Quote from: areallifetrex;960128This is granting the premise that consciousness even works that way. The more realistic response is, IMO, that they are soulless simulcra. They are philosophical zombies that mimic the responses of a conscious being. Resurrecting someone's "consciousness" won't give you any information about the afterlife because the neurons that you are emulating haven't been there. If you ask it if it's conscious, it might say it is, but only because that is what the original person would have said. It doesn't need to possess the ability to experience to say the words.

It also works if you take the reverse of the baseline assumption, and consider them to be soul-ful beings rather than soulless simulacra.  Dying and being reborn into a new morph tells you nothing about the afterlife because the instance of yourself that died went on to the afterlife, but the one that was revived is a new "you" with a separate soul which hasn't died, so it hasn't seen the afterlife.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;960155Most major religion is built around the notion of 'The Soul', a spirit or being that is tied to a body of flesh, and it's a semi-mystical thing that is assumed that we will never understand it fully.

Back in my bible-thumping days, I don't recall ever encountering anyone who explicitly believed that the soul was tied to a specific body.  On the contrary, it was generally held to transcend the body and to be separate-but-connected.  The ability to transfer the soul from one pile of flesh to another pile of flesh (or even to a pile of non-flesh, in the case of synthetic morphs) doesn't necessarily contradict that.  (It certainly can be held to be contradictory, but it doesn't have to be a contradiction.)

Of course, forking and merging would still be problematic for those who hold that only God can create or destroy souls, unless you adopt a view that multiple bodies can share a single soul, or go with areallifetrex's suggestion of seeing them as soulless simulacra instead of real people.

Even modern religion hasn't answered which you actually goes on to the afterlife, as many believe all your 'flaws' will be healed or left behind, but differ in what they consider those flaws to be.

Quote from: sureshot;960043It would have to go through major changes as in some of them writing the holy books the religion is based on imo.

#Judaism went through major changes after the temple was destroyed.

#Christianity is the #Katamari of religions, adopting whatever ambient culture exists and making Christian versions of it.

#Islam has been modified by clerics.

#Buddhism already proposes that consciousness and the ego are an illusion.

Quote from: sureshot;960097Though hopefully the the devs of Posthuman Studios do a better job with religion in their second edition of their rpg.

Now this is something I can totally get behind.

Quote from: Krimson;960131The real danger to religion from Transhuman society is not one of being disproven but one of obsolescence.

Then the question becomes: What is the purpose of religion, and does that need ever become obsolete?

Quote from: HappyDaze;960164As long as I can keep downloading EP products for free, I don't care who does the artwork. The new PDFs are still going to be free to download, right?

Not just free to download, but free to do whatever you want with except sell. And they'd probably give that away too if it was practical.

Of all the reasons I'm hoping this #KickStarter is successful, validating this philosophy is the biggest.

Quote from: nDervish;960167Back in my bible-thumping days, I don't recall ever encountering anyone who explicitly believed that the soul was tied to a specific body.  On the contrary, it was generally held to transcend the body and to be separate-but-connected.  The ability to transfer the soul from one pile of flesh to another pile of flesh (or even to a pile of non-flesh, in the case of synthetic morphs) doesn't necessarily contradict that.  (It certainly can be held to be contradictory, but it doesn't have to be a contradiction.)

Well, ancient Egyptians held and up-to-recent Japanese had some beliefs about where the soul was held (the later I remember reading some research papers on in the 90s regarding acceptance of organ transplant advances). So beliefs like that exist. OTOH, in the Japanese case, opinions clearly changed once heart transplants became a thing.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;960174

Exactly, it is hard to speculate on what consciousness moving/copying technology would do to religions. History suggests, however, that they adapt to the new situation and move forward. :-)

Quote from: nDervish;960167Back in my bible-thumping days, I don't recall ever encountering anyone who explicitly believed that the soul was tied to a specific body. \

I certainly did and still do as most of my family are strongly Christian. I guess it depends on the particular church/denomination but, IME, its not an uncommon notion among Christians. I can't speak for other faiths with any great certainty though but I'd guess its not an alien idea.

I imagine that in setting with body switching and similar technology it would be an ongoing philosophical debate. Religion and spiritual beliefs don't require rational explanation or even material logic. If nothing else, some might just beleive changing shells is just different from "actually" dying as they define it. But there could be any number of fascinating adaptations, even entirely new religions but I agree with others in that it wouldn't just be proven wrong and cease to exist. Religion has survived allot of discoveries and events that changed humanity's ideas about the world/universe.

I read the first page of this thread. Then I skipped to the last page. Is this what taking drugs feels like?

Quote from: fearsomepirate;960199I read the first page of this thread. Then I skipped to the last page. Is this what taking drugs feels like?

If that's what it feels like to you, whatever you're taking: stop.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;960199I read the first page of this thread. Then I skipped to the last page. Is this what taking drugs feels like?

The really good ones.

Thus thread de-rail reminds me of this John Weldon cartoon... To Be.

[video=youtube;pdxucpPq6Lc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc[/youtube]

While I've already added my 2c, I've just come across a rather substantial bit of #QED.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;959465do you honestly think a woman wouldn't jump at the chance to design the The World's Most Popular?

Yes.

Quote from: Kate BullockRecently Green Ronin, via Nicole Lindroos, announced a contest to find and mentor a woman* writer for their new project, Tales of the Lost Citadel. The contest was announced recently for the 5th Edition game. And I was going to apply. Seriously. Tales of the Lost Citadel sounds really cool even though I couldn't find any copies of the book to save my soul. I read all the things in preparation. I was gonna apply!

And then I found out it was 5th Edition and made a raspberry noise and moved on.

So the barrier here is not one of gender but taste, and maybe, juuust maybe, women share certain tastes simply because they're women. Now whether that's due to culture or genetics I cannot say, but considering gender identity is a product of one or both it really doesn't matter. But if the barriers are one of taste, then this 'equality' shit isn't going to fix anything.

Or it could be politically motivated, in which case it was never about writing what you love anyway.

Either way, your move cupcake.

I hardly think one could claim that Kate Bullock is somehow representative of women's tastes in rpgs. From her previous comments I believe she played a lot of D&D when younger like the rest of us. She is now part if the storygame scene, which has a lot, even a majority, of men as well. From her comments she prefers rules light systems because they're faster.

Not like preference matters. These people believe that if women and men don't like the same thing equally, either

a) Men are actively shutting out women who want to participate. The solution here is to make the men stop being mean and start including women.
b) Men are excluding women by creating a thing that has all kind of nasty sexism and "toxic masculinity" embedded in it. The solution here is to either change or destroy the thing that women don't like.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;960206The really good ones.

tell ya something about forum threads...any forum, any group, whether it's 4 guys with their own private phpbb thing going on or something as big as some weightlifting fitness forum Kyle once told me about with millions of members...and you can put this down as pure solid 100% fact.

Take any topic of discussion, anything, anything at all.  Football, video games, politics, surfing, cross-stitching, typesetting, guitar playing, car repair, light aircraft piloting, does not matter what, any topic.

By page 11, quit reading.  There's nothing to be said beyond those 11 pages.  Doesn't matter what the cut-off for the software is, 20 messages a page, 10 messages a page, 5 messages a page.  By page 11, it's over, the topic is about to descend into arguments.  

If the thread goes on beyond 15 pages, you're left with just two people arguing at each other.  Just two.  

By page 20, if it goes on that long, the two cunts left arguing at each other aren't even arguing the original subject: they're posting nasty shit at each other about how they argue, not about anything to do with any topic the thread started in.  By page 20, it's just two assholes going "Well you can't spell" and "Your argument style sucks!".  That's it.  Period.

The sole exceptions to this is heavily, heavily moderated threads where, say, an admin says "This thread is for tech support issues only" and people that go "Oh my God dude I can't believe you just told him to go AMD, I thought he wanted his computer to work" get their asses thrown out, and "jam" threads, where people are posting pictures and links, with no particular topic (photo threads/painting threads/here's my car threads etc.).  And even those you gotta watch.

It especially goes for here.  Past page 11, no useful information.  Past page 15, just a flame war.  Past page 20, just two people being cunts.  At the very end of the thread, you get meta-stuff like this, and the person who posted before you.

I dunno why the math seems to work out exactly like that, but that's been my experience going back to...holy shit, all the way to BBS systems in the 80s.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;960401tell ya something about forum threads...any forum, any group, whether it's 4 guys with their own private phpbb thing going on or something as big as some weightlifting fitness forum Kyle once told me about with millions of members...and you can put this down as pure solid 100% fact.

Take any topic of discussion, anything, anything at all. Football, video games, politics, surfing, cross-stitching, typesetting, guitar playing, car repair, light aircraft piloting, does not matter what, any topic.

By page 11, quit reading. There's nothing to be said beyond those 11 pages. Doesn't matter what the cut-off for the software is, 20 messages a page, 10 messages a page, 5 messages a page. By page 11, it's over, the topic is about to descend into arguments.
.

Can't say I've noticed this exactly but I'm going to look for it now. You may have stumbled across the new Godwin.

Quote from: Nexus;960416Can't say I've noticed this exactly but I'm going to look for it now. You may have stumbled across the new Godwin.

It's not an exact science, but specific topics will also drift.

(The Exalted thread is pretty much the best example.)

Meanwhile, it looks like Pelgrane Press is trying to break out of the pack and take a commanding position ...

(All right, technically I suppose that belongs in Other Games. )