Intergalactic Summit

Ave, Ms. Jenneth,

It was only today that I stumbled across this string of communications. I certainly have a more thorough understanding of the reasons behind your recent visit. While I feel somewhat slighted by your lack of transparency during the meeting I am not convinced it was wholly intentional and in any case I retain my respect for your personal journey. Hopefully I was able to provide you with a useful glimpse into our society and an understanding that even in a social system as regimented as the Amarr, you may still find a great deal of diverse thought and opinions. Though finding your way into the True Faith may not be your intention, I do hope that while you have opened your heart to new thoughts and idea's that God may find his way in.

Go with Him and safe travels,
DoK

Questions of the soul always does seem the usual crisis in reaction to the anomie of the capsuleer-clone transhuman condition for the spiritually bound. I wonder what use is a metaphysical construct or identity abstraction when the reality will always remain that I am an infomorph entity with no need for a soul, data gestalt that I am.

If there's one thing I learned during my time with SuVee it's that many Achuran sects do enjoy their flavours of solipism, yes. But my thoughts were not directed to you alone, Ms. Jenneth, rather a trend I noticed that has little to do with the soul but a wider condition. It matters little I suppose, all experiences differ as do the perspectives they engender, but I do feel my own have lead to certain irreconcilable differences with the memes and dreams of the old world.

Carry on, dear.

That is a good one..

But I see you are no different than her... Still +1

For an illusion to work, something must exist to be fooled...
the argument that self is an illusion is therefore cyclical .

Entry Six

Gods, what a day.

There's a lot to take in. I'll need to hold off on recording my thoughts on the Amarr proper until bits of data stop flitting around my head and start settling into a nice, coherent sheet of snow.

With boiled blood and charred offal all over it ...

... that last bit's not their fault, though.

I had a chance, yesterday, to observe a clone soldier action: an Amarrian Templar and his paladins versus a Blood Raider installation. It was supposed to be a very safe sort of thing, with me tucked away safe and secure on a war barge command deck.

I guess the Sani were expecting us, though, because the ground installation turned out to be an ambush and the barge came under attack in space, complete with boarding pods. We destroyed the attacking ships, but not before a wave of boarders got through. The commander ended up having to personally repel boarding parties.

Perhaps it was because it was only a couple hallways away, but, even over holo, watching what Templar weapons do to a person was....

Caught in a weaponized plasma channel, people ... "pop" doesn't quite cover it. Blood boils over; flesh bursts into vapor or chars and flops like the meat it is, then falls and bleeds, and the pooled blood boils, too; bone just ... burns.

It was just a mercy I couldn't smell it.

Only of course, the commander was just one man, and the last pod hit the hull right outside the bridge. I don't know where security was; trying to keep the bulk of the boarders bottled in with the commander on the lower level, I guess. Anyhow, the Raiders cut through the door before the Templar could finish mopping up down where he was, and I wound up hunkered down behind a control panel trying to figure out how to use an Amarrian sidearm.

(I wasn't quite sure whether it was them or me I was going to be using it on. In hindsight, that should have been obvious: that was the last hostile squad, and their fleet had been destroyed. There was no way they were going to be getting off that ship alive, with or without prisoners. I was in much more danger of getting shot than dying slowly on some Blooder apparatus, but that wasn't especially clear to me at the time. Heavily-armed Blood Raiders plus close proximity apparently equals kind of hard to think straight.)

The Templar commander spared me having to, though, because about the time I was hoping I'd figured out how to turn the safety off he just ripped right up through the deck plates and tore into them. (Note to self: never, ever get boarded by clone soldier infantry.)

I don't know whether he'd just run out of weapons or if it was out of consideration for his crew and me, but he didn't even use a gun. He just used his hands. He shredded his way right through them, ripped and smashed them into a ... sort of melange of meat, blood, offal, urine, and fecal matter.

That, I could smell.

Intellectually, I know I've personally done as much, and worse, even within my own short memory: naval blaster charges slamming through a frigate's weak shields and into the armor, providing my half of a matter/antimatter annihilation reaction that just blasted the ship apart. Before, what happened to the human bodies inside was an abstraction. If somebody's fluids burst boiling out of their body and then the whole mess got either vaporized or flash-seared onto the nearest wall, I never saw it.

Well, I guess now I know what I've been missing out on.

The Templar was apologetic, after. I don't really think he has anything to be sorry for. I came here to see, with unclouded eyes, the truth and way of things. If I find exactly what I was looking for, I've no reason to complain.

I have solved the question about soul rather plainly: it is just a running instance of a consciousness. Thus if you can think about yourself, that you are you, that would mean that you indeed have a soul.
When your clone dies, you get new clone with same consciousness, but different instance of it, thus, with different soul.

What I am not sure about are spirits - and for me a spirit is a soul not attached to the body. I do believe in their existence, but, as any belief, I can't prove their existence or not. It is just a tradition and a world view that I have adapted and believe in.

For a change, I strongly agree with Miss Kim's sentiments. She's hit the nail on the proverbial head in regards to science and the divine.

The problem with this is that whilst I am TECHNICALLY everything you quote, I am in actuality enjoying no more than a two year difference between my chronological and biological age. I know as much more about the human condition than a man in his mid-twenties knows than a man in his early twenties.

Most capsuleers have enjoyed that status less than a decade. How much wiser are we, really?

I see your point, but for the Amarr the soul is a concept that is clearly separate from the consciousness and the mind, which are scientific and practical objects surrounded by countless definitions and concrete applications (with still their own dose of mysteries).

Unlike the quantifiable patterns of the mind, the point about the soul and Faith by extension, is that it has yet to be proven true, or false, or otherwise those would not be about belief, but small truths. The simple fact that stating as fact a Prime Mover or even a silly celestial fatherly figure (God, for example, who wears many faces depending on the believer), would be to state it as truth, or fact. True or false, it ceases by definition to be a belief proper. More importantly, it ceases to be about Faith.

Amarr soul is part of the Faith, and thus has to be part of the faithful belief. In that case, soul is something different than consciousness and mind. Argument from silence of religious zealot apologists or atheist crusaders is absurd by itself, since Faith is not about to be stated as fact, truth, or falseness.

More generally, Faith is not about tangible facts, or proofs. Faith is before all, a defined paradigm.

So, what is the scriptural soul ? It is a very nebulous concept, on which I am not very knowledgeable... The obvious fact about the soul is its incorporeality. Like most things related to Scripture beliefs, the literal meanings have to be transcended to find the true essence of the thought.





Are you telling me to... respect religion ?

I think my message was maybe not clear enough, as a Faithful myself I can omit certain details that we often take for granted, and for that apologize.

To understand the Amarr Faith, we have to understand that everything in Amarr is about religion, science or otherwise. I would even argue further that science as a concept is redundant as it is part of the core of what makes scripture, Scripture.

Faith advances through science as well as social evolution. It is only logical that quantum physics to be part of scripture - and scripture treaties on quantum mechanisms are already legion. Thus why I think that the debate on the sanctity on flesh, continuity and discontinuity of consciousness and the transcendance of the self, solves by itself when leaving the conventional fields of thought to incorporate new ways of thinking.

The simple abandon of the standard timeline continuity, transcending space time continuum, sheds a totally new light on the concept of soul.

And thus a soul stops being born at birth, and migrating at death, to become a greater essence encompassing the individual and beyond without constraints of space and time.

The main issue with the current orthodox interpretations of the soul is that they base themselves on very old concepts that have eventually, as you have yourself noticed, mixed up with what science knows about the mind today. Either we accept that both are only one and the same, or either we transcend the definition of the soul to approach something else, for that the soul is still supposed to be immortal and timeless.