h a l f b a k e r yWhy not imagine it in a way that works?
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Have you read "A Philosophy of Stars" by Bethwick C.
Kwarts? He was nuts too. |
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Anyway, the basic idea is to send samples of
terrestrial life out on big spaceships in case it gets
wiped out here? |
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Is 'long-now' anything like [beanangel]'s 'happylong'? That is
to say, is it a
term you just made up and assumed everyone would
understand? |
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Am I the only one who's going to admit that he's disappointed that there's no link to porno planets as pledged? |
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Basic idea: to send out, on one end of the spectrum, a
gigantic spaceship/archive/Noah's arc of all of the life
forms representing bio-diversity on earth, consciously
organized and executed by the democratically
acknowledged greatest minds on earth, and on the other
end of the spectrum, to distribute the process of preserving
life by ensuring that somehow life gets out there so that if
there is a Porno Planets-like scenario and there is some
kind of way out of it but only at the perifery, that we are
there to take the opportunity when it arises, in that case
most likely by seeding through chain reaction from big to
small the eventual
grand impact of another astronomical-sized object on some
other planet around another star. |
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# a third try would be to say that, since biology is only the
impact echoes (in backwards time) of grand-scale
astronomical disruption, that, even though any peripheral
niche-finding would seem to be tautological, that, since we
have nothing to lose anyway, and since, if we are truely
free we should be looking for every possibility, that we
should be looking at the most remote distance and at the
most infragile level -- with bacteria, viruses etc in little
space ships. So I guess the idea should be for a way to
optimize the panspermia delivery method --spores of deep
purple, with maybe little sun sail wings? |
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I think "we" in language always means first the ancestors of
this logical construction - of this contractual transactional
exchange, whether you look at that as the sentence itself
or as the act of some "one"understanding it, it is always
linguistic and always a multiplicity of perspectives that go
into giving whatever point you are making its richness.
Selfish genes is a book by Richard Dawkins who says that we
are our genes or our memes and not something to be shot
"towards" as in an impact -- so I would say the answer to
that question is "we" in the personal as in the increasing
multiplicity of threads feeding backward into time from the
impact, rather than "we" the multlicity of "causes" of our
complex behavior going forward. |
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'We' in the English language is a plural of the article 'I',
which is a designation of or reference to the self in 1st-
person narrative. I don't know what the hell it means in
your language, which you seem to be making up on the fly. |
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No, [JHC] isn't making it up, somebody else did that.
He's just dynamically misunderstanding it for you, and
he is time-forward of the point at which he 'got it' -
but as it is a time-backward based understanding, his
clarity on the point will probably continue to drop. |
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I'm shocked that it costs $8 a month to join the Long Now site!! |
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I dont know what you mean by "we" or "I" but when I
say "I", I dont as much refer to the meat and bones
that surrounds any supposed physical or physically
located soul as much as I refer to the language and
ideas that keeps the meat and the bones erect and
running back and forth to work every day -- and to all
the great people and all of the great work that went
into making that language possible. |
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Its kind of more like a wei. |
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Everything [JHC] has said here has confused me. |
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And by me I mean the sum of matter enclosed proximately by the exterior of my skin. I make no inferences that "me" or "I" includes anything other than the corporeal form I currently occupy. |
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Yes, it does confuse "me" if that's what you mean
by "me", as in it confuses the definition of "me",
but the loophole is that the new definition also
"gives eternal life to" "me", as in language grows
stronger through use as opposed to meat which
wears out. |
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Why not invent different language rather than changing meanings of existing terms. Feel free to invent a new pronoun or whatever. |
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No need to invent a different language; there are plenty of
words and phrases in the English language describe such
concepts, although for some reason they aren't being used
here. Consult a thesaurus, perhaps? |
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It looks from the etymology of "I" (link) that I has
historically been used in a spiritual or non physical way --
PIE root "ego", as opposed to a material sense of the body
contained by my skin or "eye". I couldn't find the
etymology of the Rastafarian "I and I" online, but I could
guess that it is at least partly related to this issue. |
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Besides, it seems pretty simple to me that if you are
referring to your physical body by "I" and not everyone can
agree on what constitutes a complete physical body, then
somewhere along the line we are going to run into issues. |
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That's why we (lit.: 'we', plural of 'I' or 'me') have words like
body, mind, soul, corpus, psyche, id, ego, consciousness,
material form, mortal coil, etc. You should check them out
sometime, they can be pretty fun. |
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