RE: Heart or Morality in systems

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@3DProgrammer.com>]

> Is this the "heart" that has been mentioned?

Not IMO.  IMO the "heart" is how the author glues everything together,
regardless of whether it's morality or description or dialogue or whatever.

> If so, I can say that an
> algorithm could be contrived to define moral conclusion of plot
> situations. The Erazmatron method could be applied, weighing the numeric
> positives against the negatives and deducing the best possible solution
> for conflict.

Then the shape of your morality depends upon how you weight it.  This
doesn't say anything about morality at all, it is simply your medium of
expression.  If you put a bunch of spline weights on a sheet of metal that
is meant to become an automobile body, it is totally in the eye of you the
designer whether it will become beautiful, scary, etc.  Or, to take the
Postmodernist tack, the combination of you and the audience.

> A writer probably doesn't select the best possible
> solution; if anything it's usually necessary to contrive situations very
> carefully to support a moral conclusion.

Well, if you're trying to insulate a single moral interpretation against all
possible variances in audience, then maybe so, maybe not.  But even
conventional authors don't believe they're required to make things so
slam-shut.  Some authors prefer to provide a Rorschach inkblot test.  Or
demonstrate well-defined moral coda whose interactions are ambiguous.
Considering the complexity of moral possibility in conventional writing, I
think defining your automation problem as the search for a "best possible
solution" is silly.

> I wonder what the moralility of the machine would be like...

It's not special.  You might as well wonder what the beauty of the machine
would be like.  Inevitably, the beauty is an artifact of the machine's
designer.


Cheers,                                     www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every                           Seattle, WA

For plot and pace, writers use words; game designers use numbers.
Anything understood over time has plot and pace.