[extropy-chat] Survival tangent.

[Heartland]

S:
>> When will you understand that "life" is not an adjective but a noun and "live" 
>> is a
verb? Stop inventing arbitrary referents for clearly defined terms.

John Clark:
> So you believe that when someone dies something must go away. The name of
> that something is the soul.

Honestly, you must have graduated from Karl Rove's School of Spin. :)

Last time I checked with people who believe this stuff souls were eternal and could 
exist in absence of physical implementation. I claim something completely opposite. 
No function/process/life can exist in absence of physical implementation and when 
the hardware that implements that function/process/life disintegrates, that 
function/process/life on that hardware ceases to exist. What's not to understand 
here?

Your "patterns" are actually a lot more similar to souls in a sense that, when a 
body disintegrates, life (function/process) continues as if nothing happened *just 
because* the same brain pattern might exist in some other body. That's a quite a 
leap of faith, if you ask me, probably motivated by an overwhelming desire to make 
"afterlife" work at all cost. I know, it's hard to deal with inevitability of 
death, but at some point you have to realize that there's no such thing as 
afterlife. When you die, you stay dead, and no amount of "spin" can save you.


John Clark:
> I believe the difference between a 180 pound man and a
> corpse is not that something has gone away but that something has changed in
> that 180 pounds of protoplasm, it's organized differently and so requires a
> different adjective.

The important difference between a living person and a corpse is that they are 
"organized differently?" :)

S:
>> 1kg + 1kg != 1kg.

John Clark:
> Big + Big = Big

So, according to you, a diamond is made up of letters "C" instead of atoms of 
carbon? Symbols are more important than material things they refer to?


S:
>> I might also add for the millionth time that what *I think* has absolutely
>> no influence on *what I am*

John Clark:
> So if you had all
> my thoughts and none of your own it still wouldn't change what you are.

If you paint a white car black, will that cause the car to morph into a toaster 
oven? (The *function* of a car remains stable regardless of whether that function 
is produced by a black Toyota or white Honda. Get it?)


John Clark:
> If
> you had no thoughts at all it still wouldn't change what you are

Whoa, hold your horses. Who said something about having no thoughts? As usual, 
you're jumping to conclusions without knowing what you are referring to. (No, it's 
not "matter" you should be referring to.)


John Clark:
> as long as
> the proper rituals had been performed on the sacred original atoms. You
> don't think it matters if you think you're alive or dead, thinking doesn't
> matter, all that matters is matter.

Atoms don't matter! Any mind is a process (what I am) so the process is the only 
thing that matters. As long as this process continues to produce output it makes no 
difference *how and what* implements it. It might as well be falling dust, I don't 
care.

Obviously that would make sense to you if you grasped what process is, let alone 
"instance of a process." Instead, you continue to substitute "process" with "atoms" 
and pretend to know exactly what I'm talking about.

Slawomir