I’m going to misuse my stupid whenever and however I want, and there ain’t a damn thing you can do to stop me!

I get that, but at the same time I don’t. I mean, it doesn’t make sense to me. Expecting endless debate and also expecting correct conclusions to be reached seems contradictory, since once conclusions are reached, debate would cease. This is one of those things that make me feel very uncertain, like when you finish an exam in half the allotted time, watch everyone else keep furiously working, and start questioning whether everyone else is dumb or whether you are and you missed something obvious. I get that feeling a lot when reading/thinking about religion.

Because that’s the purpose of a posermobile, which the vast majority of pickup trucks are.

Hot take: It’s no stupider than any other pickup truck, and at least it stands out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fugly as hell, but that’s still better than being indistinguishable from every other vehicle in its class.

I’ve heard stuff like this several times from different sources over the years, but I’m still not convinced it’s not some elaborate collective prank. It reads like something written by Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.

You think that’s unfair? Guess what, so do I

They deserve no sympathy

Pick one.

To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?

Yes, but having a baby doesn’t exculpate you of murder. It doesn’t cancel out.

If a person is cloned by a transporter there are two of that person

Yes, thank you! Finally! That’s what I’ve been trying to explain this entire time!

Well you can fuck yourself if it pleases.

That’s not very nice, and it makes me sad that you resort to insults rather than more sincere arguments in the face of criticism. And just when we were getting somewhere. Oh well, have a nice day.

I could dispute that

Yeah, well, in Strange New Worlds the doctor’s daughter isn’t even aware she’s being put through a transporter until he tells her, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (also, spoiler warning)

starts up again, indistinguishable from before

It is distinguishable by its history, which is known. Understanding that two things that are identical are still two different things and not the same thing seems like a very basic cognitive ability developed pretty early in childhood, and I should probably remember what the technical term for it is, I’m sure there is one. It’s also universally understood and accepted that genuine things are more valuable than their replicas, even if the replicas are so good that their lack of documented history is the only thing that distinguishes them from their genuine models. (This is why genuine antiques with known provenance are far more expensive than even perfect fakes.) As such, I find it very difficult to believe you’re arguing in good faith here.

with every right to call itself “me”.

Oh really? Okay, another thought experiment: Let’s say someone creates a perfect clone of you. Does that clone now have rights to your property? Is it okay if he/she sleeps with your spouse?

I would love my children if they suddenly were twins.

But would you be okay with your child being taken away and replaced with a duplicate? If you’re being honest, you should be. Nothing’s changed from your point of view, it’s the same person. Right?

If I copy information from one substrate to another, and do so with no changes, I don’t have any new information.

But you have a different instance of it. If there were no distinction, copyright wouldn’t exist.

The pattern buffer serves the same function of redundancy.

No, because people are not conscious in the pattern buffer.

The pattern of synapse connections firing is what thinks it’s “you” and the transport duly preserves that pattern.

Yes, but consciousness is not a pattern, it’s an activity, and that activity gets interrupted. Saying that the consciousness continues is like saying that an aircraft that made a flight, landed, and then made another flight really only made one continuous flight. It’s the activity that we’re talking about, and the interruption divides that activity into two distinct instances, even though it’s the same object performing them.

If a loved one took a transporter trip I’d love them just the same when they got back though.

That’s not what I asked. The transporter destroys the original person, which makes it easy to pretend that the clone is that person. The point of my question is that you know that the original is still around somewhere out there. So I ask again: Would you be okay with your loved one being replaced by a perfect clone that looks and acts exactly the same, identical down to the last atom, while knowing that the original still exists elsewhere? Or would you consider that new version to be an impostor?

how does one know that the duplicate doesn’t somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn’t get immediately generated in the original body?

Consciousness is brain activity. New brain = new activity = new consciousness.

Yup, pretty much. It’s a shame Star Trek recognizes and points out this problem but then chickens out of it actually having any consequences.

If a consciousness thinks it’s continuous that consciousness is continuous.

No, it’s simply mistaken.

The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be “who cares”?

The difference is that molecules and cells don’t all disappear at once. Consciousness is brain activity, and the brain has redundancy that allows that activity to continue uninterrupted even while small parts are being swapped out. When you destroy the whole thing, though, the activity stops.

The arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” comes out.

Would you be okay with your child (or some other loved one) being forcibly taken away and replaced with a perfect clone? If what you’re saying is true, you should be, since according to you they’re not just a copy, they’re literally the same person.

Easy, build the clone without destroying the original, then test if they share perceptions and memories. Show one a playing card and ask the other what card it was or something. Proving that two people don’t have the same consciousness is pretty trivial, and I don’t know of any philosophical schools that would dispute that.

Given that every accusation is an admission, this indicates he realizes how deep the shit he’s in is. Good. Let him stew.

Basically all of NetHack, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the fact that the devs foresee things that don’t even exist in the game. For example, if you polymorph yourself into a monster that can eat metal and then eat a trident, you get a humorous message referencing Trident bubble gum. A similar message exists for when you eat a piece of flint (referencing the Flintstones, naturally), despite the fact that there are no monsters in the game that can eat rocks. In other words, that message can never be seen in the vanilla version of the game, but the devs prepared it anyway just in case you mod such a monster in.

It seems like BG3 is getting more attention than all of Larian’s previous games combined (and maybe all of Obsidian’s recent crpgs as well).

Legendary brand name which the game actually lives up to.

the developers still need to work on big patches, content and fixes even years after release

Why would they need to do that? If it’s years down the line, there shouldn’t be any bugs left to fix by that point. And offline single-player games don’t need regular content drops. Sure, an expansion or two might be nice, but those don’t come free. Only online games need to constantly feed their players new content in order to keep them hooked and coming back to buy more MTX.

Would the average consumer willing to spend more for a game with everything in it? AAA already cost 70$ at launch, would the average consumer accept further price increases, or would selling plummet in comparison with reduced price+dlc or free to play with microtransanction?

Oh sales would plummet for sure, but it would still make a profit, just not as much. If From Soft and Larian can do it, everyone can. They just don’t wanna. (see below)

At the end companies are not inherently “evil” they just look for what works and what doesn’t by trial and error

That really depends on your definition of “works”. Sure, it’s a business, but what’s the goal? To me there seems to be a noticeable difference between companies that want to make good games, for which the business side of things is just a means to an end, and companies that want to make as much money as possible, where the games are the means to that end. Is that latter category ‘evil’? Maybe not strictly speaking, but I have no concern for those companies whatsoever, they can go fuck themselves.

Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it’s a consumables.

The same goes for single-player offline games, though. There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you’ve seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.

you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase

If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust.