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[Untrustedlife]

Oh for the love of Armok, can we PLEASE just let this thread rot?

I saw some real dumb comments earlier and i really needed to point out how wrong they were, sorry, also it was at the top of this subforum so I didnt see it had been necrod, but in any case i finished my argument and i don't wish to drag it on, i just wanted to point out some things and some real life examples people could refer to when debating the topic of "is it ethical to torture simulated creatures" with some actual studies and scientific evidence and such.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

Fair enough. And honestly I do find the issue an interesting one (even if DF isn't even close to being there yet), I just don't think this thread has been the most productive way to go about it. Let's wait until version 1.0, maybe genuine ethics debates will be somewhat relevant by then.

[strainer]

I heard this cool term that can define dwarves as "observer-relative isomorphisms" - like everything in games and simulations, they have meaning to the eye of the beholder - different meanings to different beholders. The ideas of them ever somehow generating meaning to 'themselves' are dependent on a mystery leap - making them theoretically incomplete, as in fictions at least for the time being.
 
It helps muddy the waters that a theory of mind and consciousness for ourselves has yet to be completed and may never be, but there is no reason to suppose that whatever, mystery occurs in this world to give us important experiences and ethical concerns can create the same, in what began on the face of it as just another "observer-relative isomorphism".

[Reelya]

I'm not sure that the pathfinding proves that the dwarves in the game are actually intelligent. That's anthropomorphizing them too much.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

e.g. an external path-finding algorithm is given a start and end position, then calculates a path. The general approach for this sort of thing is to just flood-fill every tile between start to end with numbers representing distance from the finish line (some biases are added to avoid going too far off track, at the expense of missing perfect paths sometimes), then the entities just look at the value of where they are, and roll to the nearest tile with a lower value, eventually getting to the exit. The dwarves themselves just act like balls rolling downhill: but the pathing algorithm decides on where the hills are.

Dwarfs don't decide where to go or what to do, there's a central puppet-master who dictates who's doing what and which direction they must go in. e.g. dwarves are individually as intelligent as marionettes. The question is therefore a case of category error: you wouldn't ask whether the puppets in a play are intelligent entities, you'd ask whether the guy pulling the strings is. e.g. if it turned out there was a machine up there controlling the puppet strings instead of a human, that doesn't make the puppets any more intelligent or individual.

Also there's plenty of evidence that single-celled organisms act in fairly complex ways. Sure, bacteria aren't self-aware. But we're talking relative to dwarves in DF here, not to humans.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-beautiful-intelligence-of-bacteria-and-other-microbes-20171113/

[Eschar]

At this rate we’ll be debating the sentience of differential equations in no time.

What, are you suggesting that they aren't?

[KittyTac]

So, the consensus:

"While they appear partly autonomous, they are, in fact, controlled by another process, like puppets are controlled by a puppet master. They can't even make individual decisions. Treat however you want."

If Zaphod comes back and reads this, please add this to the OP.

[Eschar]

I would replace "complex" with "partly autonomous", as the processes controlling them are complex regardless.

[Eschar]

No more sentient than an L-system.

What's an L-system?

[KittyTac]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

[bloop_bleep]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

Huh, I always called those "context-free grammars."

Why must there be a dozen names for literally everything?

[Reelya]

I would replace "complex" with "partly autonomous", as the processes controlling them are complex regardless.

Not really. Deep Blue is a chess-playing AI. Deep Blue may be sentient. The chess pieces are not, no matter how often Deep Blue moves them around. It just looks like the chess pieces moved "autonomously" because Deep Blue isn't shown to physically move them. Sure, there could be an intelligence behind the pieces, but that's "pieces" as a collective whole, not each piece by itself.

[Bumber]

About bacteria being as intelligent as dwarf fortress dwarves.
They are not.
Bacteria move via something called "run and tumble" which is a ridiculously simple algorithm to write in code. Dwarves are smarter then bacteria because they can pathfind, bacteria actually cant, and  because for example they track memories while a bacteria doesn't, even at that simplistic a level, however a dwarf is in NO WAY as intelligent or complex as the simplest multcellular organism, which required a huge supercomputer with 400 computers to simulate the entire nervous system of (and they pulled it off, look it up, but still 400 computers)

And before you say :
"false bacteria are complex as heck"
complexity ~= intelligence.And while bacteria may be more complex then dwarves, they are not nearly as intelligent as dwarves.

But saying dwarves in dwarf fortress are less intelligent then bacteria is absolute nonsense.
[...]

Kind of feels like you've only proven that dwarves store more complex information.

Dwarves do not pathfind! They are provided a path by an omniscient CPU! With DF being single-threaded, the actions of every dwarf in the world is decided one at a time by a single process, using slightly different parameters. Dwarves cannot actually learn or adapt. A dwarf is merely a data structure that contains information. A dwarf is a single synapse.

We can't compare that to an entire self-contained organism that runs its own instructions. The bacterium's complexity is its hardware! DF doesn't even simulate a CPU for each dwarf brain!

[GoblinCookie]

You noticed. Don't fully resuscitate it, though.

It seems to have been necroed without my help. 

[Eschar]

About bacteria being as intelligent as dwarf fortress dwarves.
They are not.
Bacteria move via something called "run and tumble" which is a ridiculously simple algorithm to write in code. Dwarves are smarter then bacteria because they can pathfind, bacteria actually cant, and  because for example they track memories while a bacteria doesn't, even at that simplistic a level, however a dwarf is in NO WAY as intelligent or complex as the simplest multcellular organism, which required a huge supercomputer with 400 computers to simulate the entire nervous system of (and they pulled it off, look it up, but still 400 computers)

And before you say :
"false bacteria are complex as heck"
complexity ~= intelligence.And while bacteria may be more complex then dwarves, they are not nearly as intelligent as dwarves.

But saying dwarves in dwarf fortress are less intelligent then bacteria is absolute nonsense.
[...]

-snip-

We can't compare that to an entire self-contained organism that runs its own instructions. The bacterium's complexity is its hardware! DF doesn't even simulate a CPU for each dwarf brain!

Wait a minute. I believe Untrustedlife is talking about the actions of dwarves vs. bacteria. Your reply, though, applies to the complexity of the hardware that dwarves and bacteria have. But hardware, a lower level than behavior, isn't necessarily relevant to how intelligent an entity is; to use the terminology of Douglas Hofstadter*, to argue thus "rests on a severe confusion of levels".

*Incedentally, I think that his masterpiece GEB is the sort of book everyone involved in this discussion would enjoy.

[Untrustedlife]

I'm not sure that the pathfinding proves that the dwarves in the game are actually intelligent. That's anthropomorphizing them too much.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

e.g. an external path-finding algorithm is given a start and end position, then calculates a path. The general approach for this sort of thing is to just flood-fill every tile between start to end with numbers representing distance from the finish line (some biases are added to avoid going too far off track, at the expense of missing perfect paths sometimes), then the entities just look at the value of where they are, and roll to the nearest tile with a lower value, eventually getting to the exit. The dwarves themselves just act like balls rolling downhill: but the pathing algorithm decides on where the hills are.

Dwarfs don't decide where to go or what to do, there's a central puppet-master who dictates who's doing what and which direction they must go in. e.g. dwarves are individually as intelligent as marionettes. The question is therefore a case of category error: you wouldn't ask whether the puppets in a play are intelligent entities, you'd ask whether the guy pulling the strings is. e.g. if it turned out there was a machine up there controlling the puppet strings instead of a human, that doesn't make the puppets any more intelligent or individual.

Also there's plenty of evidence that single-celled organisms act in fairly complex ways. Sure, bacteria aren't self-aware. But we're talking relative to dwarves in DF here, not to humans.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-beautiful-intelligence-of-bacteria-and-other-microbes-20171113/

Not what I claimed I simply said they are more intelligent then bacteria. Don’t put words in my mouth
 
For the sake of argument let’s define “intelligence” as complexity of behavior.

Also bumbler, bacteria aren’t capeable of learning. Some can exchange plasmids though but this is out of the context of the conversation. Their adaptation is simply darwinian adaptation which is a natural law. Not a product of the bacteria itself “learning” behavior. Dwarves don’t learn either they are governed by a pre-written set of behaviors but those behaviors are objectively from a computing standpoint more complex then run and tumble.(which is simply a “biased random walk” )

Calling bacteria “beautifully intelligent” is hyperbole. As I said run and tumble is an absurdly simple algorithm. It can emerge in simulations of evolving entities with neural networks in various a-life simulations aswell. In that case we are arguing whether a bunch of numbers is more intelligent then a bunch of numbers. If run and tumble being the simple algorithm it is emerges in an a-life simulation then I could argue that those simulacrum are as smart as bacteria. But it seems people here will try to argue they aren’t anyway. Another reason this thread should be locked.

Bacteria are elegantly evolved, 3 billion years of evolution will do that to you. But that doesn’t make them “smarter” than dwarves as I said they are more complex but they are hardly smart and dwarves behavior is more complex then run and tumble from a computing standpoint. Which means it’s easy for me to claim that since the computing power required for run and tumble is less then the computing power of a computer making a dwarf act like a dwarf a dwarf can be considered smarter then a bacteria from the unbiased standpoint of computing power.