Why in science fiction rpgs is bringing someone back from the dead or immortality usually impossible...

Why in science fiction rpgs is bringing someone back from the dead or immortality usually impossible, but shit like faster than light travel possible?

In real life, its theoretically possible to make someone biologically immortal, hell its a strong possibility of happening within a century, and bringing someone back from the dead isn't far off either, especially if the brain is intact.

Meanwhile, faster than light travel is likely impossible, or at best, thousands of years off.

What gives? 90% of science fiction table top game settings are like that, it makes no sense.

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Do you know something cool about the latest in brain reconstruction that I don't know? You sound like you might do.

Also, faster than light travel is possible becaue players want to travel between star systems.

Mortality is a narrative barrier that people are used to and like more than immortality.

Not having FTL--that is, being extremely limited to a single area unless huge amounts of time are given up, origins are entirely abandoned, and so on--is a narrative barrier people are not used to and do not like as much.

That said, there are probably sci-fi RPGs where immortality is not just possible but expected (Eclipse Phase maybe? I think that has brain-in-a-jar stuff), and where FTL is nowhere to be found.

So it's just narrative bullshit?

because FTL travel is necessary for a lot of the stories people like to tell in science-fiction. it's a genre convention and present in much of the literature that sci-fi RPGs use as inspiration.

some modern RPGs, like eclipse phase, do focus on that kind of technology (and don't feature FTL so much). but they tell a different kind of story than many people are looking for.

immortality is irrelevant in most games anyway, because they don't last long enough for aging to matter. resurrection is controversial - some people like being able to bring back their characters, other people find it harder to create dramatic tension in a world where death is an inconvenience rather than a major "oh shit" moment. whether or not it's "realistic" (as you imagine it) it doesn't always make for the best stories.

You can do a whole lot without FTL - terraformed solar system with tons of asteroid bases/ringworlds/satelites making up the core of the human spaceward expansion - nearby star systems requiring long travel times developed similarly

Starships functioning as a futuristic pony-express, delivering messages between systems

Super long lifetimes from biological immortality making these long voyages feasible

You can do a lot of cool narratives with harder sci-fi

One other thing I've wondered in most Sci-fi, why are spinally weapons so rare? It's the most efficient way to pack weapons, and if you use missiles in space, theyre realistically all gonna be casaba howitzer type missiles, anything else is a terrible mass/energy proposition in space

i wish there was more stuff with spacefights that have verisimilitude

Mass effect handled space combat well, except in cutscenes. All the big guns were spinal mounts, except for point defense weapons. The only missiles used had an amazing mass/energy ratio

Realistically, any kinetic weapon or particle beam is going to be spinally mounted, because both type of weapons directly benefit from being longer. Both types of weapons are likely to be the "big guns", because kinetic weapons are BY FAR the most efficient mass/energy weapons, and particle beams are also quite destructive and have some advantages that make up for the worse mass/energy efficiency.

Lasers are not likely to be the "big guns", nor are plasma weapons. Lasers suffer from diffraction, and they both suffer from blooming. Lasers make good point defense weapons though, would probably be used for shooting down missiles or small ships because they move at light speed. I only foresee plasma weapons really being used because a fusion reactor would naturally have a bunch of excess plasma, so it can be weaponized, and you can shoot plasma out of a mass accelerator (raillgun or coilgun), so it'd be like a less efficient kinetic weapon, with a radioactive kick. Again, they'd probably just be weaponizing exhaust when it comes to plasma weapons. Maybe a second spinally mounted weapon, just for shooting out the excess plasma? Who knows. That's something cool to think about though,imagine the kind of damage some plasma moving at relativistic speeds would do.

Because FTL makes good stories, and reducing or eliminating the risk of death makes bad stories. That, or having resurrection be an amazingly rare occurrence makes for good stories.

Not always, but as a general rule.

Most SF is either a reskin of :
- greek tragedies (star wars)
- the colonization era (star trek)

Plus our civilisation has a strong taboo about death.
To allow resurrection in your setting you have to deny the existence of soul. It seems like something easy but it's far from the most spread PoV.

You can still have good stories where characters can come back to life, IF it has a clear and defined set of rules - for example, if the body is totally destroyed, they can't be brought back. If the brain is destroyed, being brought back to life won't return any of the memories or anything that makes them "them". You don't need FTL for space travel, just make the solar system REALLLLY busy, like every goddamn piece of rock is colonized

You can just handwave the soul bullshit by saying it returns to the body when ressurected

Its annoying how poor translations and cultural cruft have turned "soul" from it's original definition of mind into some intangible piece of nonsense

Mostly, yep!

Deal with it.

Well obviously it is *possible* but it's not what people think of when they think about adventure in the future.

Most works which ignore death are niche and very special settings, like Paranoia or 40k (to an extent).
They're not bad. They're not popular either, sadly.

Because if you can bring someone back using medical technology then they're not dead. The definition of death changes as medical technology advances.

You're completely missing the point. For the most part, stories require conflict. When you remove the threat of death, conflict becomes SIGNIFICANTLY harder to create. He Never Died is a really good example of this; 'Jack's immortality removes almost all conflict from the character and makes the fragility of the people around him that much more relevant. When you remove the risk of death from EVERYONE, then suddenly you have to generate risk, and thus conflict, in weird, lateral ways that people find it much harder to identify with.

I've often wondered what might happen to Paranoia if you got rid of the clone limit and made death an irritating inconvenience but kept treason the same. Would it become more slapstick with death being treated with the gravity of being slapped, or more paranoid with elaborate frameup jobs and imprisonment being the only ways to actually eliminate rivals?

You can still have the "threat of death", it just takes a higher degree of damage for someone to be dead.

Instead of people dropping like fleas, you can have death be pretty slapstick unless they actually get obliterated

In that everything is narrative bullshit. Think of it like this: the moment actual revival of the dead comes into play in a science fiction setting, that's all any story set in that world can be about. Anything else, and you'll get the same reaction: "But wait. I don't care about any of this shit. Talk more about the science necromancy." FTL travel is at least analogous to other forms of travel in the mind of the layman. Things like hyperspace usually don't involve any issues different from larger-scale version of problems you might run into on the sea or flying in a plane. But reviving the dead is totally outside the context of almost anyone, so its entry immediately becomes the topic of intrigue. It's a question of scale, and just reducing that to "narrative bullshit" is kind of intellectually dishonest.

Or, you can just treat it like any other medical advancement

A thousand years ago, getting a cut was a death sentence. Now it's easily treatable.

You just need to treat it like any other medicine and have none of the characters bat an eye. You don't need to treat it like anything special, because it's honestly not.

Immortality is actually pretty common amongst the wealthy in sci-fi, but resurrection is simple- it cheapens the idea of character death and guts the stakes.

>pay a lot of money to become immortal
>kek at all the poorfags who can't afford it and have to age and die like fucking peasants

I think that's reducing the concept of death to an unfair degree - its not a binary switch of alive/dead, normally when someone dies, its because their bodies systems are too damaged to be repaired by medical science. Well, I'd assume in a thousand years our medical science would've advanced to the point that barring disintegration, anything can be repaired.

You can still have stakes if people can come back from the dead, you just need to raise the bar on what's deadly.

If death stops being a threat, then how it's interacted with also needs to change. Eclipse Phase, for example, has a tendency to treat death a resource a lot of the time. If you're really desperate to escape from a situation, farcast your mind to the other side of the galaxy so it can be resleeved, and kill yourself in such a way that your cortical stack is unrecoverable or destroyed. "You" still exist, and you're in a state where recovering you is probably worth less effort than trying to undo whatever it is you did before you died.

Even then, Eclipse Phase treats its cortical stack technology as something special no matter how ubiquitous it is. And why shouldn't it? Making copies of your mind which can be loaded into bodies when you die (or even if you're still alive) raises a lot of questions about continuity of identity and the nature of the individual or the soul. Having that technology without at least trying to address those questions is ignoring a huge amount of the implications, societal affects and impacts upon human existence that that kind of technology would bring, which some would argue is a pretty huge part of what science fiction is about.

reminds me of dollhouse

what if theres a biological metaphysics division that figured all that out?

just pull the soul from the warp or whathave you

maybe there is no soul? then people dont care

Because most "Science fiction" is humanist space-opera fantasy.

Hard science fiction is like a detective story: everything is set up so that the reader can react along the characters, puzzle over possible outcomes, etc.

Because many readers aren't interested in that experience, but find real space fantasy unsuited to their fedora'd tastes, they choose "science fiction" like Star Trek where the technology is stage dressing instead of critical to the plot and environment.

I'd assume if a society is at the point where resurrection technology is ubiquitous they'd already have worked that out

playing TTRPGs is narrative bullshit, my friend

rarely

more often then not its an excuse to blow stuff up and take peoples stuff

Why in TV shows are the scientists attractive 20-somethings who are able to solve the crisis of the week in approximately 44 minutes?

In real life, scientific breakthroughs hinge on years of boring and repetitive research, and many scientists are physically unattractive.

in rare cases, human brains have been known to stay alive for 17 days after the rest of the body died

the more you know...

Japanese doctors have a 90% chance of bringing someone back after their heart stops beating in the case of a cardiac arrest

The More You Know

Slower-than-light travel results in deep time and its attendant consequences; which is incompatible with modern religious superstitions like universal human progress.

Humans also like telling stories about the past, but want different baubles in them. FTL enables people to tell stories about pirates, empires, and islands from the 17th century-but-with-glowy-lights. Without FTL, they would be forced to tell stories about space instead, which has very different economic, strategic, and physical dynamics and therefore results in a different set of stories. Many people don't like new stories, they prefer rehashed ones.

is deep time the same as the deep web

"Worked that out" how? Continuity of identity isn't a scientific question. In many ways, neither is consciousness yet. These questions are philosophical. They relate to how we live our lives and how we see the world. A person might consider themselves well and truly dead every time they die and see each resurrection as a whole new person. Another might become a ascetic sage in search of the memory of what the afterlife looked like while they were dead. Another person might see it as just a thing, as common as a cell phone or a computer. Another might become an adrenaline junkie with no sense of mortality, only to fall into depression when they realize that the lack of real danger takes all meaning out what they do. These people's concerns don't have anything to do with the science of resurrection itself, but everything to do with how it interacts with their lives and how it affects how they view the world and themselves. Each of those reactions says something about a person and just ignoring something that has that big of an impact on a person's life by saying "well, they just worked it out" is completely negating a lot of what could make this technology interesting from an audience's perspective.

>Continuity of identity isn't a scientific question. In many ways, neither is consciousness yet
>yet

I rest my case

When I say "consciousness isn't a scientific question yet" I mean it won't be anytime in our foreseeable future because for all the numerical data we've assembled about the brain, how it actually works and how it relates to the idea of consciousness is still very much a closed book. Even if it weren't, we don't actually know what consciousness is, how to define it, or even how to contextualize it with the rest of the perceivable universe. That the very idea of quantum superimposition rests on the notion of conscious agents being capable of observation is testament to that. We think it affects shit, and the shit we think it affects is way far out, but we don't have much in the way of real proof and nothing short of an upheaval of neuroscience on the scale of Kepler's "planetary motion" thing is likely to change that.

If it's possible to be solved, it will.

Not something to worry about.

Truths within a formal system are not necessarily provable. /godel

I sympathize but can we keep the black-science-man cosmism to a minimum?

All aspects of philosophy will eventually become just another field of the natural sciences

Eventually, there will be no questions for philosophers to ask.

I actually recall reading an article that disproved the existence of conciousness

>That the very idea of quantum superimposition rests on the notion of conscious agents being capable of observation is testament to that

In science, observation has nothing to do with consciousness. It means particles interact with other particles.

See, that's pretentious BS. There are some things that are inherently unknowable, and quite a few things that are likely unknowable.

And consciousness exists. Source: am conscious, you idiot.

Like all genres, science fiction has a past development period that defines it and everything else is built around the genre conventions developed in that first phase. In the past we had less knowledge of technology and it seemed more likely to travel to other galaxies than being immortal.

Also often light travel is there so it makes sense that planets act like islands and spaceships like boats. There's no equivalent to this for immortality.

No, really. It was disproven. Seriously.

It doesn't matter anyway. Idiots like you will do anything to prove their self exists.

Pretentiousness douchebags like you like to think some things are sacred or unknowable, but thats complete bullshit. Everything can be reduced and known.

Cite source or fuck off.

No, seriously. I'm conscious. You're conscious. I am fully aware of what I'm typing; it's absolutely retarded beyond belief to think otherwise. You're being an unbelievably pretentious douchebag, which necessitates consciousness. The act of studying consciousness and understanding the existence or nonexistence of consciousness requires consciousness.

>Everything can be reduced and known.

Obviously not your arrogance. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, I'm just saying, don't be disappointed when some things eternally remain baffling.

[citation needed]

Inb4 you misinterpret Metzinger or take p-zombies seriously.

Now you're just going full lib arts here. Descartes has been disproven for roughly a century now and so will other philosophers come time - our universe (the only one in existence) has no room for things that aren't objective and empirical, only our flawed brain living in its permanent illusory hormonal daze has. Fortunately we have science to fix that for us. But by all means, keep deluding yourself.

i know what article hes talking about

a bunch of neuroscientists definitely disproved it, its kind of a schema the mind uses to interrupt information

its a very good article but its hard to find

basically it boils down to its hard to define a different word to describe how we think and feel

ill look for it, its a few years old but yeah, we're just meat computers and our sense of self is actual a malfunction

interpret

I'm getting euphoric just reading this.

From your perspective, understanding is good, yet if we're not conscious we can't understand anything. Your position is self-defeating and you're an idiot.

>its a very good article but its hard to find

>it's a "fusion is impossible" user thread
So much for any actual discussion.

see I called it. You looked at opaque/transparent workspaces/self-reference and thought that because we understand a little about consciousness it doesn't exist.

Knowing. Not understanding. Knowledge is absolute and factual. Understanding is a fictional construct.

not him, but its hard to talk about things when the words you want to use dont exist, so you have to use "borrowed concepts"

And yet here I am, self-aware, conscious, and understanding.

>Metzinger
im not talking about any philosophical bullshit, im talking hard science

im looking for the article, its a little difficult to find several year old scientific articles when your not a student anymore

But you're not

You really aren't and neither am i

you're just a meat machine interpreting the environment

people are basically just Chinese rooms

Even if we concede that point to you, that doesn't mean every sci-fi story should be in a setting that's reached the end of philosophy.

Supposing medical science advances faster than figuring out the problem of consciousness, even if the technology to duplicate a brain exists and is commonplace conversations about it are going to dominate the setting.

So if your options are writing about societies that have figured out consciousness, writing stories about people's reactions to brain copying, or writing stories where neither of those have happened the third category seems like the broadest.

*being deluded.

>conversations about it are going to dominate the setting.

Why would they. The facts are on the table. There will be nothing to discuss.

You have to be conscious to be deluded.

Similarly, you have to be conscious to be not-deluded.

But keep defeating yourself, please.

>im not talking about any philosophical bullshit, im talking hard science

The hard science is I can observe my own consciousness, thereby disproving your fraud of a hypotheses.

Incidentally, Metzinger runs an open-access neurology journal, is director/president of two different neural science groups, and has published peer-reviewed research.

Whereas you seem invested in the fedora-tipper superstition that understanding something makes it go away.

its not a matter of conceding anything

you can't just "concede" scientific facts

>you're just a meat machine interpreting the environment
Yes, and all that means is that any sufficiently complex machine is capable of self-awareness, consciousness and understanding.

>derp derp im retarded

There's a lot of evidence that our conscious experience is constructed after the fact, and it doesn't have any causal effect on how the meat computer operates.

That's different from disproving consciousness, though. Qualia are definitely real, and no one has a good explanation for what produces them.

>Chinese room

Do you understand how difficult to use the correct words in this situation? they DO NOT EXIST yet, so you have to use borrowed concepts

anyway you can delude a computer, and a computer does not have consciousness

It isn't though. Humans aren't and machines will never be.

>Chinese room
Is it really a Chinese room when the Chinese dictionary is entirely in your brain?

Qualia are weights in a neural net.

The fact that e.g. reflexes can occur before conscious thought hardly disproves consciousness; since 1. obviously it is tested to exist, and 2. it's a quantifiable phenomenon observable as slices of time perception and 3. consciously thinking about choices produces different results than not.

The facts are pretty much on the table about what happens to dead bodies now. Doesn't stop the majority of the world from arguing over it.

You (and I) believe it to be a scientific fact with a very high level of confidence, and neither of us is knowledgeable to show that denying leads to some necessary contradiction, so you ought to be at least capable of considering an alternative case where we're mistaken.

Its entirely possible that in the future no one will argue about it

Everyone with a differing opinion has that opinion removed

Because people are shallow and easily entertained.

I would feel sorry for you if that was objectively possible. The only one you are harming with your ignorance is yourself and you are wasting my time.

Science is not a matter of belief. Facts remain the same even if doubted. There is no reason to doubt if it does not change the subject.

Searle is a meme.

Speaking of Metzinger: open-mind.net/papers

Incorrect. Delusion implies choice, whereas a computer is bound by its programming.

>you
Who? :^)

The problem is with assuming that the mind is purely physical in all sci-fi settings, even the ones which have in-universe proven there is a non physical element to the mind. Whether it is true in real life is irreverent.

>qualia are weights in a neural set
This is not even specific enough to mean anything.

>consciously thinking about choices produces different results than not.
This does not require that consciously thinking about the choice had a causal role in producing the different result, only that the operations that produce one result also create a conscious experience while operations that produce a different result do not.

Sci-Fi settings that imply the existence of an incorporal "mind" are inherently flawed because they betray the Science part of Science Fiction. They serve no purpose.

>Sci-Fi settings that imply the existence of an incorporal "mind" are inherently flawed because they betray the Science part of Science Fiction. They serve no purpose.

*The only one that unit is hurting is itself.

This one had anticipated the usage of "you" (a 2nd person pronoun used in conversation) would be adequate given the environment.

Which, again, seriously limits the kinds of stories you're going to write if widespread brain editing and duplication are always commonplace in your scifi settings.

>Science is not a matter of belief. Facts remain the same even if doubted.

Sure, but we our knowledge of the facts can definitely be wrong. If you are wrong about the facts - which is always a possibility, no matter how confident you are - your argument that brain duplication ought to be prevalent in realistic sci-fi is significantly weaker.

>This one
Which one? Please keep going, autist-kun, this is too much fun.

There is nothing more to be said.

Knowledge about facts will be proven or disproven by reality, not discussion.

>Knowledge about facts will be proven or disproven by reality, not discussion.
I've never claimed otherwise, but now we're not even talking about your original point any more.

Please keep going, I hardly ever get to actually use my philosophy degree.

If anyone here brings up quantum physics trying to prove consciousness, it's the measuring equipment that causes the changes, not the fact that someone is observing it

if there was no one there, the changes would still occur due to the measuring equipment

Funny how an uneducated lurker can completely BTFO someone who wasted years of his life getting a worthless degree in fee fee studies just by posting the most fedora shit that comes to mind. Do something productive with your life

>BTFO
user, I have some bad news for you....

You're not lurking if you're the OP, which is sort of indicative of the quality of the rest of your post.

I'm the OP and i stopped posting in this thread a few minutes after i made it

I sometimes wonder if the people who insist consciousness doesn't exist are actually desperately trying to justify their miserable existence by claiming that it's all pre-programmed and they had no choice. It sure is a convenient way to escape any responsibility for anything while still sounding "intellectual."

As far as unrelated images go, you picked a good one. I love that painting, so much life in it.

Are you a fan of cossacks?

Effective treatments for damage caused by oxygen deprivation of the brain are basically nonexistent. Even if such a thing were possible, at the point of clinical brain-death as it is defined now, even if you were to restore the material to a pristine state (which we cannot even begin to do) the person's personality and memories would essentially be gone.

Think of the human brain as a bowl of thumbtacks. Today, if you poured out the bowl, we would not even be able to put the thumbtacks back in. But, perhaps someday they will assemble gloves and we'll be able to scoop the tacks all back into the bowl--but then, the tacks will be in a totally different order from how they were originally. Unless in the future everyone has some sort of constant brain-scan going on to record the exact proper composition of their noggin, how would we restore a person's mind even if we could heal the matter? There are no guarantees that it is even physically possible to miniaturize technology that far.

Right now it looks like it may actually be impossible, not just far off, so it's not wrong to exclude it from science fiction.

>Right now it looks like it may actually be impossible, not just far off, so it's not wrong to exclude it from science fiction.
So, like FTL travel?

Science Fiction is a very wide genre, and with that gives it much of its appeal due to its diversity. Restricting Science Fiction to only transhumanist Science Fiction would greatly narrow its appeal and breath of stories. As much as you might hate it, softer sci-fi is still sci-fi.

Except assuming FTL travel often makes stories easier to relate to, is a genre convention, and allows the author to explore other scifi hypotheses without getting in the way too much narratively. The same isn't true for cortical stacks.

Yay we're back to the very beginning of the thread again.

Atomically precise manufacturing is physically possible - the theoretical math has been done for boser-style printers and diamondoid nanotechnology. And ofc biology is just another word for evolved nanotech, and does it constantly.

Perhaps any given method might be too slow or too hot, but the idea is practical.

FTL, relativity, causality; pick two, and relativity has been picked for you.

Causality is arguably an even greater jump than immortality.

nothing at all in this post is not solvable

the japanese were able to revive a person after being brain dead for a week