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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35427 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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As for settling for "us but worse off"

Who wants to settle for "us but worse off?" I do not. But that's a political project, it's not a global humanitarian utopia or deus ex machina. It's civilization.

What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way. I must be frank, as immortalities go procreation is a mocking cope handed down by the blind idiot god of evolution as an afterthought.

How else are you going to achieve your immortality? Are you going to pray to Yahweh? Receive the eucharist? Or study machine learning in joyful hope for the coming of robot-Jesus Christ? All of those aspirational dreams are fine in their own, but if they are distracting you from realizing the actual potential of your own immortality, however limited, (or worse, if they are actively inspiring behavior that ensures the decline of your progeny) then that is what I would call pitiful and disgusting.

How else are you going to achieve your immortality?

It's a false assumption that procreation can even be called immortality. It's further from immortality than masturbation is from sex.

I agree with this. I like the idea of having kids for my own reasons but I find the idea that it's immortality as strange as people's claims that they wouldn't want immortality even with an escape clause if they eventually desired it. I can only model it as cope, trying to get into the head of someone who genuinely believes it is impossible for me.

I was riffing on your tongue-in-cheek reference reference to reproduction as a cheap immortality. I suppose it's more similar to reincarnation. In religious myth, the quality of your reincarnation is determined by your deeds in the current life. The same applies to reproduction. Breeding habits and mate selection have either beautiful or disastrous consequences based on how society is organized and how we behave on an individual basis.

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