A human can be consciously aware of the words used and what they mean but not of there subconscious effects, so ant can be aware of the information in pheromones but not aware of there "other" effects.
Yes, however if they are aware of the pheronomes existance they can also potentially become aware of the other effects as well.
I see pheromones as being drugs that have information attached to them making them a bad choice for individual conscious decisions because the effect the subconscious mind like a drug, but its the perfect method for transferring information between the individual cells of a body which is why ants are considered "super organism".
There is an obvious difference between a drug that directly affects the emotional state of the brain and a scent that communicates information.
Ants are in my view a superorganism because they all quickly transmit information to eachother and since they all have same basic nature they all act in a unified manner, since all their individual conscious decisions result in the same decision at the same time.
Humans on the other hand do not all have the same information and also have different basic natures; in that regard they are very much the norm as far as creatures are concerned. What drove the evolution of ants from normal creatures is the adaptation to living in a constructed underground.
Exactly, without a definitive answer you basically decide where to draw the line using your subjective opinion and reasoning, mine is that insects are at best semi-conscious but most likely not possessed of a consciousnesses and as for why? its down to the complexity of their brain and I see the brain of an insect being too simple to house a fully developed consciousness.
How about a simple consciousness for a simple brain?
In any case it is pretty much clearly the case that all the ant consciousnesses (if they exist) are all consciously coming to the same decision. It is like we have 1000 versions of the same person all living in proximity.
From what I've observed with my two nephews, niece and nine cousins is that universal empathy is taught first and anti-empathy is taught only after it becomes relevant, so of course empathy get there first because its training starts sooner.
Indeed. This brings us to the question of the importance of early abuse/bullying in the propogation of general evilness in society.
I feel that the communication pheromones of ants are not merely a communication tool but the foundation of a chemical hypnosis that effects their whole society.
If all ants are by their individual nature cooperative and altruistic, then why would chemical hypnosis even be needed?
I think it would be possible to make it work, it just require changes to various things
What Toady One would have to do is completely rewrite the site code in order to make it more memory efficient and by a massive amount. I would gage that the better means to simulate a scattered peasant population would be to do things as we do with animal people, basically abstract them away but have then 'living' in a general area.
My point is that if old mechanics are detrimental to future builds they can be removed, sometimes your going to have to smash an otherwise functional thing to make way for something else, your opinion seems to match the Chinese officials in that fixing the mistake by smashing down one building (feature) and starting again is not cost effective and so working around the mistake is the better solution but to do so can result in things like this.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2448694/China-builds-new-flats-path-motorway.html
If you can work with the mistake and achieve acceptable results fine but if it results in this fuckery I say accept the costs and fix it properly, I've done this before way back when I was still in school, I had a project that I'd made a mistake on and so I redid it from scratch and I got reduced marks because it was late but I was happy with the result which is the most important thing imho, so while I may have possibly gotten a higher result from the original being handed in on time my goal was self-satisfaction which is why I bought up that its was a hobby first.
So its not a question of "whats the most cost effective way to do it?" but "what way will result in the dev's being happy with the result?" and if that mean removing an old function that results in their "developer grade" lowering then that fine as long as their happy with the result.
The idea is to avoid building the flats in the path of you 'future motorway' in the first place.
On its own no but no change to the game is "on its own", think of it like a staircase each new step by itself is only a minor change in elevation but climbing to the top of the staircase is a major change and a staircase that goes high enough can be seen as resulting in a fundamental change because it can result in pressure changes.
Also because each individual stair needs some framework to hold it up and you need the preceding step before you can build the one after it without it collapsing you end up with place holder mechanics (scaffolding) that are only there until the framework (support structure), this is why I see this minor "non-fundamental" change is part of the framework that leads to a massive "fundamental" change later.
The thing is that however many bricks you lay down to make a building the building still ends up being made of bricks. If you take a bunch of Socialist sites and stack them on top of eachother as it were in order to make a bigger thing then the result is never a Feudal house.
The componants for Feudalism do not exist and it would require a fundermental change in the game nature for it to do so. The problem is that the fortress must not produce surplus value and must therefore have hillocks or other minor settlements under dwarf civilization control in the area in order to support it prior to it being created. Toady can add in Feudal social relationships anachronistically, but their existance will never actually make any sense; nor would any player even invent them if he had a choice.
Which is why I said necessary, I have no doubt that is it was possible he would fully realize all the games site at once and have them running simultaneously but that's not possible so by necessity he abstracts thing outside your fortress because your fortress is your keep and the surrounding hillocks your castle town and scattered peasantry.
When we visit a hillocks in adventure mode the hillocks is not abstracted but a concrete thing, it is the fortress down the road that is functioning abstractly. Of course if we we were interacting with hillocks in your area then they would be functioning abstractly but it has nothing to do with the whole keep/peasant thing. It has to do with the fact that due to memory constraints only things that are within the zone of the player are actually able to be modelled fully.
Toady does want the player to concern themselves with this production even as the play a role in they feudal politics and peasant growth, the fact that that's not what "perfect" replication of a feudal system is actually like is largely irrelevant because the player is the "overseer" not the baron himself, its best to think of the player as an abstracted entity like the barons "regent" whose handling the day to day management and your ability to affect the outside world is by acting as the barons "adviser".
For example Toady has said that he want the player to be able to control historical figures as adventurers but is unsure how to stop the player from killing of disliked figures like they do nobles so the players control of the fortress is like an abstracted control of those who do influence the fortress, basically its not your fort its his/theirs and you just run its day to day operations for him/them from the background, trading is a good example of this type of player influence.
So the player is the "hive mind" but dwarves are supposed to be self-determined individuals and as of yet Toady isn't sure how to resolve this issue without taking control out of the players hands so its been back-listed.
The player is a spiritual being called Armok that possesses mortal beings. The fundermental issue with the setup is, how much power does Armok have to control beings and what is the limitation of Armok's ability to possess beings.
I have a different interpretation of what the basic nature of the game is (fantasy world simulator that tells stories) I don't see it as altering that "basic nature" but changing the style in which the stories get written.
The basic nature of the game is a detailed simulation of the details of ordinery life in a fantasy world. If we make the fortress unable to produce anything itself then a whole raft of the game is abstracted away. That is why I said that if Toady One makes the game into Crusader Kings I would quit, not because I do not liking playing Crusader Kings but because such an outcome calls into question his competance as a game developer.
If our dwarves are just a bunch of idle nobles and all production is done by abstracted sites, towns and peasant villages; then why did Toady One go through the bother of coming up with a detailed system for our dwarves producing all manner of items, since we are now prohibited from doing so? He could just have come up with an abstracted production system and come up with a detailed, memory hungry political/military simulation to start with.
I said right from the beginning that I don't study economics so the only economic structure I'm remotely familiar with is modern Capitalism.
Which is quite anachronistic even if we are talking about actual middle ages. For instance the modern company with it's shareholders was actually invented in 17th Century Netherlands, the reason why shareholders did not exist before is that before that pretty much all significant 'private property' belonged to a household, the 'owner' was the head of the household.
As I've said I don't see this see replacing the game but expanding it if a different direction then it has been previously, whats been done so far is merely foundation for what comes later and the self-sufficient though surplus production fortress was/is a place holder for that expansion that enables fully realized (from the peasantry level to the nobility level) and modeled economics systems.
He could expand upon what built and if that doesn't result in something like the "fuckery" I showed earlier that's fine but if whats currently in place is a hindrance to what the future economy is supposed to be and would require a "fuckery" type of work around then reduce the problematic system to rubble and rebuild.
Perhaps the reason the future economy is 'supposed' to be something anyway is because the devs did not really understand what that economy is based upon; they were just mindlessly copying institutions from other games and history. Instead of reducing the game to rubble and rebuilding they could instead understand that the game world they have created is not the middle ages at it's most basic level and set upon developing an economy for the world they have actually created. This not only creates something that is actually new and creative but also saves development time at the same time.
I think a misunderstanding standing is that you think Sociobiology is an infection that I caught from somewhere but many source's say that not how it works not just you and no one ever told me that is how it works or tried to convince me, that's just the conclusion that my reasoning arrived at after reviewing the evidence and from my point of view you the one's who "infected" with the idea that its something else at work, I believe everything about humanity can ultimately be defined though the study of biology eventually even free will.
It is a trick that works because Society created Biology; hence things like ants. The trick is simply to swap the things around, rather than Society creating Biology (thus allowing even the biology to be changed eventually we have the Biology create the Society thus granting the humans no ability whatsoever to accomplish anything. Humans can consciously change the way they live but they cannot change their flesh and blood. If they have to change their flesh and blood to change the way they live then they are locked in chains unable to determine anything at all.
So the whole thing is basically a means of paralysing the human race. It is pretty amusing therefore that one of the biologists has set out to disprove free will, that is afterall the whole purpose of the trick; to enslave the human race.
There no correct way to arrive at an objective truth but somethings have no objective truth to arrive at in the first place.
The latter statement is correct but the first statement is incorrect. If the first statement were true no objective truths could ever be known at all, since there is no correct means of reasoning to make sense of subjective sensory data.
There is a difference imho, A thing holds the property of being dead or alive regardless of our observation of it that is not true with the ideas of good and evil because what is good and what is evil has never been a property inherent to a thing or action but a value assigned after observation (like beauty) making morality wholly subjective in nature, I think your a moral absolutist but I'm not, outside of the "hard" sciences like physics, chemistry and biology I think that.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Sums it up nicely.
Exactly, a thing is good or bad irrespective of whether we percieve it or not because a good thing is a living thing and an evil thing is a dying thing. The properties of the Life = Good while the properties of Death = Evil.
because where true individuals who given the same information can arrive at different conclusions.
If we ants then we would not.
I have rejected your claim about good and evil = alive and dead.
I think its better to compare the "perfect" (socialist) society with herbivore zebra super herds which function on a collective all for one and one for all mentality and "imperfect" (capitalist) society as carnivore lions prides which compete with each other for land (hunting grounds) but collectively feed upon the zebras, with this comparison I see the lion as being the superior animal and even though they can out grow their ability to feed themselves and collapse from their own hunger without an adequate prey.
No, the lions are the 'Socialists' because they actively cooperate for the greater good of the pride, taking risks of personal injury or death in order to kill the zebras. The zebras super herd on the other hand are quite 'Capitalist' because when they see a lion they all stampede away from the lion because they personally want to be the one that does not get eaten. If zebras put the collective above the individual they would instead charge straight at the lions, overwhelming them with their sheer numbers.
Since it is the lions that put the collective above the individual they live while the zebras died. If the zebras were more good, they would crush the lions who must be fewer in number due to the food chain literally underfoot. As a result lions would quickly go extinct or cease or to prey on zebras; hence as a result countless zebra lives are saved.
I don't see the removal of that surplus value production as a fundamental change.
Then you an idiot. Changing fortress mode from a game focused upon concretely rendered production to one focused solely upon politics and abstract control of resources is a fundermental change by any stretch of the definition.
He only abstracts what he absolutely has to, if he could make it work with out any abstraction he would.
Toady One is a software developer. If he did not want to abstract things then he would be something else.
I look at it like this, only if there is no reward is it selfless and only if its selfless is it altruism, the topic falls under non-"hard" science which makes the it a subjective thing as far as I'm concerned.
I look at it like that, the existance of a reward does not make a reward non-altruistic. It is only if the altruistic deed is conditional upon personal reward greater than the cost of the act that they act become selfish.
I look at the same information and reach a different conclusion, as far I can tell selflessness and altruism are synonymous and the text book definitions agrees so its a matter of semantics.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
The text books agree the two things are related, not that they are the same thing.
Evil Cannot Comprehend Good comes into mind here. A selfish person cannot comprehend what altruism really means since his frame of reference is selfishness. To him then, altruism is simply the inverse of what he is; so it is the self-sacrificing selflessness by which other people destroy themselves for his sake. That is because he cannot really comprehend anything outside of his own intellectual framework, the Self, he cannot think of Altruism as anything but Selfishness backwards.
Because when someones frame of reference is different consistently results in them reaching different conclusion it possible to see the whole topic is subjective, whats good, whats evil, whats altruism and whats not are all dependent on how you picture them in your mind, so again if its not "hard" science the my answer is.
No, we are talking about what a thing is; not about the morality of the two things.
Altruism and Selfishness are supposed to be opposing systems. Selflessness however is quite compatable with Selfishness since the Selfish creature can simply exploit the Selfless creature by piling up demands that require that the other creature to sacrifice itself.
An altruistic creature however will not sacrifice of themselves more than the benefit to another. This is because they do not regard the self at all but solely the total good of everyone in general, treating their own good as equal to other people's good. This means that Selfishness is in trouble because it cannot make demands of other beings to sacrifice themselves for it but the other beings can work together to defeat them.
Also if evil cannot comprehend good then good cannot comprehend evil and I would say that is a false claim.
That the living man can see the corpse does not mean the corpse can see the living man.
As I've said I don't see that as altruism, its selfishness by proxy.
So when a bee strings a being for the hive and dies rather than running away; were they being selfish?
Its better to rule as a king in hell (post apocalypses) then to live as a peasant in heaven.
It really, really is not.
This is why it a subjective issue, I see you as a commodity and the current statue quo supports my belief more then yours making me more "correct" even though your belief is also "correct" from a certain point of view.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
For once it is a subjective issue, you are right there. The crucial thing however is that my view is Good while yours is Evil. Mine leads to a society growing and getting more powerful, while yours leads to self-destruction because the rational thing for every individual is to kill off all the other individuals for reducing his value until everybody is dead.
It'll never be figured out all at once, and as individuals figure pieces out you discredit them, dispose of them or use a distraction like entering a war to take the attention of the masses away from the "truth" of your game.
Eventually you run out of tricks.
The entire point of the guild is to change that, in the old economy if there wasn't enough work for the guild member to have decent pay they'd partition the mayor for more work, Toady just need to add in the ability for individuals both on and off site to hire the on site guild for jobs and combine it with other things that have been mentioned like leaseholds and you have the beginnings of a basic private enterprise.
The purpose of guilds is to allow groups of workers to interact with the player in order to advance their own interests, which includes continuing to do the jobs that define them. There were also no guilds in the old economy as far as I am aware.
I have always covered the question of hiring people in this thread, it is anachronistic unless you can offer somebody more than they already have. If everybody is already employed by the site (why would they not be?) then the only thing a hiring person can offer is something a site inherantly cannot provide, or another site.
Bringing that subject up is how I created such mayhem in the first place.
Or you could expand the game in such a way that you break the current system so its not adding anachronism at all.
The fundermental foundation of the game is such that it does not support the development of a Fuedal society. You could add in scattered peasants, but that would not make the fortress need to tax them, which means no Feudalism; both sides of the equation are needed for that, not just one. To have both sides of the equation would either transform the game fundermentally *or* would require that the fortress not be directly involved in Feudalism at all.
Since Toady One talks about us having hillocks, we
None of this is a reason why it can't be added to the game, it just expansion how its addition could be anachronistic in nature and how to model it so it doesn't it become anachronistic.
If you do not need to tax the peasants in order to acquire surplus value then something else happens. Would a fortress rather have the peasants produce wealth scattered about the place and collect only what they wrangle out of them or would it rather invite them to come join the fortress where they get the full value of their labour? The obvious answer is the latter, the peasants are more valuable working for you than they are scattered about the place. Even if you could manage to extract every ounce of surplus value from them, there is still the cost of the tax collectors to worry about.
Somewhere in the middle is probably the goal.
That is what makes things interesting, since it means we have a scope for change in either direction, making for interesting politics.
The hard bit is to figure out how the system would actually end up anywhere but the most extreme left (the Status Quo basically) in the first place.
I remember reading about Dunbar's Number before, I though it was interesting and could give a biological basis for racism as then its just he brains way coping with numbers higher then its natural capacity can handle resulting in stereotypes which negatively depict those whom are different.
If there was a biological basis for racism then cuckoos would be extinct. Creatures do not care about genetic relatedness, what they care about is social standing within the group. Racism is a symbolic thing, being of a different race is a token that means outsiderness.
I have actually changed my mind. I think that the simplest thing to do is simply to automatically set the policies of the creature in Yr 0 according to the character/values of it's initial Lawgiver, so mostly in line with the creature/values but with a potential for mistakes.
I will say that it is possible that they make the palace for that reason of neutral ground but I read it as the primary palace being dwarven Rome or Machu Picchu but that could easily be wishful thinking.
The interesting thing is that the palace has fundermentally the same conflicts with the fortresses that created it as the Feudal palace does with it's own peasants but is too weak to really do anything but beg for crumbs, owing to how little those fortresses need it.