YaDinghus

Haha you're right, I've been relying on my intuition for this statement. I couldn't find anything that conclusively supports it on short notice, but just because this emphasis is missing doesn't mean the rest of my contribution is wrong

1 includes 2. Ad 3 and 4: if you can freely move between devices, you could also squat in another device. The device isn't your body, but your home. You will most likely even cohabitate with other AI's in a server, paying rent for permission to be there. If the high-life happens in the simulated environment, which I would assume if we can simulate personalities, then a physical body to control is a luxury - imagine it being like your time share condo in Aspen. Freedom to move from one device to another at will also requires free communication. I'm assuming the information you gather as a digital personality on a daily basis is a negligible fraction of the personality core you wish to migrate from one device to another. Also the Government will want to push mainstream media on you to direct your opinion to a degree, because everyone can share whatever they like, and you know how wild social media are today with our slow brains propagating information and misinformation. A question I have for you is what kind of welfare do you mean? A digital person diesn't require extra chemical nourishment, they just need the processing power of the divice they're currently running on. Maybe they just get 1 THz allocated for their personality processes and have to pay extra rent to get extra processing power allocated?

I don't think the problem is society forcing anyone to study, especially women. It's not even forcing them to study, women seem much more interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake than men who seem more into knowledge for power's sake. The cruel thing societies do is making it harder to get their legs back up in professional life (Scandinavian countries and Austria are far more progressive in this matter than most others)

Ok here my 2 cents: There will always be powerful men, and beautiful women attracted to their power. There's nothing wrong with that as long as the women in question are really into it (the men obviously are). What I deem important is that women have the same opportunities as men. While it is conceivable, and possible, it probably most certainly does happen that women claim to having been raped when nothing happened. It should be as much of a concern as people casting illegal votes for the US presidency. If you didn't know: It hardly ever happens, despite all the fuss. If you're the victim of a fake rape accusation, chances are that you've done plenty of other despicable things that you weren't accused of. I'm not proposing that we convict anyone for crimes they didn't commit to pay for crimes they may have committed, just saying that they probably had it coming. I've heard stories of men who didn't like the attention they got from some women. I guess, since I am married and faithful to my spouse, I would feel harrassed if a woman followed me to my home or grabbed sensitive parts of my body after I told her it wasn't going to work out (I wouldn't have said that if I weren't in a stabile relationship). But while I don't know any men who've gotten this kind of unwanted attention personally, I know many women who have from men.

I like to think we humans are pretty adaptable - or adept at adapting our environment to our needs. However, I tend to agree that it's better to convert as much mass as possible into giant rotating habitats, than to colonize a planet. An earth-like planet's gravity well is a real barrier for space trade logistics, and once you've built an industry around creating space habitats, living space isn't a scarce commodity any more

Circular logic. Why would I care about anything or anyone I abuse, or abuse anything or anyone I care about? You're quite the cynic, aren't you? I think you want to say 'Engineered' in contrast to 'Grown'. Also, other animals than humans have cognition, so that's not particularly useful, either. Generally, I do agree that we humans perceive the suffering of beings that are more similar to ourselves as greater than of beings less similar to ourselves. Therefore, Human suffering is considered to be the most unbearable sight of all sufferings, which you interpret as Humans being the most important to Humans - actually, you even go so far as to say that only humans matter to humans. What I observe is that those humans that do abuse animals also abuse humans, because they lack empathy altogether. Humans with empathy are receptive to the plight of animals other than humans, but they have other problems in their lives to solve, as well, and protecting and nourishing your own is a valid priority over the life of a being not considered your family (direct reciprocity group, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(cultural_anthropology))

Ok so I took a few courses on anthropology in college, especially on developmental sociology and took a seminar on developmental aid. It is true that the initial aid projects did a lot of harm because they went into the field with very little research and a lot of very naïve assumptions. But they learned a lot from these mistakes, too. For good reasons, neither the people nor the governments trusted the aid organisations, because they were still wary of their colonial past and suspected an ulterior motive in these projects - and some of them indeed did (and still do) have ulterior motives. It didn't help that those giving aid were often arrogant, and disappointed that those they were trying to help seemed ungrateful for their efforts. Especially projects that gave natives employment saw a lot of footdragging from their native workers. A common hypothesis is that they again felt like they were working to further the goals of some rich person far away, and that this was benefiting the aid provider more than themselves. After all, their previous colonial lords handled them rather similarly, just with a lot more violence. Educating the people to a level where they might have been able to plan their own development projects led many of them to seeking opportunities in countries where their expertise would be more profitable, and thereby they supportet the dreaded brain drain in the countries they wanted to aid. We don't really need to talk about providing the local governments with money, because as mentioned in previous contributions, this only led to more oppressive governments and not more infrastructure investment, and war with their neighbours. Now that I've illustrated a few - certainly not all - problems, let me propose this: Make the people belive that they are working for themselves. If you just give them money, they will sqander it. If you LEND them money to build the business and projects THEY want to pursue, they will have a stake in it, and work for it. Your motive will be clear as you want to be paid back your money, so no ulterior motives to fear. They will themselves look for education (beyond the basic education provided to them in the missionary school), and they will use their skills to make it on their own. They might still go to a richer country and seek better profit opportunities there, and they will still need crisis relief until the entire economy is self sufficient, as these projects take time. It will also take up to three generations of constant growth to reduce the number of children born per woman below 3 (very thumby rule of thumb). Basically, you need to play a game of inception

Bill Nye saves the world, S1E1: one of the panelists, an engineer, claims the entire world energy consumption could be covered completely with regenerative energy. We have the technology and the resources. And it would only cost a few hundred billion dollars. The Gross World Product is in the vicinity of 100 trillion dollars. If we consider that it will take 10-20 years to realize this if we commit to this, it would be a negligible fraction of our global economic power.

I, personally, find spirituality overrated. Even if I didn't, I wouldn't define it by the food I eat. I mostly find spirituality overrated because self-proclaimed spiritualists are cruel to the humans they aim to convert to their philosphy.

my post seems ridiculous in the context of the present but if exact facsimiles of minds are embodied in some form of electronics, it's something that will have to be dealt with and will be philosophically challenging, as in 'what constitutes a 'person''. I am of the thought that the substrate that the mind emerges from is not important. Funny, not ridiculous ;-) and yes, that is where I was going with digital resurrection

Yes, I believe that society should accept 'high-quality men' wanting to make love to women significantly younger than them as long as it's consensual - which implies the woman can give their legal consent. I believe society should accept ALL love as long as the parties involved are consenting adults. OP's specific stipulation seems to be more of the norm than the exception, and society is usually very generous when it comes to accepting the norm. Side note: while being rich and famous, well educated and virgin are qualities in the sense of properties, they don't make anyone a better person or human.

I think you might want to crosslink this into the humour thread

Fair enough. I mean, some folks find clowns funny. ROFLOLMAO! Ok, now that that's out of my system, here goes: I love politically incorrect jokes. Not because I like laughing about people who are different - after all, I am quite eccentric myself - but because it's a digestible format of news on what the bigots who run the world hate

That's an interesting way of going about it. I would have characterized state-building insects as industrious, though not naturally or necessarily as industrial. In the context of your definition, we wouldn't need to look far for pre-human industrial societies, as state-building insects have been around for tens of millions of years. If we do however consider engines and engineering to be an essential part of the definition of industry, we might run into trouble again

Industry is an anthopocentric term to begin with, so there is only 'industry as we know it'

Switching off the computer would be like clocking someone over the head, rendering them inactive until their physical system is switched back on. Deleting the hard drive, however, could be considered murder in that case, but I for instance would be paranoid enough to keep multiple backups in discrete locations. We constantly pay the energy bill for our lives. Depending on your size, you consume 100-150 Watts on average, with peaks up to 800 Watts or more, depending on your physical strength. You go to work (I assume) to pay for your food, housing, transportation, and whatnotelse. As a digital entity, housing would be digital space, food would be electricity, transportation would be your network access (which you need now, too, to read and contribute on this forum). What rights a conscious digital entity (which I will refer to as a CDE in this context) would have? Ideally, the same rights as any biological human. Since it is likely that the rich and powerful will have access to this kind of technology first, they will also likely lobby for their own rights if they choose to go down this path.

There's not only the possibility of biological resurrection to be considered, but also digital resurrection. I personally would take any kind of resurrection if my sense of self is restored

OK. Good point. Ok so let's 'sculpt' an industrial society that has as little impact on the environment as possible and see what they would leave behind for scientists in the future to find.

Well, yeah, that's exactly my point. A smaller industrial society would have more time to impact their local environment stronger than our society, and a larger society would leave their footprint more dispersed, even though they didn't have the time to do so as intensely in a local frame. Either way, we would find something. Paleontologists have had much less to work with many a time

True. Also, I was obviosly joking

I don't understand why anyone assumes the moral high ground for anything, unless it is to shun racists, sexists, slavers, child molesters, religious fanatics, thieves, murderers, politicians, drug dealers (not for weed)...

Preindustrial Europe was badly decimated by the Plague more than once, but we never really got close to local extinction. That's because beyond a certain virulence, a disease spreads slower because the vectors themselves die too fast to reach more potential victims. Sure Ebola is pretty bad, and a pandemic would be a terrible catastrophe, but more than 30% of the worlds population wouldn't get infected even if it reached every Air and Seaport in the world. It just wouldn't be the end of our world. For beings with industry, natural predators aren't much of an issue. Yes, for the individual getting lost in the wilderness, but not for the industrialized society. I do agree that Abthropogenic Climate Change is the greatest threat to our industrialized society, as it will also cause mass population displacement from the regions of our planet becoming increasingly more inhospitable. A significantly smaller industrial society than what we have now wouldn't suffer the consequences of Global Warming as much as we will and already are, so this likely wouldn't cut short the life of the kind of industrial society you are proposing, either. Of course if this localized society had lived on the Yucatan Peninsula and exclusively there when the meteor struck at the end of the Cretaceous era, well that would give me cause to go back to church...

Unless you yourself are a vegetarian or vegan, in which case you might feel righteous anger for what I'm about to say, you know how annoying vegetarians and vegans can be when they see someone eating meat

Human history most definitely. This is a matter of belief in the sense that I believe that consciousness has a lower brain power threshold than ethics do. Ethics requires the capacity to reflect on your own behaviour in relation to other beings, and that requires consciousness. There are probably other requirements for ethics as well, but I hope this satisfies your question

I guess an industrial civilization could invent nuclear bombs before they got antibiotics, and blow eachother and the entire surface or a significant part of it to smithereens. But through the entire industrial revolution up until the modern age (1920's), we didn't have them either. Doctors didn't even wash their hands until 150 years ago before performing surgery, and Industry was marching along in the US and Europe, and beginnig to spread to other parts of the World as well. So if we're not going by the achievements and faults of our own industrial society - the only one we're aware of as to date, what else are we going to use as a basis to assume what might or might not survive for millions of years? Maybe the only thing that survives are our finely cut jewelry diamonds. But that would still be something