[extropy-chat] Top scientist asks: is life all just a dream?

[Rik van Riel]

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004, Samantha Atkins wrote:

> However, the polarization where one sees people like oneself as
> reasonable and everyone else as bloody weights on the human potential
> needs to be examined and if possible overcome long before we have the
> ability to upload anyone.

Enforcing tolerance is a form of intolerance itself.
I don't think I would want to force anybody to give
up their ideas, beliefs and/or delusions.

My feeling is that we will have to live with the fact
that there will always be people around who are
intolerant of some thing or another - especially of
other people's religious or social ideologies.

Add to that the fact that many people, especially
religious ones, are not in search of immediate
paradise for themselves.  They are securing their
place in the afterlife.

An afterlife that cannot be reached if they choose
immortality; an afterlife that might be risked by
abandoning the body that god gave them, to upload
themselves into "some soulless machine".

These people have good grounds for viewing our
transhumanist and/or extropian beliefs with distrust.

Until either point of view is proven true, they both
hold similar validity.  I am firmly on the extropian
side with my personal beliefs, but that doesn't mean
that my extropian beliefs are any more (or any less)
valid than other beliefs.

kind regards,

Rik
-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan