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Would you want to know that you were a robot?
spacekungfuman
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
So a stranger comes to you one day and tells you that there is a possibility that you are not actually a person, but are an intricate automaton constructed from living tissue to resemble a person exactly. If this is the case, then you would have been somehow conveyed to your parents without their knowledge that you were not an actual person, and in fact, the base tissue used in your construction would have been created from your parent's DNA. If you were an automaton, noone in the world but your creator and this stranger would know or be able to distinguish you from an ordinary person. You would have a normal life expectancy, and there really would be nothing to distinguish you from any actual person. When the stranger asks you if you want to know the truth, how would you respond and why?
Edit: As a further question, what level of superpower or other difference would be enough to make you want to be this automaton, instead of a "noncreated" person? Would being able to run really fast once in your life be enough? What about knowing that your life expectancy is one day longer than what it would have been otherwise?
Edit: As a further question, what level of superpower or other difference would be enough to make you want to be this automaton, instead of a "noncreated" person? Would being able to run really fast once in your life be enough? What about knowing that your life expectancy is one day longer than what it would have been otherwise?
spacekungfuman on
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Two responses:
1) I would tell the stranger to get back on their meds, and inform the orderly that they were off them.
2) I wouldn't care if it were true or not, because I was such a perfect simulacrum of humanity that conveyed zero benefit, and made from my parents biomass... it would be a pointless piece of unprovable knowledge.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
And yeah, I think I could handle it
you'll never be able to find any evidence of this, you'll just have to trust me
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Meat.
Robots.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
And lets assume that they could somehow prove it, maybe with a video of your construction.
And this is different from a "test tube baby" because that is a natural biological process just occuring in a simulated environment, with some extra help in the form of selecting the best eggs and sperm, and possibly thinning out the outer membrane of the blastocyte to make hatching easier. Here, we are talking about someone literally weaving you together out of tissue grown in a lab.
I wasn't thinking about souls at all. It was just something that occured to me that seemed a little interesting to think about.
However, I already know I'm not a robot, because I'm normal height.
You are claiming a nonphysical nonobservable deferentiation between these two stated. That's soul talk regardless of how you spin it.
I totally read that as "the stealth of ten gorillas." Which I want to MSPaint now.
No, more just that even though you are physically identical, you have knowledge that you were created and you don't know why. That question wouldn't bother you at all? I mean, I don't even think I believe in the idea of the soul, and that is honestly not where I was coming from with this, although I see how you could think that.
So what level of super powers would you need to want to be created? What if you had the power to run incredibly fast one time in your life? What if you were just slightly stronger than another person with a similiar build to yours?
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Enough to be a Hall of Fame-level professional athlete. If you are going to do it, go for broke.
Unless there's a material difference (say, the lab-growing process is imperfect and I might suffer some kind of tissue breakdown or organ failure someday) then it just does not matter at all.
I find questions of "why do I exist?" to be rather uninteresting. There is no why. (Literally; I was an accident. My parents didn't want a second child.) I'm not particularly bothered by this. The question 'why do I exist?' is an academic curiosity, but neither the question nor the answer alter the fact that I do exist.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't think you know what the word "robot" means. The important part here seems to be that you were created somewhere else and inserted into your mother somehow, not that you're non-human. In which case yes, the question would be "why"? Presumably the stranger would be able to provide some light on that.
The entire thought experiment seems rather ill-thought out and possibly inspired by Battlestar Galactica, the writers of which also don't seem to know what a "robot" is.
That's because you constructed it stupidly. You might as well have said "OMG what if you were actually a colony of cooperating single-celled specialized organisms, guyz!! No, I'm not talking about cells, honest!" You haven't specified any reason the person wouldn't be human in this scenario. There was no need to bring robots into it, you should have just used in vitro fertilisation without the mother's knowledge. And since it was using the parent's DNA, it still wouldn't be much different than normal childbirth, except the question of why someone would go through all this trouble to produce what seem to be a normal person.
Is this guy chasing after me?
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
What if we could take your robot brain and put it in a tiger body?
As to wondering why you were created, I'm confused as to why this isn't a question thjat everyone can ask. Why did your mom and dad make you? They wanted a kid? They wanted a caretaker when they got old? Whoops, condom broke?
If I found out I was a "synthetic" human, I would assume I was built because some scientist wanted to see if he could do it. Works for me. Also, I would learn to dance a rpoper robot so all the other robots don't make fun of me at robot balls.
Yes, because more importantly...Do I have a bomb in my chest? ;o
Two Words: Adrienne Barbeaubot.
Yeah, spacekungfuman, I think you need to redefine your question. What are you really asking here? Are you asking if an individual would want to know that they are artificial? Artificial vs... what?
* Because anyone who makes a robot that doesn't have a "do no harm to Humans" rule is asking for it.
This is literally a difference of two cells. Otherwise they're equally artificial.
As to why someone created you, it'd probably be about the same as you were created in the first place. Actually, odds are probably much higher they created you purposely as opposed to all the accidents out there.
Now if there were some law that would mean I had to be shut down or if I had some weird ass underlying programming maybe I'd want to know then but like someone said up there, a difference that makes no difference isn't a difference.
Let's get some being and time up in here, Heidegger style.
What is meant by being? Is being split up into multiple ways of Being-in-the-World, or is it the Being of a being in itself and its totality of Being?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'll save you the trouble. There are 10 gorillas in this picture.
OMG the stealth!