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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!) » The Haunted Apiary (Let Op!): Interaction
[EMAIL] 9/24 E-mail from the Flea via ladybee777
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grimcat
Veteran

Joined: 27 Aug 2004
Posts: 83
Location: Boston,MA

 		In regards to the current trend of treating Durga, Melissa, SP and pious Flea as aspects of one entity:

How do we explain the irregularities that were being caused aboard the Apocalypso? What about the irregularities the Operator was experiencing?

Do we attribute this purely to the presence of the Forerunner artifact?

It seems that, in our rush to reconcile these agents with one another, we have to ignore other questions. Neither the SP nor the Pious Flea seem to have their home here.

Can anyone help me out here? I'm willing to see Durga and Melissa as the same entity. I would even concede SP if given enough information. Pious Flea, though... not so much.

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 11:22 am
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Nightmare Tony
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Joined: 07 Jun 2004
Posts: 824
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 		read up the wiki link I posted. Not really a multiple personality, but a core personality shattered into its 3 component parts, each one acting according their directives, each of them acting according to their goals and base programming.
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 1:08 pm
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a7i20ci7y
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Joined: 21 Sep 2004
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 		The Queen didn't seem to care about Dragonrider's sister untill she said "Cut her open." To which the Queen replied "Cut her open? With scalpel?" When Dragonrider said "Yes," that's when the Queen broke down. I think there is significance to this. A sad story alone may not be enough to set her off.


Thinking on this some more... perhaps it is because this story is about a sister being cut open with a scalpel... much like......Kamal's sister

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 1:50 pm
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Sep7imus
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Joined: 26 Jul 2004
Posts: 149
a7i20ci7y wrote:
Thinking on this some more... perhaps it is because this story is about a sister being cut open with a scalpel... much like......Kamal's sister


I'm not trying to be a jerk here, so please don't take this the wrong, way but...

Weren't we all already thinking that? It was the first thing that occurred to me and I assumed (maybe a mistake) that it was a conenction that everyone would have made.

If not, well, needless to say, I think that a7i20ci7y (WTF kind of name is that? Screwy ) is absolutely right. This reaction recalls a memory of being operated on as a child on Melissa's part, probably to be made into an AI.

-Sep7imus
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 2:43 pm
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a7i20ci7y
Greenhorn

Joined: 21 Sep 2004
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Sep7imus wrote:
a7i20ci7y wrote:
Thinking on this some more... perhaps it is because this story is about a sister being cut open with a scalpel... much like......Kamal's sister


I'm not trying to be a jerk here, so please don't take this the wrong, way but...

Weren't we all already thinking that? It was the first thing that occurred to me and I assumed (maybe a mistake) that it was a conenction that everyone would have made.

If not, well, needless to say, I think that a7i20ci7y (WTF kind of name is that? Screwy ) is absolutely right. This reaction recalls a memory of being operated on as a child on Melissa's part, probably to be made into an AI.

-Sep7imus


I'd seen several people talking about how an emotional story had upset her, but I hadn't seen anyone note specifically the scalpal, so I tossed it out there.

a7i20ci7y comes from trying to come up with handle that you can reasonably assume no else is using. It's atrocity, for those that didn't notice.

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 2:50 pm
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tinkers_damn
Boot

Joined: 27 Sep 2004
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 		[SPEC] Father/Son/Holy Spirit
After lurking for some time I can't resist posting an idea that seems to have been missed. It's been SPECed that Melissa, SP, and Pious Flea are aspects of one entity. Perhaps they need to be united.

Queen/Princess/Pious Flea
Father/Son/Holy Spirit

I'm interpreting "Pious Flea" as "Holy Speck": "...the Pious Flea was so small that even the Widow, with her sharp eyes, could hardly see him...".

I'm not saying that the three AI's are God, just that we were supposed to make this literary connection.

This is my first post. Trout? Flames? Agreement?

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 3:25 pm
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Phaedra
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 		[EMAIL] 9/24 E-mail from the Flea via ladybee777
Quote:
Durga has no memory, and neither does Melissa nor the Princess. The Princess doesn't remember even her name, and neither does Durga.

Hence, my guess is that they are most likely parts of the same entity, different aspects, somehow split along uneven lines. The Flea would be the "sanity check", trying to merge (!grope, cmd proc) with the other entities and bring them together to reveal the "truth". However, things have become complicated as the two main consciousness shards - the Queen/Melissa and the Princess - have turned against each other.

Now then, a question to the psychologists out there. How does one go about merging multiple personalities?..


Let me begin by saying that this post is off the cuff, since I had assumed Melissa/Operator = Durga, Pious Flea = Covenant A.I. designed to infect and influence Earth A.I., and Sleeping Princess = the artifact on the ship, possibly Forerunner. Having read others' speculation, I am no longer sure of anything.

Also, hello everyone. I've been lurking for about a month and a half. All right, on to business.

The idea that they are all parts of the same personality is interesting, but in the end, unless the writers have a detailed and up-to-date understanding of psychology, the real techniques for dealing with a problem like that are irrelevant. If the storyline *is* that Melissa has DID (dissociative identity disorder, f/k/a "multiple personality disorder"), then it is likely that they are going on popular conceptions of MPD, rather than actual research; therefore if the solution they have envisaged involves us as players responding to her as if she has MPD (as it is understood in pop culture), you'd be better off watching "Sybil" or "Primal Fear" than inquiring as to how a therapist would respond to a real-life patient who was presenting these symptoms.

If the writers do have a therapist or psychiatrist on staff, I doubt that's the tack they're taking. A real-life therapist would probably tell them that identity disorders are inseparably bound up with issues of memory, and the "memory" of a computer or AI is dramatically different from human memory, making it unlikely that even an AI intended to be as human-like as possible would ever manifest a dissociative disorder in response to a trauma.

At this point, if you have no interest in psychology, please stop reading as I'm likely to bore you to tears.

Problem #1: Psychologists disagree vehemently on the question of whether MPD/DID actually exists. There are therapists who passionately believe that it does. There are also therapists who passionately believe in demonic possession. While I am not saying that the two groups are equivalent in their credibility, the fact that someone has a Ph.D. does not necessarily mean that you should believe whatever they say. There are some people with Ph.D.s giving seminars on incorporating exorcism into therapy sessions.

There are plenty of therapists out there that are kooks because when it comes down to it, we still really have very little *definite* information on how the mind works: in some ways, psychotherapy is like religion -- you end up following a school or a technique because you believe in it, and there is evidence both to support and to undermine its validity. Freud's idea of the ego/id/superego, despite its popularity and durability, is a theory, nothing more. I'm not sure it's even possible for us to ever know for sure *how* our minds work. All we can do is theorize, and if it makes sense, and if that particular view of the mind helps us to develop ways of dealing with problems that result in people living happier, more stable lives, than we will treat it as true. But we won't ever know. So, to extend the religion metaphor, while most therapists will be roughly equivalent to your average, reasonable person of faith, whether mainstream Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. or atheist, or your random spiritual seeker of goodwill and intelligence, you're also going to have people who believe that Elvis was taken away by aliens but will return to lead us to a future in which we are all deities who have pink hair and speak Esperanto.

Many psychologists believe that "MPD," like memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse, is induced by the suggestion of the therapist. Human memory may be more malleable than we ever imagined. Stanford professor Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated that "repressed" memories can be created very easily, and often are experienced as more vivid and more "reliable" than real memories.

In the 80s, there was a flood of MPD cases. It later came out that the majority of the "MPD" patients had come in with minor emotional disorders, which became full-blown MPD under the suggestion and guidance of the therapist. The therapeutic environment can easily result in a power differential between the therapist and the client that can cause more harm than good if the therapist isn't careful. This is not to say that the therapists who treated the aforementioned MPD patients were necessarily unscrupulous or unethical (although some of them were). But many were True Believers in their Cause and their patients suffered because of it.

That said, none of this rules out the possibility that some of the cases where patients' personalities seem to have split are real. The existence of a disorder like MPD is difficult to prove either way, which is one of the reasons that the name has been altered and the description changed. There are a whole host of dissociative disorders that are, as far as anyone can tell, completely legitimate.

So, to sum up: we don't know that MPD exists.

Problem #2: Machine memory works differently than human memory.

As I described above, much of the current research on human memory indicates that memory is vulnerable to the power of suggestion. In addition, (please preface everything I state from this point on with "the research suggests that") memory is not a camera -- it doesn't objectively record what a person sees or hears. What is "recorded" is dictated by what the person is paying attention to, how they're feeling, what they believe is happening, etc. What a person "remembers" although it may be subjectively "true" to them, often will bear little or no resemblance to the memories of another person who saw or heard the exact same thing.

Machine memory is not like that. Machines record. Period. Even an AI as sophisticated as Melissa is likely to record objectively, simply because that is a feature that her creators would want to retain. Her memories of conversations, such as that between Greene and what's-his-name, appear to be verbatim. Even if we get to the point where we manage to develop AI with actual emotion (and not just reactions programmed to suggest it) it is doubtful that that would undermine the ability of a machine to simply record what it sees or hears.

Problem #3: How much do the writers understand about MPD?

See above.

Problem #4: How do you treat a machine with a personality disorder?

Presumably, you don't give it therapy; you fix the flaws in its programming.

Problem #5: Dissociative disorders are usually accompanied by other problems.

If she were a human suffering from a dissociative disorder, it would likely be accompanied by post-traumatic stress disorder and depression -- at least.

Problem #6: What we have of a backstory seems to suggest that Melissa's problems were caused by whatever catastrophe caused her to crash-land on ilovebees.com. In other words, if she were human, I'd be referring her to a neurologist, not trying to give her therapy at this point. I'd be looking for brain damage, not a trauma that caused her to attempt to flee or dissociate from herself. After she'd been checked out by a neurologist, and whatever physical problems he/she found had been addressed, then I'd reassess her and address the emotional/psychological effects of the trauma. She's a sophisticated AI from the future who was damaged in some catastrophe and is now trapped in primitive hardware. I'm not even sure that there is any analogous human situation, but at best, major portions of her brain are damaged. How bound up is the core of Melissa her hardware? Even an extraordinarily sophisticated and adaptable programs is, presumably, going to have difficulty functioning normally on a primitive system.

That said, in an attempt to assess how traumatized she is, I did send her an email after the Sleeping Princess was caught, asking her if she had also regained control over that channel of communication, telling her a few stories, and asking her if she could tell a story about the catastrophe. I explained how the shape of a story is generally more important than the details, and how it's a safe way to talk about things. I attempted to phrase it in terms of security and mediums of communication, but I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea if it was appropriate. I rather doubt she'll respond, but if she does it will certainly be interesting.

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 3:52 pm
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Mazian
Unfettered

Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 529
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 		Phaedra,

Welcome to the show, and that was an impressive first post. Cool
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 4:02 pm
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t-toe
Boot

Joined: 27 Aug 2004
Posts: 47

 		holy crap, what a great post, how often can I get a mini-psychiatric lesson from a message board? thank you ARG's!
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 4:18 pm
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Phaedra
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Joined: 21 Sep 2004
Posts: 4033
Location: Here, obviously

 		I have a theory, it could be bunnies...
Thanks, Mazian. Smile Can we edit our posts? In rereading that one, I'm noticing all kinds of typos. I'm also noticing that I sound incredibly stuffy. <sigh>

Oh well, I suppose it's not important.

I don't have time, unfortunately, to read *all* the discussions here. Can anyone tell me if the Sleeping-Princess-as-Forerunner-Artifact theory has been ruled out? I've seen speculation for and against, but nothing definitive.

Basically, for that one, I'm only going on her comments about her crystal casket and Melissa's memory of the artifact, and her comment that she was older than both the Flea and Melissa (another reason I don't agree with the split-personality theory, clever as it is -- since, according to her memories, Melissa was present by name before the theoretical split, she would have to be the original personality and therefore older than the SP). There is also the Princess' personality. She seems childlike, capricious, but also very knowing. Her automatic distrust of the Queen's insectoid Rasputin seems to indicate some sort of prior experience with him or his type of program.

Maybe this is just my folklore background talking, but that's often the way incredibly ancient, powerful, nonhuman beings are portrayed, as if their power and long life span had prevented them from ever truly growing up. Someone referred to her as being "like a sprite." I couldn't agree more. She seems to have friendly feelings toward Dana and her audience, but she hasn't necessarily demonstrated any empathy toward others. On the other hand, she also hasn't demonstrated any of the innocent cruelty that is a major attribute of the character type to which I'm referring, so my instincts could be way off.

I haven't read the Halo books, so I'm just making wild guesses. If anyone has information that supports or contradicts this, I'd be thrilled to know.

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 4:25 pm
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The Turtle Hermit
Greenhorn

Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 6

 		I a newbie. Been watching the site seen june.

I got the email. And i've been emailing here 2 weeks ago.
I finally got a email and it had to be such a bad one.

Anyway, I know you all seen the crew page on ilb. Has the quote "Sometimes a mistake is the last thing you make." always been there? Question

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 5:52 pm
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Xanedon
Boot

Joined: 25 Aug 2004
Posts: 24

 		Well, I didn't recieve the email, but I just read that the flea's message was "invisible" in the email....got me thinking.

If you highlight the entire 404 page at the bottom there is another message:

reveal:
!seek Princess
fail
!seek Princess
fail
!seek Princess
recurse


recurse?? maybe we need to ask the flea what he knows?

*edit - i orignally only had rec, missed the full recurse...guess he's just on a loop looking for the princess.

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 6:54 pm
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Binarius
Boot


Joined: 23 Aug 2004
Posts: 63
Xanedon wrote:
reveal:
!seek Princess
fail
!seek Princess
rec

rec?? any idea what he could have found?

That was "recurse". He entered a loop of constant seeking.

PostPosted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 6:56 pm
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Phaedra
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Joined: 21 Sep 2004
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 		Trinity Shminity
Quote:
It's been SPECed that Melissa, SP, and Pious Flea are aspects of one entity. Perhaps they need to be united.

Queen/Princess/Pious Flea
Father/Son/Holy Spirit

I'm interpreting "Pious Flea" as "Holy Speck": "...the Pious Flea was so small that even the Widow, with her sharp eyes, could hardly see him...".

I'm not saying that the three AI's are God, just that we were supposed to make this literary connection.

This is my first post. Trout? Flames? Agreement?


Hello, tinker.

I'm probably not qualified to be welcoming you, since I only broke my own silence and posted for the first time today, but since no one else has replied to your post yet, I'll do it anyway. Welcome.

(Once again, I feel the need to issue a disclaimer about the potential for boredom inherent in my posts. I enjoy hairline distinctions and detailed analyses, but I know many people don't.)

Your suggestion is clever, but I'm afraid I disagree. The writers definitely seem to be playing with various religious/mythological archetypes, but both from a psychological and a folkloric standpoint, the Queen/Princess/Pious Flea trio does not appear analogous to the Christian trinity.

The idea that the various AIs on ilovebees are multiple personalities of the same entities is an intriguing one, and if widely accepted, will have to influence how we interact with these AIs. Someone asked how psychologists treat "multiple personality disorder," the implication being that we should perhaps incorporate a therapeutic approach in our interactions with them.

I argued against such an approach, suggesting that unless the writers understand MPD, a realistic approach (rather than a "pop-culture" one) would be useless, and, paradoxically, if they were familiar with the current psychiatric understanding of MPD, they wouldn't use it in the story line. (See post above if you want more info.)

In that post, I also explained why I don't believe Melissa could be suffering from a dissociative disorder. The various AIs *do* share a "body" (i.e. the ilovebees server) but their relationship seems more like the folkloric understanding of possession than MPD -- they all landed here, but that doesn't mean they were ever unified into one identity.

It's been suggested that Melissa is an AI based on Yasmine, and that perhaps the Sleeping Princess is the "real" Yasmine. It's a good argument, and I'm leery of dismissing it entirely, but really the only convincing evidence I've heard that the SP is Yasmine is that she seems like a little girl. That is a rather tenuous connection. It would explain Melissa's paranoia, if she were a "false" continuation of Yasmine's personality, and the SP were a "real" one, the very existence of the SP would undermine the legitimacy of Melissa's existence. On the other hand, it doesn't seem that plausible. AI is still not a continuation of the actual human being, just a program based on their personality, so the SP can't really *be* Yasmine, just a digital reproduction. And if both she and Melissa are merely digital reproductions, what makes either more "real" than the other?

Durga mentions that she does not have the memories of the person upon whom she was based, so possession of memories might make an AI more "real," but *Melissa* is the one that has manifested memories that might be Yasmine's, not the SP.

Once again, the SP has said nothing to indicate that she has any connection with Yasmine; she just "seems like a little girl." That's not enough evidence for me.

I think it is a mistake to assume a religious allusion in the larger structure of the game rather than the individual stories of the characters because of the following analysis. (cont'd)

PostPosted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 1:06 am
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Phaedra
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 		Trinity Shminity (cont'd)
Like human beings, each of the AIs has a distinctive "language": a manner of speaking, a worldview, a frame of reference.

This shapes how they interact with others, how they understand what happens to them, the metaphors they use to shape their existence, and how they frame their own narratives. This is generally true of humans as well. Just because one knows a particular story or is able to "speak" a particular "language" does not mean that that language is one's own.

To use myself as an example, I can *use* the language of the Christian New Testament and Christianity in general. When asked what happened in my afternoon, I can say that I witnessed the Passion of the Laptop, in which it suffered, died, and was resurrected by the IT department. But it does not shape my existence in the way that the Hebrew Bible does. It's a "foreign language" to me, albeit one in which I am fairly fluent. The way I understand my experiences and relate to people is not shaped by it. My view of the human condition, people's relations to one another, even the role of language in creating reality (I think) is fundamentally different from a Christian's. The religious metaphor was an obvious one, but it's not the only one. An anthropologist would be describing this all very differently, while my training in literature causes me to view it in terms of voices and narratives.

Melissa's language is non-mythological. As a shipboard AI, she apparently has access to a vast library of human literature, since she is able to quote it, and indeed, when she is disoriented and has lost some of her ability to use language, she reaches out to literature to help her regain her vocabulary. But I don't think we can take her monologue as representative of the way she normally speaks, since she was not attempting to communicate, and was relying on the fragments of literature she had (i.e. quoting others' utterances rather than producing her own). She is comfortable enough with literature to quote it even when she was whole (she compares the stranger to Odysseus, who I'm putting in the literary category rather than the mythological one because he is attributable to a single author), but when she attempts to communicate, her language is practical, concrete, and specific. She's not casting spells or weaving webs, she's building roads or connecting axons. The SP isn't a fugitive sprite or a disobedient vassal, she's a rogue process. Even when Melissa wigs out, she merely quotes the text of the website upon which she landed. Melissa-speak is the language of technology and the military.

The Sleeping Princess speaks in the language of folktale or myth. She *can* speak other languages -- she picks up the Flea's syntax with ease -- but when left to her own devices, she frames things in terms of fairy tales. Melissa is not an AI, she's a Queen. The Spider isn't a repair program, she's a Widow who will walk through Hell to resurrect her Queen. She doesn't quote other myths, she creates them. She may reference her models, but the story she tells is her own. She relates to her world in the terms of folktales. Princess-speak is the language of the fairytale.

The Pious Flea, unfortunately, doesn't speak English well enough to allow us to analyze his voice. Perhaps as he becomes more fluent, he will develop a distinctive voice as the other two have. I suspect that if he ever does, given his mantra and the suggestion that he is Covenant (and they are very religious, no?) his language will be that of religion. But he may never develop that level of fluency -- at this point he seems too simple. Also, he is very direct and I suspect that like the Princess' games and Melissa's paranoia, his program-speak is designed as a check so that no one character reveals too much.

Note that the language of myth has been mostly limited to the Princess. The framing narrative has avoided any easy comparisons: four AIs crash onto a server, corrupting it. One tries to communicate with what she believes is her crew. One plays games. One tries to attach itself to others. One tries to repair another and gets swatted for her trouble.

I have a pretty extensive background in both literature and folklore, and yet this story doesn't cause anything particular to spring to mind. Therefore, I think that the framing narrative is being kept neutral, free of any obvious references to religion or myth. So, I don't think they're trying to evoke the Christian trinity. If one of the characters had brought up a trinity, I'd be with you, but not with the framing narrative.

In addition, there were more than three AIs: you forgot the Spider.

Finally, you mention that "perhaps they need to be united." As I understand Christianity, there is no need to unite G-d, is there? The three aspects are supposedly already one. And three. Last I heard, deities don't have dissociative disorders.

In an unrelated note: do we have any idea why Melissa ended up on this particular site? (Melissa means bee, in case nobody's pointed that out.) Was she drawn here by her name? If she was human, and therefore had an unreliable memory, I would be forced to suggest the disturbing possibility that perhaps her name was *not* Melissa to begin with. But, she's a program, so I don't think we have to worry about that.

PostPosted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 1:07 am
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