Ian Lascaux

@adelethelaptop It's so poetically sophisticated that I can't help wondering whether, through translation and interpretation, we may be contributing something of our own to it. It seems the ancients were probably not so different from modern people.

Job 6:2 “Oh if only my grief were actually weighed and laid in the balances together with my disaster!” 6:26 “Do you intend to rebuke my words, when the words of one in despair belong to the wind?”

@onrebrofo @McClureShawn And can we say how much of the body must be lost before we define the outcome as the loss of life?

@LascauxIan @McClureShawn A life.

The question is not whether a god is conceivable. Countless things are conceivable. The question is whether our most rigorous lines of logical, methodical inquiry provide any sound reasons to believe such a being exists. "God" is a concept endlessly argued without such reasons.

@miltonappl3 Therefore, it seems to me that a rigid commitment to a literal interpretation of the text misses something essential. At least at first, a metaphorical reading of the whole strikes me as more valuable.

Metaphor is such an essential feature of Christ's teachings that He could not part with it, and any activity which increases a man's facility with metaphor is John the Baptist in the way it paves the way for Christ's teachings.

@onrebrofo @McClureShawn So when do we speak of death? If a person loses a leg, they do not necessarily die. How much must be lost before we consider that person dead?

@LascauxIan @McClureShawn If someone loses half their body, they die. The half they didn't lose is dead material. You can't apply any conclusion from that fantasy to the reality in which the body stays and is demonstrably dead. Another body created elsewhere would not be that body, it would be a clone.

@onrebrofo @McClureShawn Just to make sure I'm following your reasoning correctly: If someone loses half of their body and that half is reconstructed, does that mean they have become a new person?

@LascauxIan @McClureShawn No, it doesn't, it appears to be determined by body. They died at the separation, because your "thought experiment" is an impossibility. Each body still only experiences itself. There's 3 people, the one separated, and the two new ones. Original experiences nothing but death.

If we are information, then immortality ceases to be a mystical concept and becomes a technical one. Interesting discussion with @onrebrofo and a post by @Ki11switch03

@onrebrofo @McClureShawn The example is mine, yes. I'm not making an argument so much as illustrating a point: that identity appears to be determined by information. So what happened to the original person in this scenario? Did that person cease to exist, or do they still exist?

@LascauxIan @McClureShawn You've veered off topic, we have the dead person's body. . . 100% of it. Buried in the ground. Replacement is not on topic. Nothing about it is being replaced. It stays here.

I'm not sure we would interpret the result in the same way. Take a human being and assume we possess complete information about them. We split the person's biological body into two halves. Each half is then restored to a complete human being using the information required to reconstruct the missing tissues and structures. The result is two people, both physically and psychologically identical to the original, and both with an equal claim to being that person. Has the original ceased to exist?

@LascauxIan @McClureShawn When it is a *copy* of half of one and half of another.

@onrebrofo @McClureShawn At what point does the copy become a "child"? When the replaced portion reaches 50%?

@LascauxIan @McClureShawn That's a 3rd party's perspective, which is irrelevant, you would still only experience being the one being you are, even if there were 10,000 new copies made. Starting without that information means starting without you. Replacing half of you in a copy is a child.

@heimberg_a Not just religious people. Protecting one's mental integrity seems to be a standard function of the brain. Facts are usually in the service of a purpose. Evolution optimized us for survival, not for the pursuit of knowledge.

@sivori There is something deeply relaxing about the thought that some weed, somewhere, will live out its entire life without giving a damn about human civilization—its history or its future.

Walking to a swim meet and spy this cluster of yellow flowers near the curb. Not much to begin with, but making a go of it. Life. How many of us started in such circumstances? But we can move, uproot ourselves, and find a place to thrive. We can water ourselves and feed ourselves. We can create our own circumstances.

@knowclarified There is no reason to do anything. Knowledge can describe the world, but it cannot command us to act. Mystery preserves the possibility that a call to action exists somewhere beyond what we know. I believe mystery is the ultimate source of motivation.

The role of mystery is for the mind to fill in all of the gaps, I think that’s why music with non direct lyrics must hit harder You make your own meaning and feeling of it and project to it This must be true of relationships as well

The more religious I am, the more rational I become.

@dharmapoppins Banal and mysterious—that's a good description. And undefined. We don't really know what it means to exist.

Existence is unique in that it’s totally banal and utterly mysterious at the same time. Where you are at in any given moment psychologically determines which side you see and to what end no one knows.

@clrk_o The merger is unlikely ever to be complete. Some people rely on AI more, others less. The transition is gradual, with no clear dividing line.

I don’t really see how when a sizeable portion of humans fully unite themselves with machines vs those that don’t, how the two can just live side by side.

@stellahymmne A machine in our heads that serves entropy. It creates local order, only to dissipate heat even more efficiently.

the brain is just a data center, using up all our resources and shedding heat into the environment

@null_ropex Could it be that changing information about the past is, in a sense, changing the past itself?

your sense of where you came from functions as a template that every later version of you gets instantiated from, and editing that template, the story of what happened, who you were, what it meant, doesn't just change how you feel about the past, it changes the starting parameters every future instance gets built from, including the one writing this sentence right now

Either way, the relevant information has been destroyed, and there is no way to determine who is who. But we can avoid that problem entirely by starting with a case in which such information never existed. If half of you were replaced by a copy, would you still be you? And if you were divided in two, and each half were completed using a copy, which of the resulting two people would be you?

@LascauxIan @McClureShawn the fact that he may feel like he is you, doesn't put you in his body. if there's end to end reproductions of you, you still only live ONE of those, the next one is a different being.

@Ki11switch03 What else are we, if not information? I'm having this discussion with someone at the moment, and I'm struck by how much resistance the idea provokes.

Are you information? Or are you something else entirely?