Evolution on Almea

Questions or discussions about Almea or Verduria-- also the Incatena. Also good for postings in Almean languages.
zompist
Boardlord
Boardlord
Posts: 3368
Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2002 8:26 pm
Location: In the den
Contact:

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by zompist »

The ultimate reason is that I always envisioned Almea as a setting for novels. By their nature fantasy novels don't really encourage a lot of conbiology. (Except for monsters, which aren't really biology, just... monsterology.)

I mean, think about a character having a meal. It's nice to say what they ate; it's not that fabulous to hear that they had cumetu, zeri of shuchmyaso with a süro-based sauce, fazholo with draba, and for dessert a leme bulondula with embrezihi. That's not atmosphere, that's reader abuse. And it doesn't really help to explain what all of these things are... that' s the sort of off-putting infodump that makes a novel hard to get into.

I would think differently if I were creating a movie, a comic, or a video game. In a visual medium you can show all this stuff very quickly, without distracting the viewer from the story.

And again, if you like conbiology, have fun with it.

macgobhain
Niš
Niš
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed May 23, 2012 7:45 pm

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by macgobhain »

I guess that really depends on how you look at it.

I actually wasn't thinking about those kinds of details, just generalizing ones that help paint a different scene for your world, such as my world having an orange sky at certain times, blue plants, and some funny colored snow (not sure what color the snow is yet). All of these things of course are explainable with the conbiology of the world (Eurydice), which is for the book's appendix. It would also depend on what kind of a story you're writing as well I suppose...

User avatar
Melend
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 45
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:36 am

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Melend »

It's difficult to imagine a biology resembling what we know of the various Almean species that could accomplish *any* of the things it's suggested 'magic' can accomplish. Not impossible - many terrestrial organisms have the ability to sense and produce magnetic and electric fields. But moving objects, or transmitting ideas across significant distances (especially in media other than water)... those things are hard to explain, and our understanding of both physics and plausible biology doesn't really permit them. Mind control is right out.

Of course, our current understanding of physics also doesn't provide a ready means for a ship of Greeks to be transferred from Earth to Almea... wherever it is, anyway. And the ilii seem to have taken science and technology far beyond what our own species has. For all we know, all of the paranormal things that happen in Almea are effected by extremely advanced ilii technology that cannot be easily seen or touched, that uses principles known to us or even beyond what we know. Sufficiently advanced tech would be pretty hard to distinguish from 'magic'.

Isn't it suggested that the ktuvoks might have been engineered by the ilii?

zompist
Boardlord
Boardlord
Posts: 3368
Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2002 8:26 pm
Location: In the den
Contact:

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by zompist »

Melend, I pretty much answered everything in your first paragraph on the previous page of this thread, if a little cantankerously.

Kind of funny that you mention mind control as "right out" when it exists right now on Earth.

I'm not saying that biology is equivalent to magic, but people seem to be declaring that things are "impossible" way too easily. Not only does the natural world have some strange extremes, but everyday experience, looked at in terms of physics, is full of powerful things that form a toolkit for the conworlder.

Telekinesis in particular (if that's what you meant by "moving objects") is a stretch. If the object doesn't have its own nervous system, direct or indirect physical manipulation are going to be easier.

(The iliu didn't create the ktuvoks, though there is a suggestion that each species may have created at least some of the other Thinking Kinds.)

User avatar
Yiuel Raumbesrairc
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 668
Joined: Thu Jan 20, 2005 11:17 pm
Location: Nyeriborma, Elme, Melomers

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

Melend wrote:It's difficult to imagine a biology resembling what we know of the various Almean species that could accomplish *any* of the things it's suggested 'magic' can accomplish.
The best thing to do with magic, in Almea, is to ditch the world completely. As a certain elf would say, "I do not understand what you mean by magic"... It's best not to think of "magic" to be one simple category on Almea. If I go all Almean, I would say that magic is an illusion; it's an illusion because the different stuff that sounds so supernatural are different things.
Not impossible - many terrestrial organisms have the ability to sense and produce magnetic and electric fields. But moving objects, or transmitting ideas across significant distances (especially in media other than water)... those things are hard to explain, and our understanding of both physics and plausible biology doesn't really permit them. Mind control is right out.
Many things to consider here. On Almea, iliu mentalism and ktuvok mesmerism are definitely not vyozi magic. But if we go biologically, ktuvok mesmerism is easy to explain. I have a friend who can easily do it, actually, with what we call hypnosis, and it works well enough. And nature tends to do things it does better than humans, so I can easily see it done better by the Demons. Now, iliu mentalism is on a different level. As such, it seems clear that iliu mentalism is not thought sharing; it's picture projection. And mental images, in our brain, are merely wave patterns in our brains, which are electromagnetic (and chemical, but this is more between neurons). While we do not have something that's like that on Earth, it is conceivable to have your own electromagnetic waves being transformed into electromagnetic radiation that can influence the brain patterns of other brains.

Now, you would have to find a way to evolve it through various steps (sipomi could have a fairly rudimentary version of that mentalism, for example, which would show how it is used), but even that could be easy.
Of course, our current understanding of physics also doesn't provide a ready means for a ship of Greeks to be transferred from Earth to Almea... wherever it is, anyway. And the ilii seem to have taken science and technology far beyond what our own species has. For all we know, all of the paranormal things that happen in Almea are effected by extremely advanced ilii technology that cannot be easily seen or touched, that uses principles known to us or even beyond what we know. Sufficiently advanced tech would be pretty hard to distinguish from 'magic'.
Do we know all that there is to know about the Universe? I don't think so. It has been too easy, we are bound to find something weird at one point that will just blow our minds. Any "magic" (read, unknown force) can be hard to identify as a natural force. The Powers seem to have access to some force very different from the four ones we know; this in itself is very interesting and puzzling. Who knows what else there is. But I don't think we need to go into those speculations to explain iliu mentalism.
"Ez amnar o amnar e cauč."
- Daneydzaus

User avatar
Melend
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 45
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:36 am

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Melend »

zompist wrote:Kind of funny that you mention mind control as "right out" when it exists right now on Earth.
I'm sorry, I misspoke: electromagnetic mind control is right out. We're not told that ktuvoks (for example) have any specific means of accomplishing their "demonic possession"; EM 'psychic' powers are not at all plausible, and we lack the data to draw conclusions about other possibilities.

User avatar
patiku
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 285
Joined: Wed Oct 24, 2007 7:38 pm

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by patiku »

So would the brain bits necessary for this transmission of information be present in some rudimentary form in any of the iliu's sibling species? If so, could it be the true source of the ktuvoks' hypnotic power? Also I imagine that people on Almea would be able to describe things they've seen to each other more easily because they might be transmitting that information on some subconscious level.

zompist
Boardlord
Boardlord
Posts: 3368
Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2002 8:26 pm
Location: In the den
Contact:

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by zompist »

Yes, yes, and no. (And the last is mostly due to reasons of narrative: Almean humans aren't supposed to be that weird for terrestrial readers.)

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Salmoneus »

It's certainly theoretically possible to alter mental states at a distance through EM waves. However, leaving aside the problem of evolution (it seems like a massive step requiring a lot of rewiring with no advantages in the intermediate states), it doesn't seem feasible that a humanlike animal could actually produce enough electrical power to transmit the (incredibly precise) waves over a useful distance. That precision is also problematic - you'd have to not only transmit exactly the right 'thought', but you'd have to transmit it to precisely the right place in the brain - no point stimulating the visual cortex with an auditory message, at best that'll just be confusing and at worst it'll have no effect at all.
It's also important to bear in mind that we don't actually have electromagnetic waves bouncing around in our heads - we have sporadically firing neurons. The projected waves wouldn't just have to change the pattern of existing waves, but would face the much harder task of getting particular neurons to fire in particular orders. To illustrate the difference: we already have EM pulses that can interfere with electronics, and it's conceivable that we might be able to build sufficiently precise EM pulse generators that we can, say, rewrite a computer program at a distance, or remote-control an electric car. As it is, the imprecise EM pulses generally just fry all the electronics they hit. But: EM pulses have no effect at all on organic brains. Affecting an electrochemical system at a distance would require an order of magnitude more radiation.
And those waves of radiation have to penetrate deep enough into the brain to trigger neurons not near the surface, while at the same time not simply frying the neurons nearer the surface...

The problems can be seen just by looking at real electroreception. It only works in water, because the waves can't pass through enough air to be in any way useful. [Echidnas can get some signal by having their electroreceptors very close to very damp soil]. Even in water, fish that have evolved to communicate through electric fields only have an effective range of, at most, a couple of meters. And that sort of communication is barely more subtle than "hi, I'm here, I'm a female such-and-such".

It's true that humans have devised ways to effect the brain through EM at a distance. We can make you twitch, and we can unreliably make you see flashes of light. To do this, we need a magnetic field similar in size to an MRI machine's field, and we need to place those magnets right next to your head - and to actually target even a particular area of the brain you need those magnets to cover something like half the length of your skull, because of course the only way to target a particular point with a wave is to have two waves begin a distance apart, so that you can target the focal point.
This has problems, however. In order to have enough power to go from just outside your skull to a couple of centimeters inside your skull and still be able to randomly knock out enough neurons to make you maybe see a flash... well, let's just you mustn't have any metal touching your skin, because that amount of power heats up metal enough to burn skin on contact. [They discovered this the hard way - don't use metalic EEG monitors when you're putting a magnetic field through someone's head!]. And even if you don't have anything metalic on you, you're still likely to get skin and muscle pain, because to get to the brain you have to go through the skin and the muscle.

Leaving aside the question of whether the precision to target individual neurons in specific orders from some distance away is in any way even vaguely feasible, we can get a vague idea of what you'd have to be like to be able to do it, power-wise. You'd have to be eating every minute of the day, preferably eating uranium, and you'd have to have biologically evolved superconductors in your brain. You wouldn't bother with putting pictures into people's heads, because you'd be a walking death ray, except that the chances are you'd fry your own nervous system the first time you tried to transmit. Or just boil your own blood by heating up the iron...

(for comparison, the most powerful bioelectrics in reality are the electric fish, where a big part of their body is based around electrogeneration, and it shapes their entire way of life... the maximum any animal can produce is around 600 volts, or around 1 amp (not in the same animal - high voltage fish have low current and vice versa).)

Incidentally, if you can put a picture in my head, let alone put a thought in my head, you can also control my body. Actually, controlling gross physical behaviour would be a hell of a lot easier than controlling thoughts, or even just controlling sensations.

Fine control of anything also requires the tendentious leap that we all have identical brain layouts. While it's true that most of us have the same brain scheme on the gross level - certain parts of the brain do certain sorts of things - there's no reason to think that the neural layouts themselves are the same for everybody, rather than being functionally equivalent networks that have developed in each brain semi-independently (and the fact that completely different areas of the brain can be rewired for certain purposes when the original wiring elsewhere gets damaged certainly seems to suggest that the detailed architecture is variable, both between people and over time). This would make anything more precise than general stimulation of this sense or that, or maybe this emotion or that, completely impossible. Perhaps, as a stretch, it might be possible over time to learn the layout of one person's brain enough to influence it? But to influence the brain of any random person you haven't met before... completely impossible. Impossible for three reasons: you can't produce that much power, and if you could there would be massive sideeffects; you almost certainly can't target that power sufficiently precisely; and even if you could you wouldn't know where to target it in more than the most general terms, except perhaps after detailed study of the subject.

--------------------------------------------

Passive telepathy, on the other hand, is a lot more possible. It could theoretically be possible to have EM receptors delicate enough to detect the tiny bioelectric changes that accompany thoughts (and to have them be able to cancel out your own bioelectrics, and the magnetic field of the earth and whatnot). You'd still expect only to be able to get very general impressions - telepathy, not telepsychy - though maybe between individuals who knew each other well there could be more, or perhaps the species has evolved to be very similar in this respect. And this passive telepathy could be boosted by the 'sender', who wouldn't so much actually send anything but would think 'really hard' and order their thoughts in a certain easily-read way.

This would be possible, though still very, very unlikely, and hardly worth evolving. But it would be a mere miracle of nature, rather than, in the case of thought control at a distance, an actual honest-to-god miracle.

Needless to say, all this becomes a lot easier if you have physical contact, particularly physical contact designed for telepathy, and if you have penetrative contract straight into the nervous system it becomes almost no problem at all (I say almost because the problem of translation would still exist - the individuals would still have to have evolved specifically for their thoughts to be readable, or else the individuals would have to know each other really well).

----------

What's overwhelmingly easier is ideomotor telepathy. This is the principle that mental states are expressed in body language, and hence observation of the body allows deductions about the mind. This is what we do all the time - we often know that someone is angry without actually waiting for them to say so - but we tend not to appreciate the extent of the effect. Those who study ideomotor phenomena can seem like telepaths. The classic case study is the horse, 'Clever Hans', who was able to answer complex numerical questions and yes-or-no questions by observing the behaviour of the person who asked him the question - assuming that the questioner (or his trainer in the audience) knew the answer themselves, the horse could give the right answer nine out of ten times. The person who worked this out then tried to emulate it himself, and discovered that he could be 90% accurate in deducing the answer to yes-or-no questions from the appearance of the person who asked the question.
In humans, going beyond obvious body language is difficult. It requires study and practice, and is still fairly limited in extent - you may be able to guess yes or no, or even have an idea what sort of things a person is thinking about (particular if you've primed them to respond in different ways), but true 'telepathy' is beyond us.
However, other species may have developed this to a more sophisticated level, to a point that actually does equate to telepathy. Then again, such a species would likely also develop the ability to lie through fine body language - humans aren't good at this, but largely because we've never had to be. So this wouldn't be telepathy in the circumvents-lying way. And if you want the signals to be read, you'll exaggerate them. So in fact what we'd actually see is basically just language, but conveyed through sign language rather than sound. However, if the signs are still quite subtle, an individual who has evolved to read them, and has developed an interest in humans and has applied their evolved hypersensitivity to small visual cues to human behaviour, would indeed seem like a mind-reader to a human audience.

Mesmerism, the induction of mental behaviours through the body language of the speaker, is rather more fanciful, but still sort-of believable. This wouldn't be so applicable to humans, though, unless the alien had evolved to influence humans, or had applied considerable study to the problem of how to do so.

However, mesmerism is in the realms of the highly improbable... rather than flat-out mental-influence-at-a-distance-through-EM, which so far as I can see is clearly in the realms of magic alone.
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

zompist
Boardlord
Boardlord
Posts: 3368
Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2002 8:26 pm
Location: In the den
Contact:

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by zompist »

Lots of good things to think about here.
Salmoneus wrote:It's certainly theoretically possible to alter mental states at a distance through EM waves. However, leaving aside the problem of evolution (it seems like a massive step requiring a lot of rewiring with no advantages in the intermediate states),
Greater communication is always advantageous in social species. (As, for that matter, is the ability to confuse prey for predators.)

You might say, if these things are so great, why haven't they evolved already? But that's not how evolution works. Human beings-- from a human perspective-- are a pretty great idea, but it took evolution a billion years to get to them. There's no physical reason why you can't have six or eight legs-- insects and spiders do it-- but no vertebrate has done it (as part of their regular form). Evolution does not systematically explore its design space. For that reason, looking around at ourselves and our favorite mammals is rarely a good guide to what's possible even on our own planet.
it doesn't seem feasible that a humanlike animal could actually produce enough electrical power to transmit the (incredibly precise) waves over a useful distance. That precision is also problematic - you'd have to not only transmit exactly the right 'thought', but you'd have to transmit it to precisely the right place in the brain - no point stimulating the visual cortex with an auditory message, at best that'll just be confusing and at worst it'll have no effect at all.
It's also important to bear in mind that we don't actually have electromagnetic waves bouncing around in our heads - we have sporadically firing neurons. The projected waves wouldn't just have to change the pattern of existing waves, but would face the much harder task of getting particular neurons to fire in particular orders. To illustrate the difference: we already have EM pulses that can interfere with electronics, and it's conceivable that we might be able to build sufficiently precise EM pulse generators that we can, say, rewrite a computer program at a distance, or remote-control an electric car. As it is, the imprecise EM pulses generally just fry all the electronics they hit. But: EM pulses have no effect at all on organic brains. Affecting an electrochemical system at a distance would require an order of magnitude more radiation.
And those waves of radiation have to penetrate deep enough into the brain to trigger neurons not near the surface, while at the same time not simply frying the neurons nearer the surface...
The best way to think about these problems is to look at systems where they work, and then see how they could be adapted by organisms.

It's possible to create a small system, weighing less than 3 ounces, which transmits arbitrary sounds and visual images between sentient creatures. You might have one already-- it's called a cel phone. (For comparison, brains weigh about 3 pounds.)

Most of your cel phone is packaging and UI; the bit that actually sends and receives radio waves is the transceiver chip-- typical dimensions are less than 10 mm square, 1 mm deep.

The point is, we don't need to blast an EMP pulse at the entire brain. All we need a small transceiver in both brains. Naturally the sensors for such an organ will be on the surface, for the same reason the ear is not buried inside the head.

(One corollary is that terrestrial humans, who lack this organ, would be immune to both iliu and ktuvok effects. I'm fine with that. In fact, this is probably how Wat Porridgeton escaped to tell his tale.)
(for comparison, the most powerful bioelectrics in reality are the electric fish, where a big part of their body is based around electrogeneration, and it shapes their entire way of life... the maximum any animal can produce is around 600 volts, or around 1 amp (not in the same animal - high voltage fish have low current and vice versa).)
You're confusing electricity with electromagnetism here. We don't need to send electrons around, only photons.

I've talked about electromagnetism only because we have obvious technological examples. There are other ways to transmit information; for animals, the obvious choice is in fact sound. Animals already have incredibly elaborate brain mechanisms for both producing and analyzing sound waves. Our ears are a lot more effective frequency analyzers than our eyes, really-- we can separate out different auditory waveforms, while our eyes smear out the equivalent visual input.

(The first objection might be that the information sound waves would be audible to the ears, which might be annoying. But that can be solved by separating frequencies.)
Fine control of anything also requires the tendentious leap that we all have identical brain layouts. While it's true that most of us have the same brain scheme on the gross level - certain parts of the brain do certain sorts of things - there's no reason to think that the neural layouts themselves are the same for everybody, rather than being functionally equivalent networks that have developed in each brain semi-independently (and the fact that completely different areas of the brain can be rewired for certain purposes when the original wiring elsewhere gets damaged certainly seems to suggest that the detailed architecture is variable, both between people and over time).
This could certainly be a problem. Again, it's entirely avoided by specialized organs.

But also note that the brain's plasticity makes it very good at recognizing new types of input. For instance, you can send input to an array of sensors on someone's back and have the brain recognize it as visual input.

(On telepathy, I don't think I've said that any Almean species can 'read your thoughts'. I don't see a problem with positing a telepathic species; one that can read other species' thoughts is a harder sell. Arguably, however, speech is as close to telepathy as we actually need to get. We can communicate extremely detailed mental states to conspecifics; what else do we need? At least some philosophers have suggested that our thoughts are language-- we're just talking to ourselves internally. Besides, sf telepaths are almost always creepy...)
What's overwhelmingly easier is ideomotor telepathy. This is the principle that mental states are expressed in body language, and hence observation of the body allows deductions about the mind. This is what we do all the time - we often know that someone is angry without actually waiting for them to say so - but we tend not to appreciate the extent of the effect. Those who study ideomotor phenomena can seem like telepaths. The classic case study is the horse, 'Clever Hans', who was able to answer complex numerical questions and yes-or-no questions by observing the behaviour of the person who asked him the question - assuming that the questioner (or his trainer in the audience) knew the answer themselves, the horse could give the right answer nine out of ten times.
Yes, Clever Hans is fascinating. Konrad Lorenz tells some great stories in King Solomon's Ring. Many animals can do this, and it seems likely that the ability has atrophied in humans precisely because we have speech. You have less need of an ability to finely read others' emotions and intentions if they can just talk to you.
However, mesmerism is in the realms of the highly improbable... rather than flat-out mental-influence-at-a-distance-through-EM, which so far as I can see is clearly in the realms of magic alone.
Not at all. You can demonstrate it for yourself today. Find a happy baby and spend some time with it. Or a lover, preferably naked. Just by interacting with them-- indeed, to some extent just by seeing them-- your brain is flooded with endorphins. That affects your mood and behavior.

At a minimum, the ktuvoks could get a lot done if they simply had the ability to stimulate the production of endorphins (or the Almean equivalent). Ktuvoks don't need to remote-control another being like a toy car. Create a condition of trust, and they can just tell them what to do.

Mornche Geddick
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 370
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:22 pm
Location: UK

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Mornche Geddick »

zompist wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:However, mesmerism is in the realms of the highly improbable... rather than flat-out mental-influence-at-a-distance-through-EM, which so far as I can see is clearly in the realms of magic alone.
Not at all. You can demonstrate it for yourself today. Find a happy baby and spend some time with it. Or a lover, preferably naked. Just by interacting with them-- indeed, to some extent just by seeing them-- your brain is flooded with endorphins. That affects your mood and behavior.

At a minimum, the ktuvoks could get a lot done if they simply had the ability to stimulate the production of endorphins (or the Almean equivalent). Ktuvoks don't need to remote-control another being like a toy car. Create a condition of trust, and they can just tell them what to do.
On the other hand you can snap out of that mood very sharply if the fire alarm goes off, or you hear breaking glass or smell the dinner burning, or see the face of a politician you detest on the telly. And however happy the baby makes you feel, it still can't control you like the creepy telepathic Children in The Midwich Cuckoos.

I've always thought the ktuvoks' control of humans has a lot more to do with cult dynamics than their mesmeric powers. However those powers may work, Almean humans can certainly resist them, while humans like Bezu ma-Veon or Pausol (and the Reverend Jim Jones) can dominate thousands without needing any mesmeric power, by playing on the authoritarian follower streak in human nature.

User avatar
Melend
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 45
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:36 am

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Melend »

zompist wrote:It's possible to create a small system, weighing less than 3 ounces, which transmits arbitrary sounds and visual images between sentient creatures. You might have one already-- it's called a cel phone. (For comparison, brains weigh about 3 pounds.)
We know lots of ways to make electronics out of metals and doped silicon; we don't know of any ways to efficiently generate non-visible EM radiation with biological materials. It's not something biology does, on Earth.
The point is, we don't need to blast an EMP pulse at the entire brain. All we need a small transceiver in both brains. Naturally the sensors for such an organ will be on the surface, for the same reason the ear is not buried inside the head.
I don't see any indication that Almeans generally have any such sense - and even if they had such an organ, it's difficult to imagine how it could be used to 'psychically' control anyone unless it had been designed to do so. Which would raise even more questions than before.

Ars Lande
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 382
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2010 7:34 am
Location: Paris

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Ars Lande »

On EM communication:
doesn't seem that far off.
A good proportion of terrestrial animals are sensitive to electric and/or magnetic fields.
zompist wrote:The point is, we don't need to blast an EMP pulse at the entire brain. All we need a small transceiver in both brains. Naturally the sensors for such an organ will be on the surface, for the same reason the ear is not buried inside the head.
Depending on the wavelengths involved. There'd be no reason that couldn't be buried inside the head.

Frankly, I never though ktuvok mind control to be that far off - we have a very good example on Earth, and that's called 'domestication', and you can try it yourself with a well-trained dog.
Which leads to the rather grim implication that the top humans in ktuvok realms are probably indoctrinated as children, and have possibly been bred for maximum compliance. In other words, genetically obedient people raised by swamp creatures. (Come to think of it, I could name one or two such people myself).

User avatar
Melend
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 45
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:36 am

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Melend »

Ars Lande wrote:Frankly, I never though ktuvok mind control to be that far off - we have a very good example on Earth, and that's called 'domestication', and you can try it yourself with a well-trained dog.
That is not at all how ktuvok "mind-control" is described. There is absolutely no suggestion that their slaves have been domesticated - selective breeding would have taken tens of thousands of years.

Mornche Geddick
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 370
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:22 pm
Location: UK

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Mornche Geddick »

And it started out with a species of which many individuals liked humans anyway. Read In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw. His theory is that we (accidentally) selected those wolves who were less shy and more willing to hang around with us, and they evolved into the domestic dog. We left the shyer and more mistrustful wolves in the wild. When we try to tame the modern wolf, the results are much more disappointing.

Ars Lande
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 382
Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2010 7:34 am
Location: Paris

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Ars Lande »

Melend wrote:
Ars Lande wrote:Frankly, I never though ktuvok mind control to be that far off - we have a very good example on Earth, and that's called 'domestication', and you can try it yourself with a well-trained dog.
That is not at all how ktuvok "mind-control" is described. There is absolutely no suggestion that their slaves have been domesticated - selective breeding would have taken tens of thousands of years.
And it started out with a species of which many individuals liked humans anyway. Read In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw. His theory is that we (accidentally) selected those wolves who were less shy and more willing to hang around with us, and they evolved into the domestic dog. We left the shyer and more mistrustful wolves in the wild. When we try to tame the modern wolf, the results are much more disappointing.
First a disclaimer: this is entirely my own speculations, developped for my own amusement, and there is, indeed, nothing to suggest that what I'm talking about is what Mark had in mind.

1) The ktuvoks appear to control large human populations (and indeed, other species) through a mechanism that is described by external observers as mind control, or even demonic possession.
2) Taking a closer look, it appears that most of the population are not, actually, mind-controlled. As shown by the one text we have on Munkhâshi life, most of them have seen a grand total of one ktuvok, for about five minutes in their lives. Otherwise, their society is structured by very conventional methods of oppression.
3) The empire is actually ruled by a handful of humans, who are in turn, controlled by the ktuvoks.

Now, what do we know of these rulers? Well, very little actually, except that they all belong to a specific ethnic group, specifically, the very first group that encountered ktuvoks.
The ktuvoks keep an intriguing focus on ethnic groups; they also have some interest in human children. (Indeed, the first and sometimes only glimpse most humans get of a ktuvok is when they're very young and malleable).
Other points: elite humans suddenly deprived of their ktuvok masters appear curiously helpless; ktuvoks are a lot, lot less efficient when trying to rule human groups they're not familiar with. The Cadhinorian and Jippirasti armies also had little difficulty slaughtering the ktuvoks when they finally reached the swamps.

Taking these facts into consideration, I propose the following theory:
- Ktuvok mind control is actually quite similar to our own process of domestication.
- The top humans are the domesticated humans, carefully selected from those humans that were most likely to hang out with ktuvoks. They're not an ethnic group per se, they're a domesticated species. That's why ktuvok empires fail outside their home swamps (as they did Arcél): the local humans are not suitable for domestication, and there's not enough time for it anyway.
- Judging from this article: http://cbsu.tc.cornell.edu/ccgr/behaviour/Index.htm, it has taken about 40 generations to domesticate the silver fox. This suggests that humans could be domesticated in about one millenia or two. That's rather a long time – but the ktuvoks have long lifespans anyway, and they've been working at it for tens of millenia.

This also fits this quote:
(The iliu didn't create the ktuvoks, though there is a suggestion that each species may have created at least some of the other Thinking Kinds.)
Would humans actually be suitable for domestication by a hypothetical species?
What most domesticated species have in common (cats excepted) is that they are found in the wild in highly structured social groups and basically what we're doing is leveraging their social instincts. The two obstacles to it, really, would be that we reproduce very slowly and that we're really good at social dynamics. But a sufficiently long-lived species that's better than us at politics might be able to do it – and that's pretty much how the ktuvoks are described.

Mornche Geddick
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 370
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:22 pm
Location: UK

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Mornche Geddick »

Zompist implies somewhere that ktuvoks have shorter lifetimes than humans, but I can't find the reference - comment please, zomp?

Civil War Bugle
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 151
Joined: Fri Jul 09, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Civil War Bugle »

Also, do non-humans engage much in wizardry, apart from Patiku's original question about magic affecting their evolution or their current natural or 'natural' abilities? The Flaids are into alchemy, but I don't recall ever seeing a reference to a non-human doing the 'interaction with Powers' style of wizardry.

zompist
Boardlord
Boardlord
Posts: 3368
Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2002 8:26 pm
Location: In the den
Contact:

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by zompist »

Ars Lande's speculations are quite clever and reasonable. I don't think long lives would be necessary, only a continuity of culture, and ktuvok empires are good at that.

Can't find any reference to their lifespan in a quick search, Mornche.

As for non-humans and magic... the iliu would certainly never do magic in the human way— essentially by becoming a pet of the Powers. They'd consider it immoral as well as foolish. However, they'd say that they're in touch with the good Powers— but as allies not pets. Note that one of the iliu-ktuvok wars was fought largely with magic.

The elcari have a word for sorcery (guña), but I'd say they don't generally have the temperament for it. They don't care for abstract studies, especially ones with unreliable effects.

Flaids are curious and some would dabble in magic just as some humans would. They generally abhor displays of power, complete solitude, and the sort of humorless personality that would devote itself to a Power. On the other hand they are fairly tolerant of eccentricity and wouldn't prevent someone from pursuing magic unless they became dangerous. In the story of Jeerio a wizard is mentioned, Dorgetno; as the story is set in Flora he would certainly be a flaid, not a human.

User avatar
Terra
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 571
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 10:01 am

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Terra »

The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.

Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.
This disappoints me, because ultimately, they weren't reading and displaying images from the brain; The images were produced by merging youtube videos. If I wasn't watching youtube videos, but instead remembering my grandmother's old house (now demolished, and featured in no youtube video), how accurate would this method be?

This raises a couple of obvious questions:
1) How does the brain store images?
2) What's the brain's equivalent of pixels/bytes?
3) If you (or me, or Henry Markram) were to try to design a brain that sees as humans do, how would we know when we succede? Is what you and I see basically the brain's equivalent of VRAM?
Incidentally, if you can put a picture in my head, let alone put a thought in my head, you can also control my body.
If it's not just broadcasting an image, but actual putting, I'd expect some kind encryption to evolve, or maybe some kind of kill-switch (like the one that turns off the internet on your laptop). (I can't think of a way to get a kill-switch to work though, because of the obvious problem that if the body controls the kill-switch, than the hijacker also controls the kill-switch, and would no doubt work to disable it.) Or maybe the hijackers win the evolutionary contest and the species becomes a hive mind in which its normal for every "individual" to be controlled by single hijacker/leader/queen. At that point, it'd almost be more appropriate to refer to the "individuals" as one would refer to arms and legs instead.

***

Zomp, do the iliu also have all the same senses that humans have? Do they have a distinct word for "communicate by psionics/telepathy/brain-internet"? What's the range for this ability? How do they defend against hijacking? This page (http://www.zompist.com/verbio.htm#Lutinids) seems to not talk about any of that stuff.

Mornche Geddick
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 370
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:22 pm
Location: UK

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Mornche Geddick »

zompist wrote:Can't find any reference to their lifespan in a quick search, Mornche.
I suspect it's somewhere on the Old Board.

User avatar
Brel
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 79
Joined: Mon Sep 13, 2004 6:15 pm
Location: Washington state

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Brel »

Melend wrote:That is not at all how ktuvok "mind-control" is described. There is absolutely no suggestion that their slaves have been domesticated - selective breeding would have taken tens of thousands of years.
No. The speed at which genetic changes occur depends on generation time and the steepness of selective forces. It need not take "tens of thousands of years", especially not with skilled breeders who know what they're doing and what they want. Lactose tolerance and a variety of other adaptations associated with the Holocene certainly did not. People need to stop making the assumption that human evolution essentially ended thousands of years ago.

Certainly the description given of the newly liberated Eynleyni is compatible with the notion of genetic selection for meekness:
The Historical Atlas - 1683 wrote:He did what he could to rehabilitate the Eynleyni; he found them fairly intractable as subjects. As a later emperor complained, “They react indifferently to kindness; show no loyalty either to their new masters, or to the ktuvoks, or among themselves; and seem unable to act, now that there was no one to tell them what to do.”
Io wrote:Seriously, do you take it as an obligation to be the sort of cunt you are?

User avatar
Melend
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 45
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:36 am

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Melend »

Brel wrote:The speed at which genetic changes occur depends on generation time and the steepness of selective forces. It need not take "tens of thousands of years", especially not with skilled breeders who know what they're doing and what they want.
It also depends on the nature of the traits selected for - disassociating two closely linked but biochemically unrelated traits can take dozens or hundreds of generations - and whether the required genes exist in the target population.

I am highly skeptical that you could breed a human-like creature that could be very thoroughly dominated yet capable of independent action in a reasonable period.
Last edited by Melend on Wed Aug 14, 2013 6:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Terra
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 571
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 10:01 am

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Terra »

You can just get lucky, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01LFxJ4SPPY It's not hard to imagine a scenario in a primitive tribe where a mutation like this could lead an individual to dominate an activity (like hunting at night), gain much prestige because of it, and then spread their genes far and wide. It's not as useful in a modern industrial society though.

User avatar
Drydic
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1652
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2002 12:23 pm
Location: I am a prisoner in my own mind.
Contact:

Re: Evolution on Almea

Post by Drydic »

Melend wrote:
Brel wrote:The speed at which genetic changes occur depends on generation time and the steepness of selective forces. It need not take "tens of thousands of years", especially not with skilled breeders who know what they're doing and what they want.
It also depends on the nature of the traits selected for - disassociating two closely linked but biochemically unrelated traits can take dozens or hundreds of generations - and whether the required genes exist in the target population.

I am highly skeptical that you could breed a human-like creature that could be very thoroughly dominated yet capable of independent action in a reasonable period.
Religion.
Image Image
Common Zein Scratchpad & other Stuffs! OMG AN ACTUAL CONPOST WTFBBQ

Formerly known as Drydic.

Post Reply