The Human revolution thread, now with 233213% more spoilers

[Dragon]

Simply because DX is about story besides game mechanics. And broken stories piss me off especially with a game that has seen more PR than a dead cat rubber on a street.

Concerning Jensen... why should his body decide to hide something from the immune system? There's not much reason for the parts of the body to do this. If the body considers something foreign or bad it's repelled. Why should one part of the body (the nerve tissue) fight against the immune system by hiding it? The story would be entirely different if the chips operate more like virii or alike that manage to hide themselves from the immune system by pretending to be something else belonging into the host body. Thus the nano-virus approach makes more sense than expecting parts of the body to miraculously fight against the immune system trying to trick it.

[DDL]

First, plural of virus is viruses. It's not a classical latin word so doesn't have to follow latin rules.

Second, you might as well ask "why does the inflammatory response to meningitis cause brain swelling and death?"..the immune system is not perfect, and biology as a whole is certainly far from perfection. A lot of immune responses simply damage you for no net gain.
Itchy itchy mosquito bites? Nothing to do with mosquito bites themselves, all the swelling, inflammation and itching is body-mediated stuff. If the body didn't bother, the end result would be simply that mosquito bites didn't itch. There's essentially no point to the response, but nevertheless it's there (incidentally, if you live in a mosquito-rich environment for a prolonged period you may notice that they stop biting you after a few months. They actually don't: it's simply that you stop responding).

Plus, Jensen is exhibiting a unique mutation. Mutations are rarely going to be beneficial, so the tendency to build neural tissue instead of glial tissue over foreign matter doesn't have to be useful in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER. It happens to be uniquely beneficial in this particular context, but that doesn't mean it has some overall purpose: it's just a freak phenotype.

Also, the immune system is largely excluded from the brain by the blood-brain barrier, so immune system in this context is irrelevant. The neural tissue build up on the chip is allegedly acting to prevent glial (scar-like) tissue build up instead, by making the implants look 'brainy' rather than foreign. That's all.

It's a strange approach they took, and the whole issue of somehow being able to control specific, deleterious, glial cell growth via a drug is..well, fairly laughable (that blood-brain barrier is a tricky thing to circumvent in the first place, and there's no clear way for a given drug to specifically target only 'the bad glia', rather than global glial growth..which would be bad).

BUT. With those taken as givens, the science is at least not terrible, and is relatively internally consistent.

[SyntaxError]

BUT. With those taken as givens, the science is at least not terrible, and is relatively internally consistent.

With the exception of the whole idea of anticipating human evolution by looking at mitochondrial DNA (or any other type of DNA), implying that our future evolution is in any way hardcoded into our DNA. Seems as if they have watched some of the worse Star Trek episodes before coming up with that kind of science.

[DDL]

Oh, I was just talking about the brain chip stuff. The mitoDNA stuff is utterly ludicrous, and for many many reasons.

In fact what they actually say regarding "evolutionary leaps forward" is almost plausible, in that you could certainly determine 'degree of difference' by examining gene sequence (mutation rates are fairly consistent, so if a given stretch of DNA is massively more mutated than would be expected from normal variance, this would stand out), but of course it's A)not a stepwise process, so saying "two or three stages forward" is gibberish, and B)it's not forward. Mutation (and be extension, evolution) do not have a direction.

The main problems stem from the fact that mitoDNA is fucking TINY (like, 16kb tiny), and codes for absolutely fucking nothing that would in any way influence brain responses to electrodes.

Additional problems are multiple, but I don't want to rant any more than necessary.

EDIT: also I don't want to sound like a condescending dickface (even tho I totally am) so sorry if that's how it comes across.

[Neveos]

In that case, would Adam's DNA be used to clone Paul and JC? I thought that might be the case since Megan and Page were having a dialogue at the very end.

They had some emails in there about that in the singapore facility. A guy was cloning/eugenically breeding infants, and he was naming them after the apostles finding it "fitting" or something, to do so, given the nature of the task. I wish I could remember the email, but its in the room with the doctor you rescue that is a black woman.

[bobby 55]

In that case, would Adam's DNA be used to clone Paul and JC? I thought that might be the case since Megan and Page were having a dialogue at the very end.

They had some emails in there about that in the singapore facility. A guy was cloning/eugenically breeding infants, and he was naming them after the apostles finding it "fitting" or something, to do so, given the nature of the task. I wish I could remember the email, but its in the room with the doctor you rescue that is a black woman.

Cheers, I'll check that out. That's at Parklands (!?), I'm currently doing Hengsha (the first visit).

[Neveos]

Anyway, why would the biochip need to go in the middle of the brain tissue that it's translating for?

I remember a story about how this woman's nose got chopped off, and the built a prosthetic nose for cartilage, and they cut her forehead skin and placed it over the prosthetic nose to allow both areas of skin to grow in. She reported that if a drop of water hit her new nose, it felt as though it were landing on her forehead. But this changed after a few months, and her nose began to feel like her nose again rather than her forehead. What it tells you is that it almost doesn't matter where something connects to in your brain, your brain is gonna sort it out. It's kinda like a wetware-sih "signal cloud". But your limbs and stuff are more constricted to default applications. So I think you could use the nerves in your arm, but it would be just as frustrating as constantly playing a video game to interact with the world. Imagine how much easier it would be to build maps for DX if I could just think them out rather than clicking and dragging a mouse etc.

[SyntaxError]

EDIT: also I don't want to sound like a condescending dickface (even tho I totally am) so sorry if that's how it comes across.

Don't worry, not more than myself...

[nerdenstein]

They had some emails in there about that in the singapore facility. A guy was cloning/eugenically breeding infants, and he was naming them after the apostles finding it "fitting" or something, to do so, given the nature of the task. I wish I could remember the email, but its in the room with the doctor you rescue that is a black woman.

That's interesting. Considering there was a 'Paul the Apostle' in the New Testiment and JC is the initals of Jesus Christ...
So perhaps in that sense they could be using a sort of hierarchy system of names through the bible. Assuming somewhere between they named other clones John or James eventually finishing with the final Clone prototype; dubbed JC or Jesus Christ.
This was just a theory but because of previous bible hierarchical references, this wouldn't surprise me.

[Dragon]

Anyway, why would the biochip need to go in the middle of the brain tissue that it's translating for?

I remember a story about how this woman's nose got chopped off, and the built a prosthetic nose for cartilage, and they cut her forehead skin and placed it over the prosthetic nose to allow both areas of skin to grow in. She reported that if a drop of water hit her new nose, it felt as though it were landing on her forehead. But this changed after a few months, and her nose began to feel like her nose again rather than her forehead. What it tells you is that it almost doesn't matter where something connects to in your brain, your brain is gonna sort it out. It's kinda like a wetware-sih "signal cloud". But your limbs and stuff are more constricted to default applications. So I think you could use the nerves in your arm, but it would be just as frustrating as constantly playing a video game to interact with the world. Imagine how much easier it would be to build maps for DX if I could just think them out rather than clicking and dragging a mouse etc.

That they definitely did already, just not that sophisticated. Some time ago when I read the news of some handicapped guy (and I mean from the neck downwards handicapped) that got a brain chip implanted. After some training he managed to move a mouse cursor (in snail speed) over the monitor just thinking to do so. That has been quite impressive seeing how a person totally unable to move anything else but is eyes and mouth to interact with a computer by thinking.

[Neveos]

In that case, would Adam's DNA be used to clone Paul and JC? I thought that might be the case since Megan and Page were having a dialogue at the very end.

They had some emails in there about that in the singapore facility. A guy was cloning/eugenically breeding infants, and he was naming them after the apostles finding it "fitting" or something, to do so, given the nature of the task. I wish I could remember the email, but its in the room with the doctor you rescue that is a black woman.

Cheers, I'll check that out. That's at Parklands (!?), I'm currently doing Hengsha (the first visit).

Nah its after your second visit, when you take the casket to the Dept of Health, or the"farm", or whatever its called, in Singapore.

[bobby 55]

Cheers, I'll check that out. That's at Parklands (!?), I'm currently doing Hengsha (the first visit).

Nah its after your second visit, when you take the casket to the Dept of Health, or the"farm", or whatever its called, in Singapore.[/quote]


Ah yeah, I've got the place names mixed up. It's where The World Health Org is, in a different building though.

[AEmer]

Simply because DX is about story besides game mechanics. And broken stories piss me off especially with a game that has seen more PR than a dead cat rubber on a street.

Right, and Deus Ex is hard sci-fi, and therefore you can expect things to make sense, and be annoyed when they don't. And it's totally fair to discuss the little details, that's not what I'm getting at.

I'm just curious why this sprung to your attention as you were playing (or was it someone else who that happened to?).

It's not exactly reversing the polarities of a circuit to make it into an emp weapon rather than a shield generator, or something else obvious insane. It certainly doesn't jump out at you, considering that mechanical prosthetics is a very young branch of science.

Obviously DDL is awesome and knows the difference between ordinary DNA and mitochondrial DNA and is able to clarify that you can't look at Adams mitochondrial DNA and determine that his mother didn't have the same mutation he had, because his mutation really shouldn't be pressent in the mitochondrial dna...of course, unless Adams DNA is changed in entirely profound ways such that he is Homo Augmentus Sapiens or something, it doesn't make sense....so _he_ will be bothered by something like that.

But real life doctors are bothered by the inaccuracies of House MD, and I'm bothered by the inaccuracies in The Big Bang Theory.

The question is, did you get jaded by the biochip business because it's somehow in your field of expertise? Or is it just that it doesn't "feel" authentic (authentic things don't always feel that way, so that would be completely fair).

If it comes down to feeling inauthentic, that's still a valid problem (and it still will be a problem that you felt that way at first, even if you end up agreeing that it makes sense in the game), but it's a different one, more about presentation than accuracy.

I hope that makes sense, but yeah, I'm more curious why it annoyed you in the first place, than whether or not there's some technical detail that means it's sensible when you've spent hours on an internet discussion of it

[AEmer]

@ DDL

I greatly appreciate your thoughts. I think this part of biology is pretty fascinating.

"
Also, the immune system is largely excluded from the brain by the blood-brain barrier, so immune system in this context is irrelevant. The neural tissue build up on the chip is allegedly acting to prevent glial (scar-like) tissue build up instead, by making the implants look 'brainy' rather than foreign. That's all.
"
Yes, but not entirely; MS is an autoimmune desease caused by immonological response in the brain.

And there happens to be a blood-brain barrier drug, which I've been on, that inhibits that response. I've elsewhere hypothesized that Neuropozine was a similar drug that inhibits an immunological response, but it's far more probable that it just stops a certain kind of cells from going through the blood-brain barrier, isn't it? So no glial tissue can be build in the brain anywhere at all while you're on neupozine, that would be my guess.

http://www.tysabri.com/tysbProject/tysb ... /index.xml

There's the drug, since now, apparently I can remember its name.

Would it be so horrible to stop all brian glial growth? What would the consequences be?

"
Mutation (and be extension, evolution) do not have a direction
"
Except it kindof does have a direction, at least in a sense. When you look at any theory of evolution, you're bound to notice that things move from origins to evolved species; and ancestry and descendants is another kind of direction.

Not that "being 1 or 2 stages ahead" makes a whole lot of sense; apparently it was in the context of a chaos-theory based computer model that predicted a number of different theoretical evolutionary paths, and Jensen fit better with the ones that were several stages more evolved than with current day humans. What exactly signifies a stage in the context of a computer model? My _guess_ is, it must've been whenever it figured certain mutations would make those with that mutation more dominant, to the degree that they would be a common ancestor for a huge amount of people. It seems to communicate that the rest of us are neanderthals compared to Jensen.

[nerdenstein]

C-C-C-Combo Breaker!

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/09/19/deus- ... utsourced/