Alicornutopia

My thoughts were more along the line of getting hypnotized to think doing 50 jumping jacks is awesome, and then doing those 50 jumping jacks. That overcomes some of those problems, but still doesn’t look like it would work unless you were previously paraplegic or something (in which case the hypnosis should not be necessary).

Could you use hypnosis to overcome the "you set out to get your wings" bias? Like, if you want to get your wings and you do something that would totally have counted if you had done it just to do it.

Ooooooh "evil doppleganger who knows your weaknesses" is one of my favorite tropes, and it's nice to learn more about Thea!

Is the doppleganger sentient?

anthusiasm wrote:Ooooooh "evil doppleganger who knows your weaknesses" is one of my favorite tropes, and it's nice to learn more about Thea!

Is the doppleganger sentient?

Other author here. We had to grab the Wikipedia definition. "Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively." So, yes? It has the ability to react. Cynthia could have interacted with it if she was fast enough? Can you please restate what you were asking?

anthusiasm wrote:Ooooooh "evil doppleganger who knows your weaknesses" is one of my favorite tropes, and it's nice to learn more about Thea!

Is the doppleganger sentient?

I'm glad you like it!

... The answer to the sentience question is "sorta". It's mostly a yes? But as RoboticLIN says, it depends on your precise definition.

A computer can react to things. AlphaGo can react to an opponent playing a stone, my computer can react to me hitting buttons on the keyboard, Google can react to a lot of people searching for lumosity brain games to think that “luminosity” is a typo of “lumosity” instead of vice versa (which is really annoying when I want to look at the story).

Sentience is more than just reaction. Sentience is about being a person and actually experiencing those thoughts. People often try to extend the word beyond its original usage; in scifi and fantasy it’s approximately used to mean “is this [alien/droid/golem/whatever] a person?”.

DanielH wrote:Sentience is more than just reaction. Sentience is about being a person and actually experiencing those thoughts. People often try to extend the word beyond its original usage; in scifi and fantasy it’s approximately used to mean “is this [alien/droid/golem/whatever] a person?”.

Well yeah, but that's the issue. Under the definition, it's a clear and resounding yes because obviously it can react to external stimuli. Under the general idea of "is it a person?", it's a "sort of, probably, maybe not, sort of no". The Shadow copy is, as far as I understand it, a representation of her inner thoughts. It actually is very much like her, up until it shifts into a monster, and it might be a person, because if you could somehow take it out of that scenario without it disappearing, it would be able to learn and respond in new ways, but it seems to be a magically-fuelled construct that can read her mind and wants to attack her psychologically.

So, it's not absolutely a person, because it's somewhat like a machine, pre-programmed to do things (such as to attack her psychologically), but you could explain that away as a weird "personality trait".

(It's probably sentient.)

Someone else has experienced the lumosity/luminosity thing too! Woo!

Re: do not be late

Sometimes I hate when I’m right.

Yeah...