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[Dwarf]

There's a story buried somewhere in the Old Testament about a guy who tried to take a census of the many Israeli kingdoms.  YHWH said "Thou Shalt Not Count My Chosen People" and sent a plague that killed 120,000 people so the census would be wrong.  And it spared the census taker of course, so he could be mocked.

Relevant to the topic, medical technology improves all the time, but the penalties for assaulting a person haven't gotten any lighter despite it being easier to heal people.  Heck, if we had a way of bringing people back to life, Texas would the first in line to resurrect heinous criminals so we can execute them repeatedly.  Being killed and revived might even become a ordinary sentence.

Oh I hope dearly that this will not escalate, but this pretty much shows that god is an asshole, or, at least, that the OT god is QUITE different from the NT one.

[Jackrabbit]

Considering I just called my own God an asshole I should probably be trying for damage control here, but yeah, the Old Testament God was like a lot of the Gods that long ago. Not a nice chap, to put it mildly.

[Leafsnail]

Considering I just called my own God an asshole I should probably be trying for damage control here, but yeah, the Old Testament God was like a lot of the Gods that long ago. Not a nice chap, to put it mildly.

Well, he acted like the Israelites at the time.  We'd find a lot of their views pretty abhorrent today.

[Jackrabbit]

Mm.

Ah... sorry. I really shouldn't be derailing the thread like this. Sorry.

[Vester]

It's an interesting discussion, but a bit off-topic, yes.

[qwertyuiopas]

If people could be brought back from death, murder would probably still be murder, but psychological harm will certainly be a greater crime.

Murder by convincing someone to suicide will be a terrible crime.

[Jude]

Exorcism will be the new death. Your body may be reconstructed, but your soul won't. That's punishment.


Alternatively, you'll be rebuilt, you'll just have almost no control, with full awareness. Think of the punishment worse than death as fully aware robotic control, sans will.

You're a living robot, and you cannot fight the impulses, making yourself a mindless slave; ironically, with enough of a mind to be aware of the control, but just enough to keep a soul within the shell, without it's ability to control. No worse hell I can think of beyond that for now.

To make it a worse punishment, make it a job fitting of their crime that would bother them beyond reason; either by constant temptation (urges and all come, but reacting to them through their new body; tough luck.). It's a hell in which you're trapped in your body with only your emotions and thoughts, and no control over your actions. All sanctioned by law.

An advantage of a self-will-less body with a willful soul trapped in (by perspective of those who own the person, be it a buyer or law) it would be to prevent self-termination (suicide as an escape method), as well, with full awareness; all senses are active 24/7, so every command and action issued will be experienced at full awareness.

For those that would suffer that fate; may God have mercy on them.

If the mind worked anything remotely like the fantasy you just described then maybe so

Which brings up a different issue; if you can resurrect people, in what state are they resurrected? Prior to any injuries, I assume. But what about thoughts, memories and personality? Now that we know these are preserved in a physical medium, and presumably we can manipulate all the parts of the body enough to remove injuries and restart the systems working, what would we do with, say, the memory of being dead?

Hell, for that matter, if we can do that to dead people, why not living people? At that point we can basically control people's minds.

[Cthulhu]

I wonder what we'd remember about being dead.

[Dwarf]

I wonder what we'd remember about being dead.

How did it feel in your mother's womb?

[The Doctor]

Warm and comfy. o.o

[alway]

I've been dead for over 13 billion years, what's another ten or twenty?
Post-mortem revival would leave one with no memories of death, since to create a memory and to think, one must be alive. Depending on what point the backup was done from (1 sec before death or 1 hr), one might have some pretty trippy memories of pre-death halucinations.

However, the way I see it, there will be no way to do this without already having acheived immortality through technology. At which point bringing someone back after they die is pretty much pointless. There is no known reason as to why a human mind would not be able to be stored on a computer, and I would expect human minds to be put into a computer within my lifetime. By the middle of this century, computers are expected to far surpass the storage and computation power of a human brain.

Or in short... I, for one, welcome the chance of becoming one of your new robotic overlords. 

[Dwarf]

Warm and comfy. o.o

You don't remember anything. At one point, your memory just springs in, and before that, there is nothing. I imagine death would be much the same - not just a kind of blackness that you can't remember, but a part where memory just stops (and, in context with this thread, springs back in sometime)

However, the way I see it, there will be no way to do this without already having acheived immortality through technology. At which point bringing someone back after they die is pretty much pointless. There is no known reason as to why a human mind would not be able to be stored on a computer, and I would expect human minds to be put into a computer within my lifetime. By the middle of this century, computers are expected to far surpass the storage and computation power of a human brain.

Ouch. Massive morality and ethics discussion incoming!

[woose1]

Hehehe... all according to plan.

>:3

[sonerohi]

The human mind cannot become part of a computer. Everything of the mind is complex storage involving the right balance of chemicals, hormones, and protein chains. For a computer to replicate that, it would have to be able to reproduce those exact specifications. It would need a way to store those chemicals and organize them. Should we somehow manage this feat, we would transcend a body, but not the physical world. We would simply be reduced down to that tub of chemicals, and we would lose all of our ability to create new memory and experience the now, because we would have stripped away our nerves and neurons and all the real components of our brains. In short, good luck with living in the past.

[redacted123]

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