Pinocchio vs. the Tin Man

James Wynn · 25 Sep 2002, 22:03 · from urth-v0209.mbox · original

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: "James Wynn" <crushtv at HotPOP.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) Pinocchio vs. the Tin Man
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 17:03:52 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0209-1783 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0209/1783.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Jerry Friedman wrote:
Can we imagine a prosthetic-bearing bio in love with a chem wanting to
become fully a chem?

Response:
It is not a two-way street. It is the most natural of inclinations to prefer
things that are more authentic; to want to BE more authentic. Religious
apologist have declared in once sense or another that the *proper* urge to
worship the Divine comes from the knowledge that we are made in his image.

By the same token, Pinocchio, the Tin Man, and Data (of Star Trek) all want
to become "real" not just the semblance of reality. Lemur disparaged the
Mainframe gods as "ghosts" not because he believed in life after death but
because he didn't - he would assert that they (and also himself, to his own
dismay) were only a semblance of the "real" persons - actually Kypris
suggests this understanding of herself as well.

So it IS logical that a chem would want to become human. It is NOT logical
that a god would. The reasons for Jonas' disparagement of human parts and
Potto's talus' revulsion toward human "filth" are another subject but it's
not hard to see why they might feel that way even if they would become human
if given the opportunity - and that one of the parallels is people who scorn
"holy" relics.

Still, there IS Mr. Million (5HoC) who chose (with regret) to become a
robot.

-- Crush

--=20

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