[extropy-chat] Survival tangent.

[John K Clark]

Heartland, High Priest of the Unique Atom and Sacred Original Cult Wrote:

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

> Last time I checked with people who believe this stuff souls were eternal

The soul concept is common in all human cultures but in many of them the
soul is not eternal, it's not a defining attribute.

> I claim something completely opposite.

You say life is a noun so when you die something must leave or be destroyed.
Whatever that something is it must be very important, even more important
than thinking, even more important than believing you are alive, even more
important than remembering being you yesterday. However as huge as this
something is it's completely undetectable by the scientific method.  There
is a word in English for a something like that.

> No function/process/life can exist in absence of physical implementation

True, but any physical implementation will do because the scientific method
can not detect a difference between one hydrogen atom and another.

> Your "patterns" are actually a lot more similar to souls

In a previous post I already listed the similarities and differences between
the soul and information, the biggest difference being that information can
be studied with the scientific method but the soul and your Sacred Original
Atoms can not be.

> 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

It takes no leap of faith to deduce you Sacred Original Atoms theory is pure
nonsense.

> If you paint a white car black, will that cause the car to morph into a
> toaster oven?

No.

> 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.

I'm sure you picture yourself as tragic hero, bravely staring into the face
of death and refusing to turn away from grim reality. However I see you in a
somewhat less epic light. I see you as a man who is terrified of the dentist
because he fears he might slip him a anesthetic which he believes is
equivalent to death, a man who has an irrational fetish for Original Atoms,
a man who has views a well educated child in the 18'th century would be very
comfortable with but are hopelessly old fashioned today.

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

Do you really have to ask this question? The ONLY difference between a 16
year old boy a 90 year old man and a corpse is the way the atoms are
organized, and there is simply no doubt about it. There is no reason you
couldn't turn one into the other at will, there is no reason you couldn't
turn me into you; all you'd need is Nanotechnology and information.

> When you die, you stay dead

When you die you may stay dead, probably will actually, but no law of
physics would demand it.

Me:
>> You think if you had no thoughts at all it still wouldn't change what you
>> are

You:
>Who said something about having no thoughts?

You did: "I might also add for the millionth time that what *I think* has
absolutely no influence on *what I am*"

> Atoms don't matter!

Then why did you spend about 6 posts talking about Original Atoms and going
on and on about timelines and space time coordinates to make sure you could
distinguish the High Holy Original hydrogen atoms from the imposters.

> Any mind is a process

A process is a series of actions and actions can be stopped, started up
again, reversed and duplicated.

   John K Clark