Re: Identity and becoming a Great Old One

From: Michael Clark (mike.michaeljc@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 27 2006 - 20:10:39 MST


On Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:58:19 +1300, Russell Wallace
<russell.wallace@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/28/06, Michael Clark <mike.michaeljc@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I question wether significant personal survival is possible (to the
>> present us), the thread view has the problem of sleep, and the pattern
>> view has the problem of change. Self awareness may just be an illusion,
>> an
>> evolved mechanism for conventional situations. I wonder how our sense of
>> self awareness would have evolved if duplication, merging, transfer etc
>> were in our environment.
>
>
> It wouldn't have.

Haha, your probobly right.

>
> Yes a loop where you change is what I meant, since we're vectors, not
>> points. If change is bad, I would think we should take it to it's
>> logical
>> extreme (perhaps from birth to now looped, or a day).
>
>
> If we're going to get from birth to now looped, can I at least pick some
> sections to fast-forward over please? :)

Or maybe just go over the good bits. Come to think of it something similar
might happen for some with VR.

>
>> "Perfect" and "utopia" are rather vague concepts, I think I'd need to
>> > see a
>> > more detailed proposal for one before I could really comment on it.
>> A niven scenario, that would be fun! That is a fairly static society.
>
>
> You mean the UN thought police world up to the point where the kzinti did
> humanity the very great service of providing an external enemy? Yep, fun
> in
> the "dystopia with slow agonizing descent (since there probably aren't
> any
> kzinti in our universe) into an existential disaster of the Shriek
> variety"
> sense - unfortunately, that strikes me as one of the more probable
> failure
> modes for our world.
>
> - Russell

Wether it's a utopia or dystopia would depend on where you're placed, at
least it wouldn't be to boring. Besides with intersteller distances the
kzinti don't need to be 'real'. After all a fictional enemy can unite us
to (under the iron fist of authority), and it's cheaper.

A better world might be the culture, or Aristoi, but I havn't read these.



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