Intergalactic Summit

I think she means on an individual level. If I recall correctly Emperor Heideran VII lived roughly 300 or so years before the Turit Disease claimed his life.

I am unsure if anyone alive today can claim such.

Arrendis?

Respectfully, while generally I'm on your side in this? I hate this argument, and not (just) because it's painful. (It is, but that's not the only reason.) (Or I don't think it is.)

You remember we discussed perceptions, illusion, etc.? ... this is something maybe kind of related. We're in the domain of words and definitions here. There are no "True Names." The universe doesn't care how we think of it; what is, is.

But how we choose to think and talk about it is highly meaningful.

The sending and receiving clone are both vessels, built to temporarily house something. That "something" will have moved from one to the other, water poured from one glass (which is then shattered) into another.

We're literally arguing whether it's the same glass of water.

You're no doubt right: the brain that is running me will "stop" the next time I get podded. Actually it will even "stop" the next time I clone jump. That "stopping" looks really significant, if you're worried about souls, the sanctity of life, and so on.

But I'm more concerned about the little blot of data that gets jumped from the one body to the other. The "infomorph." The thing that lets the next clone wake up, thinking she's me.

It's what lets me ... be. However meaningful we choose to think that. It can be damaged. It can be copied for use in "soft clones." It's not as unique and special as some of us like to think of it as being, but I don't really think anything is.

The body is hardware that runs "me." If I switch bodies, even suffering some harm in the process-- is the next step not "me"?

Please don't say such a thing.

Tonight, I'll transfer back to Crielere, into a head with more hardware in it and a better vantage point for exploring the Federation (and maybe helping out with Drifter intel). That will be me, by every sense but the one most obsessed with a physically-rooted identity.

Subjectively, there'll be no question. The "me" waiting there will have a head freshly full of information. She won't notice that it's "not hers." It'll function much the same as if it'd always been there, between her ears. The "me" I leave behind not only won't be running that information, but won't have the ability to run it anymore. Her brain will have been burned out.

You may say that "objectively," it's not the same person. But there is no "objectively." The universe is the only one here with an objective point of view, and it doesn't use words or define things or have opinions. It just is.

So please don't tell me that I really, actually, properly died each time I've cloned. Saying that glorifies a disposable vessel, which maybe you're hoping to do, but it also minimizes the significance of what I've actually experienced.

I'm an induced amnesiac. I've cloned several times in the last six months, and the only one that's at all existentially significant (to me) is the first, the one where I woke up with a sabotaged infomorph, having lost my every personal memory.

That one, and not a single one since, drew a bright line between me and my past self. And my past self is still way less dead than I'd sometimes like.

For good or ill, that's had a more profound impact on my existence than any "death" I've allegedly suffered.





My antecedent would have agreed with you wholeheartedly. She thought her repeated deaths made her a demon, or the ghost of a ghost of a ghost of a ghost. Nothing human, certainly. Nothing that had to obey human rules....

You don't need to think you're truly immortal to end up monstrous.

The Jove made a number of mistakes in their experimentation with genetic engineering (not keeping backups, applying it to all their citizens across the board, removing themselves so far from the baseline without a clear direction for where their engineering was taking them). They provide a pretty clear example of what not to do, but I don't view their actions as a parable on the dangers of advancing too far or anything, that's just silly.

Defeating entropy is obviously a long term goal, but its a rather obvious long term goal to shoot for and we have plenty of time before we get there and an entire universe to explore first.



I disagree with this sentiment, but I've explained my attitude on that numerous times before. I'll do it yet again, but really its rehashing old ground and if we are just in fundamental disagreement then there isn't much we can do. Speaking in terms of pure science, there is no part of the brain from which consciousness emanates. You can't point to a specific spot and say 'there's the consciousness', the individual firing of nerves gives rise in its unity to the coherent appearance of consciousness. Just like how pixels in a screen can form an image when in unity, when our nerves are acting in unity it gives rise to the sense of self. That and a neurotransmitter soup we bathe our brains in constantly. But that image changes every second, and when it changes who you are changes. This is the core idea behind neuroplasticity. Whenever you're doing anything you're modifying yourself to be better at that thing. You say the person dies when they clone, but by that logic, they die when they go to sleep, or are in a long term coma. We aren't meat, we're an emergent phenomena that arises from systems acting in unity. We're software, and our hardware can be transferred or upgraded. I am not this body.



These are platitudes and excuses made for death. See, there's this little thing called cognitive dissonance, where those neurons that constitute the image in one's minds are not acting in unity. You can hold conflicting information in your head, but weird things tend to come out of it if you do. Your mind tries to make excuses to resolve the conflict and make it okay.

For instance, if people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers who would wax poetical about the amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no.

And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum!

So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing? Because you're afraid of it, because you don't really want to die, and that thought hurts so much inside you that you have to rationalize it away, do something to numb the pain, so you won't have to think about it. And how is that not in itself monstrous? You have taken the most terrible of all evils and called it good! With only a slight twist that same part of yourself would murder innocents, and call it friendship. If you can call death better than life then you can twist your moral compass to point anywhere you want.

This is not an exaggeration, if you don't want people to live forever, then you want them to die. If you really think death is an amazing and positive thing in the universe, what stops you from going on an unrepentant killing spree and thinking you're doing everyone a favour?

Yes, and it was as flawed then as it is now. I can play a recording, and copy it to play on another device. The copy? Is a copy. It's not the original recording.



Which has nothing to do with my viewpoint, but thanks for being dismissive again and coming up with yet another rationalization for why your crusade to create monsters is moral.



You're partly right: I don't want to die. But I'm going to. And yes, sometimes I fear it - I fear nonexistence - but most of the time? I don't. I emerged from the matter and energy of the universe. Someday, I'll go back to it. And that's not monstrous, and it's not 'the most terrible of all evils'.

How is it monstrous for us to have unity with countless generations of countless forms of life? How is it evil to not lay claim to some special dispensation to be exempted from natural laws?

What I want is for people to live fulfilling lives, lives that matter to them, lives where they find purpose and satisfaction. And part of that is finally reaching a place in life where burdens can be set aside, where you can look upon your work and say 'my job is done'... and not have to look forward to an endless wasteland of time, where new tasks and new pursuits must always be found to stave off boredom, to try to outrace madness.

As for the rest of your crass, and frankly insulting accusation, what stops me from going on an unrepentant killing spree is that there is more to life than 'will it end?'. What kind of madness requires eternity to declare that existence is more than rampant, sociopathic nihilism? How screwed up does someone have to be find the very prospect of 'I will end' so all-consuming that it obliterates any chance that their life has worth anyway?

And Amen.

Except you're completely missing the point.



My life only has to matter to me. What do I care if I'm remembered? I'm dead. I no longer am.

Part of this is that humans are simply ill equipped to deal with something as awful as death. We move on, because we have to, because if we truly stopped to contemplate the utter horror of non-existence that awaits, without having hope that a dawn might still come, how could we keep going? That doesn't make death okay, that doesn't mean it isn't the greatest evil to exist, it just means we've evolved to deal with it, because before we had no choice. But we have technology now, we have a choice, and we don't have to accept it and shouldn't. 'You' will not go back to the matter and energy in the universe. 'You' are the matter and energy arranged in a specific shape, and when that shape goes away, you will be utterly destroyed.



Where is the law of death written into the fabric of the universe? Its not the second law of thermodynamics, because life routinely and constantly exists in defiance of that law. Life is an extropic process, it resists entropy and creates greater levels of complexity and organisation.

And even if it was written into nature, that doesn't make it good. In fact, that's very blatantly an [url=https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-nature]appeal to nature[/quote] which is fallacious at best. Viruses and sickness and being crippled are totally natural, but we routinely take action against those things. Nature doesn't optimize, it doesn't care. But we can optimize, we do care. We constantly subvert the natural law to achieve our desires. We exert a force against nature, we build cities and starships, we travel faster then light, we cure blindness and sickness, we replace limbs and prevent infections from taking hold in wounds. You can't have unity with the generations that already died. They're dead. There's nothing to have unity with, they were utterly annihilated from existence. Their sacrifice, to get humanity to a point where we could conquer death should be viewed with reverence and awe, but unity with them is impossible, they're already gone.



An endless wasteland of time? Really? Can you truly not think of how you would want to spend eternity? Is life truly such a burden to you that you want to just end it all someday? Because that sounds...frankly...sort of suicidal. Just off the cuff, with my eternity, I would meet all the interesting people in the cluster, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party in an orbital colony, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party at the core of the Glitter Belt, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other galaxies, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Universe once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Skarkon to watch the Sun finally go out, and that's just getting started. Life is not a finite list of things that you check off before you're allowed to die, and if you feel like that, then I'm sorry things have been hard enough to make your life feel like a burden. But it's life, you just go on living it. If I'm not doing those things it'll be because I've found something better. If you want to live one more day, and tomorrow, you'll still want to live one more day, then you want to live forever. That's proof by induction on the positive integers.

If you want people to lead fulfilling lives, then what counts as fulfilling? Surely 200 years is a long and good life, but from a culture where everyone lives to be 1000, then to die at 200 would be tragic. There's no point in the universe where someone's life stops having meaning, there's just tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.



If you think there's more to life then death, then surely death is a bad thing, because it interrupts and permanently ends any chance of doing any of those other things. You've given all these reasons why death is a good thing, but there is no demarcation line between a life ended tragically early, and a life lived long and full. Most people want to live forever, even if they don't realize it, they just want one more day, and one day after that. Again, that's proof by induction on the positive integers. There is no point at which the 'and so on' reaches death. Death is just an interruption in a process that needs not end.

If you have trouble with the ideas of eternity, just take it a day at a time.

Seade knows this, because of that stuff she did.

You know, the whole vivisecting people to look at where consciousness comes from.

Even though that the general scientific community described that as laughable and reinventing the wheel.

Science.

It gets Results™





Results™ is a trademark of Zainou Biotech.

Accepting the inevitability of an inevitable death is a very Caldari trait. This allows you to focus on selling your life for the utmost - a tactic that ensured our survival and prosperity in times past. Accepting the inevitability of a negotiable death, on the other hand, couldn't be less Caldari. Yes, the winter is cold. Yes, the food is scarce. Yes, the enemy outnumbers us and fights with skill and passion. No, that does not mean we are fated to die - until we are.

I see the death of my crew in combat as the second category. Their deaths are inevitable (or at least very likely) right up until they aren't. The slingshot system makes their deaths unnecessary, and for a bargain price. Yes, I will pay the personal cost of setting up and trialling this system - because they are my comrades and I owe them nothing less.

If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, then I'd already have failed to prevent it, or I wouldn't be going to die, I'd be at risk of death - which I already am. I take that risk. I know I can die, out there in these wars. It doesn't stop me from going out there to keep other people alive. That's not cognitive dissonance, by the way. There's no inherent contradiction in saying 'I like my life' and simultaneously acknowledging that it will end. If anything, the limited nature of life helps appreciate the moments we have even more.



I may. And water may be wet.



And when you're done with that? Because forever means just that. When the universe dies in ever-increasing entropy that eventually sees the breakdown of all matter and energy to a patina of zero-point energy quarks, you're proposing to still be there looking for things to do.



I'll admit that it's painful. I won't say that pain is evil. A life without pain is a life where joy and hope become bland, dulled by lack of contrast. A life without pain, fear, sorrow... it's as empty, hollow a thing as a life without joy and anticipation and ecstasy. Does it hurt? Of course. It's supposed to. That's how we're wired. We're social animals, we seek comfort in the familiar, including familiar people.

Just because want something doesn't mean we should get it.