Intergalactic Summit

I come from a wealthy Family on Gamis VII. My mother Natalia De La Mancha, Father Ragnar De La Mancha, and Sister Veronica De La Mancha are all still alive and well as far as I know. There have been rumors that they got in trouble with Ammatar authorities, but I have no current contacts with them.

Last I heard, my sister was working on a business enterprise in the state, she is very business minded and has made deals all over, and I assume she will take over the family business of trading bulk agricultural commodities. She is always up making a profit on someone, but I still love and trust her with all I have.

My mother is a very devout woman, and I never quite measured up I think, last time I talked with her she told me I betray my "Ammatar" roots to play with a "filthy slave". No doubt a reference to my CEO who was formerly enslaved. She is however, Nefantar herself and she betrays her Nefantar roots and the Starkmanir legacy by clinging on to the fiction that was made to convince the Amarr that they were loyal.

My Father, is a very kind, strong, and humble. He is a Brutor, born in the Republic, and stranded in the Mandate when he was only 12, but oddly was never made a slave. He feel deeply in love with my mom, and bought that whole Amarrian God BS, sadly. He would tell me stories he was told as a child though, and those stories are what originally got me interested in returning to my people. I have a hard time understanding how he can be so caring about this God he knew nothing about until he was 12....

In any case I love my parents very much and I hope they can get over the fact I am in the republic now, and I am joining a Clan, and that clan will be my family now, and they have an open invitation to join it as well so we can be united again, but sadly I don't imagine that happening.

It is as you say. No machine can replicate a soul. Only God has that power. You can write off our statement as some uneducated muttering of Faith, but in fact a transneural burning scanneronly replicates the brain. The brain is not the soul, and even if we have the technology for quantum entanglement, we have no identification of a particle qualified to be a soul.

Even if we were to believe that a soul could be transferred by man-made technology, present day burning scanners and cloning technology are not designed with any specification or capability to transfer a soul.

Ms. Jenneth, you may wish to argue this point with passion, but the fact is that the moment you cloned, the person you were died.



There is a part of us that doesn't want to believe that. An eye for an eye. Each misdeed must be paid in full. A lash for every offense. It must be the way. And yet, when we will come to stand in Judgment on our last day, would we bear the weight of all the souls who are not us, but a version of us? If we are not the same, then have we truly committed the sins we must answer for?

We thank you for your response, Ms. Jenneth. It is a pleasure to peer into your thoughts as you write them down for us.





1. In the absence of any proof of a migration occuring..

2. In the absence of any explicit design specification present in burning scanners to allow for such a migration..

3. While firm in our belief that the creation, destruction, and manipulation of souls is strictly God's purview..



Ms. Jenneth, what else should we conclude? Neither the Adherent nor the Scientist in us is able to accept the fantasy that a soul migrates from clone to clone.

With immense respect:

1. As proof of migration of something itself unprovable will inevitably prove difficult;

2. And as the design specification to allow for it will likewise be tricky;

3. God's purview seems, therefore, unthreatened.

Why should such a numinous thing as a soul be bound by the rules of this universe alone? Is a temporal distance meaningful in the spiritual domain?

If it exists, and travels with the mind, there is no problem. If it exists, and is bound to the mind, but exists in a transcendent state in which spatial distance is not meaningful, there is no problem. If it does not exist as a separate phenomenon, there is no problem.

There's a problem if it's attached to the body or if separate from the mind and spatial distances are meaningful to it. However, it does not seem obvious that this is so-- or even workable as a basic assumption.

Nobody living is really in a position to study the migration patterns of souls, after all.

Fair points, all, and perhaps not a discussion worth derailing Ms. Neph's lovely topic for.

It is a fascinating topic, however, and Captain Jenneth's thoughts and yours have great potential for further discussion. Should you feel so motivated, Lady Rkard, I would be keen to read a separate thread on these matters.

As you contemplate the nature of the soul I think on the nature of the question, Who is my family?

I am a Kameira, at the moment of my birth I was taken from my mother forever. I know I have a mother because no Kamiera of Hexandria is ever born of an artificial womb. I know nothing about her and no information about her will ever be within my reach; there are few secrets in the Empire more precious than the databases that have for a thousand years mapped and shaped the progress of the Kameiras Program. I know nothing about my father or even if I had one. Perhaps that genetic heritage was manufactured, a manipulation done with science and not with heart. Perhaps he was a Kameira too. I like to think this of my potential parents, that they too were descended from warriors who survived and thrived to donate to god their lives and the lives of their children. But It does not matter which is true.

I know the meaning of the word family, I have looked up many definitions of it in many languages. ..But I have not felt anything.

I felt no kinship with the other members of my subigo, though they all had the same skin and same eyes as me they were not my family. I have killed who would have been my brother and I have fought for my life against those who would maybe have been my sister. I felt nothing for those Matari like me, those who share a genetic lineage. They look like me and their blood tests tell me where my ancestors may have lived but they are not Kameira. They are not like me.

I have felt a bond of human before, something that has been brief between me and another, between me and a great many. ..But this is not family this is a feeling of shared humanity. This has little hold on me for as quickly as I feel it it can go away and leave contempt or more often ..nothing. I know many expect me to say I feel like my family is my corporation, the pilots I fly with every day and share jokes. But the feeling of kinship with them is just as fleeting. Gone in a moment.

My family is not even those who also recognize god. So many are different and they all seem so different to me. Only a few times I have ever felt that brief and fleeting feeling of connection with others of god. That they hear his voice like I do.

I cannot say I will ever understand what a family will be. A connection or moment in combat, in philosophy, in spirituality ...it is gone already. As close as I must be in heritage from the other Kameiras who I competed with, as close as the Brutor Tribe, the Matari, Empyrean, ...humanity. I feel no kinship now. Even if I may once have briefly. Or worse, I feel kinship to all and every one of you. I understand you even as I watch you die. Even as I try to harm you I do so because I know you. Even as I look on without caring, wondering how I can understand so well and it can matter so little. But even that feeling does not stay with me.

I look at a mountain, at a bird, at a star. ..I close my eyes and imagine all of creation around me. I feel so close to god and humanity and everyone I have met, I wonder about what people and animals think, what it is like to be them. ...And just like that is gone. I feel so close to god sometimes that I cannot imagine holding onto anything, even myself. Nirvana, is a word I have heard the Brutor use. But that is nothing to me either.

The more I think about who I am or who my family may be, the closer I feel to god and all of creation;
The easier it becomes to feel kinship with nothing and no one.

I think sometimes that maybe I should feel something about family.

I sat for a far longer time than it took me to write this and wondered if I should press submit ...or just erase my words.

Shite!

My mother suffered from chronic pain in her lower spine and loss of movement for most of my childhood, and committed suicide when I was fifteen.

My father is a former Ishukone executive now living in very-forced retirement on Achura. He works assisting my great-grandmother with the management of our families investments, and spends his spare time collecting technological antiques, gambling (in the bad I-want-to-make-lots-of-money way, not the recreational Caldari way), and saying pretty openly treasonous things that he gets away by virtue of being from a family with a lot of money. Please remember this is all relatively anonymous and don't go into my room and throw away all my old things if you're reading this, Dad.

My younger sister, who is frighteningly intelligent, is currently attending the Science and Trade Academy, where she is studying some sort of mathematical subject that it completely beyond my understanding. She already has some sort of important job lined up in Perkone. The fact that I'm able to make more ISK than her simply because of genetic fluke proves that there is no justice in the world.

My little brother is still in secondary school. He goes back and fourth between telling me that he wants to become an artist and that he wants to become professional game-player. I'll leave the reader to make a judgement there.

Papa Anslo don't need no biological relations!