Should NPCs have Human Rights?

And there's no such thing as consciousness or intelligence either because the universe is deterministic.

 

A train following the tracks.

 

I was going to write long reply but after scanning through 4 pages, I decided it is not worth it.

They should not unless you're making military sim, that is actually taking military laws into account. (The closest thing to that is swat 4, IIRC, they deduced score points for firing weapon before issuing warning first, etc. Too many deduced points could result to the end of player's career at higher difficulty).

NPCs are not living beings, they're simulated entities that act as actors in the story. Depending on the story, it might be their job to portray dying horribly, sometimes because of player's actions.

Also, I think that people that do not understand the difference between games and reality (the kind that ask this kind of question), should not be allowed to play video games.

 

It has been a slow motion train wreck. Reality and rational thought have been assaulted brutally. Some of the posts are cryptic and hard to understand, while others aren't worth understanding.

NPC's aren't even simulated entities. They aren't even polygons resembling humans. They exist entirely in our own perception, they are the result of our mind telling us the thing we're looking at is human enough to be thought of as human. The same way people see human emotions and behaviors in their pets, the same way we see a coat rack in our living room at night and think it's a burglar. It's the reason why emoticons work... we're profoundly proficient at seeing human traits in things.

NPC's are imaginary people. That's what is so scary about this thread being 4 pages long.

 

The furor over Death Race and other depictions of violence in video games has always been about its effects on the human player, not concern for the crude little stick figures / sprites / polygons on screen. No dofferent to the furor over violent films, certain books, rap music and so on.

Ultimately all an NPC is, is a drawing on screen. All of the data and code is designed to have dynamic images that respond to input from the mouse appear. If you want to give them rights, then you'll need to start giving all depictions of human beings rights as well.

 

You are missing the part where people think they can have intelligence, and forgetting that it has nothing to do with the visual image of the NPC but the idea that there is a living person there. Again, we are talking about imaginary friends having human rights.

I am just waiting for the next argument in favor.

 

before considering the virtuals consider our animals which live in the real world.
what about the giant panda who are being murdered?

 

That's an interesting way to put it. I'd like to think that mine do, but they really don't need any. They exist through me, and I have rights.

Would building a sentient robot be considered an imaginary friend of the person who built it? If you are creating a personality and an intelligence, that does sound a lot like creating an imaginary friend. I think this thread is about to take an interesting turn

That's going a little off topic since they are not virtual. Pandas certainly display more intelligence than insects, viruses, amoebas, etc. Should they have rights? Well if we're going by intelligence, the next creature in line for rights would be the cuttlefish. If we're going by rate of extinction then you're too late each day, because ~200 (average) species go extinct every day. They are insects and plants, sure, but what makes pandas more important than insects and plants? Is it because pandas are nicer to look at than plants? Is it because we consider insects a nuisance?

It's unfair to ask humans these questions because they know they have no real answers. The topic of virtual life people can at least speculate on

 

I'm not holding my breath.

 

I like this tangent too. We're discussing the thread in the thread.

Any thoughts on why pandas matter more than plants or insects? I personally value plant life above all else, because it's the only life that can exist without predation.

 

Sure, why not.

Pandas are cute, which reminds us of human babies, which triggers a protective instinct.

Bugs and plants are icky and stupid.

 

Indeed @anselmo.fresquez. My professor has us making a maze solver this week, and he showed us a demonstration of his solver yesterday. The thing had a bug which did almost exactly what cyberpunk said. Its just a bug. I wonder if any of the people who keep arguing for "NPC rights" have ever written a line of code.

I suspect there are things I don't know about Unity but are you even doing on Unity if you haven't ever written code?

 

Common sense says that evolution would always favor avoidance of pain and suffering for yourself and other creatures. In that that often so crassly fails on this earth is proof in itself of God abusing God's creation. So really to be bluntly truthful, Einstein, Bohr, & the like inventing the atomic bomb is far less impressive than me scribbling with a box of crayons in a coloring book.

Ultimately, in this universe what we say is quixotic as it's only God that can change things for the better and not each of us.

HSUS.org & HSI.org

 

I don't think babies are cute #nothuman

I do believe people would say that. I mean, they're people, right? They have no concern for a world without plants or what that would mean for themselves and their beloved pandas.

I made something like that for my ai class. I made a [poor] model of a mouse and had it go from where ever it was to any other point in the maze.

Haha, good one. I like that one. It's like a better way to word the refutations for the "fine tuned universe" arguments.

What about clones of people's minds in robot bodies? I think if we were being serious about ANY of this, that would be the best starting point.

I hope I retain my rights when I discard my flesh, at least.

I think if I were an ai I would appreciate my existence more than that of an organic who's only purpose is to meander on a rock in space for ~100 years.

 

Great to see this thread is still going.. having a break is useful because new ideas appear and I realise what prompted me to open this "rabbit hole" in the first place.
There is a theory that if you copy a shape (be it sculptured in the in the physical or the digital realms) then something of the original is imbued in it. I know that this is not an area that conventional science will necessarily agree with but there are people who align with this idea and base their whole belief system around it.
So if a human shape is created, not only does it have the contours of a human, because of it's shape it has other qualities of humanness.
Carl Jung the great psychologist speaks of 'archetypes' and this is what is contacted when a human shape is created and if the human archetype is present in the NPC then there there could be much more there as well.
If this line of thinking is true then 'yes' NPCs would appear to deserve human rights as much as we earthly humans.

 

I think for a lot of people the problem with taking this thread seriously will be the term "npc". You can clarify all you want but NonPlayerCharacter for a lot of people is those npcs programmed to decorate a world and react to things artificially (and not intelligently).

 

That's why I am explaining it.

 

You should make it a foreword in the original post so people see it before everything else

 

I'll probably keep the brain, since it runs far more efficiently (power consumption) than any machines will for the foreseeable future. Even in the far future, I'd replace at most only certain pieces of it. History has shown us people can survive and continue to be themselves with chunks of their brain missing. Replacing the missing chunks with machinery might be the best way (and only way) to preserve spirit.

What's the difference between an ai serializing it's thoughts before powering down and people going to sleep?

It would still be a different kind of appreciation, since something with a life span of more than a decade would get to observe certain phenomena that operate on large scales of time. I think a person who was 500 years could give us an interesting perspective on climate change

I think it won't be so bad. Just gotta save up enough money. The third Carmat heart recipient is also doing well. Once the trial moves on to 20 people (assuming #3 and the upcoming #4 survive), we will be that much closer to artificial hearts

The news of patient #3 doing well was posted on october 14 of this year, almost 2 weeks ago.

 

First interesting point.

 

I couldn't say everything at the beginning of the thread, if I did there would be nothing to say at the end.

 

Threads on these forums really seem to take on a life of their own. Won't be too long before we need to give them rights too.

 

We have already had a few people complaining about Hippo closing threads. The last thing we need is for them to bring in a bunch of thread-rights activists to join their fight. ;-)

 

Hey, don't break the fourth wall... this thread has become a sort of coast-to-coast AM thing.

So, if the consciousness can be transferred electronically, can it not then be placed into another person's brain?

If that can occur, can that person not live forever through younger bodies? Can that person not clone himself?

Or would there be some degradation over time? A little quality lost each time...

 

I meant just post a definition of NPC as a foreword. You know how people are after they have established their perception of a topic... it doesn't matter to them if you clarify 2-3 pages in.

I don't even know what thread I'm in anymore. There is a community wide meme going on right now with this.

It depends on how much of 'you' is chemical and what's electrical. If there's a way to 'write' the state of someone else's brain to clone yours, that's going to be a copy, not a transfer. See the game Soma for details.

One will live on thinking so, the other will be upset that they lost the coin toss. See Soma for details.

Probably not. But a better way to preserve yourself would be to gradually replace the organics with inorganics.

 

Consciousness and stuff is pretty silly. I'm convinced that the whole idea is just an attempt by atheist intellectuals to hold onto the idea of a 'soul'.

I donno, personally, I'm a big believer in determinism, cuz like physics and stuff.

 

Wouldn't concern for continuity be the opposite of thinking you have a soul?

Me too.

 

Well technically electro-chemical. Hell, it's really just plain ol' physics with a couple of ions rapidly defusing across a membrane, but who's keeping track.