Maybe that might have more to do with how often we’re paid to kill large numbers of people, my lady?
Yes, indeed, but I believe this goes hand in hand with us being able to cheat death. We do get offered these contracts because it is easier for capsuleers to accept them. It is easier for capsuleers because they do not risk their lives.
Ah-- respectfully, my lady, it might also a little bit be because an experienced capsuleer with a battleship (never mind a marauder) is essentially an autonomous weapon of mass destruction that more or less casually kills entire conventional fleets.
Not having to fear too much for our own lives makes it easier to be reckless, it’s true. But it’s not as though people throughout history (aristocratic military commanders being a common example) haven’t played casually with other people’s lives whether their own was at risk or not.
So, technically, we’re all ghosts.
A ghost is created when a person’s body dies and the spirit is severed from it, but no final rites are performed, and/or the living are unwilling to let the deceased go.
While a ghost might be initially well-meaning and benign, it is ohnesh for it to exist, and so the separation from the true human plane of existence will slowly drive it into darker forms, creating a vengeful spirit of aggression, or a sinister haunt that’ll corrupt what it touches.
So, yea.
We’re all ghosts.
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Aaaaand that’s what the Quantum-Entangled Helium-4 is for.
Or we can challenge you to demonstrate any evidence that this ‘soul’ thing exists. Inserting an un-observed thing without any compelling evidence that it must exist is, after all, bad science.
I never said I agree or disagree if a soul exists.
Go back and reread what I was responding to.
‘You’ in the general sense, not you, specifically.
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For my part (and I think you knew this, Arrendis, but I’ll repeat it for others), the “soul” is a sort of broad, all-encompassing version of who a person is, the total history-- every life touched, every person harmed or aided, every meal eaten, every insect stepped on, every stone disturbed. It’s sort of the overall picture of a person, construed absolutely as far as possible: the full tapestry of a life.
Obviously I don’t see this as much disturbed by cloning, since a “soul” applies holistically to a person’s history and influence in and on the world. Minor discontinuities aren’t so important, relative to, like, whether you’re more apt to aid a desperate person or kick him.
To me, the more “spiritual” version of a soul as a sort of separate spirit-self is most useful as a shorthand or metaphor for this, since in practice the concepts tend to track pretty well.
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How fascinating. From the very clinical view of Arrendis to the more morally tied stance of Erica Munory about it, all of you helped me to get a much broader sight about this.
I used the word “soul”, maybe I shouldn’t have, because it is a word heavy of many significances.
What I try to catch is this intangible thing that makes us, well, us, and that I feel deeply above me.
Now, the technical side of our capsuleer mind transfer interests me. I’m not at all an neurostuff engineer and don’t have the start of any idea how that may work, but. It still seems mysterious to some. Does the quantum nature of the process make it instantaneous? And if some time occurs, even a fraction, at this moment, when we are “flying” towards our next incarnation, is it possible that we travel through some sort of a superior level of being? And, in a more mundane manner, is possible that this flow of information that is “us” may be altered or damaged, given some conditions, while retaining a link to what is maybe a soul? Maybe not. Maybe all what I feel is the result of the conjonction of these past memories and my new flesh.
I’m an amnesiac. Something went wrong for me during a transfer, and during the subsequent ones. Hence, well, my questions, because I still feel (or maybe just imagine?) a strong link to something I can’t grasp. I will have to be carefull not to loose the knowledge you all gave me here. Good thing it is inscribed in the marble of the IGS.
Strikingly, Aria Jenneth told us of her experience. If I understood well, she went through a change during a transfer, and she’s been someone else since. But she does still feel a strong link towards her past self. Why?
I guess that now, I will try to get some insights from Amarrians theologians and Minmatar shamans. Or just read books and holodatas in recluse libraries. Maybe I should start by Minmatar, because I fear how Amarrians may react to my questions.
Because I’m not the sort of amnesiac who has to wonder much about who she was, and my first reaction on finding out was to pray I’d turn out actually to be someone relatively righteous and upstanding instead. Like a clonejacker.
Some sins aren’t cleansed just because they’re forgotten, Ms. Nazka. I’m a kinslayer, someone who murdered family. Family is important most places, but especially in the State, and on Achura. A kinslayer’s about the worst thing an Achur can be, short of an actual traitor.
So even if my prior self, my “predecessor,” had led a pretty quiet life, she’d have cast a long shadow over mine. And she didn’t remotely lead a quiet life.
Please excuse me if brought back some things hard to deal with. I would, of course, have a lot a questions to ask you, but maybe this place is not the right place.
I heard here about the importance of ancestors (which opens a whole new perspective about the soul by itself). Would you say your Achur lineage and culture make you feel redevable about the bad actions of your past self? (feel free to tell me to piss of - you would have all the rights to do so)
All Hydrostatic Capsules have a ultrahigh gain FTL burst broadcast array for the transmission of captured neural data. So when a breach is detected the Transneural Echo Burn Scanner (TEBS) activates and in a less than five picoseconds two things happen.
Firstly, the hardware completes a highly destructive deep neural scan of the capsuleer’s skull, recording the status of every neuron within their brain, along with all vital medical statistics including blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen level. The pilot is then euthanized with a direct 10 milliliter injection of a methylmercury-based neurotoxin to the adrenal cortex.
Secondly, the entire data package, which can be several petabytes in size, is burst transmitted to the capsuleer’s cloning facility.
Now we have covered how the information is recorded we need to know how it is transmitted, the answer being, Fluid Routers, Quantum entangled superfluid 4-Helium basically two atoms are paired and no matter the distance can communicate.
Entangled 4-Heluum is placed into sperate fluid boxes containing the necessary equipment to encode and decode bytestream into quantum state measurements. So at its basic level a byte of information is mapped on an initial condition of the logistic map leading to a chaotic attractor. This noisy sequence is then used to modulate the measurements done on a sequence of entangled particles. At the same time on the other side, measurements are made on the particles and a noise sequence is extracted. Maximum entropy analysis is then done to determine the initial condition from which this series has been generated and thus map it back to a given byte of information. Note that in this case, the noisy sequence sent is totally uncorrelated to the one measured. What they do have in common is to be from the same chaotic attractor, and that is the information that actually gets transmitted instantly, regardless of distance.
Your ship usually has a pair, one for incoming another for outgoing, all stations and stargates are also recorded and it can be sent directly to one of theae to make use of the greater amount of fluid Routers available.
hopefully this has explained it all pretty standard material during capsuleer training, usually this is pretty instantaneous so while we have transcended to where are consciousness exists as data what we experience while this is happening is limited
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Thanks alot for your technical knowledge, which by what you say, must be standard by capsuleer training, which, sadly, I don’t remember.
Now I think I should seek advice from scientists (beside mystics) like you (?) to find my soul (or not).
When I became a capsuleer, a couple of my cousins tried to organize a funeral for me. I was actually more amused and planned to crash it, but the clan elders shut it down hard. Elder Koren told me something that stuck with me:
“The spirit will find its way home, as long as you leave the door open”.
Some capsuleers eventually forget their lives from before they were in the pod. Others don’t. I think what matters is putting in the effort to maintain your identity. If you don’t, then eventually your spirit doesn’t recognize you anymore. For some capsuleers, I think losing who they were before is a bonus. But not for me.
Maybe it’s because I’ve only died once (the graduation euthanasia), but I’m as certain as anything that I am Arya Chernovar, not just some ghoulish approximation of her. And I never want to forget that. Because if I’m not Arya Chernovar, then who the hell am I?
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It’s possible to be both, lovely.
And more.
You are. Just not the one that died. There’s nothing particularly ghoulish about that, it’s just… you know, a technicality. For all intents and purposes, so far as anyone who isn’t the Arya Chernovar who was euthanized, you’re the same person. You fill the same role in their lives, provide the same responses, same emotional support, etc etc.
It’s kind of like the ages-old question of ‘Do we have Free Will?’ More and more, the conscious mind is shown not to be what’s making decisions, only what’s coming up with justifications for them (Maybe even the right ones!), an illusionary construct for comprehension, not control. But no matter how we try, we’ll never really demonstrate that there’s no Free Will… and we’ll never really demonstrate their is. So the best way forward is to live your life as though you do have Free Will, because if you don’t, then you were always going to, anyway. 
Similarly… be you. Don’t stress over whether you are the you you were ten years ago. You’re not. That’d be true even if you were an uncloned baseliner: people change. They grow. The way they think evolves. So one way or another, you wouldn’t be that person anymore. But more importantly… being you is literally the only option you have. Even if you decide to be someone else, that’s still you. There’s only ever the present, and we have to live the lives we find ourselves in right now.
Just be you. That’s far more important than trying to work out how ‘you’ you are.
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That was a very long way of saying…