> Alex Williams wrote:
[CLIP]
> > (Extra points: Differentiate your above virtual psychotic from someone
> > that believes in reincarnation.)
>
> Most of the people who believe in reincarnation, as part of their religion,
> tend to be fairly peace orientated, as one group (and I think it's Bhuddism,
> but I'm ot sure), believe that you come back as an animal, so you have to
> be nice to animals. Others believe that if you're bad in life, you get demoted,
> so to speak, to a lower level of humanity, but if you better yourself then
> you get promoted. The probelm is that if you are so bad, you become an
> "untouchable", or something, and you can never escape from that situation.
>
> I have thought about re-incarnation, and figured it would be nice if it were
> true. It all comes down to this thing we call a "soul", IMO. If your soul
> really is a spiritual thing, then it *must* live on after the body dies.
> I'm not sure I believe that, but I can't prove it. If, on the other hand,
> the soul is just a lucky combination of chemicals, which form a thing called
> your soul. Is it synonymous with consciousness? I don't know.
Why is there this flying assumption that a "soul" must be "spiritual"?
I've mentioned this before:
I consider computers to operationally have "souls". [They have somewhat
more reliable memories than I do, and can be instructed to do
interesting chains of reasoning.]
I have yet to see evidence that they operationally have "spirits".
[Areas where breakthrough might occur, and falsify this, are Turing-human
programs and Genetic Algorithm metaprograms. The former goes for
consciousness, the latter for self-programming.]
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
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/ Kenneth Boyd
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