• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Substrate-independent minds


mike

Paranormal Adept
For writer Stephen Cave, author of the new book Immortality, digital immortality does not refer to the "legacy" we have left on our Facebook pages. Cave's book explores the quest to live for ever and how – he believes – it has been the driving force behind civilisations,

Which beggers the question do all civilisations chase this prize ?

ie Is ET post biological ?

"So your brain is scanned and your essence uploaded into a digital form of bits and bytes, and this whole brain emulation can be saved in a computer's memory banks ready to be brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life, or even in the body of an artificially intelligent robot that is a replica of who we were."

For Dr Stuart Armstrong, the rise of the idea of digital immortality is due to the realisation that this time – perhaps – we actually have the key to immortality in our hands. Dr Armstrong is research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.
"Technology is now advancing faster and faster and we understand it a lot better because we built it ourselves. So the problems that digital immortality is facing are merely engineering problems – albeit complicated and difficult ones – that could be solved within the decade if we decided to set up a scheme on the scale of the Manhattan Project."
In particular, he feels that "scanning is the critical problem" and that if you "spent stupid amounts of cash then within a decade many of the limitations of scanning, such as its resolution, could be solved".

Dr Randal A. Koene, though, is determined to take digital immortality from the pages of books like Cave's and turn it into reality. Koene is founder of the non-profit Carbon Copies Project in California, which is tasked with creating a networking community of scientists to advance digital immortality – "although I prefer to talk about substrate-independent minds, as digital immortality is too much about how long you live, not what you can do with it".

And for Koene it is very much "you", there being a "continuity of self" in the same way that "the person you are today is still the same person you were when you were age five".
"This isn't science fiction, either, this is closer to science fact," he argues. Carbon Copies "is working to create a road map to substrate independence by pulling together all the research that is going on, identify where the gaps are and then what we need to do to plug it.

For Koene, human societies have faced these kinds of problems many times before. What matters more, he believes, is that digital immortality is the next stage of human evolution as it will "allow us as a species to have the flexibility to survive the process of natural selection that every species has to face", whether on this planet or another.

Will scientists ever discover the secret of immortality? - Science - News - The Independent
 
I'd heard of Randall Koene before, don't know much about him, but what research I've done on this Carbon Copies stuff is pretty wild to put it mildly. "Scanning" and "emulating" the brain to create a virtual person, I know that's a bit simplistic, but all in all from what I've found out it's rather presumptuous for some, whatever their impressive credentials may indeed be, to project being able to do anything like this within "decades" is really pushing it.

I recommended his book before, but Frank Tipler, a mathematical physicist from Tulane, though he can be rather way out in some ways himself, does an excellent job of getting you REALLY INTO FEELING what emulation in this fashion means, and just how it indeed could happen, all the exquisite details of it, but in the FAR, FAR (did I say far?) future where computational capacity is, well, I do recommend his book: The Physics of Immortality.

And then there's the whole "problem," and that's precisely the word researchers into the nature of consciousness call the mind/body, just-what-is-consciousness study: is consciousness merely the product of neurochemical processes, the firing of neurons, an "epiphenomenon" of physical processes in the brain only, or is there a component also of something apart from those physical processes, too? Some of this was covered in the consciousness thread a week or so ago, and I recommended some good books to read. It's a fascinating subject.

Now, to the point of this post: I can tell you that in my opinion, this Stephen Cave fellow, and excuse the condescension, is a lightweight of the first caliber, despite, yes, his PhD from Cambridge in philosophy, which I do genuinely respect him for.

But the book reviewed in this article that started the thread: my Heavens, what sheer pablum. It's equivalent to one of the literal definitions of that word: a cereal you spoon into your baby's mouth as you say, now, open up, here comes the airplane, that's my boy, and the kid, whom you love dearly (I raised four) coos and laughs, and the stuff dribbles down the sides of his mouth onto the bib, well, excuse that digression. His book, Immortality (and the title goes on after that), is pure mind-numbing puree. I read the book just a week or so ago, and an exercise in pretentiousness is letting him off the hook too easily.

He purports to ascribe the search for immortality to, well, what doesn't he? History is thrown pell mell into the trash bin, and he pretends he can get into the minds and nearly psychoanalyze actual historical figures, and what he does to Alexander (of Great fame) should, in my opinion, net him a sentence of a year in a penal institution. Alexander and what happened to his huge dominions after his death is such a rich mine of interest and delight, and then the study of the Hellenistic kingdoms resulting, is very sophisticated stuff. All this is dispensed with in a juvenile fashion. I don't think he knows a whit of history.

But that's just my opinion. Kim:eek: I know, use of these faces is a bit juvenile, but they are funny and I like using them, and this one sums up my take on Cave's book.
 
There are many many people with credentials who are saying this is possible

Ray Kurzweil

Those who have lent Kurzweil their support include space-travel pioneer Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation; videogame designer (and creator of Spore and SimCity) Will Wright; and Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot. All three can be found on the faculty and adviser list of the recently founded Singularity University (Silicon Valley), of which Kurzweil is chancellor and trustee.

It's as well to mention at this point that, in 2005, Mikhail Gorbachev personally congratulated Kurzweil for foreseeing the pivotal role of communications technology in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates calls him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence". A man of lesser accomplishments, touting the same head-spinning claims, would impress few beyond an inner circle of sci-fi obsessives, but Kurzweil – honoured as an inventor by US presidents Lyndon B Johnson and Bill Clinton – has rightfully earned himself a stockpile of credibility.

A model that replicates the functions of the human brain is feasible in 10 years according to neuroscientist Professor Henry Markram of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. ‘I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial

According to Ian Pearson, a British futurist, death will be a thing of the past by 2050.

Pearson is one of many futurists, cybernetic experts and artificial intelligence researchers whose thoughts are converging on the same basic idea: Why not upload everything that's in the brain—everything that makes a person who they are—into a computer and then download it again into a new body? Doing such a thing would make the individual theoretically immortal

Ian Pearson has been a full time futurologist since 1991, with a proven track record of around 85% accuracy at the 10 year horizon. He has delivered keynote presentations at over 1000 conferences, company away-days, PR events, dinners and workshops and appeared on TV and Radio over 450 times. He previously worked forBT, where he invented text messaging in 1991 and later established their futurology presence. Ian’s brief covers technology impacts in almost every major field over the 5-20 year timeframe. He has written several books and won numerous awards for his writing.

Yet virtual reality holds little interest for Pearson. He wants the real thing, and so does scientist Anders Sandberg. A member of the new transhuman movement (beyond human), Sandberg believes uploading minds and downloading them again into new bodies is a technology that's imminent
Anders Sandberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some like 80-year old Marvin Minsky, called the father of artificial intelligence, creator of artificial neural networks and the co-founder of the AI lab at MIT, believes the general masses haven't a clue about how to handle immortality,

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City to a Jewish family,[1] where he attended The Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Harvard (1950) and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton (1954).[2] He has been on the MIT faculty since 1958. In 1959[3] he and John McCarthy founded what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being Carl Sagan.[4] Patrick Winston has also described Minsky as the smartest person he has ever met. Ray Kurzweil has referred to Minsky as his mentor.

"I think it very likely -in fact inevitable-that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe."
Paul Davies -acclaimed physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist at Arizona State University."

Thats quite a consensus from acclaimed physicists, and PHD holding scientists.............

I could post an entire page of links showing brain scanning technology works but a couple of examples should suffice

Mind-reading scan identifies simple thoughts - health - 26 May 2011 - New Scientist

'Mind-reading device' recreates what we see in our heads - Telegraph

The idea this stuff is far fetched sci fi is simply not true, Its the reality and its the future

And while i cant see what kimmy has posted, since he is still on ignore i dont doubt its the same pattern of unsubstantiated denial and pompus dismissal that is his SOP here.

The reader will therefore have to weigh up the opinion of a person who believes without any proof that a god man was born of a virgin and could magically transmute water to wine, against the opinions of these degree holding scientists...............
 
Well, I wouldn't presume to question the credentials of many very, very intelligent and even brilliant people, and I have read Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near, and I, like he does, certainly think that technology will keep growing and growing to things I can't even begin to envision.

I do think Kurzweil is way far out with the nanotechnology stuff. Again, I don't presume to know enough to make grand predictions, but for me that's my point: that the brain emulation stuff, downloading our consciousness, our brain functions into computers, creating an artificial intelligence that has consciousness, all this stuff is SO FAR, FAR into the future in my opinion. Not that research shouldn't go on.

Kurzweil also, if I remember some stuff right I read long ago, has mentioned some scheme to reconstruct his dead father and download his brain into, well, I just remember something along those lines. And then there's the idea I remember he brought up about having himself frozen after his death, again, I don't remember the details, but..............

I have read some pretty critical rebuttals of Kurzweil: Susan Greenfield and Stuart Hameroff, respected researchers into the nature of consciousness, have disputed some of his thinking.

I read all of Mike's post, and was actually enjoying it, and I know most of it by far is just cut and paste, but I was enjoying it. Then I got to what he himself actually wrote, the part about me.

I thought I'd written a good review of the book Mike brought up in his thread, Stephen Cave's book, which I just read about a week ago. I had actually read it, and yes, the review is pretty tongue in cheek, but I really did not like the book at all, just my opinion, and I thought it was very poorly and pretentiously done. I don't think Mike has read the book at all. I don't think he's really read anything by Ray Kurzweil. In fact, I don't think he reads much at all. After his bringing that uncalled for personal attack into this thread, I feel I have a right to at least point that out. But I know, I'm on ignore, which is probably easier for him. Kim
 
Whopsie i made the mistake of browsing the forum without logging in and and caught kimbo's latest intellectual pants soiling.............

His ignorance is matched only by his pomposity and arrogance.
This from the man who insisted i live in england and that jesus , with a wave of his hands turned water into wine...

most of it by far is just cut and paste,

Yes we have heard this criticism before and a Mod has even pointed out the absurdity of the argument, this is the internet, we are discussing data found on the internet.
Kim would have you all stop cuting and pasting links for discussion, as they are irrelevant.
Instead buy yourself a few good books and a scanner, and upload the contents as scanned......
Since kim is sadly locked in the past and the musty old book paradigm, thats the only data source he considers valid.

He cites the critical rebuttals of Susan Greenfield

she has been criticised by Dr Ben Goldacre for claiming that technology has adverse effects on the human brain, without having undertaken any research or properly evaluating available evidence

And
Stuart Hameroff

his theories were sharply criticized by Lawrence Krauss, among others

But this, like his arrogant assertion i was english

In fact, I don't think he reads much at all

Is like the rest of his feeble arguments, DESTROYED by this

001-17.jpg


I couldnt fit my entire library into the shot, notwithstanding all my technical manuals are in another room entirely

I can honestly state that the number of books in this pic i havent read could be counted on a single hand. and those purchased in the last few weeks or so.
From shakespere to the russian masters (tolstoy, chekhov, dostoevsky) to name but 3.
Comparative theology, and several shelves of ufology, botany psychology and law
From dog training to herbalism, History Art and otherwise.
Enhanced by an eidetic memory..............

And his argument contrary to people with credentials up the wazzo ?

what sheer pablum. It's equivalent to one of the literal definitions of that word: a cereal you spoon into your baby's mouth

Oh well , sounds legit. im convinced.......NOT

The internet is a far larger and more up to date source of data than his musty old, out of date books, but clearly suffering a bad baaaad case of mental diarrhoea he would suggest to the rest of us that cuting and pasting such data is worthless.

Dont bother posting (via cut and paste) links anymore folks, kim wants you to find some out of date perhaps even out of print book and refer to that as a source.

Because such Anachronisms are all he can relate to as valid.........

Speaks volumes doesnt it
 
I will leave the "cut and paste vs whole cloth" argument to others.

The notion that ufos and other paranormal phenomena are immortal manifestations of once biological sentients is a worthwhile take. But I don't think we are close to knowing enough about the interaction of mind with matter to make valid predictions about our species' future. I defer to the experts. I am betting their opinions will vary wildly.


Would the design and creation of an artificial intelligence we could regard as sentient move us closer to the ability to transfer an individuated human consciousness to another medium? We cannot say. And the layman like myself gets the impression that true AI is proving to be a tougher nut to crack than was originally believed.

I'm not sure what is meant by the term "substrate independent". Any conscious process arising from operations in a physical medium would still be based on a substrate, silicon or otherwise. Perhaps the term "substrate variant" might apply. But I am now splitting hairs.

A "biological to other medium" theory to explain the paranormal spectrum is intuitively very appealing. We might consider methods by which to test and evaluate it, either by experiment or some kind of meta-analysis. (don't ask me how!)

It seems hard to imagine a big brained monkey with opposable thumbs as the paragon of creation--or evolution.

An afterthought--Would transferring sentience to a non-biological medium result in behaviors we would regard as irrational--i.e. Tricksterish?
 
This is very thoughtful commentary here.

The notion that ufos and other paranormal phenomena are immortal manifestations of once biological sentients is a worthwhile take. But I don't think we are close to knowing enough about the interaction of mind with matter to make valid predictions about our species' future. I defer to the experts. I am betting their opinions will vary wildly.


Would the design and creation of an artificial intelligence we could regard as sentient move us closer to the ability to transfer an individuated human consciousness to another medium? We cannot say. And the layman like myself gets the impression that true AI is proving to be a tougher nut to crack than was originally believed.

I'm not sure what is meant by the term "substrate independent". Any conscious process arising from operations in a physical medium would still be based on a substrate, silicon or otherwise. Perhaps the term "substrate variant" might apply. But I am now splitting hairs.

A "biological to other medium" theory to explain the paranormal spectrum is intuitively very appealing. We might consider methods by which to test and evaluate it, either by experiment or some kind of meta-analysis. (don't ask me how!)

It seems hard to imagine a big brained monkey with opposable thumbs as the paragon of creation--or evolution.

An afterthought--Would transferring sentience to a non-biological medium result in behaviors we would regard as irrational--i.e. Tricksterish?

I think it might look on biological intellect the same way we do the other animals,

As acclaimed physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist Paul Davies says

"I think it very likely -in fact inevitable-that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe."
Paul Davies -acclaimed physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist at Arizona State University."​

I think there would have to be a sense of superiority only natural from this pov.

Perhaps such a post biological intellect would look at us like we do food animals......... a lower lifeform and not worthy of too much consideration
 
The notion that ufos and other paranormal phenomena are immortal manifestations of once biological sentients is a worthwhile take

I think it COULD be the key.

Imo looking at the data through this filter, a lot of things suddenly make sense

biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe."

he believes, is that digital immortality is the next stage of human evolution

If, and i say IF we do it..................... what then are the chances a non human biological intellect would do the same ?

Its the logical expression of the survival instinct, our very own species is chasing the prize right here right now

Singularity University: meet the people who are building our future

Take top thinkers from Silicon Valley and science, mix them with scientists, innovators and philanthro-capitalists, and you've got the Singularity University – on a mission to seek technological solutions to the world's great challenges

It's day one at the Singularity University: the opening address has just been delivered by a hologram. Craig Venter, who was one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome and created the first synthetic life form, is up next. And later, we will see two people, paralysed from the waist down, use robotic exoskeletons to rise up and walk.
 
Perhaps such a post biological intellect would look at us like we do food animals......... a lower lifeform and not worthy of too much consideration

Quite possibly. But if so, why do they seem to have paid so much attention to "us" throughout human history? Or perhaps their presence here would be considered very slight on a cosmic scale. Or--does transitioning to a different medium have inherent tradeoffs leaving post-biologicals in need of something we still have? There is room for wide speculation.
 
Team | Singularity Institute

Singularity Institute

Thats some serious minds chasing this prize

Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. Magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included him as one of the 16 "revolutionaries who made America," along with other inventors of the past two centuries. As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray has worked in such areas as music synthesis, speech and character recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, and cybernetic art. He was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. All of these pioneering technologies continue today as market leaders. His website, KurzweilAI.net, has over one million readers. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office. Ray has also received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. His books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Three of his books have been national best sellers. His latest best-selling book, published by Viking Press, is The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

I'll stake his 12 honary doctorates against kims "god made it" philosophy anyday

I think you'll find his negative attitude comes from this place

Human cloning: It’s the soul, stupid!

The very idea that we could create a technological mechanism that will actually deliver the goods a supernatural ,superstitious mechanism can not...... offends ppl like him
 
Quite possibly. But if so, why do they seem to have paid so much attention to "us" throughout human history? Or perhaps their presence here would be considered very slight on a cosmic scale. Or--does transitioning to a different medium have inherent tradeoffs leaving post-biologicals in need of something we still have? There is room for wide speculation.

But have they ?
has the level of attention been any greater than that we give a herd of cattle ?

A distant and disconnected stewardship, with the harvest of the product of value, (in this case sentient conciousness) the goal.

Like cattle the quality of the meat product is more important than the overall "happiness" of the animal as it matures.

A chicken in a battery farm cage wont get a broken wing seen to by a vet, its just not that important in the big picture.

And thats the point i want to make, is that from a post biological pov biological existance itself becomes a trivial matter, the trials and tribulations of biological existance wont seem relevant to a post biological mindset

Like looking at an ant farm

Yes they are alive, yes they are interesting, but they just dont have that DEPTH of existance we ,the next level up do
 
And thats the point i want to make, is that from a post biological pov biological existance itself becomes a trivial matter, the trials and tribulations of biological existance wont seem relevant to a post biological mindset

There is a certain logical consistency to this argument. This would mean that we are incapable of, or not allowed to see the larger picture and that humans will never see it.

Alas, we are once again in a very gray basket.
 
I don't know. At first glance this reminds me of the suspended animation craze of the 50's and 60's. For one thing although we have many people here with different opinions the truth is that consciousness is not solved and is not proven to be a result of the firings of organic matter. It's also not proven to be the human soul. So, I don't think we are very close at all to downloading and making a complete transfer of a individual. What would be the difference in simply saying it's a computer program or a robot instead of the actual person you are you are making a copy of? Isn't it really just a copy or program? You can program my name and favorite sports teams into a computer program but that still won't be me. I also am on Kurweil's mailing list and he is a very interesting character. I would love to have a cup of coffee or a beer with him. But, I'm not convinced of his theories. I did read some of the Tipler book. It got a little to convoluted and the physics were a little over my head. Anyway, interesting stuff both from Kurweil and Tipler and I'm not buying either. ;) But, that might be simply that I don't understand all I need to know or it might be because it's b.s.
 
Mike, I'll address you personally since you have brought all this here now, too, even in your own thread.

I thought I deserved a bit of indulgence in pointing out that I don't think you read too much. I don't. Was a reason for saying it that you personally attacked me yet again? Yes, partially so.

But I do get frustrated that Stephen's Cave book, which you used to begin this thread, and which I reviewed negatively on its own merits (or lack of them), which review was of course my own opinion, was a book you have not read. The personal attack you initiated made me want to point out a frustration with you. You do mostly cut and paste, and I think read very, very few if any of the actual books that all the stuff you cut and paste mention, or very, very little about the scientists and scholars your cut and paste mentions, or let what you cut and paste lead you to open the door and search, say, on amazon, for books about the very subjects of what you cut and paste about.

Your posts above are attacks on me personally. I have been very frustrated on other threads in which you overwhelm with cut and paste but offer little comment based on books you have actually read. I recommend a lot of books here, not to be pompous or pretentious, it's just what I love to do, read. So it was not really much of a coincidence that the review you posted of Cave's book was of a book I had just read. It has been out only a little while, and I've read it. It was a very quick read, I thought it was pablum, as I said, and I reviewed it because it was brought up on a thread.

I have different perspectives from you on what Tyder refers to so well, this "suspended animation," "downloading and making a complete transfer of an individual," "computer programming" of the human brain. Those are his phrases, and very well put. I've said in my posts on this thread that that stuff is so incredibly far into the future that scientists who think it could be accomplished in a decade or so are way off the mark.

I said that, Mike, because I have read a lot, a real lot, about the research into human consciousness, and even the consciousness of other animals. That's why I was able to say right off the top of my head that Susan Greenfield and Stuart Hameroff had vehemently disputed Kurzweil's claims. You remember that it was you who brought up Kurzweil. I didn't see you mention that you'd read any of his books. I have, and commented on him based on that. You respond with personal attacks and attacks, again, on, well it's clear from your posts what gets you so worked up.

You then "refute" Greenfield and Hameroff with specific cut and paste against them, SPECIFICALLY MENTIONING merely that so and so refuted Greenfield and so and so refuted Hameroff. No mention that you had actually READ any of it YOURSELF. The capitals are indeed mine.

I have actually read the so and so and so and so that you just throw out there, but have not read yourself.

I want to make clear that cut and paste and links can be a good tool, but when they replace independent and personal research, reading, and studying, WHICH REQUIRE SOME REAL EFFORT, but which also give great pleasure, Mike, they become overwhelming and actually make it clear that the person who does that much of it nearly exclusively has not done much reading of actual books himself.

In fact, I've used links here. They can be illuminating. I know I'm on ignore, but you might want to read my posts numbers 153 and 170 in the thread "Thoughts on Religion," where I point out the similarity between some cartoons in a website you linked to and some actual historical posters about the same thing those cartoons disgustingly (in my opinion) pointed out. I merely noted the similarity between the cartoons on a website you referred us to on a public forum and some posters from the twenties and thirties in Germany in my posts. Those posters in Germany were also posted in a public forum, and they were reprehensible, as I think the cartoons on the website you linked to are, and those cartoons are, though seemingly cleverly done, perpetuate things that have been used against that group for a long, long time and which still are. I DO NOT maintain that you hold any of these beliefs, but linking to that website, your comments in other posts, and you specifically mentioning things you found on this website regarding this group went beyond a discussion of religion. I think you probably did see my posts and follow the links, because subsequent diatribes afterwards focused on just the dreaded Christians and left the Jews alone. And then the thread was closed.

I think, and I know this sounds pretentious and pompous, Mike, that you have a certain style of posting, and I think you can make some very good and insightful observations on many things. Then, something terrible happened from your perspective. You picked a subject, religion, that you know little about, and I stress that my focus on those threads were on FACTS and HISTORY regarding religion. And, I will say that you picked the wrong guy to argue with. I tried to remain on the facts, we both got personal at times, but the extent to which you personally attacked me and still do, and the extent to which you attacked Christians and Jews, most of whom are wonderful people (PAST and PRESENT!), went way, way over the line. You found this enraging, not that I wasn't angry at times, too, but I do think I let my better nature prevail. You have not. You exhibit some very bullying behavior, I think, and when you picked a guy who frankly was more educated (and I don't mean that just in terms of education meaning college degrees; I think many people without are more educated than those who have degrees), you found yourself floundering helplessly in a sea of knowledge you had never so much as dipped your toe into. I know how that sounds, but I believe it, and I don't think I make a leap of faith when I say that you were essentially exposed for your bullying and for your lack of study and reading, and that didn't go down well. Kim
 
OH boy, let me say this and I think some other posters might agree. I do understand where you are coming from Kim. Nobody likes to see their faith and honest search for meaning treated like a pile of excrement. However, the dialog between you and Mike should now be done on a PM level. Otherwise this will never cease. I ignored (except for a couple of clever posts) ;) being called a retard simply because it's offensive and wrong. But, sometime you do better to let you post (they are there for everyone to see) speak for themselves than to get into mud slinging. Simply outshouting somebody or getting a bunch of buds to join you in an attack still doesn't make you right. But, I do urge you to either talk to Mike personally or if he doesn't want to do that then leave it alone. But, I'm not telling either of you what to do. I'm simply putting some thoughts out there. I find that when I have PM''d a couple of folks here I get more civil and better understanding of issues than I do when I indulge in shouting and "gotcha's." Just an observation and yes, you absloutely did hold your own and then some on the historical facts of Jesus walking the earth. But, I also found that when you and Stonehart discussed things it got quite interesting. Both of you bring much to the table. But, once the mud started to fly it got really, really tedious to read those threads.
 
Seriously, Angelo, I agree with you. I've tried stopping this stuff with him, very directly and accommodatingly, but you see how this is perpetuated by him. I came into this thread because I was interested in the topic, as is evidenced by my participation in other threads about the brain and consciousness, and because i'd read a book brought up in it. Mike keeps getting profane and very, very personally contemptuous. I know I come across as lecturing, but you know, I'm reading threads between you and pixel smith that get pretty lecturing on your part when you yourself are confronted with someone who takes positions on issues like global warming and vaccination. I happen to agree with you on those issues, hands down. But you are no innocent in lecturing someone who in my opinion does some of what mike does. Very frustrating,isn't it? I don't disagree with the basic stuff you are saying, but, man, have I tried to end this with him, and his attacks are personal against me, and against groups of people. And no, they are not discussion about religion. They are personal and vile, and I wonder if you've sent him an email, too. Have you? I want this to stop too, and I went into this thread to review a specific book and because the subject interested me. So, I have to check every thread to see if mike started it or if mike posted to it, or if I may be mentioning something he mentioned, and avoid it? That seems the clear message to me in your email to me, and that is unfair to demand, but it's clear to me that's what you want me to do. I did not deserve the personal attacks he made in this thread, and you are clearly demanding a high level of self censorship of me. But it's ok to link to a website with vile stuff about the Jews, and I just point out the similarity between those cartoons about usury and vile posters about usury. That's ok with you, along with his other disgusting diatribes. You should be sending him an email saying STOP IT! I'm willing to do that, but I can't censor myself when I see that a book I've just read is mentioned in a thread because, oh no, mike started the thread, or mike is in the thread. Kim
 
I wonder what a forum would be like where the ideas were the main focus instead of the personalities espousing them?

The whole beyond the biological argument boils down to this for me. You are supposedly taking information (the consciousness) from a human being by some extraction method and copying it to another medium of some sort like a positronic brain or something. Even if it were perfect the best you would have is a manufactured copy of the original. It would not be anything like the original in anything but the most abstract sense of the word. Will humanity manufacture artificial replacements for themselves that mimic human beings to the extent that some believe that some sort of immortality can be obtained by such means? It's a chilling thought and not something I would look forward to occurring.
 
Although we have different views of consciousness that was well said T.O. ;) Angel, ya know Kim does have a point. I remember you saying waaay back that people shouldn't disrespect Muslims or try to sterotype Islam. Yet, the you have not publically had a problem with Mike cursing people (even a host for gosh sakes) :eek: and calling people names. I have had some good conversations with Mr. Mike and hope to again. But, this religious vile silly stuff needs to stop. ON Both Sides!
Peace,
Steve
 
I agree with you tyder, and I've discussed this in PM's with some people. With regards to mike's comment towards one of the hosts? That's not my battle since it was directed towards a different moderator.
 
Back
Top