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

[Samantha Atkins]

On Apr 7, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Robert Bradbury wrote:
> 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.
>

Unfortunately the message is highly diluted in effectiveness by many  
of our actions.  Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth is not rational  
in that conflicts cannot end by adhering rigorously to such an  
approach.  It leads to an unending feud.


> 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.

Perhaps you would need to include yourself in the set of those to be  
bobbled as being too intolerant of the opinions of others to be  
safely left around.

- samantha