To: trekcreative{at}yahoogroups.com
From: Allyn Gibson 
Reply-To: trekcreative{at}yahoogroups.com

On Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Jay wrote:

> Why?  If someone walks five steps away from the transporter
> and gets killed you can't bring them back.  If you're going
> to back up people,  I see no reason to limit it.

Fair enough.

I think what you say makes a reasonable amount of sense.  It's immortality
by other means.  And who wouldn't want to live forever?

It's like playing a video game, and restoring old save points when you've
gone down a path and died horribly or found yourself in a position where
you simply can't go further.

It's a massive do-over.

I resent that.  I wouldn't appreciate rendering every decision I make
worthless because I could "revert" to an earlier state.  I don't
expect to live forever, and I don't believe that anyone else does, either.

(Though I've suddenly seen a story angle with this.  Because your
consciousness would have reverted to an earlier state, but the world that
consciousness lives in would have been shaped by the decisions your
"previous" self(ves) made, and it might not be a good one.
Imagine being twenty again, but in a world where "you" had
already lived to be forty or fifty.  A world where "you" had
married and had children, but your twenty year-old self had never even met
your wife or husband.)

I think there would have to be a shift in human philosophy.  People want to
be unique, people want to think that they matter, but if you can be
duplicated, if you can be "restored" from death by activating a
back-up copy, then they are no longer unique, and their struggles don't
matter.

Allyn                                    http://www.allyngibson.net
AIM: mknzycalhn                                        ICQ: 4342396

"Who decides," Kenyon said, "what is right?"
  "The gods.  I just do my best to interpret."
  "And do you truly believe in gods, Mackenzie Calhoun?  Do you?"
  "I believe in myself.  That's generally been good enough."
   -- Peter David, "Once Burned"


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