Intergalactic Summit

Ms. LeMew, Dani Dusette:

Well ... I don't really agree with the people giving your friend a "hard time," even if I'm not sure whether you're talking about Kellie Dusette or Mr. Vheruk.

If you're going to dismiss us all as poisonous while your own lips drip venom, though, I guess I'm not really interested in what you have to say, anymore, either.

I think I'd rather just talk with the people you're defending. They seemed to have some interesting things to say.

Op success.

Thank you for playing, Ms Jenneth.

One can only hope others might follow your example.

Sure it is n' so do I when we're talking via holo-comm, in person or even reading translation transcript.

But I reply as best I can, or just tell him I didn't quite understand this bit or that bit. I don't poke fun at him.


I dunno about you but our translation software ain't quite that intuitive. I put in a square in my tongue it'll put out a square in yours. If it's not perfectly shaped when I put it in then it's gonna come out a bit strange too.

Hmm, that all kinda sounds a bit naughty. Anyway...

Software can't help Kellie. Her speech problems aren't vocal, they're mental. The language centre of her brain has trouble selecting which words are most appropriate to express a given thought and also struggles to order them 'correctly'. There might be implants that could help with that, but Boss's family has always frowned on such things unless a dire requirement of daily life, such as combat implants to aid piloting.

Plus she doesn't want to risk anything changing in Kellie's little mind. It's already perfect, at least to us.

I really pretty much agree with Ms. DuSette. People look to cloning as a possible source of something, well, wrong with us, but I really don't think cloning is the grand existential question some of us want it to be.

I've cloned a few times. I don't feel ... broken, in any substantial way. I don't feel like I'm missing anything I ought to have. The question of my amnesia-- whether I'm still the same person I used to be, the same Aria Jenneth-- seems much more profound to me.

She didn't feel like she was whole at all, and thought cloning might be to blame. Maybe she wasn't, but ... I think capsuleers get scarred or carved up mentally the way anybody gets scarred or carved up. She went through some things that would damage anyone, but that's her history, not mine.

I've got my own scars, but I don't think I'm missing anything new, just because I'm a clone a few more times over. And missing those earlier bits of history ...

... I think I've got back some, maybe all, of what she was missing, what had been carved out of her.

Not in spite of a cloning issue; because of it.

It seems like a lot of this question is tied up in metaphysics.

First, if we believe every living thing has a soul, that stays with the body during life and departs at death, then our minds pass on while both body and soul die. This would be a true death; the same-ness of succeeding lives would be an illusion. It also implies some awkward meetings in the spirit world.

Second, if we believe people have souls (or else no soul separate from the mind) that pass from body to body indefinitely along with the infomorph, we would seem to be pseudo-immortal.

Third, if we believe that the soul comes only with natural life, and departs with the death of that body ... then the body dies, and the mind passes on, but into a vessel without a soul. (I really hate this option.) The mind may live indefinitely, but only as an echo of a dead person.

I'd describe my own view as a variation of the second. I don't believe in separate souls, or measure my own existence as a very weighty matter-- I'm a bio-electrical illusion to begin with, so whether the illusion that is "me" pops up in this body or that body doesn't matter very much.

Quite the opposite of being immortal, I'm a mirage. Sooner or later the conditions that allow me to appear will end. I don't exist as a separate being to begin with, so it doesn't make a meaningful difference whether I appear here, or there, or never appear again.

That's the usual atheist's take. There's not a whole lot of daylight between this and Shuijing sect teachings. A lot of the difference comes down to focus-- the absence of gods versus the omnipresence of the Totality.

I have my own idea for how all this works - I'm a good Wayiist, after all - but when it comes to things that can't be independently documented and verified, I tend to not want to hold forth in favour of my own beliefs in opposition to the beliefs of others.

Sadly, that leads some people to assume I don't hold my beliefs terribly strongly. That isn't true, although I do have criteria for abandoning Wayiism and assuming a different faith. This admission often leads to people trying to convert me, whereupon I produce my criteria and they cry foul because Wayiism itself hasn't satisfied them.

I'm not a hypocrite. I realise this - but shouldn't the new faith outperform the old one in order to supplant it?