First Exodus theory revised

Gerry Quinn · 11 Feb 2011, 16:20 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:20:49 -0000
Subject: (urth) First Exodus theory revised
References: <748945.97512.qm at web161818.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>	<4D548E81.7090602 at gmail.com><8FF1E2264741495A927DB86865858E56@jill>	<4D5499C6.7070409 at gmail.com><E1124EF3F70D46429D69D797ED39A538@jill>	<4D551BD2.7080904 at gmail.com><DDB91688C0B04BE9B643D42FB86B130E@jill>
	<4D55490D.6080703 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1F1F8DFC2F46461BBAC048514021A1A4@jill>

From: "Ant?nio Pedro Marques" <entonio at gmail.com>
> Gerry Quinn wrote (11-02-2011 13:43):
>>
>> From: "Ant?nio Pedro Marques" <entonio at gmail.com>
>>>> In fact he
>>>> treated some people (such as Piaton) as robots. Maybe he treated almost
>>>> everyone as robots, in fact - consider the whole possession technology
>>>> for controlling them! Mamelta tells us how everyone was wired up in a
>>>> sort of always-on internet, with Typhon's family wandering through 
>>>> their
>>>> heads. That is before some of them were forced abourd the Whorl and
>>>> given brain operations.
>>>
>>> Yep. It all sounds like blatant disregard for anyone else's feelings.
>>> Why should he be concerned with the well-being of a computer program?
>>
>> Suppose we accept your argument that Typhon had a particular disdain for
>> computer programs
>
> ? That's emphatically *not* what I said.

Well, you started off by saying that computer programs are not people, and 
went on to say Typhon wouldn't have cared about Pas.

[By the way, I wasn't going to bring it up as I don't see the importance of 
the status of software to the issues under debate, but surely Scylla's 
appearance a a girl on the Red Sun Whorl indicates that computer programs 
can have souls?  If so, I think it rather settles the issue of whether they 
are people (in the most general sense).

>> (though it makes it very odd that he had digitised
>> versions of his family made to accompany Pas). What difference does it
>> make to anything? Pas rules the Whorl, not Typhon.
>
> You're the one talking about Pas's intentions. I said that there is no 
> reason why *Typhon* should want Pas to possess a hypothetical heir of 
> Typhon.

Well, I agree that Typhon probably wouldn't have been bothered to put 
embryonic heirs on the Whorl - but if he had done so, I am sure he would 
have left them in the charge of Pas (and Kypris if she were the mother). 
Who better to look after them?  So if we want to know what Typhon wanted to 
happen with any such embryos, we should look at what Pas is doing.

- Gerry Quinn

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net