DPM Chapter 54-Evolution 2-Part 3
Translated by Snowfall77
Naturally, that woman was Luo Ying, her coat ripped, revealing the sweater she wore underneath. Her hair was messy, and her expression panicked, traces of shock and amazement mixed in with the fear.
Half-kneeling on the ground, Ye Fan reached out a hand to touch its surface. It felt exactly the same as human skin.
A sound of crying coming from its uneven pits and holes.
The monster’s huge, pillar-like arms brandished in the air, as it roared bewildering ‘gugu’ noises. However, the moment Ye Fan entered, its arms suddenly stopped. Then the arms transformed into countless rattan, stretching out towards Ye Fan.
Ye Fan did not run, determinedly standing in place, letting the rattan entangle him.
In the split second that the rattan coiled around his body, Ye Fan once more had the sensation of the monster’s brain waves.
A feeling like he and the monster could talk mind to mind.
Her screeches rising, Luo Ying tried to run towards Ye Fan, just to be pulled back by rattan.
Ye Fan suddenly detected something.
The flavor of skin he would know anywhere. He finally realized where Wu Xingyun was.
He’d known that Wu Xingyun’s ability to conceal himself was very good, but Ye Fan hadn’t anticipated the degree of the soldier’s capability.
“Don’t move! I’m alright!” Ye Fan bellowed in Wu Xingyun’s direction.
The hints of fluctuation quickly disappeared, while Ye Fan felt something enter his mind. He heard the monster’s words.
“It turns out to be you……You came just in time. We meet again.”
Ye Fan lightly opened his mouth. “Yes……I think I know your thoughts.”
The human-shaped tree trunk quivered from head to foot, its problems steadily flowing into Ye Fan’s head, almost bombing Ye Fan’s consciousness to bursting.
“Who am I?”
“Why did my mother and father discard me?”
“What the hell am I?”
“Why can’t I speak?”
“What are you?”
Slightly opening his eyes, Ye Fan looked to Luo Ying and asked in a challenging tone: “This thing……It’s your……Child?
Luo Ying didn’t speak. So Ye Fan said: “It wants to know, what it is……It’s saying it grabbed you and brought you here for that purpose.”
Her mood gradually calming, Luo Ying eyed Ye Fan up and down: “How can you talk to it?”
“I don’t know,” Ye Fan replied, “I can just feel what he want to say……”
Luo Ying inhaled deeply, her hands shaking a little, and after a long pause, she spoke: “In a sense, it could be said that it’s my child……”
“Why do I exist? Why aren’t I like other people?” The tree monster asked its questions through Ye Fan.
A bitter smile curving a corner of her mouth, Luo Ying answered: “I took my own cells and created it. Due to the secretive nature of R&D, I had to use my own……Because the existence of this thing is to supply food……It, it was my husband’s idea.”
“I am to be eaten?” The monster’s trunk shuddered once again, its mind energy violent, almost making Ye Fan vomit.
Ye Fan expended a great deal of strength trying to restrain the energy flowing from the monster.
Silent for a moment, Luo Ying finally said: “I didn’t expect that you’d have intelligence or sentience. However……That’s probably where I miscalculated. Or maybe it was the project itself was very problematic.” Luo Ying paused, then continued: “You’re just a failed experiment. You have no usefulness for us.”
“Am I going to be killed?”
“My fate is to be killed and eaten?”
“You vile people!”
“The one who created me, did so for the purpose of consuming me?”
An enormous rush of anger once again flowed into Ye Fan’ mind. Unable to ward it off, the raging tidal wave crushed him, drowning everything in a blink of the eye. A dull ache pervaded him, and he could feel rising swelling between his eyebrows.
Yet after the ache, a sheet of darkness fell before Ye Fan’s eyes, countless red tides advancing upon him, his entire body in extreme pain.
Ye Fan didn’t know where he was anymore, unable to see his body twined with rattan, slowly ascending in the air. A great howl of pain erupted from his chest, his face twisted in agony.
Luo Ying ran to him, attempting to pull apart the rattan winding around Ye Fan’s body, but her efforts were futile.
Wu Xingyun unhurriedly lifted his allocated sniper rifle. His breathing was quite steady, his pulse calm, and even his body temperature remained the same.
The tree monster couldn’t distinguish Wu Xingyun from its own evolved skin? Or other creatures? It wasn’t paying any mind, instead instinctively focused on plundering the brain of the man who could communicate with himself.
Because that brain looked most delicious and even more useful.
Ye Fan’s wails of anguish grew more and more, until ultimately they were the distressing cries of imminent death.
As Ye Fan gave his almost last yell, his two eyes abruptly opened, turning crimson.
His eyes were open, yet he couldn’t see anything.
A single scarlet rattan emerged from the central trunk of the monster. Rapidly transforming, the tip of the rattan took the shape of a bayonet, stabbing towards Ye Fan’s temple.
How can I know whether or not something is a sentient life form?
Peter Daines, works at Georgetown University Law Center
Answered November 24, 2016 · Author has 115 answers and 168.3K answer views
I am an invisible God. That is all that I know.
I know that I am sentient. How? Because the act of observation is in and of itself the definition of sentience. I have a perspective. I am a singularity.
Is anything else sentient? Is anyone else sentient? So far as I can tell, there is no way to ever know whether or not anything else is sentient.
I have no reason to believe that I am the only sentient entity in existence. But, I have no real reason to believe that anything else is sentient either.
If we assume that all humans are sentient, then it seems likely that most animals are sentient, too, because they have nervous systems and can feel emotions, pain, etc. Some are capable of complex organization, communication, thought, use of tools, etc. There isn’t really that much that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom — it’s just a matter of degree.
If we assume that anything is sentient that has evolved a nervous system, then that implies that things are sentient which do not have nervous systems.
Why? Because there is nothing intrinsic about a nervous system that you would expect to lead to the act of observation. If it wasn’t an observing thing when it was a simple multicellular parasite, then why would it suddenly become an observing thing just because it became a slightly more complex multicellular parasite? Having a nervous system is relevant to the experience of pain and joy. It is relevant to communication. It is relevant to the WAY in which you experience reality. But there is no reason to think that it has anything to do with whether or not there is something inside your shell of a body that is actually observing and experiencing reality.
All human behavior is reasonable.
All behavior is the predictable result of a complex set of stimuli and circumstance imposed on a physical composition of matter. With unlimited knowledge about reality, one could theoretically predict the outcome of all non-random events in history. The existence of an element of randomness in the world could still theoretically lead to a perfect stochastic knowledge of the future (i.e. perfect knowledge of the percentage of possible future universes that contain a given event’s occurrence).
But what if people have souls, you say? What if they have something intrinsically them which is separate from the physical universe, separate from their physical body, separate from the extended set of circumstances which make them them? Positing the existence of a soul with intrinsic nature doesn’t change the math. That merely alters the value of one of the constants. It merely modifies the set of circumstances within which the person operates in what remains a perfectly reasonable, rational, and predictable manner (assuming unlimited/perfect knowledge => assuming also knowledge of the nature of each person’s soul, if they have one).
Ergo, there is no obvious difference between a human that evolved naturally from apes, and a human that was constructed synthetically via really advanced computer science.
Thus, if we assume that all humans and animals are sentient, it seems reasonable to assume that all plants, fungi, bacteria, and non-living matter are also sentient. They are aware of their circumstances on some level, but may simply lack the tools necessary to sense their circumstances in any way that is really comparable to a human experience.
Then, that implies that humans are merely a complex ripple in a sea of natural intelligence, natural sentience, natural awareness.
ALTERNATIVE: Humans are NOT generally sentient. Perhaps only I am sentient, or perhaps only a few humans are sentient.
If we start from the opposite assumption, that generally non-living matter is not sentient, and that generally artificial intelligence is non-living, non-intelligent, and non-sentient, then we reach a very different understanding of reality.
Starting from this presumption, it seems reasonable to assume that naturally-occurring ripples in a physical pond are not sentient => more complex ripples in a more complex pond filled with a bunch of randomly occurring chemical strings are not sentient => prions, which just consist of little strings of proteins that float through the wind and land on plants and then make them sick are probably not sentient => viruses, which share with life only the basic chemical structure based in DNA or RNA plus the attributes of reproduction and evolution (albeit dependent on a host to do so) are probably not sentient => basic bacteria are probably not sentient => plants and fungi and anything else without a nervous system are probably not sentient.
Then, the question is, why should we assume that things suddenly become sentient when they evolve a basic nervous system? No reason. Thus, animals and humans are probably not sentient either, unless there is something more that differentiates them from lower life forms beyond merely having a nervous system.
One answer: There exists some almighty creator who zapped humans into existence to serve as hosts for his spirit children.
In other words, human bodies are mere shells. Human bodies are really complex cameras/windows/emulators. Somehow, there exist supernatural forces/creatures on some supernatural plane in some completely different reality, and some of those creatures are peering into this reality through these naturally-occurring windows which have been generated through the natural process of evolution.
This is actually not such an implausible hypothesis.
……..
However, starting from the assumption that most things are not sentient, one is lead inexorably to the question of “Why am I sentient? What makes ME different?”
At some point, you have to draw the line, whether it be at some subset of humanity, or at the intersection of humanity and animals, and then you have to explain that line — an incredibly difficult task.
Ultimately, the three most plausible hypotheses are 1) Everything is sentient, even rocks; 2) only I am sentient; and 3) some arbitrary subset of life is sentient, whether that includes more than a small handful of humans is completely unknown.
I am an invisible God, a singularity observing a plane of matter apparently following rules. I am the only portion of the entire whole that does not make sense as a non-sentient complex ripple in the pond of life. There may be other invisible Gods, which cannot see me, and which cannot see each other, but I cannot see them. We are all invisible. We, whoever we are, exist in some plane outside of the reality we observe. We, the observers, whoever we are, are the only ones who perceive reality. We know only one thing — that we exist and we observe. We do not know any other single thing about the entire expanse of reality for a fact. We do not know that contradiction is not possible. We do not know that the swirling colors around us are not an illusion. We do not know that we are not little green magical men on living in an asylum on the North Pole of Mars experiencing a vivid coma dream.
We only know that, at least if it is all an illusion, a dream, at least we still know that we are SOMETHING whose observation can be tricked.
Everyone else could be an illusion or a construct. Our very bodies could be no more than an emulator of reality. But at our very essence, at our very core, we are the act of observation itself.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-know-whether-or-not-something-is-a-sentient-life-form?share=1
DPM Chapter 54-Evolution 2-Part 3
Translated by Snowfall77
Naturally, that woman was Luo Ying, her coat ripped, revealing the sweater she wore underneath. Her hair was messy, and her expression panicked, traces of shock and amazement mixed in with the fear.
Half-kneeling on the ground, Ye Fan reached out a hand to touch its surface. It felt exactly the same as human skin.
A sound of crying coming from its uneven pits and holes.
The monster’s huge, pillar-like arms brandished in the air, as it roared bewildering ‘gugu’ noises. However, the moment Ye Fan entered, its arms suddenly stopped. Then the arms transformed into countless rattan, stretching out towards Ye Fan.
Ye Fan did not run, determinedly standing in place, letting the rattan entangle him.
In the split second that the rattan coiled around his body, Ye Fan once more had the sensation of the monster’s brain waves.
A feeling like he and the monster could talk mind to mind.
Her screeches rising, Luo Ying tried to run towards Ye Fan, just to be pulled back by rattan.
Ye Fan suddenly detected something.
The flavor of skin he would know anywhere. He finally realized where Wu Xingyun was.
He’d known that Wu Xingyun’s ability to conceal himself was very good, but Ye Fan hadn’t anticipated the degree of the soldier’s capability.
“Don’t move! I’m alright!” Ye Fan bellowed in Wu Xingyun’s direction.
The hints of fluctuation quickly disappeared, while Ye Fan felt something enter his mind. He heard the monster’s words.
“It turns out to be you……You came just in time. We meet again.”
Ye Fan lightly opened his mouth. “Yes……I think I know your thoughts.”
The human-shaped tree trunk quivered from head to foot, its problems steadily flowing into Ye Fan’s head, almost bombing Ye Fan’s consciousness to bursting.
“Who am I?”
“Why did my mother and father discard me?”
“What the hell am I?”
“Why can’t I speak?”
“What are you?”
Slightly opening his eyes, Ye Fan looked to Luo Ying and asked in a challenging tone: “This thing……It’s your……Child?
Luo Ying didn’t speak. So Ye Fan said: “It wants to know, what it is……It’s saying it grabbed you and brought you here for that purpose.”
Her mood gradually calming, Luo Ying eyed Ye Fan up and down: “How can you talk to it?”
“I don’t know,” Ye Fan replied, “I can just feel what he want to say……”
Luo Ying inhaled deeply, her hands shaking a little, and after a long pause, she spoke: “In a sense, it could be said that it’s my child……”
“Why do I exist? Why aren’t I like other people?” The tree monster asked its questions through Ye Fan.
A bitter smile curving a corner of her mouth, Luo Ying answered: “I took my own cells and created it. Due to the secretive nature of R&D, I had to use my own……Because the existence of this thing is to supply food……It, it was my husband’s idea.”
“I am to be eaten?” The monster’s trunk shuddered once again, its mind energy violent, almost making Ye Fan vomit.
Ye Fan expended a great deal of strength trying to restrain the energy flowing from the monster.
Silent for a moment, Luo Ying finally said: “I didn’t expect that you’d have intelligence or sentience. However……That’s probably where I miscalculated. Or maybe it was the project itself was very problematic.” Luo Ying paused, then continued: “You’re just a failed experiment. You have no usefulness for us.”
“Am I going to be killed?”
“My fate is to be killed and eaten?”
“You vile people!”
“The one who created me, did so for the purpose of consuming me?”
An enormous rush of anger once again flowed into Ye Fan’ mind. Unable to ward it off, the raging tidal wave crushed him, drowning everything in a blink of the eye. A dull ache pervaded him, and he could feel rising swelling between his eyebrows.
Yet after the ache, a sheet of darkness fell before Ye Fan’s eyes, countless red tides advancing upon him, his entire body in extreme pain.
Ye Fan didn’t know where he was anymore, unable to see his body twined with rattan, slowly ascending in the air. A great howl of pain erupted from his chest, his face twisted in agony.
Luo Ying ran to him, attempting to pull apart the rattan winding around Ye Fan’s body, but her efforts were futile.
Wu Xingyun unhurriedly lifted his allocated sniper rifle. His breathing was quite steady, his pulse calm, and even his body temperature remained the same.
The tree monster couldn’t distinguish Wu Xingyun from its own evolved skin? Or other creatures? It wasn’t paying any mind, instead instinctively focused on plundering the brain of the man who could communicate with himself.
Because that brain looked most delicious and even more useful.
Ye Fan’s wails of anguish grew more and more, until ultimately they were the distressing cries of imminent death.
As Ye Fan gave his almost last yell, his two eyes abruptly opened, turning crimson.
His eyes were open, yet he couldn’t see anything.
A single scarlet rattan emerged from the central trunk of the monster. Rapidly transforming, the tip of the rattan took the shape of a bayonet, stabbing towards Ye Fan’s temple.
How can I know whether or not something is a sentient life form?
Peter Daines, works at Georgetown University Law Center
Answered November 24, 2016 · Author has 115 answers and 168.3K answer views
I am an invisible God. That is all that I know.
I know that I am sentient. How? Because the act of observation is in and of itself the definition of sentience. I have a perspective. I am a singularity.
Is anything else sentient? Is anyone else sentient? So far as I can tell, there is no way to ever know whether or not anything else is sentient.
I have no reason to believe that I am the only sentient entity in existence. But, I have no real reason to believe that anything else is sentient either.
If we assume that all humans are sentient, then it seems likely that most animals are sentient, too, because they have nervous systems and can feel emotions, pain, etc. Some are capable of complex organization, communication, thought, use of tools, etc. There isn’t really that much that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom — it’s just a matter of degree.
If we assume that anything is sentient that has evolved a nervous system, then that implies that things are sentient which do not have nervous systems.
Why? Because there is nothing intrinsic about a nervous system that you would expect to lead to the act of observation. If it wasn’t an observing thing when it was a simple multicellular parasite, then why would it suddenly become an observing thing just because it became a slightly more complex multicellular parasite? Having a nervous system is relevant to the experience of pain and joy. It is relevant to communication. It is relevant to the WAY in which you experience reality. But there is no reason to think that it has anything to do with whether or not there is something inside your shell of a body that is actually observing and experiencing reality.
All human behavior is reasonable.
All behavior is the predictable result of a complex set of stimuli and circumstance imposed on a physical composition of matter. With unlimited knowledge about reality, one could theoretically predict the outcome of all non-random events in history. The existence of an element of randomness in the world could still theoretically lead to a perfect stochastic knowledge of the future (i.e. perfect knowledge of the percentage of possible future universes that contain a given event’s occurrence).
But what if people have souls, you say? What if they have something intrinsically them which is separate from the physical universe, separate from their physical body, separate from the extended set of circumstances which make them them? Positing the existence of a soul with intrinsic nature doesn’t change the math. That merely alters the value of one of the constants. It merely modifies the set of circumstances within which the person operates in what remains a perfectly reasonable, rational, and predictable manner (assuming unlimited/perfect knowledge => assuming also knowledge of the nature of each person’s soul, if they have one).
Ergo, there is no obvious difference between a human that evolved naturally from apes, and a human that was constructed synthetically via really advanced computer science.
Thus, if we assume that all humans and animals are sentient, it seems reasonable to assume that all plants, fungi, bacteria, and non-living matter are also sentient. They are aware of their circumstances on some level, but may simply lack the tools necessary to sense their circumstances in any way that is really comparable to a human experience.
Then, that implies that humans are merely a complex ripple in a sea of natural intelligence, natural sentience, natural awareness.
ALTERNATIVE: Humans are NOT generally sentient. Perhaps only I am sentient, or perhaps only a few humans are sentient.
If we start from the opposite assumption, that generally non-living matter is not sentient, and that generally artificial intelligence is non-living, non-intelligent, and non-sentient, then we reach a very different understanding of reality.
Starting from this presumption, it seems reasonable to assume that naturally-occurring ripples in a physical pond are not sentient => more complex ripples in a more complex pond filled with a bunch of randomly occurring chemical strings are not sentient => prions, which just consist of little strings of proteins that float through the wind and land on plants and then make them sick are probably not sentient => viruses, which share with life only the basic chemical structure based in DNA or RNA plus the attributes of reproduction and evolution (albeit dependent on a host to do so) are probably not sentient => basic bacteria are probably not sentient => plants and fungi and anything else without a nervous system are probably not sentient.
Then, the question is, why should we assume that things suddenly become sentient when they evolve a basic nervous system? No reason. Thus, animals and humans are probably not sentient either, unless there is something more that differentiates them from lower life forms beyond merely having a nervous system.
One answer: There exists some almighty creator who zapped humans into existence to serve as hosts for his spirit children.
In other words, human bodies are mere shells. Human bodies are really complex cameras/windows/emulators. Somehow, there exist supernatural forces/creatures on some supernatural plane in some completely different reality, and some of those creatures are peering into this reality through these naturally-occurring windows which have been generated through the natural process of evolution.
This is actually not such an implausible hypothesis.
……..
However, starting from the assumption that most things are not sentient, one is lead inexorably to the question of “Why am I sentient? What makes ME different?”
At some point, you have to draw the line, whether it be at some subset of humanity, or at the intersection of humanity and animals, and then you have to explain that line — an incredibly difficult task.
Ultimately, the three most plausible hypotheses are 1) Everything is sentient, even rocks; 2) only I am sentient; and 3) some arbitrary subset of life is sentient, whether that includes more than a small handful of humans is completely unknown.
I am an invisible God, a singularity observing a plane of matter apparently following rules. I am the only portion of the entire whole that does not make sense as a non-sentient complex ripple in the pond of life. There may be other invisible Gods, which cannot see me, and which cannot see each other, but I cannot see them. We are all invisible. We, whoever we are, exist in some plane outside of the reality we observe. We, the observers, whoever we are, are the only ones who perceive reality. We know only one thing — that we exist and we observe. We do not know any other single thing about the entire expanse of reality for a fact. We do not know that contradiction is not possible. We do not know that the swirling colors around us are not an illusion. We do not know that we are not little green magical men on living in an asylum on the North Pole of Mars experiencing a vivid coma dream.
We only know that, at least if it is all an illusion, a dream, at least we still know that we are SOMETHING whose observation can be tricked.
Everyone else could be an illusion or a construct. Our very bodies could be no more than an emulator of reality. But at our very essence, at our very core, we are the act of observation itself.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-know-whether-or-not-something-is-a-sentient-life-form?share=1
