Author Topic: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)  (Read 141280 times)

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
The most terrible thought in the universe is the perfect awareness of being aware: and the beauty of the trap is that it cannot be detected or foreseen until one possesses the godlike power and scope of awareness which makes the metadamnation inevitable.

Here's a question: If the Vishnans are a high-level consciousness, how do they avoid being consumed by the Great Darkness or becoming a new one?

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
The Great Darkness is consciousness. It is self-awareness and nothing else. It is thinking about itself. Read that again, and understand. It is thinking about itself.

Hmm. Is it thinking only about itself because it knows everything and therefore anything it could think about would be considered part of itself, or because it's unable to perceive anything outside of itself?

 

Offline Trivial Psychic

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
OK.  I've mostly tried to avoid getting into conversations regarding this high-level consciousness stuff, mostly because the terms getting thrown around are outside of my vocabulary, but I just came up with an analogy that might simplify it.

The Great Darkness is a massive computer AI, and the various intelligent races within the universe are subroutines within the AI, but as the computer program works, the subroutines are constantly improving and updating.  At some point one of them expands to the point where it becomes a miniature AI itself, aware of what it is, but not of the fact that it is within a larger AI.  This sub-AI begins making its own decisions, which threatens the effectiveness of the large-scale AI.  It therefore employs other programs to either curtail or eliminate these offending subroutines.  The Shivans act to destroy it or attack it enough to keep it contained.  The Vishnans act to try to rewrite the subroutines to keep them on track and prevent their expansion.  If they can't, then the entire memory block has to be formatted and the AI rebuilt, loading critical software and subroutines from protected backups.

Am I close?
The Trivial Psychic Strikes Again!

 

Offline Darius

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Thought cancer is a good analogy, because there are no failsafes to redirect its thought away from itself. All resources are directed towards propagating its own thoughts of itself, subsuming all consciousness in the universe into itself. It is the natural conclusion of the conscious manipulation of reality.

Like cancer, the only way to eliminate it is excision and quarantine, and screening for precancer (?precursor hyperconscious thought)  in the healthy tissue.

 

Offline Delta_V

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Would AI rampancy in Halo be an accurate small-scale comparison?  Not necessarily how it was potrayed in Halo 4/5, but in the earlier books.  Basically, a smart AI is constantly learning and getting smarter, but over time, they begin to devote more and more processing power to thinking, instead of normal functions, and eventually "think themselves to death".  I think one analogy they used was "thinking so hard you forget to breath".

These descriptions of the Great Darkness reminded me of this, but on a civilization/universal scale.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Thought cancer is a good analogy, because there are no failsafes to redirect its thought away from itself. All resources are directed towards propagating its own thoughts of itself, subsuming all consciousness in the universe into itself. It is the natural conclusion of the conscious manipulation of reality.

Like cancer, the only way to eliminate it is excision and quarantine, and screening for precancer (?precursor hyperconscious thought)  in the healthy tissue.

Okay, yeah. That makes sense. But...again, what's the problem? Why is this something to be avoided at all costs? I don't know if I'd call it ideal, but it doesn't exactly sound like a fate worse than death.

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
It seems like there's a point at which a consciousness is so powerful, that it can't grasp itself and goes mad/completely unstable and destructive. Or maybe at some point out of its awareness over 100% of it is needed to sustain awareness of itself... and something happens. And it stops being aware, just malignant, unaware of its actions and so powerful it can immediately incorporate other awarenesses into it. This seems paradoxal, but it's also very interesting.

That would totally confirm the phrase "The deepness that stalks the cold roads", not "darkness". Possibly comparable to a black hole, just on a psychical level. Once you get too near it, it sucks you into itself and you simply won't get out no matter what. It would also seem that any psyche that gets sucked in becomes some kind of no-shape blob, just like the matter in a black hole.

It also seems that calling it God or God-like seems to make sense. Since it seems that it's being attracted VERY quickly by any thought about it, which would mean that either it sees everything in the open spaces of Nagari network simultaneously, or there's just some magic summoning it to whoever thought about it. Since witnessing such thing seems to be VERY traumatic, it would also seem that Ken in UT2 actually didn't only place a firewall between Laporte and it, but also actively erased Laporte's memory of it. Because if he didn't, she would almost instantly think of it.

So it seems that Shivan's role is to remove any single entity that's even remotely close to becoming such a thing, while Vishnans seem to convert entities they seem fit into parts of the Great Psyche, which is either separated from the rest of Nagari... somehow, or whatever is in the Psyche isn't aware at all.

It also seems very paradoxal that human awareness was developing quite slowly if at all, and the actual reason for it to be able to reach Nagari or whatever's in it were the Shivans themselves. The research about Nagari became because of them. So if their goal is to prevent civilisation from reaching an awareness threshold, they seem to be doing it very wrong by providing tools like Nagari for the humanity. I think that's Vishnu's idea.
How do you kill a hydra?

You starve it to death.

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Because the Universe is a diversity factory and this is the antithesis of it. The darkness propagates and erases all sources of diversity. Without diverse thought, it will never be able to gain the capacity to escape something as simple as:

1:
Goto 1

Because it is impossible for the darkness to comprehend or care that there is more to existence than that though.

Since the darkness assimilates, it makes all other things have only that though. There is no point to its existence, it contributes nothing to the universe and steals thought from literally anything else in existence to make that goto statement become the only thing everything in reality is. Realty becomes a ****tily coded goto statement because it can no longer be conceived by anything to be anything else.

Imagine if something made your body redirect all of its autonomic nervous system's computing power into baking pizza. What are the obvious, immediate, fatal consequences of that?

 

Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
A delicious meal.
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
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Offline Darius

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Okay, yeah. That makes sense. But...again, what's the problem? Why is this something to be avoided at all costs? I don't know if I'd call it ideal, but it doesn't exactly sound like a fate worse than death.

As An4x deftly outlined, there is no problem if you don't mind the universe being pizza  :o

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Honestly its starting to sound like its just another hegemonising swarm rather than some completely different thing as had been implied up to this point.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Not rly.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
The Great Darkness is consciousness. It is self-awareness and nothing else. It is thinking about itself. Read that again, and understand. It is thinking about itself.
The most terrible thought in the universe is the perfect awareness of being aware: and the beauty of the trap is that it cannot be detected or foreseen until one possesses the godlike power and scope of awareness which makes the metadamnation inevitable.
It also seems that calling it God or God-like seems to make sense.

This reminds me of God's name in Exodus. "I AM WHO I AM."

As an aside, I wouldn't equate consciousness with self-awareness. Consciousness isn't inherently recursive. For example, I think there are conscious people who never think about consciousness.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
They have qualia, though - they know that they exist, their states are paired with a subjective experience of being in that state.

  
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I agree with everything except this part:

they know that they exist

Some people (those with Cotard's syndrome) believe the opposite. Others (e.g. those in vegetative states, or in states of intense concentration) don't think about "self" or "existence".

Even if you know that you exist, this knowledge is only part of consciousness; many qualia aren't related to this knowledge at all. Qualia are tied to the self, but only in the same sense that noses are.

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Alright, so why does that result in 'the universe being dinner'?

e: For instance, if it is purely thinking about itself and only itself, then why is it a problem for anyone else?  At most it seems like it would occasionally ingest additional matter at random if it figures it needed that to continue its work, but even then if it is purely thinking about itself, then how could it have any ability to interact with the outside world in an organized way?  It would just be this free floating entity that ignores everything because those things are not part of itself.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2017, 05:42:27 pm by QuakeIV »

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Because no matter what precautions you take, some idiot will touch the xenomorph egg.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Perhaps I'm misreading things here, but it feels like a lot of people are mistaking the Great Darkness for something that exists in a real and/or physical sense... I've always understood it to be more conceptual, a state-of-being more than an entity... But then, I could be entirely wrong myself. The nature of the thing seems to be pretty difficult to explain/understand.  :doubt:

On a related note:
Just finished playing through Tenebra again, and was extremely disappointed to find a bug where in the Darkness didn't do it's cool creeper thing... was just blackness the whole way.  :(


Question for the Oracle though:
Federation POW camps - In "My Brother, My Enemy", it's mentioned that the TEVs look at interment in a Solus Lacus (sp?) camp as a "fate worse than death" and go to pretty great lengths to release their imprisoned captain. Ubuntu culture would, in my mind at least, treat their prisoners with the utmost respect and humanity. I had previously assumed the fear was entirely a product of the TEV propaganda machine, but during "The Plunder" Levi (think it was Levi) mentions the camp in a way that makes me think there might be something else there...
So the question is: Which side is doing the heavier propaganda about the conditions in a Fed POW camp? Or, more simply I suppose, what are the conditions there like?

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
Lacus is full of Nagari VR sets that put you in contact with the Teletubbies Vishnans.

In a more serious post, some of the things that they go through there might involve some form of brain washing, I'd argue more in the sense of expunging the source of someone's violent or militaristic tendencies.
I'd also bet that such a procedure could also be non-permanent/flawed in a way that permits someone to go back to their original frame of mind or a new damaged one. Hence permitting castoffs of Ubuntu to exist.

 
Re: The Blue Planet Oracle (full BP2/3 spoilers within!)
I've re-watched a clip of UT2 playthrough and a couple things got me interested.

Ken says to Laporte that "There have always been others". As in, other people like her. While she seems to have been the best "design" of them all, therefore the most successful one... Others? I once figured that Simms might be one of them, but... nah. Any tracks of these other people we'd like to know of? I don't think any of Beis would be related, the same for people speaking in Ken.

I believe there is one part in UT2 (where you're fleeing from the Vishnans) that has a bunch of jump nodes that are named after characters in Blue Planet. I always took them to be characters who were Nagari sensitive. IIRC, one of them is Simms but when Laporte goes through it it is just silent. Unlike, say, the Steele one that has him repeating a mantra as a defence against hostile neural incursion.

edit:
Ivan Genady, Chiwetel Steele, Lorna Simms, Ehud Levi, Etomgi Kyrematen, Dmitri Toqueville, Svetlana Henriksson, Martin Mandho, Thea Carey, Anita Lopez
« Last Edit: September 16, 2017, 10:15:16 pm by Azrael15 »