Birds, bees, mind-wipes

James Wynn · 18 Nov 2011, 17:24 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:24:48 -0600
Subject: (urth) Birds, bees, mind-wipes
In-Reply-To: <17C6B4E1901B47888484801843DD5A13@Rover>
References: <1321557165.31105.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com><4EC564E7.6070002 at gmail.com><CAJ8=rtj2S639qkvW+L4HP2ajnxKb6EZ9wssdWzDkw3TUWy0VLQ at mail.gmail.com><4EC5686F.3090709 at gmail.com>
	<4EC56B8E.2010706 at verizon.net><4EC573F7.2080409 at gmail.com>
	<4EC575D1.3080500 at verizon.net><CAJ8=rtg7PUbDvBEFnOVqOZfpOjhTOfNZ8yM4F-vexWC+V2iUcQ at mail.gmail.com><4EC5801D.5010306 at gmail.com>
	<4EC59E29.2030208 at verizon.net> <4EC5A517.2030509 at gmail.com>
	<17C6B4E1901B47888484801843DD5A13@Rover>
Message-ID: <4EC694E0.6040304 at gmail.com>

> *From:* James Wynn <mailto:crushtv at gmail.com>
>
> > Since I believe that chem personalities are made from mindwiped 
> scans of
> > actual people
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
> Why do you believe that?

Because Marble's hands passively absorb Rose's personality.
Because the Ayuntamiento's chems aborb their personalities to the extent 
that they continue to live after the bios have died.
Because although the method for constructing chems is not available a 
method for connecting human minds to chems is apparently easily done.

> There's some evidence against it, I think.  Hammerstone's disquisition 
> on officers and men.

We'd have to review that those statements in context.

> And the soldiers don't sleep as people do,

That's irrelevant. Sleep is a biological requirement. The Mainframe gods 
don't sleep either AFAIK.

> and they don't *remember* sleeping as people do, or think it's odd.

I would presume that the mindwipes and tweakings are far more extensive 
chems than for humans. Chems are specifically programmed for some useful 
activity. Marble is going to be fulfilled in cleaning and service. At 
the same time, Hammerstone notes that chems enjoy the smells of good 
food but can't eat it. Female chems wear perfume. They practice their 
handwriting. What value would there be in programming such character 
traits into a robot?

> Who was scanned to make Olivine, and how was the scan arranged?  Chems 
> talk to Silk about reproduction once or twice, and nobody mentions 
> this part.

That's a very good question. Equally puzzling is that chems can't create 
replacement parts but two of them can build a whole chem from scratch. I 
presume a new chem's personality is some kind of merging from its parents.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111118/a68175f4/attachment-0001.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net