[extropy-chat] Consciousness vs. awareness [was: I keep asking myself...]

[Robert Bradbury]

On 4/7/06, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>  No, flinging hydrogen bombs/grey goo nanites/etc around the place is not
> likely to be the right answer. I'll ask again - did you read my post last
> time this came up where I argued in specific detail why starting a nuclear
> war over religion is a bad idea?
>

I don't believe I did more than skim it, but I had reached that specific
conclusion (nuclear weapons being an ineffective solution) at the end of my
discussions a couple of years ago.  Though I would suggest there is a
distinct difference between conflicts such as the Crusades or the current
Israeli:Palestinian conflict where the goal was to "possess" the land
involved and acts which simply seek to remove the symbolic underpinnings of
a meme set.  Of course history can provide numerous examples where the
elimination of an "underpinning" only makes the problem worse.

Interestingly enough, the conclusion that I did reach, for communicating
non-SOP ideas to the masses was/is actually implemented.  The U.S. is
spending on the order of $70 million/year to broadcast a semi-legitimate
non-Islamic view of reality into the Middle East (this was documented on one
of the major news channels about a month ago).  I've never done a cost
analysis of producing & maintaining nuclear weapons but I suspect that
funding a TV channel is a rather less expensive alternative than developing,
maintaining and potentially deploying even a small number of nuclear
weapons.  It is certainly less expensive than spending $10's of billions
annually trying to sort out differences of opinion between tribes which
although they may be operating rationally (eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth
perspectives) are doing so based on irrational meme foundations.

I would love to know the realistic cost of putting a few million people
(hard core fundamentalists of any cloth) into cryonic suspension (one has to
account for economies of scale).  I suspect it wouldn't be *that*
expensive.  Don't kill them (as in destroying their meme set) -- simply
prevent them from propagating those meme sets until such time as they can be
presented to an impartial jury as being valid or invalid.

Robert
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