I don't see how anything that happens in a video game can be considered insulting. Real life yeah. A video game? Nah.

isn't this thread a great example of why Bethesda's concept of the main story and the factions outdid the previous two Fallouts? ^^

so many different opinions.. so many people that think their exact faction does the right thing

it's finally something that you can think about, something that is grey and twisted and brings out different opinions

I feel like this is way more exciting than the NCR/Legion conflict that we had :/

the writing may not come out on top, but the whole idea behind it is amazing

Well it's a idea that's been done countless times before this. I can't really give them credit for doing something that's been a debate for years now.

Bethesda writing is what is suppose to make the idea interesting like Ex Machina. They get no credit for the idea but I give them a ton of credit for their writing.

1. This belongs in spoilers

2. Slaves were given a place to eat and sleep or a "home" and work or a "purpose" they just didn't get paid and they couldn't leave any time they wanted sort of like the Synth retention program. Synths just are not human.

The Institute sympathisers want to play with all the cool toys. Therefore, synths are not people because if they were they'd be evil slave owning scum. And we can't have that.

The Brotherhood types want to polish their armour and shout "Ad Victoriam!" at everyone. Therefore synths can't be people because if they were, the BoS would be xenophobic, genocidal tosspots. And that would never do.

It's just politics. First decide what you want to do, then adjust the "facts" until they support your position.

I'll concede that Beth do have a knack for getting people to identify with one side or another. It was the same with Imperials vs Stormcloaks.

I never did the civil war in Skyrim. I thought both sides was either run by an idiot tough talking fraud( stormcloaks) and the Empire is not any better.

There was a bit of a political side-bar starting in this thread - I've gone through the last couple of pages and removed or edited out the most of them. Please do keep on topic and try to keep the real-life politics out of this.

ya, I was like "can I kill both of you somehow for annoying me?"

Which logically means if someone was in an accident (or war) and had his or her limbs blown off and replaced with prosthetics, you would not think of them as human.

I don't think you mean that. Be careful with declarations of principle. Some of them are not very good principles.

In theory, I can.

I need tons of raw biological material, a copy of your DNA, a complete body scan down to (at the very least) the cellular level, and a machine with the capability to create cellular structures from scratch to preplanned specifications.

I turn on the machine, and it starts churning out copies of you, with your exact memories and thoughts as when you were first scanned.

Strictly speaking, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says you can't. The more accurately you know the position of a particle, the less you can say about it's state. So if you get the structure correct, the particles are likely to random velocities unrelated to the ones they had in the original. The body might form correctly, but it's likely that the fine cellular structure would shred itself internally.

A better question is, perhaps: "how does a person's possession of a machine-like attribute (such as being capable of mass-production) make them less of a person?"

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle only applies to quantum particles, or molecules in a quantum state. Cells, synapses, and transmitter molecules are too large to natrually be in a quantum state.

Or are you really going to sit there and tell me that I can't know the state of my own parked car due to the uncertainty principle?

No. I'm going to sit here and tell you that you if you try and duplicate someone by recording their physical structure down to the sub-atomic level then you're not going to know the relative velocities of the atoms that make up, say a cell wall. Or fragile RNA strands that some have theorised encode memory.


So you can have delicate internal structures tearing themselves apart when the copy is instantiated, or you can get a good idea of the relative speeds involved and molecues not form because their component atoms are too far apart.


But hey, it's your research project. If you can get the funding, go for it!

I never said that they'd be duplicated down to sub-atomic levels. Just that they needed to be duplicated down to the Cellular level, at least. Y'know, so that cellular structures can be made.

You can go through a charisma check with him to get him to admit that he's lying about being a synth. I suppose it's possible that he's lying in turn about this as well, but the game doesn't really give us a reason to actually conclude that he's a synth. At least not that I've seen. He also claims to be the founder and leader of the Railroad with Desdemona as a figurehead, but you can get him to admit to lying about this as well.

A22-22's last message. That is all I have to say.

mmmm... but it's not as if cells are like lego blocks. All those neurons are the different shapes and you just need to know awkward things like long long those dendrites are and for that you need to know where the molecules that make up the cell walls go. And if you want to capture the state of consciousness, "your exact memories and thoughts as when you were first scanned" as you put it, then at the very least you're going to need to know the charge on those dentrites, which means you need to know about ions and electrons and that means going down to sub-atomic level, never mind atomic. And that's for a fairly conservative model of cognition.

So yes. To replicate down to cellular structures in a way that does what you said it would do, you absloutely do need to go down to sub-atomic levels. You know, so it world actually work?

best bait thread i've seen in a while, nice job

You mean like Cait? Yeah, she turned out alright. For the most part.

Then we run in to the issue of whether the "normal" human beings should be allowed to run the Commonwealth either. Look where it's gotten them.

On the other hand, many do. I know for a fact that my cat recognizes herself and is fully aware of herself as an individual. Does that mean she's sentient? What defines sentience? Self awareness - check. Self preservation - check. Dreaming, thinking and planning - check?

I guess my cat is sentient.

this is why i dont like the railroad

Allright, maybe exact thoughts at the time of scanning is too much. However, since memory is a creation of dendrite connections, all you need to do is scan down to the point where you know where and how they're connected. The only real difficulty is getting the brain to start working without causing a seizure and frying neurons. I'd imagine clone will be disoriented as hell once they're on, though.

Moral equivalencies. I am so at a crossroads in the game having just met my son. Hate lying to him, but I'm just not sure.

I wonder why the would want to

as well.

Seems counter-intuitive to eliminate the creative force if you want long term success.