Crazy Ideas Thread

Gunnar_Zarncke

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

How conscious are our models of other people? For example; in dreams it seems like I am talking and interacting with other people. Their behavior is sometimes surprising and unpredictable. They use language, express emotion, appear to have goals, etc. It could just be that I, being less conscious, see dream-people as being more conscious than in reality.

I can somewhat predict what other people in the real world will do or say, including what they might say about experiencing consciousness.

Authors can create realistic characters, plan their actions and internal thoughts, and explore the logical (or illogical) results. My guess is that the more intelligent/introspective an author is, the closer the characters floating around in his or her mind are to being conscious.

Many religions encourage people to have a personal relationship with a supernatural entity which involves modeling the supernatural agency as an (anthropomorphic) being, which partially instantiates a maybe-conscious being in their minds...

Maybe imaginary friends are real.

You worded this badly, but I agree.

It is possible to read "you robbed a bank" without imagining robbing a bank. Just very hard, and maybe impossible if you're not readied.

0[anonymous]11y

This is a great blog post on a similar idea: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

7medlcld11y

What exactly does "consciousness" even mean here, though? I've written before, and at my best my model of my characters included: * Complex emotions (as in multiple emotions at once with varying intensities) * Intelligent behavior (by borrowing my own intelligence, my characters could react intelligently to the same range of situations as I can) * Preferences (they liked/disliked, loved/hated, desired/feared, etc) * Self-awareness (a well-written character's model includes a model of itself, and can do introspection using the intelligent behavior above) What else is necessary to have consciousness? There are plenty of other things that could be important, but they don't seem necessary to me upon reflection. For example: * Continuity of self; Time skips in stories involve coming up with approximately what happens over a period of time, and simply updating the character model based on the expected results of that. But if it turned out that significant parts of my life were skipped and fake memories of them were added, I would still value myself for the moments that weren't skipped over, so I don't think this is necessary for consciousness. * Independence; I can technically make a character do whatever I want, but that often breaks their characterization, and if someone was a god and could make me think or do anything, I'd want to get free, but I would still value myself. * Consistency; At my best my characters are mostly consistent in characterization, but I'm not often at my best. But mood swings and forgetting things happens to real people too, so I don't think it's a deal-breaker on consciousness. * Subconscious; A really good author almost certainly uses their own subconscious to model the character and their behavior, so it's not clear that a character doesn't have a subconscious. It's not quite the same as a real person's, but as long as it still results in the big 4 at the top I don't think this matters much. * Advanced senses; Visualization

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