Well of Souls Forums

"Sapience" just means intelligence, and a being (such as an AI) can very intelligent without being "self-aware" or having "free will", or the various hard-to-define characteristics which separate humans from AI or other animals. Which is why science fiction literature uses the term "sentience" inst...

Talking of sentience to describe human-like intellect is a misnomer (popularized by Star Trek I believe); properly sentience is the ability to sense one's environment and react to it, which is actually a rather low bar to clear. Even people who aren't hippies are starting to acknowledge that, for ex...

Losing the ability to digest lactose in adulthood seems like a pretty random "adaptation." I would be curious to know whether this is common in other mammals as well... but I would be surprised if there is a lot of data on this. A quick search suggests that both dogs and cats can also be lactose in...

Though would Alex have a cultural background to recognized a plasma based sword and what it could do? And would the Loroi or other powers even considered such a high tech melee weapon as practical. One of the Loroi in this shuttle is named Fireblade. They may or may not consider energy swords to be...

gaerzi: yes, you are quite right, but that is not the point of the excercise. Mechs make negative amounts of sense in just about any application, what I am trying to come up with is some sort of semi plausible reason why they are not a rediculously stupid choice. And my point was that this semi-pla...

Mechs however is a different beast altogether, the only semi realistic way I have come up with for mechs is that human minds require human shapes, so the neural interface and it's MANY advantages require a humanoid machine. I'm not convinced by that argument, because the human brain is extremely ad...