Intergalactic Summit

So you're one of those "all capsuleers are soulless shells in spiritual limbo" sorts of Imperials.


I'm wondering when those Theology Council fossils will give a proper ruling on the capsuleer/clone soul issue so you lot can progress right to the proper grieving and/or wrist cutting stage.

This is a most interesting question. I'm on the side that believes that I'm still quite alive, although my birth body was lost some years ago.

All that was and is "me" remains, even though that which carries that essence is now a custom vat-grown clone.

Telling others whether or not their grieving has a "real cause" seems to be a fairly exotic level of arrogance.

I don't think I'd hold a funeral. I think I'd like to see my old self one more time though. Maybe I'll even keep it.

This thread is probably an emotional topic for some, and we, as capsuleers, shouldn't sneer at someone's human feelings. If it is any consolation, I've heard this topic before come up, and I would say your best resource, if you'd like a good conversation about Caldari topics, would be Pieter Tuulinen. In fact, I'd recommend you talk to him even if that isn't a topic of conversation. He's simply an excellent person to know.

This is my original body. Though they did think I was dead (or worse) when the Republic kidnapped me, thankfully the funeral was postponed until they found a body - and it turns out it wasn't dead after all.

You've never been podded?

Are you saving yourself for someone special?

Funerals are for people, not for biomass. Scientifically speaking, there was very likely not a single cell in the body you buried that was originally present at birth.There may very well have been none of the original atoms. The person is a structure of neurons and the electrical and chemical activity dancing throughout and between them, and that is naturally maintained, rebuilt and replenished by the body every day. When we clone, we effectively just do the exact same thing very rapidly at long range via quantum FTL comms.

Yakiya Verin Hakatain is alive and well. His first body was a battle-damaged wreck that got splattered all over the leading edge of a plasma smartbomb shockwave somewhere in Deklein, about eight years ago. Nothing left to be recovered. But the man himself is still around and if his family and friends ever noticed a difference, it was that he stopped complaining about the pain in his prosthetic knee.

I'm as much a sucker for sentiment and ritual as the next man, but if you're going to thrive as a capsuleer, you need to grasp - and soon - the fact that bodies don't matter, and so long as there's a clone walking around still thinking of itself as you, with your memories and attachments and personality, that's all that really matters.

Subjectively, I am the same man. Nothing else matters.

But....you're not really dead? Your mind is still alive, just in another body.

My original body was interred in a private graveyard owned by my family. I was there while it happened.

I'm not one for philosophical pronouncements, but it's an odd feeling. Until the day my neuron pattern goes dark for the final time, I'll always be a being of two places; my body in that grave, and my will in the stars.