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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
An Ontology of D&D Alignment
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7866497" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Now, as for my objections:</p><p></p><p>Leaving aside specific definitions, your have 10 categories for each specific definition of alignment that implies that there are at least 1024 different settings for each alignment definition based on your choices in each category.</p><p></p><p>My questions are, "Are the 10 different choices truly independent dimensions, or does a choice in one category force your choice in another?" For example, a choice of low reliability would seem to force a choice of high dynacism. If something can't be trusted to behave in according to its principles, can it be actually categorized as having them? What would a universe where how you behaved didn't actually control your ethical category actually look like?</p><p></p><p>Likewise, if Exclusivity is low, does anything else matter? If there is no way to categorize anything because everything is in every category, does alignment have any meaning?</p><p></p><p>And this brings up the other point, is of the 1024 different choices, in how many would alignment actually survive and not be functionally meaningless?</p><p></p><p>I feel like this is a bit like a protein folding problem, where you can make a very large number of choices about what amino acids to string together, but of that vast number of choices there is only a tiny percentage that actually fold into a protein. We are in a small version of Borges's Library, where every book is present but we would have to search for a long time to find one that contained meaning.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7866497, member: 4937"] Now, as for my objections: Leaving aside specific definitions, your have 10 categories for each specific definition of alignment that implies that there are at least 1024 different settings for each alignment definition based on your choices in each category. My questions are, "Are the 10 different choices truly independent dimensions, or does a choice in one category force your choice in another?" For example, a choice of low reliability would seem to force a choice of high dynacism. If something can't be trusted to behave in according to its principles, can it be actually categorized as having them? What would a universe where how you behaved didn't actually control your ethical category actually look like? Likewise, if Exclusivity is low, does anything else matter? If there is no way to categorize anything because everything is in every category, does alignment have any meaning? And this brings up the other point, is of the 1024 different choices, in how many would alignment actually survive and not be functionally meaningless? I feel like this is a bit like a protein folding problem, where you can make a very large number of choices about what amino acids to string together, but of that vast number of choices there is only a tiny percentage that actually fold into a protein. We are in a small version of Borges's Library, where every book is present but we would have to search for a long time to find one that contained meaning. [/QUOTE]
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