From: "Bryan Moss" <bryan.moss@btinternet.com>
> thinking, "I'm dead, I've wasted my life" etc. Nonexistence
> is difficult to comprehend at best, and if you don't know that
> your thoughts are the products of interacting neurons or, for
> that matter, where babies *really* come from, as I suspect the
> majority of people do not, you have no reason to invoke such a
> notion and are left with a soul-shaped gap in your reasoning.
>
> BM
I like the way you put that, Bryan. Of course, since life, per se, has no
purpose, it can't be wasted. It's only when we decide to give life purpose
that it can be wasted. In this regard, the US bill to ban all forms of human
cloning is a huge waste of resources... and a waste of life. It is a waste of
all the lives that remain immured in bogus political moralism.
As Michio Kaku has said, the only thing preventing humans reaching Type I
civilization is humans' willful subversion of attempts to do so. I'm not a
"should" sort of person, but in this case I think neo-luddites should be
charged with sedition, and I think they should be treated as the traitors to
humanity that they are.
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 - 10:00:00 MDT