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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Right back at you, neighbor.

You posted somewhere else in the thread that the obvious core drive of a human is to escape death. I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite. I see it as a repudiation of everything I recognize as noble within humanity, of the true core function to choose well from limited, fraught options. Obviously, I can't force you to adopt my view, and neither can you force me to adopt mine. All that can be done is to point out that the chasm between values, even for baseline, unmodified humans, yawns wide indeed.

I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite. I see it as a repudiation of everything I recognize as noble within humanity, of the true core function to choose well from limited, fraught options.

Then you die and let me do as I will.

You posted somewhere else in the thread that the obvious core drive of a human is to escape death. I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite.

You're Christian, yes?

I find the Christian objection to transhumanist anti-death pushes fascinating, because "death" means such different things to Christians and atheists. To a Christian, there is no need to escape death on Earth, because Christ already overcame the bonds of death for us with the Resurrection, and we too will be resurrected and raised to a state of perfection if we hold firm. To seek to overcome death on Earth looks like pursuing a shallow, partial, impossible form of what is already granted free of cost to all of us. Christians have fulfilled this drive already in their minds. The rest of us, lacking such a perceptual safety net, do what we must.

This fundamental disconnect over what death is makes it complex to have a meaningful conversation about the nobility of pursuit of immortality between Christians and non-Christians, as the rest of us seek to build what you believe you already have.

I am Christian, but I've been an atheist too. Even from an Atheist perspective, I think people are better off making their peace with death than fighting to the bitter end. One of the things that makes life good is people being willing to eat the badness set before them, rather than desperately attempt to avoid it or pass it off to others. Even on the assumption that death is the absolute end, how one reacts to that end is the product of immediate and indirect choices. Abject terror is largely, I think, a choice, and not a very good one given that it seems pretty unlikely to me that such death is going to be avoided for most of the current population. Where such fears grow especially pernicious is when the threat of death might appear to be forestalled by exploiting or victimizing others. In that case, the opportunity for evil is nearly boundless, and the attitude that takes death to be the worst possible thing just weakens one's resolve.

the resurrected person would be a copy of that person who long ago died and was buried in a grave, I think its arguable to say that its the same thing as extending your life without death.

I’m glad we have so much diversity of values!

I was a bit hyperbolic there I admit - I apologize. What do you find noble in humanity?

What do you find noble in humanity?

The ability to choose what is Good, even when the choice is hard. Death and pain are among the things that make it hard, but it seems to me that one of the choices we have to make is between accepting them, and acquiescing to them. Avoiding death is of great value, but it is not a terminal value. Treating it as a terminal value often allows one to be "forced" into choosing evil, in an attempt to avoid the ultimately unavoidable. Evil is the Great Enemy. Death is just an unfortunate fact. One might as reasonably declare that the speed of light is the Great Enemy, and all that matters is breaking physics by achieving FTL. Any passive feature of reality can be transformed into the ultimate villian, if one is willing to torture perspective sufficiently.

I don't feel like I'm afraid of death per se, certainly not like Yud's Voldemort or even like Yud's "DAE what can be worse than death???" Harry. But it would certainly be blasted inconvenient, and I'm particularly incensed that some people turn to worshipping some funny spiral chemical's lack of interest in letting us live longer above our own interests.

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