[ExI] Existing as stored data (Was: How many current members of ExI?)

[spike at rainier66.com]

...> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat

Subject: Re: [ExI] Existing as stored data (Was: How many current members of
ExI?)

On 19/04/2020 00:53, Spike wrote:
> Second thing in SDA: that religion holds that when a person perishes, 
> they are on hold, no conscious existence in any form.  They exist as 
> stored data until they are re-assembled at a later time.

I'm curious, Spike: Where or in what form what do they think this stored
data is? I'm presuming this is not thought to require any particular actions
on behalf of the person in question (apart, possibly, from membership of the
SDA), but just happens magically?

--
Ben Zaiboc

_______________________________________________


Eh, I don't know that it is commonly pondered Ben.  The religion was
invented before computers were a thing.  They might be asking that question
now, but it has been over 30 yrs since I had any deep philosophical
discussions with true believers.  I do not wish to challenge their belief
system, for good reason: salvation in most religions requires belief in that
religion.  If you damage their faith, you could cause them eternal
damnation.  I wouldn't want to be responsible for even fictitious eternal
damnation.  I would feel so bad about that, even if my religion is right and
I managed to get an upload existence in a holodecky kind of simulated
reality, knowing that I mighta caused some true believer to go to eternal
destruction, regardless of the fact that the feared eternal destruction
doesn't exist.  If it did exist, I mighta contributed to the bastard going
there, because I contributed to his disbelief.

...emmm... OK so perhaps that whole thought paradigm needs some work.  

In any case, I like to help people and encourage people where they are,
never mind trying to convert them to atheism.  Atheism works for me, for I
am a person who cannot stand cognitive dissonance, not a trace of it, not
one nanoparticle of internal conflict.  I do know smart people who are built
differently from me psychologically.  

I know personally a civil engineer who I went to school with, who is a
literal recent creationist.  Part of his job is to do core samples and map
out historic mud flows in the Seattle area, so they know where are the best
evacuation routes in case the mountain blows and dumps a wall of snow and
mud on the towns north and west of there.  He has to look at the mud cores,
and calculate dates on the various features and fossils they find in the
cores.  He can clearly see evidence that life is old.  But he has two
different hemispheres, each capable of its own belief system, and he uses
both.  He fully recognizes he believes two different things which are
mutually incompatible, and has done that for over 30 years, but... on he
goes.  This is a calculus I cannot do.  But if he can, then it isn't my job
to disabuse him.

Ben I have wandered far from your original question.  So here's the answer:
I don't know

spike