Bankor

"You might document your travels," Tethys suggests, musing aloud. "The galaxy as seen by an independent droid... some beings would be interested in that perspective."

Veeone looked from R4 to Tethys.

"All our actions are recorded to our internal data storage . . . "

It clearly hadn't understood the 'document' comment.

*I have not noticed many beings interested in a droid's perspective, but your knowledge of organics is superior to mine.*

"I meant making a narrative out of it," Tethys explains to Veeone. "A story." She looks down at R4OXY, opening one hand palm-up. "Some sentients have no interest in the stories of other beings, but many do. Especially if the story has a unique subject, and is presented in a compelling way. The more you learn about other people, the better you'll understand what they might find interesting."

*A story. Why would one make a story? Could not one present the facts and that would be interesting enough? Why would a narrative be required?*

"Making a story is presenting the facts." The Jedi smiles for a moment, carried back in memory to a series of interesting conversations with the Jedi archivists. "Any time you do so, you decide how to choose which facts are important, and how to arrange them. So..." she purses her lips slightly, considering how best to put this to a droid, "if you have some information you want to convey to Veeone, you might transmit it in the form of a data array. If you told the same thing to me, you would need to put it in linear order, or produce a visualization. And before you even assemble the array, you would have to decide what kind of data to include in it, and what to leave out." She watches the droids as she tries to explain this, but it's harder to read a droid's expression than a human's, especially an astromech droid she isn't very familiar with.

"A story is just selectively chosen information, arranged according to a certain kind of structure."

*Ahh! It is like deception! Am I correct?*

Tethys frowns thoughtfully. "Only if it's deception to deliver a data set one way to Veeone's data centers and another way to my ears or eyes, and I would not call that deception. You would be presenting the truth either way--from a certain point of view meant to reach your audience clearly."

Veeone shook it's head.

"This does not compute. It seems a very inefficient way to impart knowledge. Direct observation and computer code are far more efficient."

*but is not selecting which facts one shares a form of deceit?*


/ooc will be afk for weekend so feel free to talk around me.

Tethys laughs softly, low in her throat. "That may be, but it's not always possible to convey knowledge entirely through direct experience and code. Especially for we organic beings."

She purses her lips and considers analogies for a moment or three. "Suppose you are given some raw astrogation scans and asked to produce a navigational plot. You will have to clean up quite a lot of noise from the scans to produce a result that can be used efficiently--the finished plot will look different from the original scans." Spreading her hands, she concludes, "Choosing an algorithm to clean up raw data is not deceit. But it is a choice about which data is important for your purpose, and how to arrange it."