They display emotions repeatedly to each other in private, in their internal monologues, and when there is clearly no further gambit because they are about to die and what they are saying clearly won’t save them.
Anyway, beyond those statements being false, this is again a “curtains are blue” argument because you are saying that “they are a race of creature that shares countless behavioral traits with humans but has an unfalsifiable malevolence underneath that can never be removed and that means it’s good to kill them” and that is also what I am saying and that a story element like that is bad because of the significance of such a portrayal of a race of creature. It’s just a way of producing a genocide fantasy where you get to be the good guy for exterminating all of the bad people, even the powerless ones who beg for mercy.
Part of the issue is that it makes a lot more sense with slimes or plants, organisms that clearly substantially lack mental faculties that humans have that mean there is apparently a hard mechanistic limit on how they could potentially be “rehabilitated.” Even wolves are intelligent enough that even if you still need to take safety precautions, you can kind of work with them (hence us having dogs now). Intelligent organisms have, as a basic element of how they operate, an extreme capacity for behavioral variance depending on individual differences and personal history. Even the demons could be said to demonstrate this in the way they have varied approaches to accomplishing what is ultimately basically the same goal, but nonetheless it is contrary to the idea of something having intelligence and the ability to learn that it cannot be rehabilitated, even in the absence of having empathy and/or in the presence of emotional reactions that interfere with rehabilitation (as can be seen in real people with, for example, ASPD, who are rehabilitated from what are sometimes very bad states).
“They are a race of creature that shares countless behavioral traits with humans but has an unfalsifiable malevolence underneath that can never be removed and that means it’s good to kill them” is just not a good thing to write and it doesn’t even really make sense, it’s just a fig leaf for fantasies about “moral” pogromism.
They display emotions repeatedly to each other in private, in their internal monologues, and when there is clearly no further gambit because they are about to die and what they are saying clearly won’t save them.
Because that’s what they do, they mimic emotions. They don’t turn it off when in private because they aren’t scheming people, they are monsters that mindlessly mimic human behaviors. They act like people when they’re in private and when surrounded by others of their kind because all they know how to do is act like people. The same way a mimic acts like a treasure chest when there are no people around. It’s not a person who decided to act like a treasure chest, it evolved to act like a treasure chest because that’s what allowed it to eat people.
Part of the issue is that it makes a lot more sense with slimes or plants, organisms that clearly substantially lack mental faculties that humans have that mean there is apparently a hard mechanistic limit on how they could potentially be “rehabilitated.”
But you can’t believe that it would be possible for a creature to exist which similarly lacks those mental faculties but appears to have them?
This is all addressed in the story. There are monsters everywhere on the spectrum from something like a slime that doesn’t appear to have any complex thought to a demon that could convince you it has just as complex an inner world as a human. There are monsters out there which aren’t convincingly human but have mastered speech to lure people into their clutches. There are more primitive forms of those who can make noises that kind of sound like speech, or form only a few words. Demons are just the most evolved form of an ecological niche whereby human empathy is exploited to hunt them. They are literally no more internally complex than slimes, they’re just good at convincing you otherwise.
Because that’s what they do, they mimic emotions. They don’t turn it off when in private because they aren’t scheming people, they are monsters that mindlessly mimic human behaviors. They act like people when they’re in private and when surrounded by others of their kind because all they know how to do is act like people. The same way a mimic acts like a treasure chest when there are no people around. It’s not a person who decided to act like a treasure chest, it evolved to act like a treasure chest because that’s what allowed it to eat people.
There is no reason for a demon to think to himself “I despise geniuses”, because there is no circumstance where it should be able to fool anyone, and before you say “telelpathy,” if you’re already doing telepathy on them, you would probably be able to see the lack of emotion, as evidenced by the Macht backstory where the magic item didn’t detect any malice from him. Speaking of Macht, he clearly displays emotions, albeit evidently not malice or guilt, because his, uh, termination of contract is clearly highly oriented by affect and not some plan. He clearly has a meaningful inner world, or he would have pursued a solution that didn’t put a huge target on his back and ultimately trap him in the city.
And again, the demons are extremely intelligent creatures, around the same level as humans, and exhibit vastly different behaviors, this isn’t merely an insect being strung around by a series of reflexes. They literally are capable of reflection and make choices based on desires that are counter to what they know is their better survival strategy.
But you can’t believe that it would be possible for a creature to exist which similarly lacks those mental faculties but appears to have them?
I think that you need to establish a motive, since these are intelligent beings who are shown to deceive with intention, lying according to a prepared story, even if they have some natural proclivity to just sort of ingratiate themselves unconsciously anyway (Macht’s backstory), because they display emotions in circumstances where it’s just a waste of energy to perform or where there are clearly much greater concerns for their ruse than how they feel (like the specific nature of their conspiracies).
The only conclusion that you can draw here is that it’s just word of god because the story does not support this interpretation aside from when it says “we used magic to look into your brain and here’s what it said”. P-Zombie predators are a garbage concept, is what I’m saying, because if you are keeping up a ruse even when it’s actually counter to your survival and you know it, it’s a shitty survival strategy, and inconsistent with the fact that they do also sometimes drop the ruse when they find it expedient. But there’s no line to demarcate between making one choice or the other, so it’s just whenever the author says so and we’re instructed to just pretend it makes sense because the magic bracelet (i.e. the author again) also said so.
Edit: Also I just hate p-zombies anyway for basically the same reasons, because they are question-begging not having internality when clearly there is a causal basis for being totally consistent with being human. This is most egregious of all with a line like:
They are literally no more internally complex than slimes, they’re just good at convincing you otherwise.
Because there is nothing you can tell me to say a p-zombie or a demon is incapable of complex thought based on an array of memories, inferences, and other factors, because whatever process takes the input and turns it into the output that is observationally identical to thought must itself also be a type of thought, even if it’s using punch cards rather than circuits or circuits rather than neurons or “magic” rather than any of it. It is still processing information with just the same level of complexity and diversity as a human (perhaps one with an on-and-off emotional disorder in the case of demons), and indeed exactly the same type of information (same caveat for demons again) and exactly the same output. It’s like solving a math equation with the same answer in two different ways (neither of which is random) but saying that only one is actually “doing math.”
This is loosely the basis of the Turing Test, and obviously we’ve developed since then, but it’s still just the same “ghost in the machine” mistake as Turing was addressing then.
Worth noting insects don’t seem to be thoughtless creatures run by reflex.
I personally don’t think that is true of any creature. I have no evidence that it was just a framework imposed by the whitest people of history and we bought it.
That being said ants have just recently been shown to pass a mirror test. I am have no doubt ants have more complex inner lives than some other species. However the notion that some creatures lack an inner life doesn’t appear well supported.
Nah, I’d say even ameboa have inner lives to consider. Several types of protazoa do for sure ar least.
If we are considering them like virii it is meaningless as they don’t display virii like behaviors.
As written it is an excuse that you get to enjoy being rascist a little. Most of us don’t get to enjoy that very often so that is a big treat for some people.
How do you differentiate a demon faking emotions from a demon experiencing emotions?
I think faking them to sufficient complexity is actually feeling them. I am pretty sure that is how brains work.
The McGuffin of pseudo sentient creatures that can fake sentience is bad writing. No one but a terrible rascist type thinks such a thing is possible enough to think of it as a worthy artistic space to explore.
The McGuffin of pseudo sentient creatures that can fake sentience is bad writing. No one but a terrible rascist type thinks such a thing is possible enough to think of it as a worthy artistic space to explore.
I think that is worthy in the context of fantasy. It is the exploration of the extension of a fantasy trope dating back to before written history. The man-eating trickster monster which can speak but is no less monstrous or more civilized for that ability. Fantasy has had monsters like this since long before fantasy was a genre of fiction.
Frieren is a story where these sorts of fantasy tropes are explored with more thought and focus than usual. For example, something a lot of people love about Frieren is that an elf isn’t just a dude who happens to have seen a lot of stuff. An elf is a fundamentally different type of person. If you’re going to live forever, your perspective on events in the tiny human lifespan of ~80 years is going to be different from the perspective a human has on those events.
Demons are just another exploration of a fantasy trope that is taken for granted. What if monsters that can speak to take advantage of intelligent/sapient/empathetic prey were actually the result of a long line of evolution? What would the end result of that evolution look like? What is the most effective form of a monster that preys on your natural inclination to cooperate with your fellow inhabitants of the world? They’re not an allegory any more than the giant plant that saps people’s life energy to feed itself is an allegory. The giant plant is just a difficult enemy to fight because of its anti-magic properties and its own magical effects it can inflict on people. The story of how it was defeated was fun to watch because of how difficult an enemy it was and how clever the main characters have to be in opposing it. The demons are the same, with the difficulty being that you look like a monster yourself if you just blast it in the streets. That they look and act like people is no more than a challenge for the main characters to overcome.
Real life has monsters that are human in appearance, but completely hostile to human life, the bourgeois. Them having complex inner lives doesn’t make the guillotine any worse an idea. Them having no inner life would add nothing to the story especially if they had a simulated inner life that was indistinguishable from just having an inner life. That is just rasisct cost of paint to allow people the room to enjoy it.
If the demons in the story were just demons would it be worse? Are there any plot points that need the demons to lack powers of complex thought to work?
If the demons in the story were just demons would it be worse? Are there any plot points that need the demons to lack powers of complex thought to work?
I guess I just don’t understand why you feel it’s necessary to ignore everything the story told you about this particular type of monster in order to reinterpret it as a racist story about about how some peoples need to be exterminated. What exactly does that add to the story?
Verisimilitude. The work is written in a world that seems like ours. In worlds like ours that is a thing people say and are both lying and wrong. So, it is a more artistically dense view to consider it in the context of them being an unreliable narrator.
A bunch of people that don’t exist talking about situations that can’t exist has less intresting things to say about life.
A species is a group.
They display emotions repeatedly to each other in private, in their internal monologues, and when there is clearly no further gambit because they are about to die and what they are saying clearly won’t save them.
Anyway, beyond those statements being false, this is again a “curtains are blue” argument because you are saying that “they are a race of creature that shares countless behavioral traits with humans but has an unfalsifiable malevolence underneath that can never be removed and that means it’s good to kill them” and that is also what I am saying and that a story element like that is bad because of the significance of such a portrayal of a race of creature. It’s just a way of producing a genocide fantasy where you get to be the good guy for exterminating all of the bad people, even the powerless ones who beg for mercy.
Part of the issue is that it makes a lot more sense with slimes or plants, organisms that clearly substantially lack mental faculties that humans have that mean there is apparently a hard mechanistic limit on how they could potentially be “rehabilitated.” Even wolves are intelligent enough that even if you still need to take safety precautions, you can kind of work with them (hence us having dogs now). Intelligent organisms have, as a basic element of how they operate, an extreme capacity for behavioral variance depending on individual differences and personal history. Even the demons could be said to demonstrate this in the way they have varied approaches to accomplishing what is ultimately basically the same goal, but nonetheless it is contrary to the idea of something having intelligence and the ability to learn that it cannot be rehabilitated, even in the absence of having empathy and/or in the presence of emotional reactions that interfere with rehabilitation (as can be seen in real people with, for example, ASPD, who are rehabilitated from what are sometimes very bad states).
“They are a race of creature that shares countless behavioral traits with humans but has an unfalsifiable malevolence underneath that can never be removed and that means it’s good to kill them” is just not a good thing to write and it doesn’t even really make sense, it’s just a fig leaf for fantasies about “moral” pogromism.
Because that’s what they do, they mimic emotions. They don’t turn it off when in private because they aren’t scheming people, they are monsters that mindlessly mimic human behaviors. They act like people when they’re in private and when surrounded by others of their kind because all they know how to do is act like people. The same way a mimic acts like a treasure chest when there are no people around. It’s not a person who decided to act like a treasure chest, it evolved to act like a treasure chest because that’s what allowed it to eat people.
But you can’t believe that it would be possible for a creature to exist which similarly lacks those mental faculties but appears to have them?
This is all addressed in the story. There are monsters everywhere on the spectrum from something like a slime that doesn’t appear to have any complex thought to a demon that could convince you it has just as complex an inner world as a human. There are monsters out there which aren’t convincingly human but have mastered speech to lure people into their clutches. There are more primitive forms of those who can make noises that kind of sound like speech, or form only a few words. Demons are just the most evolved form of an ecological niche whereby human empathy is exploited to hunt them. They are literally no more internally complex than slimes, they’re just good at convincing you otherwise.
There is no reason for a demon to think to himself “I despise geniuses”, because there is no circumstance where it should be able to fool anyone, and before you say “telelpathy,” if you’re already doing telepathy on them, you would probably be able to see the lack of emotion, as evidenced by the Macht backstory where the magic item didn’t detect any malice from him. Speaking of Macht, he clearly displays emotions, albeit evidently not malice or guilt, because his, uh, termination of contract is clearly highly oriented by affect and not some plan. He clearly has a meaningful inner world, or he would have pursued a solution that didn’t put a huge target on his back and ultimately trap him in the city.
And again, the demons are extremely intelligent creatures, around the same level as humans, and exhibit vastly different behaviors, this isn’t merely an insect being strung around by a series of reflexes. They literally are capable of reflection and make choices based on desires that are counter to what they know is their better survival strategy.
I think that you need to establish a motive, since these are intelligent beings who are shown to deceive with intention, lying according to a prepared story, even if they have some natural proclivity to just sort of ingratiate themselves unconsciously anyway (Macht’s backstory), because they display emotions in circumstances where it’s just a waste of energy to perform or where there are clearly much greater concerns for their ruse than how they feel (like the specific nature of their conspiracies).
The only conclusion that you can draw here is that it’s just word of god because the story does not support this interpretation aside from when it says “we used magic to look into your brain and here’s what it said”. P-Zombie predators are a garbage concept, is what I’m saying, because if you are keeping up a ruse even when it’s actually counter to your survival and you know it, it’s a shitty survival strategy, and inconsistent with the fact that they do also sometimes drop the ruse when they find it expedient. But there’s no line to demarcate between making one choice or the other, so it’s just whenever the author says so and we’re instructed to just pretend it makes sense because the magic bracelet (i.e. the author again) also said so.
Edit: Also I just hate p-zombies anyway for basically the same reasons, because they are question-begging not having internality when clearly there is a causal basis for being totally consistent with being human. This is most egregious of all with a line like:
Because there is nothing you can tell me to say a p-zombie or a demon is incapable of complex thought based on an array of memories, inferences, and other factors, because whatever process takes the input and turns it into the output that is observationally identical to thought must itself also be a type of thought, even if it’s using punch cards rather than circuits or circuits rather than neurons or “magic” rather than any of it. It is still processing information with just the same level of complexity and diversity as a human (perhaps one with an on-and-off emotional disorder in the case of demons), and indeed exactly the same type of information (same caveat for demons again) and exactly the same output. It’s like solving a math equation with the same answer in two different ways (neither of which is random) but saying that only one is actually “doing math.”
This is loosely the basis of the Turing Test, and obviously we’ve developed since then, but it’s still just the same “ghost in the machine” mistake as Turing was addressing then.
Worth noting insects don’t seem to be thoughtless creatures run by reflex.
I personally don’t think that is true of any creature. I have no evidence that it was just a framework imposed by the whitest people of history and we bought it.
That being said ants have just recently been shown to pass a mirror test. I am have no doubt ants have more complex inner lives than some other species. However the notion that some creatures lack an inner life doesn’t appear well supported.
Substitute with “amoeba,” I don’t care. It’s more appropriate given the slime example anyway.
Nah, I’d say even ameboa have inner lives to consider. Several types of protazoa do for sure ar least.
If we are considering them like virii it is meaningless as they don’t display virii like behaviors.
As written it is an excuse that you get to enjoy being rascist a little. Most of us don’t get to enjoy that very often so that is a big treat for some people.
This is now in reference to demons again, right?
Yes. It is some recreational rascism for liberals to enjoy.
Alright, then we’re in agreement
How do you differentiate a demon faking emotions from a demon experiencing emotions?
I think faking them to sufficient complexity is actually feeling them. I am pretty sure that is how brains work.
The McGuffin of pseudo sentient creatures that can fake sentience is bad writing. No one but a terrible rascist type thinks such a thing is possible enough to think of it as a worthy artistic space to explore.
I think that is worthy in the context of fantasy. It is the exploration of the extension of a fantasy trope dating back to before written history. The man-eating trickster monster which can speak but is no less monstrous or more civilized for that ability. Fantasy has had monsters like this since long before fantasy was a genre of fiction.
Frieren is a story where these sorts of fantasy tropes are explored with more thought and focus than usual. For example, something a lot of people love about Frieren is that an elf isn’t just a dude who happens to have seen a lot of stuff. An elf is a fundamentally different type of person. If you’re going to live forever, your perspective on events in the tiny human lifespan of ~80 years is going to be different from the perspective a human has on those events.
Demons are just another exploration of a fantasy trope that is taken for granted. What if monsters that can speak to take advantage of intelligent/sapient/empathetic prey were actually the result of a long line of evolution? What would the end result of that evolution look like? What is the most effective form of a monster that preys on your natural inclination to cooperate with your fellow inhabitants of the world? They’re not an allegory any more than the giant plant that saps people’s life energy to feed itself is an allegory. The giant plant is just a difficult enemy to fight because of its anti-magic properties and its own magical effects it can inflict on people. The story of how it was defeated was fun to watch because of how difficult an enemy it was and how clever the main characters have to be in opposing it. The demons are the same, with the difficulty being that you look like a monster yourself if you just blast it in the streets. That they look and act like people is no more than a challenge for the main characters to overcome.
Real life has monsters that are human in appearance, but completely hostile to human life, the bourgeois. Them having complex inner lives doesn’t make the guillotine any worse an idea. Them having no inner life would add nothing to the story especially if they had a simulated inner life that was indistinguishable from just having an inner life. That is just rasisct cost of paint to allow people the room to enjoy it.
If the demons in the story were just demons would it be worse? Are there any plot points that need the demons to lack powers of complex thought to work?
I guess I just don’t understand why you feel it’s necessary to ignore everything the story told you about this particular type of monster in order to reinterpret it as a racist story about about how some peoples need to be exterminated. What exactly does that add to the story?
Verisimilitude. The work is written in a world that seems like ours. In worlds like ours that is a thing people say and are both lying and wrong. So, it is a more artistically dense view to consider it in the context of them being an unreliable narrator.
A bunch of people that don’t exist talking about situations that can’t exist has less intresting things to say about life.