It's a new one, and it's not exactly SF -- but it's not exactly not SF either -- but Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss really did it for me. It's about a guy's quest for this surreal, rare, and possibly supernatural videogame called Lucky Wander Boy. Funnier than hell, and well worth checking out.
This reminded me of a passage in a book I read not long ago, one that was discussed on this very website. Here it is:
"In my attachment to MAME, my thrall to its glamour and fascination, I had overlooked the crucial element the emulated arcade games lacked... I'd been too quick to agree... that the essence of a game was in the running of its code, I'd sided too easily with the config against the Thing Itself. The MAME games were facsimiles which came so close to covering all salient points of the originals that I had not noticed what was missing: their aura. Their uniqueness, their spark, that something (or no-thing) that resides in the Game Itself - not just in the circuit board but in the beaten up plywood cabinet, in its side decals, in the 10 watt bulbs behind its translucent plastic marquee, in the synergy of all these things together - and is not passed on in a digital copy, however perfect."
--Lucky Wander Boy, by D.B. Weiss
The problem that I've always had with Searle's thought experiment is that, although any thought experiment must necessarily leave out many details, the details left out by Searle have bearing on his own basic, operational terms: "understanding," "consciousness," however he words the original. The basic question behind the Chinese Room is: Does the room think? Which really means: is it conscious? (Of course, if someone would like to argue that thinking and consciousness can somehow be separated, I'm all ears.)
But we can't ignore the fact that thinking and consciousness aren't context-free; they occur in a spatial context, and a temporal context. I could be off by an order of magnitude here or there, but by my count, the storage capacity of (say) a 100 terabyte brain would take about 266 million volumes to catalogue, and even given enough employees in this Chinese room to make a response time of one operation per minute possible, the timescale of the thousands of operations necessary to compute a true language response would run into the days or longer - and this very timescale would make the experience of consciousness AS WE KNOW IT (i.e., on our scale, within the boundaries of human experience) impossible.
As for passing the Turing Test... well, if you asked the Chinese Room, "Why is the Chinese food in Shanghai so different from the stuff in San Francisco?" and it took 45 days to get back to you, you'd probably know it was because that Chinese Room attendant had to sift through a few hundred million books to find the answer. If not more: allowing for the near-infinite variety of responses, to avoid the redundancy that could be easily sussed out in a Turing Test, the Chinese Room would have to approach Borges's library in size.
Totally agree (not just about Mario Brothers). There is something nice about the fact that I don't have to see GTAIII billboards every five feet everywhere I go... but the penetration of gaming has been limited by a refusal to recognize them as a creative endeavor as worthwhile (potentially, anyway) as movies and music and whatever. And I hate to harp on the most tired-ass analogy in the fucking world... but you're not going to get the Citizen Kane of video games (or pick whatever movie you like the most if you think Citizen Kane is long and boring) until games are to people now what movies were to people in the 30s and 40s.
And there's a difference between a story slapped together with the characters from a video game to make a quick buck (even if, like Mortal Kombat I, it's a pretty good popcorn movie), and a story about what games mean to people in the real world. This book is the latter.
I have to disagree. I read the book, I thought the central character was very well drawn, and that the book was a very unique take on the 'quest story' genre (since what the character is questing for is basically unattainable). Since the whole story is told from one character's point of view, the other characters are seen through his eyes, and his powers of perception are pretty limited when it comes to other people. But I thought it was consistently funny, LOL in many places, insightful, and a little sad.
Oh well. That's what makes horse races...
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It's a new one, and it's not exactly SF -- but it's not exactly not SF either -- but Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss really did it for me. It's about a guy's quest for this surreal, rare, and possibly supernatural videogame called Lucky Wander Boy. Funnier than hell, and well worth checking out.
This reminded me of a passage in a book I read not long ago, one that was discussed on this very website. Here it is: "In my attachment to MAME, my thrall to its glamour and fascination, I had overlooked the crucial element the emulated arcade games lacked... I'd been too quick to agree... that the essence of a game was in the running of its code, I'd sided too easily with the config against the Thing Itself. The MAME games were facsimiles which came so close to covering all salient points of the originals that I had not noticed what was missing: their aura. Their uniqueness, their spark, that something (or no-thing) that resides in the Game Itself - not just in the circuit board but in the beaten up plywood cabinet, in its side decals, in the 10 watt bulbs behind its translucent plastic marquee, in the synergy of all these things together - and is not passed on in a digital copy, however perfect." --Lucky Wander Boy, by D.B. Weiss
That strategy may make you a hero, but it will probably cost you your job.
But we can't ignore the fact that thinking and consciousness aren't context-free; they occur in a spatial context, and a temporal context. I could be off by an order of magnitude here or there, but by my count, the storage capacity of (say) a 100 terabyte brain would take about 266 million volumes to catalogue, and even given enough employees in this Chinese room to make a response time of one operation per minute possible, the timescale of the thousands of operations necessary to compute a true language response would run into the days or longer - and this very timescale would make the experience of consciousness AS WE KNOW IT (i.e., on our scale, within the boundaries of human experience) impossible.
As for passing the Turing Test... well, if you asked the Chinese Room, "Why is the Chinese food in Shanghai so different from the stuff in San Francisco?" and it took 45 days to get back to you, you'd probably know it was because that Chinese Room attendant had to sift through a few hundred million books to find the answer. If not more: allowing for the near-infinite variety of responses, to avoid the redundancy that could be easily sussed out in a Turing Test, the Chinese Room would have to approach Borges's library in size.
MSC
Totally agree (not just about Mario Brothers). There is something nice about the fact that I don't have to see GTAIII billboards every five feet everywhere I go... but the penetration of gaming has been limited by a refusal to recognize them as a creative endeavor as worthwhile (potentially, anyway) as movies and music and whatever. And I hate to harp on the most tired-ass analogy in the fucking world... but you're not going to get the Citizen Kane of video games (or pick whatever movie you like the most if you think Citizen Kane is long and boring) until games are to people now what movies were to people in the 30s and 40s. And there's a difference between a story slapped together with the characters from a video game to make a quick buck (even if, like Mortal Kombat I, it's a pretty good popcorn movie), and a story about what games mean to people in the real world. This book is the latter.
I have to disagree. I read the book, I thought the central character was very well drawn, and that the book was a very unique take on the 'quest story' genre (since what the character is questing for is basically unattainable). Since the whole story is told from one character's point of view, the other characters are seen through his eyes, and his powers of perception are pretty limited when it comes to other people. But I thought it was consistently funny, LOL in many places, insightful, and a little sad. Oh well. That's what makes horse races...