual's personality, memories and the like. Does that stop them from being self-aware?

[-Afterman-]

Well.....

According to the Patron in Fortuna the solarians don't own their bodies.. Which raises the question if their brains have been shelved why doesn't Nef simply squish/deactivate the shelved brains. Lmao Warframe is mysterious indeed

Edited November 18, 2018 by afterman85

[(PSN)GrottanGo]

reminds me so much of that particular event in Battle Angel Alita/regarding the inhabitants of Salem.

 

(which I won' report because of spoilers)

Edited November 18, 2018 by (PS4)GrottanGo

[LarryYourWaiter]

But we have to honestly draw the line some where between what is a sentient being and what is a machine programmed to act like it’s a sentient being.  Where is that line?

awesome discussion, guys!

[Loza03]

1 hour ago, LarryYourWaiter said:

But we have to honestly draw the line some where between what is a sentient being and what is a machine programmed to act like it’s a sentient being.  Where is that line?

awesome discussion, guys!

Tough line to draw there. A similar question is (intentionally or not) posed in the Megaman series.

Supposedly, the machines in the classic Megaman series are as you describe, just machines just programmed to act like sentient beings, a halfway point between normal robots and the 'Reploids' of the Megaman X era and beyond which are supposedly fully self-aware and with free will. 'Robot Masters' (as they're known) have, or at least simulate, emotions and personalities, but have limitations, mostly in the department of free will - supposedly they can't operate outside their assigned functions.

Yet they otherwise (at least in the brilliant comic adaptation) display a variety of things associated with self-awareness and sentience - most notably mental health, and lack thereof. In the comics, Mega Man, Proto Man and the comic-original character Quake Woman all display mental health problems. Mega Man and Quake Woman display signs of PTSD from their constant fighting and a cave-in respectively, whereas Proto Man experiences an identity crisis due to... a LOT of reasons to be honest. Proto Man especially quite clearly displays free will and other signs of self-awareness, actively abandoning his 'function' of being his 'father's son' twice and determining his own name and life goals. So would that make him self-aware?

I would imagine that, for Warframe, the question primarily applies to Cephalons, in particular Cephalons not made from people like Ordis, Suda and potentially Simaris - most likely the Conclave Cephalons and Jordas. Are they self-aware? We know from Ordis that human-made Cephalons have their personalities suppressed and then allowed to 'regrow' for lack of a better term through their precepts. Presumably, artificial Cephalons skip this step. But by having a personality 'grown' through the molds and precepts designed to hold a human personality, would that artificial personality be similar enough to count? Is it even possible to create a self-aware being through such a system?