From: Joe Jenkins (joe_jenkins@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Oct 20 1998 - 13:08:46 MDT
---Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> wrote:
>
> Scott Badger wrote:
>
> > Where I work, it would have been socially and politically
> > courageous of me to bring up or admit that I was an
> > Agnostic . . . let alone an Atheist.
>
> why is that? are you a minister or something? none of
> my business really, just curious.
Spike, I work for the same company you do, except I'm in the bible
belt and your way outside. Many of the cubicles surrounding me have
that jesus fish thing proudly displayed. Now, if I were to so boldly
display that evolve fish with legs thing - all hell would break loose.
Not to mention that all these church ladies would stop giving me that
Sunday morning "high on the jesus high horse" smile five days a week -
not that I would miss it either. It actually makes me sick.
Back to the subject line:
I had a similar but less intense aha experiences concerning,
evolution, nanotechnology, and immortality. My aha experience for
identity was however, much more intense and long lasting. It started
around 1988 when I found Engines of Creation and literally read it
front to back, called in sick at work turned the book over and did it
again. When I got to the end the second time, I went directly to the
library and started looking up most of the references including the
books.
When it was all over, I started realizing that what *I* had read "in
between the lines" was having the most effect on me. Identity had not
even been a subject discussed in the book, but indirectly, my own
working definition was falling apart as a result of my reading. I had
not really ever put a lot of thought in my own definition of identity.
It was just something I assumed was the "physical stuff inside my
skin".
All of a sudden, I found myself inventing simple, yet non-intuitive,
thought experiments to help narrow and refine my personal definition.
It was as if, within just a few days, I was intellectually ready to
change my working definition, but that change just wasn't happening at
a more personal level. It was as if allowing a discontinuity of that
definition was not allowed. Something was forcing me to change my
definition of identity much slower than what I could handle
intellectually. I found myself repeating simple thought experiments
many times a day for about two years before the dichotomy within my
own mind was resolved. The whole time this was happening, only slow
continuous change (never discontinuities) was experienced.
Over many years of reading the extropian and then transhuman list, I
had always assumed most had adopted the same definition I now use.
Recently, to my surprise, I found out this was true for many on the
list, but just as many were using different definitions. Then the
reality of the difficulty of putting this "so called" definition into
debatable words hit. Now I find myself somewhat unable to communicate
such a subjective issue and resolve the differences or at least
identify their roots. I'm still working on this though.
Joe Jenkins
joe_jenkins@yahoo.com
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