I am glad to have landed into your thread here, dear Macdog.
Please stay calm with me, don't go blowing up your stack at me, again.
Here is my contribution to your thread, which is a reproduction of my contribution earlier to that thread of Joydfox on
Why I think aging should be fixed first.
I thought that from my stock reading, genetic engineering and genetic medicine will get rid for man such troubles as diseases and aging and death.
But it does not render man invulnerable to extramural agents of destruction like a bullet coming at you from a gun that can decommission a rhinoceros.
Genetic engineering, genetic medicine, and cloning will fulfill their promises of keeping us biologically alive indefinitely or even restore our biological life if we have the misfortune to suffer biological demise. But I like to bring our attention to the preceding paragraph, how do we save ourselves from extramural agents of destruction.
Turn ourselves into mechanical entities, they can last longer or they are much more durable, very much tougher, than biological systems.
Considering that what makes us peculiarly human is our rationality, then we can dispense with all the biology needed to keep biologically functional and alive.
Produce a memory machine which can acquire more memory of everything in the universe and of an individual person himself, say, Susma; make this machine capable of manipulating memory data, exactly you are correct, like the computer I am actually using now, only it can operate of itself, from itself, on itself, by itself, in itself, and for itself. What do you have now, what else but a person, an identity, a self.
This is a human self, if it is loaded with all the memory database of Susma, even though it is not biological. And this mechanical version of Susma will be rid of all the diseases and aging of the biological Susma, and do everything Susma is doing that is essentially and distinctively human, namely, rational operations.
I mean that the search for immortality or restoration of an individual human existence, mark that word, existence and not life, is best consigned to engineers and technicians. In which case we should not be properly speaking searching for immortality, but for indefinitely endurable existence or even restorable existence for man in his essentially distinct character of a rational being.
Susma
what do you think, isn't the mechanization of the human entity a sure countermeasure to the avalanche coming of the Carter Catastrophe?
And please, again, don't blow your stack on me, for this contribution, which in my most sincere heart and mind is certainly on-topic.
Susma