u/darafinchie

The Arikei in Embassytown by China Mieville follow linguistic determinism. For them, words are physical states and not symbolic abstraction like it is for humans. Their words are directly linked to their reality. As human language is perceived to be disconnected from their immediate physical reality, they can’t comprehend humans directly. 

The octopuses from Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky have mini-brains across their bodies. They communicate through a shifting array of pigments and textures on their skin. 

The ocean from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem touches at the dangers of trying to understand “god-like” consciousness. The entire project of trying to decipher any pattern or meaning behind the actions of the ocean falls flat as it is simply too beyond our understanding. 

Stevland from Semiosis by Sue Burke experiences reality through root networks, nutrients, and evolutionary strategies. All animals and humans to him are a passing phenomenon that he humours and tends to.

For those who haven't heard of it, it's a game in which you play as a queer Londoner in the 1720s, throwing parties and attempting to achieve happiness at Mother Clap's molly house, all while being hunted by the citizen watch group, the Society for the Reformation of Manners. The game is a card game with a heavy focus on hidden agendas and loyalty. It's for 1 to 5 players, best with 4, and takes a couple hours to finish.

You're trying to build a good hand of cards to throw good parties and gain points, but all of the cards that make good party cards are also what will get you arrested if a constable winds up drawing them. Every party represents a choice to risk your personhood for enjoyment and points. It is an interesting tension to experience.

At a specific point in the game, you can be an informer and secretly decide to turn against the community and inform the authorities of all of the shady dealings at Mother Clap's. Because it's a secret, nobody knows if you've done it until the very end of the game, when everyone's fates are revealed at once. This means that in some games nobody informs, and the community is safe, and in some games multiple people inform, and the community is doomed. It also means that in some games, the person who informed wasn't really a bad person, they just got scared and made a choice that hurt everyone. I've seen games where people have been informing while apologizing to everyone at the table.

Mostly posting because I want to know who else here has this one on their shelf. I've mostly played it in groups where the theme is meaningful but not personal, and it makes me wonder how differently it would be approached by a group for whom it's more personal.

In economics, specialization and division of labor compound productivity. But that assumes workers with different aptitudes and different conscious experiences. You'd have the same biases, strengths, flaws, eureka moments coming from the same conscious substrate (they only differ by being in different points in physical space).

Clones would have identical thought processes, so creative problem-solving suffers. Yet, you would be able to manual labor much more easily since there's more physical workers to use.

Applying qualia and cognition to a common daydream: clone yourself 10x with identical memories and neural wiring (also assume you can clone and deploy instantaneously in parallel). Setting aside common tropes like jealousy and fighting over who's the real "you", what would happen?