[Lore Discussion] Commanders' Genders and the use of "He".

I agree.
That's why I'd be comfortable with them adopting genders (if they decided to) based upon their memories.
In their natural, non-conditioned state (i.e. when they had just awoken, before accessing memory fragments) I think they'd most naturally be called 'It'.

A mind has a gender in the way it defines itself and others; "As a man/woman I/you should do this." being the most extreme example.

they seem to simply know what they are and realise their existense
they are selfaware
i took sentient in a rather loose way but i doubt such a robot would not care to be nuked

Sorry I meant 'Sentient beings' as opposed to calling them lifeforms
Yeah there's certainly scope for exploration of their sentience/free will.
I like to think that it'd be a balance between individualism and a hive-mentality, if not hive-mind.
Which raises the interesting question, if a bee/ant/robot does not obey the queen/will of the collective, what does it do?

Now THAT's a good question! x'D

I Suggest whatever the toilet sees fit for the day, he is after all the god of all Machina :

being destroyed or exciled and follow its instincts/programming

My Commander speaks as a female that is all.

General idea. I want the reason you think it's good scifi, not necessarily what you think is good scifi.


Eh? So essentially you think the Culture novels are bad scifi?

I agree with the mind associating to a gender. I'm not sure what the correct term is anymore, but with gender dysplasia, the mind reacts as one gender while the body may be another and is why people go to great lengths to change their physical appearance to match how their mind interprets their gender.

And speaking of gender - there's really a lot more than just two. Our human bodies have created several combinations and with cultural gender norms, it can make it pretty tough to abide by social standards if you don't fit into the two main ones.

In any case - I could see how the bots receive a "mind" that is in line with their past makers who were male. I mean, if humans are the ones programming computers, then you'd have to look at the programmer and what their influences were. Makes sense to me!

yea maybe "he" here is a reference of Legionis Machina to the eighteenth gender, the one a great majority of robots like to refer to themselves as, they are especially proud of it because this gender classification was created by machines. Alas, it shares an unfortunate resemblance in spelling and pronunciation to the human-made classification "he".

Lol.

That's a good way of thinking of gender. I agree our grammar is a too binary when it comes to gender.

Are we going with 'These Robots were programmed by men to be men' then?

Maybe! I think the Lore is still being written, but I don't know how deep into the past they are going to reveal. We'll find out!

I hope the discussion here has thrown up some interesting inspirations

I could go with that, but amount of female AI minds in fiction, none of the men decided they wanted a daughter, and none of the self-aware robots experienced gender confusion and realised they weren't actually male?

Yeah I was trying to emphasise that idea in my posts.

I think other people stated the responses to your posts, with the same messages I wanted to emphasise, in a way that was less stormingkiwi-esque, and came from more people.

One point that I did want to make - if you understand gender definitions, then you understand that gender is not related to physical body, and hence does not need to be reflected in that physical body. Ultimately, you have no idea whether I am male or female. I say I identify with males. You actually don't know if I have a female body, and you can't be certain given I have a female body, that I am perfectly happy having a female body,. I.e. you can't really be sure how in touch with my "feminine side" and "masculine side" I am, you can't be sure that while I may identify with male for most of the time, that I don't think of part as my personality as female. Or vice versa. Or I could be female by gender and female by biological sex, but I just assume a male voice on the forums.


At this point I haven't even mentioned all the funky 3rd gender stuff that could be occurring here.

Rather silly question - the science fiction is written for human beings who primarily think and talk in English. If it was written in Japanese, that majority english speaking and thinking audience wouldn't understand it without a translation. If it was written entirely in machine code, it would be utterly incomprehensible to the vast majority of the human race.

How can I have a gender? As far as you are concerned, I'm a creature of pure text, and there's not really that much evidence that I exist as a human being at all.

I would like to challenge the writers to write a section of the lore in C just for a laugh.... (I'd say machine code but I think there are enough people who know a bit of C that we'd have a chance of understanding what's going on)...

Program code doesn't support language. It's a construct, a brain so to speak. It's not a language in itself that is used for communication.

Machine code is a slightly different story, though even writing a single packet's worth of data would take up a lot of page space

I mean, if you were describing a system's startup routines, perhaps?

Code:

package core.brain.startup

import base.util.*
import base.cognitive.*

class StartupProcess extends StartupBase() {

   public StartupProcess(Brain brain, LogicalParams params) {
     super();

     defineBrain(brain);
     defineParameters(params);
     importParameters(getBrain(), getParams());

     startup();
   }

   private void defineBrain(Brain brain) {
    // i'm sorry dave, i can't let you do that
   }

   private void defineParameters(LogicalParams params) {
    // you monster
   }
}

This is of course if the machines were running Java . . .

I'd do pseudocode but I've been doing a lot of Java project work recently, so proper Java just flows from my fingers. It'd be more of an effort to write C++-like pseudocode!

To be honest I have always envisiond you to be a kiwi hopping around on a keyboard . Giving the matter some more thought the last day I think you are right. Thank you for widening my horizon on the issue.

As far as I understand machine code, it's written in binary. It's the direct intructions that the CPU is doing. IT's the electrical signals. Or something.But it's certainly not Java. Java is a high level language.

You get machine code after you've compiled the high level language.



Good luck.


I think you could still express ideas in machine code. . . but well, you can't, can you? They have to be translatable in some way.

I uh . . . . know. But thanks!

I was going off of @cdrkf's post in challenging lore to be written in C (or similar)!