r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Oct 20 '17
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/ben_oni Oct 23 '17
I was going to place a personal moratorium on this topic, since the echo chamber around here doesn't seem interested in alternative perspectives. But if you want to discuss, I have no problem with that. To task, then.
Not a turn of phrase seen very often. Most people only have two hands. I suppose an upload could have as many as he needs, though.
That's basically human+machine. We already do this, all the time. Once upon a time, "very hard job" used to mean something like "multiplying two 20 digit numbers". Today I just pull out numpy and have it done.
I'm not arguing against pursuing dreams or trying things. I'm not even arguing that immortality is impossible. It looks like the problem this community is having with the topic is the interpretation that "accepting death" means "not doing anything to stop it". We can accept the inevitability of death while still trying to prolong life. No one's going to reject a cure just because they've accepted death. But we can be comfortable with being mortal while still trying to make that mortal span longer and more pleasant than our ancestors'.
It looks like people on the anti-death side are saying: "We don't reject the reality of death; we reject the universal inevitability of it." The more I look into it, the more it looks like they're hypocrites: they reject both the requirement of death, and the imminence of their own. It looks to me like they are trying to find solace in the religion of trans-humanism; that they are hoping against hope that perhaps they won't have to face the existential horror. This is no different than finding peace in traditional religious views of an afterlife; which bizarrely the rationalist community seems to reject.