From: "Samantha Atkins" <samantha@objectent.com>
> Victimless crimes should not result in prison sentences. A lot of
> people are in prison on pot charges. That is a major travesty.
It likely happens because druggies are easy to apprehend, convict, and
imprison (easier than more sober felons, anyway), and the US prison industry
is an economic growth enterprise. The most violent and successful criminals
tend to avoid drugs, of course.
> If I spent all my time in the future jacked in working on very
> sophisticated problems and tend to forget about physical reality matters
> unless reminded, am I then an addict or simply engrossed in my work?
Yeah, the old "workaholic" tag. It seems to me the world would benefit from
more people getting engrossed in work, and fewer people trying to pathologize
the life styles of others.
<snip>
> Although admittedly I often dream of playing Technological Boddhisattva
> and secretly uploading or backing them all up so that ultimately, if
> they so choose, there always is another chance to grow and succeed.
If you released the information about their back-ups, they mightn't have the
same sense of urgency to succeed in their present lives. Buddha used the
opposite trick of teaching people that they would have to re-live their
miserable lives over and over until they got it right, thus imparting a
different kind of urgency to avoid the cycle of ego suffering.
> I don't believe technology alone is sufficient. With a large-scale
> enrolling vision or set of visions and a very solid rationally grounded
> ethics I suspect the technology will only result in all our strengths
> and flaws becoming so magnified that the change of humanity surviving is
> much too small.
Oh yes, you've indicated precisely the danger of entrusting too much to
technology *alone* because, after all, there is no technique that allows you
to appreciate the full splendor of being human/transhuman.
τΏτ
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
Useless hypotheses:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism
Everything that can happen has already happened, not just once,
but an infinite number of times, and will continue to do so forever.
(Everything that can happen = more than anyone can imagine.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:46 MDT