Maximius

Interesting ideas. I think its possible to make a normal map of each bunch of foliage, then reapply that map to low poly spheres, THEN use some of these spikes you are talking about to give it an irregular outline. I have to find out how to skin the things first, though.

Fair enough. It may be that in instances where the brain has been tampered with, where a command is planted on one side (the command to laugh for example), the other side feels compelled to provide reason for its actions (I chose to laugh) perhaps either due to the habit of thinking one's actions are the results of one's decisions (of course I chose to laugh, why else would I laugh?) or because in the realized absence of such a reason an individual feels compelled to provide one anyway (I didnt chose to laugh but since I only laugh for reasons I must have had one) I think experiements like these are not necessarily useful for discussing freedom of the will. Yes, if you stick a wire in someones brain you can stimulate certain reactions in the mind. I certainly would not say my will was free if every input was the product of some other agent, a mad scientist or demon who has possessed me, and the choices I made were also the product of this agent, namely it would not let me respond in any other way but the way it wanted. Theres no doubt this is freedom destroying. But consider a related scenario. The mad scientist is sticking wires in my brain, making me think Im in a room filled with hot girls. Now, I want to smooch these girls, but they are not there, so how can I be freely choosing to kiss them? Well, because the decision to smooch the girls is still mine. The girls are an illusion but the desire to take the action to smooch is still the product of my reflective consciousness, even one that has been "compromised" with false data. My freedom of action has been compromised for certain, as I am making actions that have no real world corollary. But the decision to act has still been mine. So now the mad scientist implants the desire to smooch the girls as well. This is still not effecting my freedom of will formation. I can desire that action, but remember humans can reflect upon their own desires and from that process form volitions, desires that become our actions. So now I want to smooch the girls because the mad scientist has made me feel that way, but I can still reflect upon the desirability of that course of action and produce another. Say I have these feelings from the scientist but my girlfriend walks into the lab. No way am I kissing them, cause now I have a new desire not to be beaten unmercifully by my girl. Now, if the mad scientist implants a desire (call it X) into one's head as well as a firm desire to want only to do X, we can say that our wills are no longer free. The crucial difference is in capturing the reflective hierarchy that allows us to have desires, desires about those desires, and most importantly desires to make other desires our actual actions. When this arrangement is compromised, only then can it be said that no will of our own can be produced because all of its components have been infiltrated.

Why is this evidence of such?

Hmm, what kind of oDDball would know that information? Its a rather oDD topic after all. It makes me feel oDD fishing for criticisms but what can I do? BTW I was showing my family your website this weekend Springheel, they really loved your illustrations, especially the dog people you designed. Nice work!

thank you, mein freund, but these bastards are soo high poly I doubt anything short of a mainframe could put them in a map. I really need to find out how to skin them then normal map the boughs to capture all that yummy leafiness.

I agree with the post above completely! Those are the greatest 3d trees ever designed, hands down. So max, which design company are you going to go work for now? They must be kicking down your door, after all you have created the greatest 3d trees ever designed!

Why Maximius, those are simply the greatest 3d trees ever designed! Theres nothing to be changed at all, you keep right on making the greatest 3d trees ever designed. I'm betting that most folks are soooooo impressed with the greatest 3d trees ever designed, that they feel all sheepish and embarrassed to leave any comments or suggestions. I mean, who can improve on perfection?

This is an idea for making trees I've been messing around with. Its really, really hi-poly, I was thinking I could skin it and map it onto a low poly model. I think I could remake the tree trunk and low poly spheres with around maybe 200 polys? The lighting and scene are lame, its a rush job as I'm leaving for the weekend early tomorrow. I used the fractalize function under multiply tab to make oblong spheres into the foliage. I did it four times for each sphere. They are still a little too oblong for my taste but this is a trial run anyway. The textures and everything else sux I realize, I'm really looking for feedback on the hi poly to low poly mapping and the general concept of using fractalize to do this. Im thinking with a good normalmapped texture, the level of detail of the boughs could be increased dramatically. Right now its still not enough for real "leafiness" but the poly count was killing my puters when I tried to fractalize five times. http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/564/treesample1vq5.jpg http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/3325/treesample2li0.jpg http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/1363/treeproject3az0.jpg

Yes that could be a pain in some instances, I can see that. You may be in a situation too where yu have to use an arrow but its unrecoverable and it will definitely trigger a game fucking up experience if you use it. Catch 22 Maybe it could be an intelligence dependent, in that low level guards and such would not question it as much while captains would call for searches. It would limit the number of instances like I described above a bit.

Thanks, that interesting. It seemed as if it would be fairly straightforward.

Excellent! I always loved the pebble idea, lo tech, infinitely reusable/renewable, makes perfect sense. Noise arrows are fine of course, one of the more sensible of the special arrows IMO, but I've always thought that they had a few logical problems, such as if a AI heres a pebble rattling, thats a sound that anything could make, you may check out that noise but its not going to send you into a Red Alert status. But a spring loaded gizmo or (sigh...) the Roman Candles of TDS would not only alert guards, it would IMO make them really, really, really, really, really suspicious. As in "I aint ever coming down off of high alert, cause I've never heard that particularly extra weird noise before in all my years of guarding stuff." im certainly not arguing to get rid of them, but I think there should be heavy consequences to their use, much like using a fire arrow will draw everything and its aunt to your location. One more question, will the AIs be able to see arrows? I have always found it a little weird that a guard will walk down a hallway and hey, theres an arrow laying in the middle of lady Snootfields bedroom floor, but bah, nothing really out of the ordinary. An arrow laying around a bedroom should be like finding a bullet casing on your living room floor when you get home from work at night, you start asking >serious< questions and poking around. If I had my druthers, I would make it that after firing water, rope, broads, noise, moss, or gas arrows, you have to pick up the arrow shaft or guards will spot it and raise hell. These shafts then just disappear, its just to account for the Thief stashing them or something similar. Except for rope and broads I should say. Fire arrow shafts burn up and the shaft of a vine arrow can be subsumed into the vine. (Im not calling for new animations or anything, Im just saying its easy to think of these things happening and so we neednt worry about them.) But the other kinds should require a little cleanup I believe.

In the screen shot of the Thiefs equiptment, are those pebbles in the upper left hand corner? If so, are these, ala FarCry, used to attract/distract AIs? PS I too like the Belchers look, although I see some of what Ombrenuit is saying I like the image of a rather primitive looking cave dwelling creature. Maybe a nip and tuck here and there would not hurt but overall I think they have what it takes.

Except if your profs are so busy writing and publishing and expelling noxious gases that they have no real time/interest in imparting that knowledge. I am currently taking night courses at one of the Ivies, trying to worm my way into the Philo department. All the profs are more than qualified, but try getting one to answer your emails. The young, very cute, assistant prof who is helping me with my writing project tells me that the senior faculty ignore HER emails and shes in the goddamned department! Undergrads, grads who are not the students of the professor in question, and junior profs get blown off regularly. When a night student emails them, they probably aren't even aware the school has such a program. Yes, yes, and no! They are both really nice guys, Bear is the type you could offer to grab a beer with and he would spend the afternoon bullshitting with you. Dyson was like meeting Jesus or something, I told him "Sir, I am unfamiliar with all aspects of your work except the idea of Dyson spheres." He cackled at that!

I think you would have a decent shot getting in on a far more equal level than most, but remember too that there are always political relationships that will get in the way. I had to learn this the hard way, you can have the best ideas, best skills, best whatever but if you rock the apple cart too much The Mediocrities will sneak up and back stab you fast. Remember the moral of the story of Amadaeus. I worked at the American Philosophical Society museum here in Philly a few years ago as a exhibit interpreter. My tours were some of the best ever given, I was told by Society members and visiting academics, teachers and their student groups, you name it. I was fucking good at interpreting, taking very complex historical objects and developing a narrative that explained them from multifold angles at once. My crowning moment was when I used hand signals and a few words of German to explain the difference between a mastadon and a mammoth to a family from Bulgaria. I had Charles McCullough, the big wig historian, tell me it was the best tour he'd ever had there. I had Freeman Dyson, yes Freeman Dyson, and his wife tell me I gave the best tour they'd ever had there. Greg Bear came up to me at our annual dinner and publicly praised my work. It was my department boss who did me in. One week I was the Golden Boy of the place, getting personal requests for tours, people writing letters praising me to the curator. Then, poof, I was accused of robbing the petty cash box, of yelling at guests, of sneaking out early, of sneaking into rooms that were off limits. I refuted all of the claims, demanded proof, demanded that other managers be brought in to corroborate these accusations. This woman hated and feared me, she was a dope, an art bureaucrat, a talentless ball of dust that didn't know what the pieces on display even were. She once told a group of fifth graders that our giant sloth and mastadon bones, once the property of T. Jefferson, were dinosaur bones. The fifth graders laughed and corrected her, saying that dinosaurs died out millions of years before these animals. She repeated the mistake a few days later with another group. But none of that mattered, she knew what to say, who to say it to, how to couch it to make everything I did look suspect. The bureaucratic, or corporate, mind is a simple, savage thing not given to context or details but concerned with only control and suppression of dissent and difference. I was fucked, fired and told I had damaged the public image of the Society. After a solid year of nothing but compliments and kudos from high and low, a jealous mutt with the IQ of a starfish did me in, hard. I spent the next six months on my couch in the dark, dreaming of sinking my teeth into her neck. So be careful, sometimes even doing your job >too well< is the thing that will get you canned.

Will the spiders have different powers like the ones in the Precursor games? Didn't one throw its webs and others fireballs or something, I think someone made fire spiders for one mission or another. Everything looks really good though, great work guys!

Soon you will enter the Hall of the Ancient Ones....... Not yet though, Happy B-day!

Thats not true, no one should be faced with such a stark choice!

Ok Oprah, don't take my words out of context. Yes, there is no denying that being under the influence of a substance alters your perceptions of reality. That is the point, after all. But you are pretending its a black and white issue, when in fact it is a broad spectrum. As I pointed out, smoking a joint hardly makes one's problems disappear from ones mind, but it can push it to the side for a second or two. So what? If I was mainlining cocaine to escape my problems or huffing metallic spray paints, now those are dangerous forms of escapism. But smoking a dooby? Please, even you aren't that uptight. Fortunately, I have no intention of doing any such thing. Problem solved! Drugs are like anything else, a little bit can be enjoyable, even helpful. A lot can really cause you problems. Its a question of degrees. Don't condemn me if you know your sense of self control isn't strong enough. Thats fine for you, but as I said, in my experience the folks who scream about "facing the world" and "dealing with reality" are usually the one's who don't know much about it. Its brave talk and makes for killer sound bites from cops and bureaucrats at anti-drug seminars, but I am well informed as to the state of reality, better than most people I would wager. When I get stoned, I don't forget the world, but I can put it on a shelf for a brief period of time. Jeez, this reads like the intro to "Reefer Madness." I started my habit as an adult, and I have more reasoning in my shirt pocket than most responsible adults carry around in their noggins. The majority of dealers to 16 year olds ARE 16 year olds, someone sells it to them sure but again, I tell you from personal experience, most adult dealers refuse to deal to kids. Now, is there somewhere in the world a dealer dumb and unscrupulous enough to sell to kids? Obviously. My point is that I've never met one and the dealers I've known considered dealing with children a poor business decision at best, an enormous risk at worst. Its not worth it, especially when there are plenty of adults to sell to.

Begging to start talking drugs? I was making a point, that recreational use of drugs is hardly the world threatening evil some Puritans like to make it out to be. I'd love to discuss it but I'm hardly losing sleep if it doesn't take off. Reality does stink sometimes, but smoking pot hardly makes reality go away. It just makes it a little groovier for a short period of time. Like having a beer. Its been my experience that people who claim they have no problem accepting reality on the face of it have pretty stunted views of what reality might really be. In place of drugs they have fantasies about this and that, how the world really works and how if only everyone would see it their way it would all work out just fine. Delusions, in other words. Give me a joint, at least the illusion it creates is more honest than self righteousness. And it goes away in a few hours. Thats highly debatable. Oh my, you sound like one of those goofball D.A.R.E. commercials they show over here. And why would I share my stash with a bunch of kids? Listen, for the record, I have known a lot of drug dealers in my life, some very well. None of them, not one single one, was >ever< interested in selling to children. Why would they? Not a steady source of income, they talk too much, they can't keep secrets, if they get in trouble they spill the beans in a fast second. The dealer targetting children in a rare creature, I've known drug dealers who beat the shit out of dealers who sold stuff to children. Its another myth of the drug war, another distraction to keep folks confused and ineffective. If you want to see the real evils of drugs, take a look at some of the literature surrounding the pharmacutical industry. Now there is a real drug problem!

Dem, I have not had a chance to read your post yet, I will today.

Not really, I feel no need to justify what I don't think is wrong. I enjoy the effects, I hurt no one doing so, and I like the positive side effects. Lets talk smoking pot as our example. I enjoy watching movies while under its spell, certain movies like fantasies or animations are the best. The lines of meaning get blurred, the weirdness or strangeness of a particular scene or character is compounded. I watched that "Faustus" by Jan Svankmajer while ripped on some really good buds, I felt as if I had been sucked into my TV set for a few minutes there. It send my imagination off into different directions, flights of fancy. Similarly with a good video game, I find the sense of immersion is deepened with a little buddha, especially a really scary or freaky T2 FM. Now could I prove this to you? No, its totally subjective, and it sounds like your subjectivity would not enjoy the experience very much. And if you are ever interested in remembering all those dreams you have at night, I have the perfect little plant for you. Its a Xhosa dream herb, the dried and powdered roots are used to induce lucid dreams by West African shamans. My Xhosa is growing big and strong in the window as we speak. What I would really like to do someday is to try and model some of the things I see in my dreams.

Drunks are no fun, but two drinks a day can lower your blood pressure. And not everyone who drinks gets blotto, I was at a beer tasting party at my local pub, people were feeling good but no craziness, whats wrong with that? You should see me attack a plate of my homemade oatmeal cookies, you would think differently! Why? When properly handled, they can be fun and rewarding. Im not being flip, I mean it. I could tell you stories of the whacky crap I have seen. I think its beneficial, stretches the brain in new directions. Care has to be taken of course, and certain trips are never worth the risks, but others are, they really are.

Because of all the different ways you can conceive of new X1s. X1 is not merely an evolution of X, its your mind producing an entirely new set of possible influences of your future actions. Humans are determined, but are to a great degree and to a fine level of detail, self determining. The nature of our consciousness, the fact that we simultaneously experience both our external sensory world and our complex mental world allows us to conceive of reasons for actions, good reasons, ones that fit with goals both simple and complex, short term and long term. We can form our wills, they are not free as in undetermined but we have a great degree of freedom in their formation. And why does it dominate? Because we can conceive of it and therefore it presents itself as a possible course of action. A dog can only conceive of so many of these possible options, while a human mind can conceive of essentially an infinite variety of responses. Then, it can act on those new responses, translating reasons into actions, with an impressive range of freedom as well. None of this is free in the sense of "free from the world", we do not chose one of these options from on high, free from influence, above the gears and pulleys so to speak, but rather the choice, or rather choices, decisions, that are formed by a particular arrangement of these patterns that you have described is us literally. But these patterns are not completely from "outer space", they are far from entirely random, there is a feedback loop, they are intricately sculpted by our ideas and memories, they are formed by the "filter" of our consciousness that they must pass through. But the origin will never be the experience. You can find every neuron that does everything, but the experience of actual consciousness, what you are feeling at this second, can only be described in its own terms, not the terms of science. Transfer it to a water cooler, if its reflective of its own thoughts and desires it can form a will of its own and it owns a degree of freedom. Precise predictions of behaviour, fine, if you know every possible input you may be able to map every possible output. The point is, our minds allow us to take in inputs and produce a rich variety of outputs, thats the freedom of action brought about by the freedom to form our wills. Figured out how to induce any possible experience in the mind? Not a big deal, I wouldn't call that a free state at that particular moment of illusion creation but once the electrodes are pulled out and my consciousness is once again autonomous of that influence, its back to forming my will with a high degree of freedom.

But none of the entities in Life are reflective. Its usefulness as a model of human activities is quite limited. I tend to agree with your argument up to a certain point, you sort of can see human thoughts/ideas as bubbling up from this cauldron of conflicting wants, needs, thoughts, perceptions, what have you. (Correct me if this is a mischaracterisation of your POV.) But again, reflection. Not only are your thoughts and actions the product of this sea of consciousness, if you will, but there is an additional component, namely the ability for you to not only reflect but to reflect on those ideas as well. Lets say at time T you think of thought X. Lets ignore where X arises from originally, it can be as simple as a hunger pang or as complex as an appreciation of a wonderful piece of artwork. So now you have X in your head, but by virtue of your human ability to reflect upon even your reflections, you also can now have a new idea, an idea >about< X. Call this X1. Rather than your actions being the result of simply X, the "raw" desire that has manifested itself in your consciousness, your actions cannot now be helped but to be effected by X1. Even if you ignore X1, you cannot help but think X1, its only effect may be in fact to strenghthen X but the important point is that it comes to bear on X in some manner. If you experience idea X, then form X1 from it and X1 is compelling enough to be the idea that moves you to action, that is your will. Its not free because it appeared magically or due to quantum activity, its free because of the particular hierarchy of reflection, being able to think X and then to think about X and so create X1. Humans think things, as do many of the higher animals, but only humans appear capable of thinking about their thoughts and in turn producing new thoughts that are an amalgam of the original idea and their reflections on that idea. This is a degree of freedom in the world, freedom of will formation, the freedom to be determined by one's ideas but ideas that go through a "finishing process" of reflection that allows for very specific, complex *reasons* for action. So lets say you are a dog and you experience hunger. As far as we can tell, that desire is translated pretty directly into action in a dog, it seeks out food and eats it. Now, its not a blind search, if a bear is eating the food the dog isn't fanatically driven to eat at the cost of its life. But it seems pretty straight forward, dog is hungry, seeks and eats food with attention paid only to those influences that may cause it harm or death. (To be fair, there's probably a lot more going on in the mind of even simpler animals but this is a good philosophical approximation.) Now, you are a human and you are hungry. Probably a very similar impulse, stomach contracts, saliva runs at the smell of food, etc. But, unlike the dog, who is a sort of prisoner to those impulses, you have the ability to think "I'm hungry" AND you have the ability to think about what it means to be hungry, the various ways you would like to satiate that hunger, your worries about cholesterol levels and expanding waistlines, some fish and chips versus a veggie burger with mixed greens on the side, your distaste for a particular vegetable that a certain old aunt made you eat as a child and which brings unpleasant memories of your youth to the foreground. All of these are determined, utterly, but they are in part determined by this hierarchy of reflection upon your desires. So, as a human you experience this simple desire called hunger but its immediately translated into a much more complex affair by virtue of our reflective natures. From this process, new ideas are formulated which in turn lead to new actions, OUR actions, actions highly specialized to match our complex, multilayered desires. Incredibly specialized, consider that humans can eat because they are hungry, because they are part of an experiment with food and eating habits, because they have an abstract superstition that eating at a certain time is beneficial, because they have a religious belief that demands it, because eating is a "woobie" blanket that makes them feel better about themselves. A multiplicity of reasons, conceivably all contained in the same mind. It is this multiplicity of possible reasons that allows us a space to claim a degree of freedom in the formation of our wills. I tend to think of consciousness, and most especially human consciousness, as a sort of feedback loop within reality. It can both experience reality firsthand and simultaneously it can experience its memories and abstractions of that reality. The space in between these two worlds is the "elbow room" for will formation, as Dennett calls it. I agree with this completely, those patterns and the patterns they sire by virture of the "finishing process" of our reflective abilities ARE us. Even as we think about freedom of the will, X, we must reflect on that idea and form new ideas, X1. I often laugh when arguing this with others, who try and tell me that those desires and ideas and such are fine but we cannot be free because they are imposed on us by our consciousness. So I ask, how many "yous" do you have in that head of yours? This process is you, I believe, a complex of ideas that come from a variety of places, our memories, our physical needs, our misperceptions, our creative thoughts, you name it, but with the crucial component of the ability to experience all those things and then reflect on that experience, to compare and contrast it with other ideas and from that process form an entirely new set of ideas, hybrids of X and our thoughts about X. This is far from a black and white process either, but again, this is a philosophical model not a scientific construct. No, we can only analyze certain components of those things scientifically, thats a whole different thing from saying we can analyze all of those things scientifically. You can use the rules of evidence in history, but then you are only left with what is good evidence from bad. THEN you have to construct a historical narrative around that evidence. For example, you have a historical document such as the Magna Carta. You can scientifcally analyze its chemistry, you can use that to help determine where the document was constructed and when. But then the historian takes over, constructing a story about the meaning and import of the document, the ideas behind its creation, key individuals and organizations in the process who have contributed their thoughts, beliefs, and dreams to such a document , the social trends at work in the society at that time, why it addresses this idea but ignores that one, etc. This is >not< a discussion that looks to science, it demands different kinds of evidence, namely historical argumentation clustered around the few concrete pieces of evidence at hand. And to be clear, this is also how science works, its just that science can make far more concrete claims than other disciplines, because its mostly dealing with things that do not think for themselves. And even those that do have a harder time making claims about behaviour, a biologist has to insert a lot more grey area into her claims of the reasons for a particular behaviour of some animal versus a physicist or chemsit making a claim about the behaviour of an atom or molecule. But science, even phsyics, still depends upon narratives and argumentation, and these are and always will be "grey areas" where analytical claims of truth/not- truth cannot be readily applied, if at all. We have lots of physics knowledge of black holes, but much is still conjecture, albeit carefully formed and edited conjecture within the framework of physical knowledge. Or lets take the arts as our example. You can conduct scientific studies of the arts, but they can only tell you so much. You can identify the parts of the brain that appear to be linked to the creative process, but that is only a part of the picture. That does not tell you why a particular color produces a particular emotion or why the open spaces of Edward Hopper makes my heart soar, why the emptiness, the nothingness he captures in his paintings means so much to me, why they make me lighthearted and happy. Science cannot tell me why I feel this, it never can because it can never process all of the variables involved in a scientific manner. Sure, interview me, interview everyone who ever saw a Hopper painting. Thats valid research and very interesting, but as any pollster can tell you there are always grey areas that concrete analysis will never be able to melt away. At some point, you have to deal with emotions, meanings, perceptions, in other words consciousness. And again, we can only understand the experience of consciousness via consciousness, we cannot construct an objective standard with which to compare consciousnesses, not one rigorous enough for the claim of analytical science. But we can construct narratives, log personal stories, take field surveys, do comparisions with other artists and artforms, to try and sketch out a picture of the effect of Hopper on the human mind. That sketch is valuable and interesting, but in the final analysis its not science. It certainly uses science along the way, as it should, but the final product is not a body of scientific claims.

Then try vaporizing it. I can tell you how to make a cheap vaporizer out of a lightbulb if you want. Or if you can afford it, eat it. The important thing is.......GET STONED! *<)