| From: | Marc Renouf renouf@********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | simsense and the astral |
| Date: | Tue, 16 Feb 1999 17:20:27 -0500 (EST) |
> Side note: Mage's don't have RAS, that would require cyberware in a
> mage, which no one would ever do... :)
Not the RAS in the mage, the RAS in the audience. It would keep
them from actually twitching. Oh, they'd *feel* like they were twitching,
but they'd just be sitting there drooling the whole time.
> You missed the point entirely....maybe I wasn't clear enough. It
> isn't that they twitch, it is that there is something there to *make*
> them twitch, which the brain responds to. INPUT! From the astral
> body, to the meat-bod's brain. This could be recorded.
No, it can't. It can't be recorded because it's a stimulus that
is not passing through the brain's sensory centers. It's not sight. It's
not sound. It's not a smell or a taste or a physical sensation. It's
something else entirely.
Let's take a step back. ASIST simsense recording works by
figuring out what's going on in the sensory centers of a person's brain
and recording it. This recording is "encoded" in a language the brain
understands. Simsense players simply play back this "signal" to evoke the
same response in the audience's brains, so that they physically sense the
same things as the person who made the recording. ASIST input for virtual
reality goes one step further. They have "cracked the code" if you will,
and can create images and sensations directly without a recording. You
can "see" the Matrix because the computers that control the host you're
logged into are feeding you information in a form your brain interprets as
sensory information.
Okay, note that I said "sensory centers." ASIST ignores *large*
chunks of the brain, and in fact only deals with the senses. It doesn't
deal with memory or the regulation of bodily function, for instance. Now
there is a fair amount of published information that states that astral
perception is not "sensory" in the way you or I would think about it.
Blindness does not affect astral perception. Cyber replacement does not
affect astral perception. So if you don't need your eyes to do it, and
it's not governed under one of the other 4 senses, what's the deal?
The deal is that it's a "sense" that is getting information and
piping it to an entirely different area of the brain (at a stab I'd say
the pineal gland, which has been suspected to be linked to "paranormal"
activity for a long time). ASIST is not set up to be able to record this
kind of information, and even if it could (or if you jury-rigged
something), playback might very well be meaningless. It would be like
piping visual images into the brain of someone with no visual cortex.
They just aren't equipped to "see." Even another mage might perceive
things completely differently (as magic is *highly* individualized),
making your recording not worth the chip it was pressed on.
So all the audience is going to end up feeling is the twitching of
the body, because the inputs that caused it can't be conveyed within the
context of ASIST simsense as defined (consistently) in the SR world.
I'm not saying it's totally impossible. I'm saying that the
published rules and source material make it *very* clear that it's not
possible within the scope of current (in 2060's terms) technology.
Make sense?
Marc
