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I won't be making my own game this year, but roped a friend into it, so I'll be helping her out with coding and design. Hope we manage in time, so far the concept seems all over the place and somewhat... um... experimental .

[imgzoom]https://i.ibb.co/X21Mg9z/treeman.png[/imgzoom]

Not sure who or what this guy is, but seems woodlandy enough

No, it doesn't mean that we should assume rocks feel pleasure and pain. How do we know that a living human feels pain but a dead human doesn't? We have no access to their inner state. It's simply that living humans tend to act as if they experience pain. Just like animals, especially mammals do.

So you're saying that we can never be *certain* about the inner states of others? Sure, I agree. But that's very, very different from saying that our knowledge of their states is *exactly zero*, don't you think?

EDIT: Maybe this is too pedantic. If I get what you meant now, we don't have to fuss over semantics.

Of course, that means we're likely to misinterpret the behaviour of living things that are dissimilar to us. But I think making a moral distinction between humans and species is completely arbitrary.

I can't make an argument that it is ethical to eat plants, only that it's more obviously unethical to eat animals.

I feel like we're talking past each other. I'm not saying that humans are somehow objectively more valuable than other species. I'm saying that human moral values apply best to humans and species which are similar to humans in relevant ways, namely in what (if anything) makes them suffer. And once again, it seems to me you are thinking along very similar lines, you're just framing it differently and using behavior instead of neurobiology to gauge suffering.

All I'm projecting is the idea that it is something like to be another entity and that some of it's experiences are more positive and some more negative in nature. Meaning that such experiences matter in a moral sense. This is as abstract as I can be, I really don't know how else to explain it. Based on the knowledge I have, the reasons to think that, if all other functioning humans have this intrinsic property, no other species has it, are less than trivial. And I don't know about good enough reason to be more than agnostic about small invertebrates lacking this property.

Consciousness is weird thing, as Ali said, maybe hive of insects could generate it, maybe your brain stem has its own consciousness, maybe each cell has one, maybe freakin cpus generate it for all i know 
There are theories describing consciousness as property arising from low entropy systems, there are theories claiming it to be property of elementary particles. Bunch of those theories are trying to explain the 'Hard problem' away, I was alluding to it when I said consciousness doesn't make scientific sense. I can't imagine how they could explain it to some satisfactory degree though.
We are nowhere near concluding with confidence where it makes sense to contemplate the presence of it.

I can accept, in a very abstract impossible-to-really-imagine kind of way, that it could be like something to be an insect, or a cell, or a universe... or evolution itself, apparently? I gravitate towards physicalism and epiphenomenalism when it comes to consciousness (so I'd take Carroll's position here for instance), but lately I've been feeling that there's something I wasn't getting before, so who knows what I'll be saying in a month or a year from now .

But I think consciousness is a red herring here. The problem we keep circling back to is that for your notions of morality to apply – even for the words ,,positive" and ,,negative" the way you use them to carry any meaning – it isn't enough for it to be like something to be another entity, it needs to be something like being you. I believe that human moral values can ultimately be traced to avoiding suffering, including the deeply rooted taboo against taking a life. And it seems to me both you and Ali are taking this taboo and misapplying it to consciousness.

And don't get me wrong – I think a taboo against taking a life is generally a great thing to have (although in my personal opinion it tends to misfire with issues like abortion and euthanasia) and I can relate to the ,,better safe than sorry" intuition when it comes to eating other beings. But it's just that – a human intuition, and one extremely prone to anthropomorphic bias at that. Once I try to disentangle where this intuition comes from and whether I should apply it differently to rocks/plants/insects/pigs/humans/CPUs, I always end up with ,,it's really about suffering". And then centering human experience is not only reasonable (because more neurons = more ways and opportunities to suffer), but in fact absolutely unavoidable (because our experience is the only way we have to even define what ,,suffering" is).

If we can agree on the above, we can talk about more practical matters. Like if neurobiology is a good tool for assessing suffering (as I suggested), or if other ways are better (like the argument by analogy which you seem to favor). I might have been wrong in this regard.

I think what LameNick and I are getting at is that - yes - we are projecting our experience onto animals. Or, at least, interpreting their behaviour though the lens of our experience. But (and I think David Hume got to this point first) we have exactly the same knowledge of other humans' internal states as we do animals - that is, absolutely none.

Doesn't this mean that it's equally reasonable to assume a rock has the same internal states as you as it is that another human does? Wouldn't it render statements like ,,I'd be prepared to accept that insects are incapable of thought or feeling, but there does seem to be some kind of emergent intelligence in swarms of insects" completely irrelevant? Could you make a case for eating plants with this notion in mind?

By the way, the idea that evolution could be a conscious process might be an example of what I meant by ,,schmoozling". It would be a consciousness to which I am like my cells are to me, and it could be ,,exploiting" me in ways I can't even begin to conceptualize. Guess what – I don't mind .

[your]

I don't know what you mean by human values and human-like experiences. I don't like pain and (for all intents and purposes) I don't like other beings experiencing it. That is pretty much the crux of what I call morality.
The experiences I have, might be most similar to other humans, goat has goat like experiences, kiwi has kiwi-like experiences, ET has Schmuckfaceians-like, some might not spend time worrying about taxes but non of us is pinned at the top of an objective importance of experiences pyramid.

You don't know what those other experiences are like. You may say something is a goat-like experience, but what you imagine when you say that is really just a variation of human experience. All you are doing is projecting your feelings onto other creatures. And what I'm asking is: why are you doing that? Does it always make sense to do that? Does it make sense with a chimp? With a rock? With a dog? With a computer? With a tree? With a fly? What decides when the answer is "yes"?

My rule of thumb is that - if an argument would permit a significantly more intelligent alien to eat me, it's a troubling justification for eating something.

This is a bit similar to the above. You say "a significantly more intelligent alien", but I suspect you are thinking of aliens as just a different kind of humans. If aliens wanted to schmoozle my grom-tron or collapse the wave function of my subatomic particles or do some other super-intelligent alien thing I have no conception or awareness of, I think I wouldn't mind. I also wouldn't be particularly grateful if they decided not to do that because they hate it themselves (and I contain phosphorus, which they find very relatable). Flies don't give a flying fuck about our apish morals.

I too have to derive knowledge from my own experiences, I'm not saying that to me the probability that insects are conscious is exactly the same as that mammals are and I'm not even talking about bacteria, but to claim that "You can smash bugs left and right and you haven't caused any real pain to anyone.", I really don't see where you get the certainty from.
I have no experience of your brain at the moment, I can't rule out the fact that you are a brain zombie or that I am just a Boltzman brain and nothing I experience represents reality. But given I make the epistemological choice of an interpretation that is more sensible, I can observe similarities in my behavior and that of other creatures (including invertebrates) and I know that most if not all I experience corresponds to events in some parts of my central nervous system which is another attribute I share with most animals.
Maybe there is a misunderstanding in that I'm not trying to draw a line here, I don't know where the line is if there is a line. I'm not telling you what to do, what I'm saying I disagree with your reasoning.

I don't know, it looks like the only thing we really disagree on is the level of certainty. Fair enough - I can dial it down a notch and acknowledge this is a complex issue with smart people on both sides. I still see the possibility of a fly having a human-like experience of suffering very implausible, and I insist that a human-like experience is what people really mean when they talk about "cruelty" and "suffering". But that could be a limitation of my not-quite-so-complex brain for all I know .
Other than that, you seem to essentially be using the same reasoning I do. You elevate octopuses above other creatures because you see their behavior as "sophisticated" and "relatable". You're gauging other animals' experiences based on the fact that their nervous system is similar to yours. What else are you doing here if not putting non-human animals on a scale based on how similar they are to you neurologically? Which works for me, because I think it only makes sense to apply human values to entities which have the human-like experiences those values are based on. But I don't know how you justify it? Why is it important to you that some animals have the same central nervous system as you and others don't?

You're right this is quite a subjective ideal, its not sanctity perhaps only in the regard that its not like some holy book that got imprinted into me without questioning it, but something I observe in myself, which is a very strong discomfort coming directly from the idea of deliberately taking life. Its hard for me to imagine a moral framework where the act of taking other's life is seen as irrelevant.
Does it mean according to you there is nothing wrong with e.g. world like in Loggan's run where everyone lives a happy life and then thinking they're going into a even better place they get killed painlessly even though they could live happily longer?

This is an interesting question implying a whole bunch of other interesting questions I'd be happy to try to answer (if only to sort my own thoughts), but it's getting late and my layer of neocortex is more shriveled than ever . Maybe tomorrow?

I think that the burden of proof to back the claim, that human brain is the most adapted to experience suffering and in a way that would make it reasonable to think that animal's capacity to suffer lessens with the distance from our evolutionary branch, is on your shoulders.
Octopuses for instance seem to exhibit quite sophisticated even relatable behavior, to assume they have no consciousness or just no capacity to suffer, because they lack e.g. libmic system seems to me like jumping to conclusions.

It seems reasonable to me to assume that the closer a brain is to a human one, the closer would the experience it generates resemble the human experience we have labeled as "suffering" (and deemed immoral to inflict). I don't see how we can pass judgement on other things other brains do when we have no experience of them.

Would you call it "jumping to conclusions" if I assumed bacteria have no subjective experience of suffering? Where do you draw the line and why? Does it possibly have something to do, consciously or not, with the level of similarity to humans?

And frankly so far my brilliant research that I'm conducting for years by starring at the internet seems to be showing that most of the complexity human brain has evolved is to talk bollocks to improve their social status by appearing like they know more than fuck all.

This just improved your social status. 

I don't believe in sanctity either but to decide to contribute to taking away consciousness of another being has moral implications to me.

What moral implications exactly? It seems to me you're just replacing "sanctity of life" with "sanctity of consciousness".

I am reading "The human brain has the greatest capacity to suffer", but I'm not sure that's been evidenced.

Yeah, I was afraid someone would nitpick on that . It's an assumption I'm making based on the overall complexity of the human brain. If anyone has a better understanding of the neurobiology of pain, I'm happy to be corrected.

Interesting. Is that the criteria you would set, then? "They feel the way we feel, so we shouldn't eat them" (yum yum to all the reptiles and insects and plants)?

Yum yum indeed. Eating anything is actually perfectly fine in my book, it's causing suffering that's wrong. And since suffering is a function of the brain and the human brain is the most developed one in this regard, it just so happens that the more something is like us, the more it can suffer. I don't believe in the sanctity of life or anything like that - my body kills millions of bacteria every day and I'm not planning to do anything about it .

While the enivironmental footprint is way smaller, I'm pretty sure bugs are still "meat".

For me, the most compelling argument against meat-eating is that the brain architecture devoted to experiencing physical pain and even some basic types of emotional distress is essentially the same in humans and at least the mammals we eat (not so sure about fish and birds). So while some animal rights sentiments can be naively anthropomorphic, this one is pretty real - what animals experience in factory farms is quite similar to how people would feel in the same situation. Which is pretty horrifying when you think about it for a while.

None of this applies to bugs in any way. You can smash bugs left and right and you haven't caused any real pain to anyone. Counting them as "meat" would be the naively anthropomorphic bit.

I eat it, but have occasionally been feeling like a hypocrite about it ever since I stumbled upon this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcVR2OVxPYw

- buy from a source that guarantees the animals had a normal life
- buy from a source that guarantees the animals aren't been slaughtered in a way that is pure torture.

Do you really do this on a day to day basis? How do you manage? I get it when you're buying raw meat for cooking, but what about eating out and buying ready-made stuff? Salami on pizza, the meatballs in your soup, things like that? I should make more effort to look into this, but I'm guessing avoiding products of animal suffering without going full vegan is actually pretty hard.

Loving the aesthetic! Also happy to finally see a fellow Czech around here .

About the same as in the uk...Preparing a 3rd and 4th Jab... People are now smelling a dirty big rat....

I think people don't realize it's a betting game and expect all or nothing results with everything. Solutions might not work out and new plans have to be developed, but most people still have to participate, even in the necessary mistakes along the way. To refuse to get vaccinated and then either a) be a free-rider if the virus is eliminated in spite of you, or b) go "I told you so" if new problems arise (or if it doesn't work because of people like you) is a pretty annoying strategy.

EDIT: I mean the generic "you", not you personally of course .

Got my second shot of Pfizer on Friday. Was a little feverish and very tired yesterday, nothing pleasant but also nothing horrible. Seems to have gotten better overnight, will see how today goes.

There's a lot of anti-vaccine scepticism in my country, the government has been confused and inconsistent with restrictions and communication around COVID, and nobody takes them seriously anymore. There is a steady supply of vaccines now, but it seems we won't get past the 70% threshold because people refuse to get vaccinated.

https://dark.netflix.io/en  -  helps keeping track of people and relationships. You can choose season and episode to avoid spoilers. I didn't need it, but I binge-watched, which really helped, not too much time between episodes, so not so much stuff I could forget from one episode to the next or from season to the next.

That's a really well-made website! I think I could have made sense of it if I had been more invested, but the endlessly labyrinthine nature of the plot started feeling silly to me - it seemed to have reached a point where everything that could have been done had been done at least three times and nothing could surprise me anymore. I still respect the show, but if I want a story in the form of a Sudoku puzzle, I'll finally finish Obra Dinn instead . Actually, come to think of it, Dark might be one of those rare cases of a story that would work better as a game.

This looks so good, even though I fear for any artist who puts this much time into a project!

That's a well founded fear :/. Some time ago I was catching up on your and Grundislav's podcast, and the part about people who get too ambitious with their first project, quickly burn out and never finish was scary. Well, at least I've got the jam games now, we'll see what happens with this one. Not giving up on it just yet, but might take a detour to something much smaller first.

Good luck with the development! I'll try out Off the Clock soon(ish).

Thanks, let me know what you think when you've had the chance to check out OTC!

@Honza - I’ve been thinking of watching this. From the trailer, it seemed a bit like DARK, which is the best thing to come out of Netflix so far. Based on your review, I will lower my expectations. But if I watch it, I’ll share my thoughts.

By the way, everyone watch Dark.

I really enjoyed the first season of Dark, kept watching through the second, but then I gave up on it halfway through the third season - it became too convoluted, I realized that most of the time I had no idea what was going on anymore . Katla is similar to Dark in tone and atmosphere, but the story is much simpler and more straightforward. The plot could probably be condensed into one episode of Outer Limits.

A lot of people seem to enjoy Katla, it has surprisingly good reviews - so maybe give it a try regardless of what I said. There's a lot to admire about it if you can get past the way the characters (don't) communicate or even think clearly.

Has anyone seen the Netflix show Katla? It seemed great at first: a slow-burn, psychological sci-fi mystery with amazing atmosphere and cinematography. BUT...

The behavior of the characters in the show is *insanely* illogical and stupid. I'm not a stickler for these things, I'm usually perfectly fine with suspending disbelief and just enjoying the themes and atmosphere when logic takes a back seat. But this one takes all the frustrating contrivances from mystery shows like Lost and brings them to an entirely new level. People *never* ask the most basic questions. Nobody has a coherent conversation about anything - it's always a variation on "vague comment - vague response - pensive stare - leaves without a word." Ridiculous and disastrous misunderstandings ensue because none of these people seem capable of forming a sentence. It literally had me yell at the screen a few times, and then wonder if this is supposed to be some sort of dream reality, or if they are intentionally trolling the audience. I haven't been this frustrated with a piece of entertainment for a very, very long time.

Anybody with me?

For those interested: The following is the list of games that ranked #1 to #5 in at least one voting category.

Spoiler

[close]

Just two corrections:

#4 in Mental Engagement is Nebraska Smith (not Darts 2).
#4 in Characterization is Coffin Valley (not Anamnesis II).

Looking good, Honza! Love the attention to detail - every art piece you post looks so polished!

Also, is it just me or do you really like drawing naked people partially hidden behind objects? 🤔

Hey Patrice, thanks! And yeah, I kinda recycled that gag in Off The Clock. But twice is enough, promise to not use it again any time soon .