Fallout 4

So I started playing Fallout 4 about 2-3 weeks ago. I have almost 4 days of game time so far, and have completed one of the main questlines/ found out about my son Shaun. And as I was playing, I took great pains to not reveal details about my playthrough with my girlfriend, who was also playing, so that she would make decisions on her own regarding the future of the Commonwealth and her allegiances without my interference. As I am doing now also.

But the core question of the game's questline is this: do you believe that synthetic creatures, robots, synths, advanced AI systems, whatever you want to call them, can become sentient and thus, just as deserving of freedom and the pursuit of happiness as all of us rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh? Why or why not?

Secondary question, specifically for those who have 'completed' the game: which faction did you side with? The Minutemen? The Institute? Or their sworn enemies, the Brotherhood of Steel? Or even the lesser known Railroad?

I think i'm going to be a minuteman. I've already taken the castle and have quite a few settlements. I've also found/upgraded Currie.

I'm actually not that fond of the synth storyline. The railroad is stupid imo: why would so many people risk their lives just to save a few synths? Hello this is the wasteland. more people want to have me for dinner than to help me, why the obession with synths? Most of them try to kill me, they appear no more enlightened than the average super muttie or raider. I don't think that kid i saw is shaun, and i've got a feeling the institute missions are going to annoy me. I certainly can't imagine "slavery" at the institute is all that bad, and certainly doubt they are more overworked there than those folk at vault 81.

Flesh and blood is not necessarily what we are, in my opinion. That is what our bodies are made of, and everything about us is strictly tied to our bodies, but what makes us who we are (as opposed to what) are the processes happening with our bodies, arguably our brains more than anything else. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that these processes are us, and nothing else is.
Now, a process is a domain of functions acting upon a system. Defined coherently, the system itself has little influence on the function. I could illustrate this idea with fields of numbers, but it applies to anything to which logic applies at all, so reducing it to math alone may be something of a disservice. So anyway, I think if the same processes could indeed run on silicon and copper as opposed to flesh and blood, the difference would to me then be one of body alone. I think the extent to which any being is equivalent to us is the extent to which it should be treated as though it was one of us, however far reaching that extent is at any given time.

Gisteron wrote: So anyway, I think if the same processes could indeed run on silicon and copper as opposed to flesh and blood, the difference would to me then be one of body alone. I think the extent to which any being is equivalent to us is the extent to which it should be treated as though it was one of us, however far reaching that extent is at any given time.

see, thats what i thought too. my son and i had this very conversation over chess last night. about artificial life, or life evolving from non carbon base, more specifically. that 'after a certain point', it makes little difference if the creature in question is primarily flesh and blood or not.

the tricky part comes with individual definitions of what that 'certain point' are, coming to a consensus on it. the brotherhood, for example, state clearly that all synths are a danger to humanity and must be destroyed. but is that demonstrably true in game? obviously not.

theres a good discussion on the ethics of siding with the institute or the brotherhood on reddit right now, a bit further down the thread. i find the conversation fascinating, if (for now at least) only theoretical.

i just watched ex machina last night....many of the same questions regarding sentience come up...

how can humans even be sure that we're sentient?....because we decided on defining a word?

we're not too far from the singularity....or at least based on the last timeframe i saw (which pegged 2025 approx.) man machine...at some point it won't make much difference since we continually find ways to merge the two....prosthetics etc...

having finished the main quest (I opted for the institute/minutemen ending). I have given your question some thoughts. I think I don't care at all about sentience. It does not make something more special. What we call sentience is a process of a certain complexity which is similar to ourselves. In comparison to us, other things are not sentient. Yet that which gives us sentience breaks just like those other things do. We are easily manipulated. Our "prgramming" is easily corrupted. more advanced life forms would look at us in the same way we look at molluscs.

Codsworth is a re-purposed dishwasher with the ability to express feelings. I can appreciate him for being just that whether he qualifies as "sentient" or not. Currie expresses love for me despite being the same programme she was when we first met. She simply has new sensors and new data to play with. The railroad "frees" synths by wiping them, which is in no way different from lobotomy in the real world, or what the institute does when it recovers deffective units. People have strokes and "recover" as a completely different person.

We think as highly of our sentience as the supermutants think of theirs, and in the end we are just as misguided and insignificant as those green videogame monsters.

so keen for the settlement building when i get Fallout 4. Gonna build a fortress and a bunch of towns, fortify them like crazy and start an Empire with my character as a corrupt dictator video games bring out the dark side in me...