You go on with this ‘new clone = new me!’ nonsense and then literally disprove it with the next sentence, ya goof.
Nerp. You are the goof. And goof is in the data transferred from your brain.
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The goof is part of the baggage. doesn’t mean I’m the same me.
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Especially since (and moving this here to preserve the relative sanity of that thread) we’ve managed to avoid the truly horrific corollary to your question… which I will now invoke:
When do the ends justify… the memes?
I say never. Absolutely never.
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Memes are an end justified unto themselves.
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They’re only justified when they’re firmly behind the gate that prevents Mr. Galente from viewing them.
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Yes? But in a “This is awesome and wonderful” kind of way, not a “this defies all rational sense, must be divinity” way
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Theoretically, given the right technology, you could build one from scratch. Nothing mystical needed.
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Which? A god? A soul? A functioning human mind in an artificial brain? A meme? 
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Creating a new mind in the wetware is a lot like editing DNA. We have the tech to ‘edit’ DNA, sure… but we don’t have the tech to engineer it properly. Just to try a couple of things and see what the effects are.
The Jove, the acknowledged masters of genetic engineering in New Eden, couldn’t cure the condition they inadvertently caused with genetic engineering. If they couldn’t… do you really think we can build from the ground up?
Building an infomorph from the ground up is worse, near as I can tell—as I am not a cyberneurological engineer. It involves an insane amount of recursion. It’s how the brain grew. Yes, we know what the major regions of the brain are and what they do, but… follow me on this one… there’s variation in the exact positioning of each neuron.
The position of each neuron impacts the time signals take to travel between them. Yes, it is a mind-bogglingly small variance, but that variance matters. That variance accretes with every step along the route. That variance changes with different chemical conditions, which vary based on mood, and which cause mood variance as they change. The chemical history of each neuron matters, because that chemical history is part of the building-blocks of memory, and what associations are built into what signal routings to produce ‘this memory saddens me’ and ‘this memory calms me’.
And each of those chemical histories is constantly rewriting itself, because you remember remembering things. You can associate a memory with the original event… and you can associate the same memory with ‘yeah, I remember when I was talking to Bob about this’ and have completely different emotional associations on those. And each and every one of those histories is affecting you at every moment, in conscious associations, subconscious associations, theoretical associations (‘well, if I do X…’).
And that’s before we get into ‘which neurons connect to which other neurons in which directions?’ Remember: all of this: how the brain grows, what connections neurons make, what chemical conditions are present when a connection is made, what conditions are present when a specific route is first imprinted, etc etc etc… they’re all dependent on what is happening around the brain. Life, and the rest of the universe, all affects how your brain continues to re-engineer itself throughout your lifetime.
There are 3 billion base pairs in human DNA. 3 billion. The whole thing.
There are 100 billion neurons in your brain.
In the ‘Build a working body’ vs ‘Build a working brain’ complexity battle… the body is nothing. And we can’t really do that right, yet.
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Our technology should be better than our technology? Eh?
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Funny how there almost seems to be a season for this sort of thing.
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Interestingly as a matter of public record, that mediocre ganker alone has 1/6th of the vessels destroyed that CONCORD has ever recorded Vigilant Tyrannos responsible for. Shouldn’t we start classifying her as an emerging threat?
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For example the Sisters of EVE classify indie capsuleers in general as an emerging threat, and CONCORD’s recent comments about “meddling degenerates” suggests they do the same. So they’ve got it covered.
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…i hadn’t thought of that. Good point.
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Interestingly, Captain Rhiannon, the ‘meddling degenerates’ came from the Empire’s representative to the Inner Circle, not a CONCORD apparatchik.
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Captain Marshal Sirdan xer Qosh telling it like it is, as he always does. I appreciate that man.
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Well, fellow meddling degenerate, I must say this: when someone exclaims loudly that they are not afraid of a thing, it usually means that they certainly are.
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They should be. We are terrifying, and a threat to the cluster.
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I marvel at your capacity for self-loathing.
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I think you may be conflating your religion with broader Matari spiritualities.
- The Elders don’t embody the tribes. They represent the leadership of the tribes as they once were, in ancient times, as it’s trickled down to today. Most of us think of them as very specific nature spirits rather than gods.
- Stark isn’t meant to be anyone’s ideal, and neither are the other Elders. In fact, they’re incredibly flawed. As I understand it, the Amarrian God is supposed to be perfect and possess perfect understanding of all things; for the Elders, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Their mysticism mostly comes from the fact that (according to our beliefs) they are the collection of millennia of learning and suffering, which is more than we mere humans have, but still nowhere near perfect.
- Generally we don’t assign any particular responsibilities to the Elders. We don’t expect them to answer us or appear before us when we call, and we don’t expect them to reveal themselves to us. That’s why with their being gone for so long, no one was really surprised (highly distressed, but not really surprised). But we were super surprised and thrilled when they showed up with their Fleet, because as of modern times, they don’t really do stuff like that.
As a note, as well, not every spiritual Matari approaches the Elders in the same way; there are tribal and clan and personal differences. But I think this covers it in broad strokes.
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