As Bacon Ator is doing with Orlando and Jahan.
As Bacon Ator is doing with Orlando and Jahan.
Daniel van Os and myself are going to Vienna, So If you have any question for the acolyte, that you did not put on Matt Stevenson post, please post them here, so we can ask her directly.
Daniel van Os and myself are going to Vienna, So If you have any question for the acolyte, that you did not put on Matt Stevenson post, please post them here, so we can ask her directly.
Both the Acolyte, and Jarvis before her, have always publicly presented themselves as serene, peaceful representatives of a force that only wants to help us. But in video and audio leaked from agencies and individuals that have tracked them, each has sounded more like an absolutist Maximum Leader, unwilling to brook dissent. We also know that in the course of the "treatments" (perhaps using chaotic matter?) that extended Jarvis' functional presence among us, some of the people involved in that process were murdered in cold blood ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30tUjbpZ9Ss ). I'll grant that it's not 100% clear whether Jarvis knew / ordered / approved that, but it seems quite likely.
ReplyDeleteHow does she explain the apparent conflict between public messages of "peace and enlightenment" and these recordings?
I'm curious why you would refer to the Acolyte as "it"? Whether she remains a bio-human or has become an XM simulacrum, she pretty clearly originated as a human. She seems to have been born with a normative physical sex and grew up with a normative gender identity. The mind resident in the body pretty clearly thinks of herself as female. Unless a person decides on an agender identity and chooses the pronoun "it", most people consider that form of reference insulting, a form of delegitimizing the personhood of the referent. (Most persons I know who do not identify with the traditional gender binary prefer "singular they", and consider "it" insulting, because "it" traditionally has an explicitly non-agentive referent. I'm married to an agender person, and know a fair number of others, as well as several transgender or genderfluid people.) I may profoundly disagree with the Acolyte and hope to thwart her plans, but I don't think she is undeserving of consideration as a person.
ReplyDeleteSingular "they" is so dominant among the alt-gender community that it has been written up in the Washington Post and was declared the word of the year by the American Dialect Society.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/08/donald-trump-may-win-this-years-word-of-the-year/
http://www.americandialect.org/2015-word-of-the-year-is-singular-they
WaPo, along with many other English-language media outlets, has officially adopted / approved the use of singular "they" in its style guide.
And of course I think XM simulacra and AIs are something other than simply human. That doesn't make them non-persons. "Person" simply describes a discrete sapient being -- a unitary entity that has the ability to store and process information, embodying beliefs, desires, a sense of self, rational analysis of the world around it, a "theory of mind" about the behaviors and intentions of fellow sapients and sub-sapient sentients, and communication with other sapients. (This may not be an exhaustive list of properties for a "person", but it's a good start, and certainly all of these properties are mandatory.) Biological sapients that evolved on a different planet, even using a completely different biology (such as methane/ammonia metabolism, or silicon mixed with gallium and selenium arsenides), would also be people.
It's also conceivable that we could encounter entities that challenge and blur this definition. For instance, the "Avatar" storyline presents us with individuals that have personhood as distinct beings, but are also capable of temporarily assimilating into a mass-mind; it's unclear whether we should consider their entire planetary network as a distinct super-person, or... something else.
In any case, treating any sentient being as an un-person is morally wrong, as I understand morality. There may be times when ending / executing a sapient is the best possible course, but extinguishing a mind should always be recognized as costly and unfortunate. Every mind, regardless of its physical substrate, is unique, irreplaceable, and precious.
is the norm for participants in conversation about Ingress to use English, and mostly US dialect. If you aren't a native speaker, or are a speaker from some other community, that would be interesting information; if a significant number of non-normatively-gendered persons who speak non-US English dialects feel differently about pronouns than what has become common in the US, that would be even more interesting.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, describing the Acolyte as an "it" came across as de-humanizing her, or more specifically declaring her to lack the moral weight of personhood. (We run into the problem here that "de-humanize" is the word we have at our disposal to describe making out a target entity to lack the moral weight we accord human persons... Which is problematic when we want to talk about non-human, or at least not-entirely-human, moral agents / persons.) The usage of "it" to dehumanize is extremely common, to the point that the pop-culture analysis site TVTropes has a page about this usage. It's also mentioned in the usage notes on the Wikipedia page for "it". (And I'm sure you can find plenty of academic discussions as well, but my point here is to highlight popular usage, and collaboratively-edited sites are pretty good at representing that.)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItIsDehumanizing
As this conversation ( http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/89937/why-does-it-have-a-dehumanizing-connotation/89940#89940 ) notes, the dehumanizing nature of the pronoun rests in some sense on circular-logic, but language is fundamentally a system of conventions, and so that kind of problem is inescapable. Most of us hear "it" as dehumanizing, therefore it is. Similarly, most of us hear "dog" as referring to the class of domestic canines, and so that's what the word means. It's turtles (or dogs) all the way down.
The linguistic stripping of moral weight from beings that appear conscious is something I find alarming. If you agree that both ADA and the acolyte are moral agents with intrinsic value, then I apologize that my questions came across as hostile.
I tend to think of "being" as a much broader class than "person", including sub-sapient sentients, and possibly supra-sapient beings such as the planetary mass mind of Avatar. (Which is itself pretty similar to the Gaia mass-mind that appears at the end of Asimov's Foundation stories.)
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I hope you can understand why I found your use of "it" jarring. It sounds like we may be mostly in "violent agreement" about a lot of the principles in play, and mutually recognize that they're complicated and difficult, and that it's possible for reasonable people to come to different conclusions about them. At the very least I've found the extended conversation stimulating.
Turning back to your original point: My impression is that the Acolyte and Jahan are under the influence of the Shapers and N'Zeer respectively, but not "posessed" or in direct / continuous communication -- rather, they have been shaped (heh) since their early lives to be the kinds of people who will make choices that advantage their respective "patrons". This form of influence is bad, though not as bad as possession. You could see it as akin to how authoritarian parents seek to indoctrinate children to perpetuate systems of religious belief, or the way a totalitarian state like North Korea "raises" its citizens to be loyal supporters. I would guess that each of them remains a discrete individual. It's possible I'm wrong, but I don't think there's strong evidence of what you're suggesting, the way there obviously was with Klue.