From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Oct 05 1999 - 06:04:18 MDT
At 09:46 AM 4/10/99 -0400, Robin wrote in reply to Greg's:
>>Same here. If I have to go down for the cold sleep, I don't expect to be
>>initially reanimated as a meat machine.
>I think uploads will really miss meat bodies for a long while.
One of the major problems we face in conveying our apparently outrageous
ideas is a simple matter of tact versus self-preening shock value in the
terms we coin and use.
I'd like to suggest that people stop using the term `meat' about human beings.
I know there's a tradition behind this usage. I realise it's partially
meant to wean us off our enculturated regard for the contingent fact that
minds are currently instantiated in flesh rather than on other substrates.
But it's an unnecessarily offensive term, when you stop and look at it for
a moment.
`Meat' is dead flesh intended for eating. Few of us eat human remains. Most
people are revolted by the idea. Conflating healthy, alert living people
with slabs of stuff at the butcher's counter is... well, it's
counter-productive.
I'd like to suggest a moratorium on this usage, not because I'm squeamish
but because a vast number of the people we'd like to guide to a better
understanding of the coming world *are*. I'm not sure what term to offer in
replacement, but perhaps *protein body* might do? That's also a tad
dehumanised, but it doesn't have the swaggering adolescent taint of *meat*.
I don't mean to offend anyone who has used this term, certainly not the two
excellent people cited above. But we need to be careful about the
side-consequences of the words we allow to shape the reception of our
ideas, which have a sufficiently uphill battle already.
[Now den Otter can take the podium and denounced `political correctness'...]
Damien Broderick
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