The problem with consciousness is we don’t actually have a standard for it, largely because we see humans as conscious and everything else as not. But when we isolate a given trait (language, tool use, humor, etc.) we find examples in other species.
So we’re in a sorites situation: We can point to clearly conscious things and clearly not conscious things, but it’s rough finding an edge case that is by consensus on one side or another. Coco the gorilla might have been but turned out to be far removed (largely because she faked knowing sign language and her handlers didn’t know sign well enough to see she was faking it.)
That said, our brains clearly operate through material mechanics, and when its components deteriorate, so do we. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are serious cosmic horror: It’s not just tears in rain but tears of oceanwater joining rain into the sea. We really do dissolve into oblivion, and it would take some pretty fantastic steps to assume that whatever experiences an afterlife is the same thing as the engine that lived (👓🗲).
Heck, we can’t be certain the person who wakes up every morning is the same as the person who went to sleep. Continuity, like the Ship of Theseus, is the only thing that links us. And if this is the case, then you can bet your crypto some billionaire right now is looking at DeepSouth and wondering how far we are from putting their brain sim in one to run their estate from beyond the grave. If Deepsouth/EMusk was booted up the moment he died, would that be a legitimate case of immortality?
If this is the case, we can assume that any life is a continuity of ourselves, which doesn’t mean much without our memories and experiences that establish who we are. By the same argument the Ship of Theseus continues today as the USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier as well as the Space Shuttle Columbia.
I’d say it was a relief to discover the authorities who expected so much of me failed to live up to their own standards.I suspect this figures into the drive behind Camus’ rebellion.
One of the joys is that top and bottom surgery are necessary only in a world without magic or magic-level tech. Trans folk in worlds with resurrection spells don’t get surgery, they drink a potion or wear a girdle, and get a really rather complete transformation, including the capacity to bear / sire children.
Will resurrection reverse a magical sex-change transformation? Depends on how the spell works out how to restore you, and if the sex change is material or a magical construct, like an illusion.
I suspect it would undo labiaplasty and appendectomies. Ressurection seems to be a fresh install of the corporeal OS. I suspect bodybuilders would be disappointed while those who live with obesity would be pleasantly surpised. Heredary cancer, previously treated might restore itself.
If Resurrection is open source, a branch might detect and accommodate body / identity conflicts and detect and fix hereditary conditions. Talk to your referee and temple high priestess to see which resurrection is right for you, and be sure to file an advance directives document to inform your fellow party members and resurrectionist about your post Resurrection intentions.
I can count my lucky stars my income level never dipped below the rice-and-beans povery level, but it has dipped below cereal made by Kellogs and General Mills. They’re a false product like Nestlē baby formula as sold in Africa. They are expensive by the ounce and poor nutrition.
But if you are that dirt poor and have a 60 hour job then you may not have the time or energy to make rice. You’re also stuck in bonded servitude. That is a profound level of fucked.
Pilnick is celebrating selling desperation food at inflated prices to slaves.
salmonella on the surface, even on the penis shoul be low risk. If you’re causing lesions with vigorous pounding, that can cause an infection.
The four factors for transmission of infectious disease are: pathogen, vector, quantity and opportunity. The sooner you wash up with common body soap, the lower the risk.
Yeah, it’s super evident when the RIAA and MPAA sent ICE to New Zealand to raid the Kim Dotcom estate on grounds of media piracy. They actually used other ambiguous charges like conspiracy and espionage which are what the US legal system uses when they don’t like what you’re doing but don’t have a specific crime against it. It’s been over a decade and its still in court.
ICE also was raiding Florida repair shops for servicing Apple products without an Apple license, one of the events that drove the current right-to-repair movement.
The reverse happened. But I’m GenX so that might be normal?
I was given the full American Exceptionalism battery of civics propaganda in my public schooling, and I believed it all even more than my peers. It might be a neurodivergent thing, being credulous and actually believing what my teachers taught me.
I also took economics 1A and 1B in my early college career, which was all capitalism centric. (They talked about command economics, usually as a counter example, highlighting the problems it has.)
I was kind of an asshole, but I was young.
Then SCOTUS gave Bush the presidency, and that was weird. He was creepy even before 9/11 but then that happened and, well, all the conservatives went full evil. When my dad was telling me that yes, Donald Rumsfeld is right that waterboarding is not really torture (Narrator: Waterboarding is, in fact, commonly classified as torture by the scholarly consensus) and that extrajudicially detaining and torturing people because they’re Arab and Muslim is entirely acceptable, I had a reckoning and an internal identity crisis. I knew that torture was what Darth Vader did to Leia to show that the Galactic Empire was evil through and through, and Vader didn’t flinch at the grisly tasks.
In the next decade civil rights, including ones established in the Constitution of the United States, started getting massive carve-outs. The bill of rights didn’t apply whenever national security was invoked. FBI was sending NSLs left and right telling people they’re now FBI informants, yet were obligated to keep that secret on threat of being disappeared. (NSLs are still a thing, BTW.)
Officials were openly engaging in war profiteering. Halliburton was getting fantastically rich. Also Texas, by way of Enron was fleecing California. The rolling blackouts were featured in Monsters Inc. …as was the scream extractor, possibly the best representation of late-stage capitalism at its most extreme.
We talked a lot of enhanced interrogation and extraordinary rendition and black sites. Signs of the surveillance state started manifesting even before Edward Snowden dumped a ton of data to news agencies.
Obama got elected. There was tons of talk about Hope and Change. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush. Neither hope nor change were forthcoming. In fact, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis starting in 2007 resulted in some massive bailouts (about $1 Trillion) to some really big companies. If your company collapses, I had learned according to Capitalism 101, it means your business model is bad and it deserves to collapse, so this bailout didn’t make sense from the ideological perspective. A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.
Then in 2014, Michael Brown was shot in dubious circumstances, triggering the Ferguson unrest. Police uniforms lined up pointing their assault rifles like they were at a firing squad, what I remember was poor weapon discipline, and the sort of thing Red Goons from the Soviet Union did in movies starring Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. Troops and troops of police officers pointing their guns like they’re ready to start shooting into the crowd. Then when the policing hour happened at night, they gathered up in their MRAP and started tearing up the streets (literally) firing their tear-gas grenade launcher willy-nilly, just gassing the whole neighborhood for no peacekeeping purpose. It was terrifying.
I learned in the 1970s a congressional order required FBI to catalog all officer-involved homicides and report annually to the BJS. They hadn’t. Only civilian volunteer groups had been tracking killings and brutality by law enforcement. Several news agencies started after Ferguson. One of the beats on Techdirt already was about police being stupid or drawing their guns early, or SWATTING the wrong house and rendering it unlivable. Oh yeah, social engineers discovered they could get a house raided by police with big guns anytime they wanted to, and it became an occasional tactic in COD PvP.
In 2015, I was long read about the faults of capitalism, the failures of government, the rise of regulatory capture, the police state, the surveillance state and rising wealth disparity (which was a big deal in my college Macroeconomics class – this is how you get your civilization to collapse to social unrest). I’d also taken a deep dive into moral philosophy so I understood why torture is generally frowned upon, and I didn’t have to take my cues from George Lucas.
From there, I was a few breadtube videos away from going totally Pinko Commie, but I less adhere to any given ideology so much as specific ideals (e.g. Everyone gets fed. )
Strangely, a Bolshevik chorus follows me around everywhere I go.
I assume the jet thing is just an excuse because Taylor Swift is the target du jour of the MAGA movement. They don’t care about the jet use of anyone else but are actively making up shit about Swift.
This isn’t about principles. It’s just about othering.