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On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> "J. R. Molloy" wrote:
> >
> > Alex Future Bokov asks,
> >
> > > Just out of curiousity, what's worse than death?
> > >
> >
> > You really don't know, huh?
> > Can't imagine anything worse than death?
> > Not much imagination.
> >
> > Just to get you started:
> > Wishing you could die when you can't die is worse than death.
>
> I find it odd that so many people in the world think that living is the most
> important thing, to the exclusion of all else. For me, liberty and intelligence
> are more important than life, as I would fight and die to resist any attempt to
> remove either from me.
You cannot be free, and you cannot exercise your intelligence if you
are dead. Furthermore, whether or not you guys or some SI holding me
captive thinks escape or hope are possible, I can still contemplate
escape and hope. If my faculties for thinking, remembering, or feeling
anything other than the pain to which I am being subjected are
temporarily switched off, there is still the faintest ghost of a
possibility that some turn of events will get those faculties switched
back on[1]. If they are permanently, irrevocably switched of... i.e.
destroyed, making me nothing more than a pain-bot, then I suppose I'd
be indifferent to being dead because as a sentience that limited I'll
already be dead for practical purposes. So, I suppose that if you
permanently destroy enough of my brain you'll eventually get me to be
okay with getting killed... but that will happen a long time after
you've already gotten me to be okay with the idea that the sun being
made from Jell-o.
Also, there is the question of what level of complexity one has to be
for pain to have meaning. If I am reduced to nothing more than pain
neurocircuitry, will "I" truly feel the full intensity of that pain,
anymore than an olfactory system devorced from any higher functionality
truly smell?
[1] For the record-- if you ever see me lying in a deep coma and some
'concerned', 'ethical' physician asking whether I'd perhaps prefer to
die with dignity and forego 'heroic measures', if you're a buddy of
mine, you'll stand up and say "He'd want every heroic measure you've
got and dignity can wait. Shove tubes into and out of every orifice in
his body and drill as many new ones as you need to. Some people wake
out of coma."
- --
CID Hillary CID
Why are the above words in my signature? Check out:
http://www.echelon.wiretapped.net
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:16 MDT