I don't think that our understanding of language is subconscious, our ability to infer intent from the tone of the voice is not a subconscious understanding of words used, a insult said in the same tone as that of a compliment is indistinguishable from a compliment to the subconscious mind this I why I bought up language comprehension because even if you don't understand the language if the tone is hostile or insulting you understand that subconsciously but if its said in a friendly manner then the subconscious is taken out of the equation and this is where it becomes apparent that language itself is conscious in nature.
At best the subconscious can pick up a single word like "dinner" or "listening" and draw conscious attention to them but it can't understand a sentence or words in general because "Dinners going to be late" and "Dinners ready!" can both trigger the same subconscious response of "food" if the listeners not paying attention.
Yes, our ability to understand language subconsciously is limited. If we can make an analogy to ant pheronomes, what that means is that in order for pheronomes to transmit detailed information to an ant, that ant must be aware that there are pheronomes.
I understand consciousness, if you think of all animals as being biological von-neumann machines (I do) then the brain is the computer control system and the conscious mind is the computers "user" and the subconscious mind is all the background processes that the user doesn't directly effect.
I tend to see animals (and people) like that too.
I see this as the result human consciousness being of a higher order, if the brain is a computer then a human brain is a modern computer with an OS like windows 10 installed while an ant brain is like an old analog computer, by comparison to our modern computer the "user" (consciousness) of an analog system is far more limited in both what infomation they receive from the system and what commands they can give the system.
The ant "consciousness" is aware of pheromones because pheromones are a simple "analogue" information "food", "follow", "attack", "defend", "ours", theirs" ect and the effects that this has is more pronounced on their simple computer then our modern one because they have 5 background "processes" and less processing power while we have 50 background processes and power to spare, so what input they do receive from pheromones has a much larger effect on the computers overall processes making the "user" aware of it.
Because of pheromones simple analog nature and our computers greater capacity we've been "phasing" out there use for thousands of years making them a smaller part of the overall input we receive resulting in them being reduced to a background process that the "user" is unaware of, yet even so they can have profound effects on our physiology and psychology.
Every ant colony on earth has their own unique pheronome, so the information potential of pheromones is clearly quite vast. The reason we have phased out our awareness of pheronomes is because sound is our primary means of communication. Getting rid of pheronome consciousness frees up more 'memory' for our conscious awareness of sound and for our general conscious intelligence in general. We could equally have gone nearly deaf but have developed a similar awareness of pheronomes that ants have.
Is it a "conscious" decision or is it a simple analog system responding to input? I personally feel that an ant "consciousness" is far to simple to actually be called a consciousness at all when comparied to mammals but whether they are consciously aware of pheromones or not (I think they are) isn't really relevant when my whole point in this topic of discussion is that pheromones have a stronger more inherent effect on the system (brain) then that of words.
There is no direct evidence to believe that any creature other than ourselves has an actual consciousness at all. Saying that any one other creature than humanity has an actual consciousness leads however to a slippery slope, if monkeys have consciousness then why not rabbits? If rabbits have consciousness why not birds? If birds have consciousness why not reptiles? If reptiles have consciousness why not amphibians? If amphibians have consciousness why not fish? If fish have consciousness why not insects?
Correct, the problem is that the indoctrination process for the second system (indifference to bullies) generally does not start until after the bulling has already begun leading to the damage you mentioned while the indoctrination process for the first system (universal empathy) is started after birth but if you start the indoctrination for indifference earlier then this isn't an issue because the system will be in place before the bulling begins.
Universal empathy gets there first. We have to learn to *not* emphasise, the whole stuff about indifference to bullies is part of the general anti-empathy training that starts at birth.
I think that it mostly tone and infliction that bypass consciousnesses and carry the emotional content.
As for advertisement the fact that we pay little or no attention is bad advertisement, a subconscious desire for a product of a certain type (food) doesn't make as want their product this is why many add are design using music, tone, infliction or colorful imagery so that you do pay attention and want their product.
Yes it is mostly tone that carries the emotional content. As for advertising, if you are aware of an advert it normally annoys you and has the opposite of the intended effect. An ubiquitous advert that is ever in the background but never in the way works best (or so the advertisers seem to think).
Hypnosis is mind control if powerful enough and I'd imagine that its effect is stronger on simple minds.
Yes, but now prove those simple minds do what they do because they are hypnotised.
Pheromones are chemicals that effect with brain chemistry and drugs are also chemicals that effect with brain chemistry, there's only one thing that really separates the two ones source is inherent to the animal (pheromones) and the others source is not inherent (drugs).
Basically pheromones are drugs which is what I've been saying about them having greater effect then words and language
pheromone
Definition of pheromone in English:
noun
Zoology
A chemical substance produced and released into the environment by an animal, especially a mammal or an insect, affecting the behavior or physiology of others of its species.
drug
Definition of drug in English:
noun
1A medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body: a new drug aimed at sufferers from Parkinson’s disease
More example sentences
1.1A substance taken for its narcotic or stimulant effects, often illegally: [as modifier]: a drug addict figurative mass adoration is a highly addictive drug
This is why I see the scientific article about the bee queens "drug" pheromone as valid.
No it is not. The term pheronome has such a broad meaning that it's use alone does not specify what exactly they are talking about. In this case we are talking about essentially an anaesthetic drug pheronome and not the kind of pheronome that the ants use to communicate. No information is being transmitted, merely pain/distress is being dulled by it's effect.
The point is it a soft cap not a hard cap, there's room to increase the basic amount of sites with optimization and I've gone as high as 2000 sites without culling history figs but it takes a long time to gen.
I have managed to increase the site cap to 3000 before, but still the world is unnaturally undeveloped. The site cap is not something that is in there because Toady One wanted to limit the number of sites, it is in there because there is a limit to how many sites the memory can cope with. Adding in a whole legion of small peasant hamlets will result in a rather empty world, since it will hit the site cap quicker and thus stop growing.
I said way back when this discussion started that I support Toady in making his dream game even if he not the most "efficient" developer also Toady started game development as a hobby.
Toady One's Wiki Page
In 2006, he started his post doctorate in Texas A&M, which was his goal since his undergraduate days. He decided to leave during the first year due to the increasingly stressful situation[3] and is said to have broken down in the head of department's office. He left in the same year after receiving a stipend, to devote his full attention to developing Dwarf Fortress and other games, which was until then only a hobby. He said, "At the end of a math problem, you have a paper and maybe you publish it, and the paper can be a building block for the edifice of mathematics, but to me that’s not so important. But working on a problem and having a game when you’re done? That’s pretty damn cool."[2]
He's learnt allot since then but if features he introduced early need to be removed or altered to advance further then so be it.
It really does not matter if it was originally a hobby. Ultimately he is making something and even if it is only for himself the less he has to throw out/replace existing mechanics to move ahead then the better he is at what he does. The problem is that everbody makes mistakes/bugs so some replacing is inevitable, but the more the new mechanics can seamlessly build upon the older mechanics the better the game developer is.
So the fact that hillocks around your fortress are meant to be your hillocks under your abstract control isn't a change? seems to me like your fortress is the barons keep or castle town and the hillocks are your "lands" and the residents your peasantry a la CK.
No it is not a fundermental change. We already have a central government that assembles armies larger than that of one site; it is merely abstracted. Now all we are doing is becoming a cog in that central government, ruling over a region and commanding it's forces.
Except that he decided that he does want to model the production elements and not abstract the game any more then strictly necessary for it to function.
99.9% of the game elements are already abstracted. The only elements of the world that are *not* abstracted are what appears on the map in Fortress Mode and what comes into the immediate proximity of your adventurer. Here in the computer-world, memory and dev time are both finite; this means the game does not model every detail in the game world but only that which is relevant to the kind of game you are playing.
So what? how does it matter whether Crusader Kings bothers with those details or not? having similar elements "feudal politics" doesn't mean that the entire game is copied, DF has a far more grandiose goal then CK does anyway.
Because in any computer game, whatever is not relevant to the player's experiance of the game is abstracted away; because *both* dev time and memory are limited. This means that if you do not wish the player to concern themselves with work and production then you abstract these things away to focus on things that do concern the player. A Feudal Castle does not concern itself with the details of the peasants growing stuff, it concerns itself with taxing the peasants and ruling over them.
Then why cant the fortress be modified do the same?
It can, however it involves completely altering the basic nature and mechanics of the game!
What I meant was system run by private individuals (nobles, wealthy merchants) for private individuals.
In a word modern Capitalism, something that did not develop until 17th Century Netherlands/England.
As I've said I hold the position that things will develop in a way where the the Hillocks/Mountain Halls/Present DF Fortresses will become more like Rome or medieval England or any ancient economy system that had taxation of individuals by local lords and of those lord by the crown.
You hold the position that rather than the game continuing to expand, it will simply be scrapped and replaced with a new game.
You can know its a trick and choose to play along as to reap the benefits of that system for yourself at which point your no longer being deceived but joined the deceiver in deceiving the sheeple.
Precisely. While you can use Sociobiology against those infected with it, you should never allow yourself to fall for it.
I'm not confusing anything because I know what they mean, its just that somethings have no objective truth.
What subjective means is.
Definition of subjective in English:
adjective
1Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions: his views are highly subjective there is always the danger of making a subjective judgment Contrasted with objective.
1.1Dependent on the mind or on an individual’s perception for its existence.
What objective means is.
Definition of objective in English:
adjective
1(Of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts: historians try to be objective and impartial Contrasted with subjective.
1.1Not dependent on the mind for existence; actual: a matter of objective fact
From what I can tell part of the issue is my dyslexia, this.
Gravity is an observable objective truth and I would say that evolution in objectively observable though fossil record and DNA testing.
Was meant to say this
Gravity is an observable objective truth and I would say that evolution is an observable objective truth that can be observed though fossil records and DNA testing.
I got it the wrong way around and I did a double take when I reread it just then.
I understand. The key thing here is that is no direct way to arrive at the objective truth from a subjective experiance, our ability to observe objective truths depends upon a process of reasoning, however basic and instinctual. This means that two people can observe the same information and come to different conclusions, which of them is correct is determined by whose reasoning is most sound.
An objective truth exists independent of our observation of it, gravity and evolution are observable objective truths because they are true regardless of our ability to observes them but can be observed, however knowing or understanding an objective truth comes though reasoning but something that is based purely in subjective experience like morality or ethics has no objective truth to be observed because like beauty it only exists in the mind.
Morality and ethics are ultimately no more subjective than the question of whether a man is dead or alive.
Dwarves aren't ants or mole rats and them living in "hives" is a new thing and as I've said a number of time I see the current situation with the first fortress as a place holder because dwarves aren't like that imho.
Given that all aspect of the game are replaceable and that in version 21.93.19a an entire civilization amounted to only a single fortress, town, dark fortress or forest retreat but now we have civ's that grow with multiple site type and that starting scenarios are to introduce new site types there is no reason to think that the statue qou with year 0 forts will remain.
I think that there is a number of possible way for Toady to bring in a private individual based economy but for them to make sense within the simulation would require change to other aspect of the game and we know Toady doesn't have a problem doing that.
I do not see much replacement going on in the way you describe the game as developing.
I think that whats good is an entirely subjective issue because it depends on your personal values after all I am a morale relativist so I've already rejected Plato’s ethics on "the good"
Just this part of Kelly's post on Free Keene sums up my thoughts on the matter.
What is it that defines good? According to Webster’s dictionary, it is defined as “being positive or desirable in nature “. Is good then a subjective value to be determined by each individual according to what they find desirable? If that were the case it would mean that there is no such thing as good or evil, that man’s life has no meaning, that there is no existence outside of consciousness; that the world is nothing but an accidental playground of pure, unbridled nihilism and that we are the devil’s children with empty, cackling, infinite nothingness as our total sanction and final purpose.
She goes on to say this belief is "wrong" and only held by psychopaths but its the one I hold to be true and I'm no psychopath as I'm pretty sure the psychologist I saw for manic depression would have picked it up.
So while ant society is perfect from many points of view its imperfect from mine. There's also the fact that I view the act of change itself as good while static perfection as bad, so never "committing" to a single social structure but having a constant state of flux is the natural truth and ideal.
Ant's: objectively perfect but subjectively imperfect and bad for change.
Human capitalism: objectively imperfect but subjectively perfect and good for change.
Ultimately I think that you like the ancient Greek philosophers but I prefer people like Stephen Hawking because physics, chemistry and biology provides objective answers while philosophy provides subjective answers.
Good and Evil are as mentioned before, no more subjective than Life and Death. A Good creature or society has the characteristics of the living, it is growing, unified, whole, stable and functional. An Evil creature or society has the characteristics of the corpse, it is diminishing, divided, disintegrating, unstable and non-functional.
The society of ants and naked mole rats is not necessary for living underground its just ideal there are animals that live underground without devolving into ants and the thing is its also an "ideal" system on the surface but it doesn't happen because its not necessary, dwarves only need to cooperate as much as the Romans, Egyptians, Incas and who ever built Derinkuyu did becasue each of them built something that was akin to a fortress and before you bring up fortress self sufficiency I will say again that I think that its just a place holder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city http://sometimes-interesting.com/2014/05/09/derinkuyu-the-underground-cities-of-cappadocia/
I was talking about self-sufficiency in
surplus value terms. That is never going to go away without making a fundermentally different game, but self-sufficiency might well go away.
I think the hack is a place holder nothing more and once the political framework, supply & demand, law's & ownership is in he can work on making a system that'll stop that independent viability from being a problem and its not that Crusader King is the "Goal" but that its a side effect of the goal, much like the difference between demon intending to create poverty stricken peasants and poverty stricken peasants merely being a side effect of the economy as I mentioned earlier.
Toady doesn't like abstracting things so why would he abstract that? I mean look at how he's done temperature where every single "cells" temperature is checked constantly he could have abstract it and it would have been easier or trees he could have just made them all generic "wood" like most games do but no that's not what he wants he wants a simulator that can simulate all aspects of the world from the ground up and I'm sure if it was possible he'd have every single peasant in the world be a tracked history figure.
Toady One abstracts 99.9% of all the content in the game.
Its not altruism if the goal or motivation is that enjoyment then its just a reward system at work.
A reward system that rewards us for being altruistic is an altruistic reward system not a selfish one. Nobody does anything without some kind of reward system being in place because that is how the mind works, it acts to achieve something it deems desirable. What you seem to be trying to say is that altruism subjectively works by means of selfishness, but objectively they are acting altruistically.
The definition of altruism is not relative and it mean selflessness.
altruism
Definition of altruism in English:
noun
1The belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others: some may choose to work with vulnerable elderly people out of altruism
1.1 Zoology Behavior of an animal that benefits another at its own expense.
If their motivation has any self interest its not altruism because it is the "reward system" disqualifying them from being considered selfless or altruistic as far as I'm concerned and it means that working towards equality is not altruism because its not selfless because equal rights for others reinforces the belief of that you have rights yourself.
selfless
Definition of selfless in English:
adjective
Concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one’s own; unselfish: an act of selfless devotion
Synonyms
unselfish, altruistic, self-sacrificing, self-denying;
considerate, compassionate, kind, noble, generous, magnanimous, ungrudging, charitable, benevolent, openhanded
View synonyms
You are welcome to think of it like you do but I don't and its unlikely I ever will.
We have two words, a word called
altruism and another word called
selfishness. Why do we have two words, because we are talking about different but related things.
Altruism sometimes requires selflessness, but selflessness does not require altruism. To sacrifice yourself in order that another person might be cured of a common cold is selfless but it is not altruism; this is because altruism is fundermentally opposed to selfishness. When seen backwards, to allow somebody else to sacrifice themselves to cure you of a common cold is quite selfish, that means that you are propogating selfishness through your selflessness as opposed to altruism. Selfless and Selfish fit together like two opposite poles in the same magnet, Altruism on the other hand is hostile to the very existance of Selfishness.
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.
The motivation is more important than the action itself, if the motivation for having more "workers" is that there's less work for you then its not altruism but selfishness because its ultimately about making your own life easier and this is why social behavior exists in the first place because it has personal benefits "I'll watch your back if you watch mine" and the good feeling you attribute to altruism is a biological reward mechanisms that trains the individual to act in a certain way where the personal benefits aren't immediately clear.
Indeed, selfish creatures do sometimes cooperate. Once they start doing so the group they create will either fall apart or they will develop altruistic tendancies because they end up having to think about what is good for the group (and their long-term interests) as opposed to themselves (and their short-term interests).
I never said that they had to just that I think at lest some of them would rather do that then be reduced to a mere peasant.
They do not need money anymore since everything they need can be replicated at no cost. So why is being a mere peasant worth the end of the world?
I am a commodity, you are a commodity, every single human is a commodity, your only worth is the value that others in your society assign you this is why your life is more valuable to your family and friends then to a stranger and it also why people without any family or friends can die without even causing a ripple, being forgotten and rotting away in their apartment or home for weeks/months until it start to inconvenience others with the smell or though unpaid bills.
I think that society is founded on selfish desires and everybody works together not for the common good but for personal gain, ants have just taken this so far as giving up on any selfish desires completely by converting to a communal good system on a biological level and have become a lesser creature for it.
According to Capitalism you are indeed a commodity; you sell your labour power to the Capitalists, whether they be individuals or abstract collectives. I do not see myself in that way, I see myself as a force or power; the more of me that there is, the more power or force I have.
The fewer of you there is, the weaker you are. Yet since you are a commodity, your value is dependant upon your scarcity; resulting it the bizzare world we live in where the 'rational' thing for the individual worker is to kill off all the other workers so there are fewer of them despite the fact that more workers can accomplish more than less workers.
Yes, but the elites are better one for one and a hillock doesn't have enough numbers to soak the damage elites can do and while yes they can all band together and starve out the fortress with Gandhi style non violent resistance so the question is how do you stop them from doing that? by dividing and conquering.
You cannot divide and conquer people who are in contact with eachother and whose interests and circumstances are exactly the same.
I've never seen it as "overturning" the game just that the result of the implementation of certain dev goals result in there being something similar to a dwarven Rome.
Given the amount of fauna that live in the DF caverns and the size of some of the fauna I feel that something must be producing enough oxygen for it all.
Depends upon how much oxygen there is in the DF atmosphere.
That's why you use deceit to hinder the competition and stop them from figuring out your game. as a note Toady does want to introduce lying and misinformation to DF.
What happens when they figure out your game?
I wasn't thinking of the crafters as public sector workers but private workers contracted by the public sector with the guild being their "corporate" front.
They are not private workers if the state/fortress is their direct employer.
So what to stops Toady from introducing those private leaseholds for the exact same reason?
Nothing as such, as I said you can add in anachronism all you wish, it is just irritating and causes problems if you want to make a more detailed simulation.
The reason is that the fortress, as a surplus value producing entity has no need to tax the hillocks in order to sustain itself. It can just continue to mine stuff and make stuff, while the hillocks can continue to grow stuff. The two peacefully trade their respective goods, becoming more interdependant and consequently being drawn into forming a larger political union that can accomplish what they alone cannot.
You keep saying this over and over again as if I don't understand that if everybody rebels the system fails and that with the statue quo that rebellion is inevitable but I do understand this because Gandhi's whole premise was that if everyone refuses to follow an "unjust" system it stop working which is the only reason why non violent resistance can work.
This is also why the phrase "divide and conquer" exists, changing the statue que to enable the parasitic Roman "fortress" by dividing the hillocks both from each other as sites and internally though individual competition its only way you can subjugate them and have a dwarven Rome because if you don't change the statue quo it just wont work.
Divide and conquer is exactly why you have private property leashes and then eventually true private property when the goverment loses control of what they have leashed.
Think of government as an exchange. The palace 'produces' government while the peasants produce taxes for the palace but while the palace is happy to have the taxes, the peasants do not want to part with them. This means that eventually the system by which the peasants produce surplus value and the palace produces negative value is inherantly unsustainable for reasons you know well, the peasants pay for the palace's ability to crush them for not paying.
If the peasants live in any sense in a collective, communal fashion then they *are* a government, which means they have little need to 'import' government from the palace. The question for the palace is then how to create such a scarcity of the government commodity that people are actually going to pay for it. By dividing the people up (or keeping them divided) into private plots they are both in need of protecting *and* at the same time poorly able to stand up to the palace. The palace therefore 'solves' the problem that they produce negative value by artificially inflating the value of the one commodity they produce in abundance by destroying the competition. Think of it as an example of hoarding goverment in order to drive up the market value *of* government so that people would actually willingly pay for it.
The result of course is not very nice, but all the problems that their new institution creates drives up the demand for government. People are impoverished and starving, well enter the government welfare state which naturally needs taxes to fund it. Impoverished people become criminals, no problem enter the government police and government prisons; they also need taxes to finance. On top of all the problems caused by the government created artificial lack of government that the government needs to solve there is of course a 'little extra' to sustain the lavish lifestyles of the government elite.
The same thing however would not happen simply if we placed hillocks under the control of the fortress. The reason that the fortress may represent a higher rung in the goverment of the civilization, but it is not actually trying to sell government, owing to it producing surplus value. It wants strong, unified and stable hillock goverments because they are it's hillock government, the fact that the hillocks and fortress form part of a larger economic whole binds them together quite tightly. The stronger their hillocks are in every sense, the stronger they are while ruling a swarm of scattered peasants makes them weak.
Personally I see a difference, when I think pure "white" DnD's lawful good is what I picture and when I think pure "black" DnD's chaotic evil is what comes to mind. True morality cant be measured on a good vs evil scale and is Infinitely more complex which is why game systems tend to abstract it though measurable values and why I don't like those purist systems.
The thing that annoys me is more the Lawful/Chaotic axis; Law *is* Good and Chaos *is* Evil. Chaotic Good just means less good (4E actually got it right) but still not as evil as Neutral.
Which is why I called the values of a society its genes, while genes can lead to the death of the creature that creature can still be considered successful if it passes its genes on to the next generation, to put it in the terms you used, if someone whom posses a congenital defect passes that it on to their children they succeed even if the defect kills them.
A virus is simply what we call a gene that behaves in a 'selfish' manner, sacrificing the individuals that it is a part of for it's own propogation.
I have no problem with you locking them as ant people so long as I don't have to play with ant people and there's an economy system in game that supports a capitalistic play style.
That is the best solution indeed, to have a variety of different economic/political systems rather than the One True System. At the moment we have the One True Communist System, before that we have the One True Capitalist system. Most civilizations should end up in the middle somewhere, because that is realistic and is probably what most people will want as well.