From: andronicus451@gmail.com   
      
   One might crave naturally to live forever, as death is a painful act and if you   
   ask psychiatrists, they will say that thinking and speaking about this   
   natural end of things is "morbid". This by no means that they or their   
   patients become immortal by the psychiatry or their mind drugs. On the   
   contrary, average schizophrenic lives 10 to 20 years shorter than the   
   control group in the same living conditions.   
      
   Life isn't such a wonderful thing, not in this mortal and corruptible body:   
   whatever choicest delicacies and most expensive foods and drinks you   
   put into your mouth, the output is always reduced to poo, pee, blood,   
   sweat and tears. Rather pathetic - and this is equal to the starving   
   in Africa and supermodels on catwalks, no matter how many perfumes   
   and makeup they use to hide that natural fact from the environment   
   and the consumer of the "Instagram artificial reality".   
      
   If you are a rich oligarch or a statesman, you might produce more   
   expensive poo, but it is still poo and no good for anything than   
   sewer or a fertiliser plant if you live in a smart city. But most of us do not.   
      
   The problem becomes worse if we are infants or the elderly or the terminally   
   ill: somebody will have to wipe off our poo and pee, or we will suffer   
   infections,   
   decubitus and gangrene. This will eventually kill us, just as the hip joint   
   break   
   or the lung disease coming from the long lying in a position where the lungs   
   are not ventilated properly. But I am not a licensed physician, I just came   
   across where people were terminally ill and dying, beyond the help of   
   human medicine and science.   
      
   And this is the reality.   
      
   It is not morbid. Eternal life in this world would eventually mean losing   
   all hair and all teeth, no matter how much we take care of both.   
   Many things we see attractive would mean our spiritual death, stop   
   of existence of us as we know us. This is sometimes worse than the   
   physical death. And life is constant fight against all of these negative   
   and destructive inclinations.   
      
   I like to say that there are 360 ways to fall down, but only one direction   
   to stay upright. The vertical one.   
      
   Even worse it comes when they tell us that we should digitalise our   
   minds and live in a computer that would eventually be perpetuated   
   until forever. Not only that this is not forever - it ends in the Big Crunch   
   of the Universe, or thermal death of our beloved star Sol.   
      
   But what would come much sooner is the condition with no satisfying   
   our five senses (eyes, ears, smell, taste, touch) and seven inclinations   
   (envy, arrogance, greed, anger, lust, eating and drinking, laziness).   
   What would the mind do without the senses? It would probably not   
   come to greater scientific truths, but suffer an existential vacuum.   
   What is now depression, psychiatrists recommended that we cure   
   with shopping, medications or walking in nature.   
      
   Needless to say, for a mind trapped in a digital computer nothing of   
   that is available. It will suck up in itself and without the receptors   
   for pain it would invent new ways of suffering and misery.   
      
   This is what I called "The Digital Tantalus".   
      
   Tantalus baked his own son Pelop to test gods of Olymp whether   
   they would really be omniscient and recognise they are eating   
   human flesh. Demetria recognised as soon as it touched her lips.   
   But it was such a defilement and insult to gods that it required   
   divine retribution. Gods realised they should never mingle with   
   the common mortals - and we don't see much of them ever since.   
   People would offer them man flesh, stone them or crucify them   
   just because they are [sons and daughters of] gods.   
      
   So, Tantalus was placed in Tartarus, and he saw beautiful fruit trees   
   and plenty of water to drink. He was very hungry and very thirsty,   
   but when he reached for a fruit, it would escape his grasp, and so   
   did the water, ever-increasing his thirst and hunger.   
      
   This would be the condition of a digital mind with cravings for the   
   physical objects of the five senses, but no means to satisfy them.   
   Today we have microphones, tactile sensors and cameras.   
   But we have nothing that could watch straight into the Sun like   
   a guru and later watch a million times less bright moonlit scenery.   
      
   We have nothing that could hear a whisper and then an airplane   
   passing at 100 decibels. The difference is again a million or more times.   
   10 decibels more means ten times stronger, not 10 per cent stronger.   
      
   With touch, we know that a bodybuilder can lift 150 kg, and then gently   
   touch a baby or a butterfly without hurting them or crushing them.   
   We do not have such androids.   
      
   But the worst thing is to think that the replacement of brain with   
   a computer and body parts with artificial prosthetic would make us   
   stronger like Ripley was in Alien 2 against the aliens.   
      
   First, computers are hackable. If we would like an interface to the   
   world instead of being blind and deaf to the environment, those   
   sensors would be hackable too, in a way we cannot imagine, but   
   hackers can.   
      
   Having a hacked computer brain and core wars inside one's head   
   isn't quite a sense of peace either.   
      
   Eventually, we would lose the ability to procreate with the human race.   
   We might even marry as intelligent or financially prosperous, but   
   females would instinctively seek someone with brute force and   
   raw genes instead to conceive with.   
      
   But there are other forces at work, or man of today by the current   
   woman selection would be very tall, and with manhood of a donkey   
   or horse, but not with a very significant brain.   
      
   We have such species, but we castrated them to pull wagons and   
   do the ploughing for us before we invented tractors. Obviously,   
   the evolutionary success of homo sapiens is not in what women   
   want from man today (three sixes: six feet tall, six inches in bed and   
   six figures salary). Or we would never transcend apes.   
      
   I am not certain that even chimpanzees select males by the biggest   
   male organ, but by some other characteristics, like the status of   
   an alpha male or even some characteristics of a beta male.   
      
   But the result in the human race is that the only guy who got seventy   
   virgins is a porn actor whose company could offer what was required   
   for those verified virgins to comply.   
      
   This means that sixty-nine guys will be without a girlfriend or wife,   
   or with second-hand goods. For their lifetime.   
      
   I think the human race has a serious problem, it is in a major decline,   
   and I don't really plan to leave offspring here, or tend to the illegitimate   
   offspring of the guys with three sixes.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)