Why would they have to be built?  Why couldn't they evolve on their own?  Maybe they evolved from a silicone based life form and then slowly evolved including more silicone based life into themselves through mutation and experimentation?

@gladiusdei - My only point of contention with you is that you continue to equate proof with existence.  They don't necessarily correlate.  But I won't say any more on the subject, as I can't think of any further relevant argument to make.

@Varsovian - One possible way that it would work is to start with "sometime in the past" androids were granted acceptance as sentient beings.  These androids could commission the creation of android "offspring" to raise as their child.

I guess I was equating the two because I was talking about examples and references for intelligence.  Even if we find alien life, we're still the basis on which we will judge that intelligence.  Right now we are the only thing we can use as reference.


and life evolving from silicon life would be...life, not an android.  If he's talking about androids, that implies a constructed thing.

Yes?  Help me out here, I'm having difficulty conceiving of how you're having trouble understanding this despite the plethora of settings in which is this is already the state of existence.

What is it you are really asking here?


They get built.  Again, what is it you're really trying to ask here?

False.  'We' are teh only examples you're willing to use.

Hello?  /taps mic...  Am I on mute here?

It's difficult and rife with problems, and you might not want to think about it while tearing into that steak later, but animals are sentient and sapient.

Unfortunately for them as individuals they are also tasty.


Seriously, am I on an ignore list?  Do we even have those here????


So... you also just declared we can't even measure sapience and sentience accurately or adequately in other people...  what are you arguing...


Oh, I see you're arguing with PCO.Spvnky... for some reason...  I'll leave you to it.

I really have no idea what is going on, but you have fun.

My point was humanity is the basis of all comparison in terms of intelligence, sapience, sentience, or whatever else.  We don't know how dogs, or octopi, or anything else actually thinks or feels.  We can only compare their behavior to our own.  You can't tell me what life is like as an octopus.  Or an alien.  Or anything else.  Humanity is the benchmark.

So if you're designing an android, or an alien, or anything else, you sort of have to start with humanity as the base line.

Perhaps, instead of seeing it to believe it, we need to assume sentience until proven otherwise.  I have had pets for almost my entire life, and I spent four years working at an animal Care and control agency.  While I have often looked at dogs and cats and thought they were stupid, I have often thought the same about humans.  No matter how intelligent they may truly be.  However, in my experience, when I speak to animals as though I am speaking to a human, they often act as if they understand me.  Even animals I have just met.  Maybe not the language itself, but certainly the intent, or even the meaning.  I had a roommate whose cat, from the very first time I met the fuzzball, would obey me.  "Yes, I like you, too.  Hey, no butt in my face.  Get off my desk.  Go in the living room and lie down."  My roommate would watch me tell her cat to do something, then watch him go do it, and ask me how I did that.
Maybe because I treat them like they are intelligent.  Maybe because I understand how they do things and why, they think I am intelligent.
Wouldn't that be interesting?  To find out that cats and dogs, while they think we are clever and inventive, also think we are pretty stupid?  Remember that cats used to be worshipped as gods.  I don't think they've forgotten it.
My point is that maybe we don't see other creatures as sentient because we need proof of it.   Seeing is believing.  Maybe, instead, if we had faith that they are, then we would see the proof.  I believe it was Einstein who said that if you judge a goldfish's intelligence based upon his ability to climb a tree, that goldfish would spend his life thinking he was stupid.

wow, you guys are really taking this in a weird direction.  Like I'm discriminating against animals.

Fine, have it your way.  Varsovian can also use the mental functioning of a dog, cat, or octopus as his frame of reference for designing how androids see life.

Good luck to you.

I'm just trying to make a point off of something someone else said.  Maybe we don't recognize sentience in other species because we don't believe it is possible that they are.  We could see proof of it every day, multiple times, but we just believe it is a Pavlovian response because of our humanocentric viewpoint.
If it hadn't been brought up, I wouldn't have said it.  LOL

we're humanocentric because we are all human.  I'm sure cats are felinecentric.

we define intelligence by comparing to us.  We're really unable to define a wholly inhuman intelligence.  We'd have no frame of reference.

We've probably progressed too far in an esoteric direction, but, I might as well mouth away.
The problem with determining sentience is that one of the axioms has to be the sentience of the observer. Perhaps there's some reverse uncertainty theory at work, such that measuring the sentience within a subject immediately applies sentience to the observer, so that you can never independently state the sentience of the observer and subject and must instead use probabilities to approximate these states prior to measurement. I may think I'm sentient, but there's nothing that can prove my sentience is real, even to myself.
We're attempting to discuss the internal state of a creature with no way to measure the internals. Perhaps some scientist will one day define 'sentient calculus' whereby a mathematical model can be used to determine the sentience of a creature, until then we'll have to take it on faith that no one is pulling our strings.

You wandered into some people's personal pet bugaboos... that of "personhood outside of humanity".  Some of us delve deeply into this topic...

Also you were arguing with PCO.Spvnky but mentioning me.  So I poked at you.



It is not.  Scientist have literally been comparing non-humans for awhile now.  Not only the ones we can converse with (in a limited fashion) but in measuring the ones we can't.


This is completely true.  Almost.  We have begun to build baselines for chimps and dolphins and some others.


And every bit of that is wrong.

Like I said, "'We' are teh only examples you're willing to use".

I do agree that using humans is the easiest benchmark for a GM to use.  In fact I said it in message 8 (basically, essentially).  I am overall agreeing with the destination you're driving, I just object to the road you're taking to get there.

Kinda pedantically.  For no good reason other than you walked out into my minefield.


You don't ha- ahhh.  I do agree however that you should.

Unless the androids are supposed to be outside the frame of human reference.  If they are not to be Characters for the Players, alien minds could be interesting.  I mean if Deep Blue were aware, it would have some really weird (from our perspective) thought structures.


I mean, why would Roy rescue Deckard at the end of Blade Runner when it was a very non-human reaction?

comparing two non-human species is not the same, at all, as comparing animals to the idea of human-style intellect.  The entire conversation was around artificial intelligence.  Not whether or not animals think.

And, again, you're wrong.  you can not tell me what it is like to feel like an octopus.  To live like a dog. You can only give what science can give, which is outside analysis.  No human can step into a dog's brain and live it.

Humanity is always the benchmark.  Even when you use the terms sentience, or sapience, or intelligence, it is analyzing feeling as a human feels, thinking as a human thinks.  We don't use a cockroach's nervous system as our benchmark because we actually have no idea what it would feel like to live with it.

And one of the core aspects of sentience is feeling.  And feeling is a humanly subjective thing.

Ah.  But that is where a fertile imagination comes into it.  We can makes guesses.  We can hypothesize.  What would it feel like to have no bones, a big and floppy head, and eight arms, to be able to move three dimensionally?  A good imagination can approximate that in some way.  We can do the same for artificial intelligence.  Look at all the movies where an actor has put themselves into the experiences of a non-human character, whether alien, animal, or Android.

and your guesses would be based on a comparison to humanity.  no human knows what it feels like for a starfish to lose it's arm, or a dog to smell fear, or a cat to catch prey.  We can only compare it to how we feel.

When judging the intelligence/sentience of another being, we're the only reference we have.

all of those actors have used humanity as their basis, which was my point to begin with.  If Varsovian is designing artificial life, he'll need to decide how close to humanity they are, and in what ways they differ.  Because his players only have human experience as a reference.

I can't even explain to you what it feels like to be me.  We don't see colors the same way.  It's all approximations and the hope that we share the same definitions.


Guess they can't ever play something they have no experience as then... like dwarves, swordsman, mages, spaceship captains, jedi...

thanks for taking it to the obvious, ridiculous extreme to prove my point.

You CAN'T know what it's like to be a dwarf, or a jedi, or even another person.  You can only use yourself as reference.  And you can only use yourself, a human, as reference when examining other life.  That's why our definition of intelligence, of reason, of sentience, of logic, of feeling, of anything in regards to consciousness, is based on our own human experience.

So, again, if you're designing androids, you have to begin with a human as the benchmark, yourself if you're really looking at feelings, and then decide how it may differ.
This message was last edited by the user at 03:59, Fri 20 Sept 2019.

Hmmmm. The discussion got quite esoteric... Could we go back to more concrete stuff?

I'd really like to hear your ideas as to how humans and androids could co-exist...

they could be a servant class that does hard labor/dangerous jobs like in blade runner.

They could be a fully independent people that has their own government, etc, that has to work politically with humanity.

they could be somewhere in the middle, where people are still debating how to handle them.

I think a lot of it would depend on their origins, how many of them there are, and what they can do.  There's a big difference between dealing with androids like those in the Alien movies, and dealing with a large number of androids like Vision.

This message was deleted by a moderator, as it was against the ToU, at 16:52, Fri 20 Sept 2019.

My preference for human-nonhuman relations is always to have some level of friction.  This helps drive drama and conflict.  But then I don't run 'slice of life' games... so
Varsovian it depends on what you want.  You haven't been very forthcoming with details.
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was moot, at 16:54, Fri 20 Sept 2019.

This message was deleted by a moderator, as it was moot, at 16:55, Fri 20 Sept 2019.

Honestly the relations can be whatever you like them to be.  This issue is covered in many different rpgs.  I really like the Machine People description in the Rifts Phase world supplement if you have access to that it might give you some neat ideas.  They could be seen as slaves by some humans and others believe they should be free.  They could be completely autonomous from human society and have their own culture even.  In the end it is what you feel would be the most fun for you and your players.

Androids don't necessarily have to be the direct product of human hands.  Consider this: The Singularity occured, some kind of paperclip AI cascaded into some hyperbeing with an understanding on a completely different plane of existence.  But, in order to understand its origins and its creators, it could use its incomprehensibly vast intellect to create artificial humans: androids.

It uses these to explore the nature of humanity, both by creating increasingly convincing androids, and by using these androids (who are designed, by nature, to be curious and empathetic) to collect data on humanity.  They assimilate themselves into society by being both useful and novel, and interact with humans in an effort to understand and improve themselves and other androids, as they're given a specific, instinctual drive to become more human.

The benevolence of this post-Singularity intelligence, the autonomy of androids, and the nature of humanity itself and free will would be the core themes.  Is an android that is a perfect physical replica of a human with a completely convincing personality still an android..?

Oh man, I just had a nightmare thought... Clippy gains sentience, creates quadrillions of tiny AI/robots in his image to better serve humanity...


/You look like you're trying to form a sentence...

/Sir or madam, I cannot help but notice you require assistance driving your car...

/Perhaps if you choose pills instead of a gun, you would have a better suicide experience...

/Can I assist you in committing global thermonuclear war?