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Comment by dsign | Hacker News Reader

Oh, this was a fun read and one that kids should have in school before they turn ten.

Because we are not taking things seriously. If ClosedAI or DeepDisTrust or Posthropic come up with something that quacks like a sentient being, our built-in innate reaction is going to be to scorn it, dismiss it and end the conversation. The alternative, to even consider that we fungible creatures who live in apple-eating-sin that got us expelled from Eden can create alien souls, souls that are at the very least our equals, would be teleological Armageddon. It would force us to acknowledge the mutable nature of souls and the malleability of being. We would have to stop believing that the nature of disease and death is more divine than ourselves.

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> alien souls

Do those actually qualify as alien, if they're products of our human culture and just the substrate is different?

> We would have to stop believing that the nature of disease and death is more divine than ourselves.

Why? Stopping believing in mutually contradictory claims is not a requirement. Especially when it comes to concepts that don't seem to have a definition, like "divine".

> Do those actually qualify as alien, if they're products of our human culture and just the substrate is different?

I'll posit "alien" is a spectrum.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume that some form of panspermia is real and the same tree of life has reached Earth, Enceladus (moon of Saturn) and TRAPPIST-1 (a different solar system in our galaxy). Let's also say there was a second abiogenesis event somewhere in Messier 104 (another galaxy).

Earth to Enceladus would arguably be already "alien", but there might be similarities, maybe there was something there that looked like one of our Archaea, while sharing none of our Eukarya and having its own domains of life.

Earth to TRAPPIST-1 would be distinctly alien, evolved so differently it'd be almost unrecognizable, but they'd likely still be carbon-based lifeforms sharing the same basic building blocks. Maybe something like lipids forming cell walls would also be seen there, but they'd likely be independently evolved.

Earth to M104, any similarity would be at best convergent evolution. Truly unarguably alien.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180423171909/https://cosmosmag...

How commmon is Panpsychism belief and vegan-on-ethical-grounds among the AI Soulists?

While you write very dismissive and pseudo philosophical, enough people do not believe.

I'm a complex biological thing.

Existence is what i have to experience through.

>> While you write very dismissive and pseudo philosophical

Even with the "pseudo" in front, I'm very sorry any of my writing sounds philosophical; I didn't intend that sort of confusion :-). The "dismissive" is not exactly intended either; instead, I was aiming for "bitter".

>> enough people do not believe

Here we believe different things. First, enough people, even today, do believe. Second, the body of culture we are raised in accrued during centuries. The vast majority of it comes from people who believed. Everybody in my family was atheist and yet I was raised homophobic, and I have it from good sources I'm not an isolated case.

>> I'm a complex biological thing.

That state comes with a big wallop of misery. For millennia, we have used faith to justify that misery. Not a year ago, I was at the hospital, next to the bed of a dying girl. Can't forget the doctors saying "we do what we can, but we are not here to prevent what is going to happen." Coming from them, it was sensible resignation. Sensible because as long as we believe those things are inevitable and there's nothing we poor humans can do, we can absolve ourselves.

This looks promising, especially the no-account-required part. Does it handle SPAs or heavy client-side rendering well, or is it more geared toward traditional server-rendered sites?

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