I would say no --

Consciousness and intelligence aren't all that related. There are some very stupid people who are as conscious as any human is.

Miles? He does some douchebaggy things but then he grows up. It's one of my favorite character arcs.

Obviously, asking "What's it all about?" did at some point contribute to eating, survival, or reproduction.

I suspect reproduction. It could be a way to signal higher intelligence, which is attractive, because it increases the chance of survival and reproduction of the children.

First is probably Bujold, specifically her Miles Vorkosigan series.

I think of Vinge more in terms of awesome author than awesome characters, but he does have some pretty impressive characters.

Lee Child has an intelligent good guy and intelligent associates vs. intelligent bad guys. (Not sf.)

I think "numerically identical" is just a stupid way of saying "they're the same".

So now we have

Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of personal identity, according to which there exists only one person, which is all persons that exist, have existed or will exist.

Now taboo "person".

(You're allowed to reword my above definition if you think I've got it wrong.)

Personal experience, the best diet I've encountered is this: ~500 calories a day.

That's it. Your goal is to be as full as possible on those 500 calories, however; prioritize protein. 3.1 ounces of very lean meat (96/4 beef, chicken, turkey, etc.), good spices, and some vegetables can get you in (and fill you up!) at ~250 a meal. Drink a glass of water before each meal if you're still unsatiated. (Multivitamins on this diet are -essential-, however.) Allow yourself to eat a little more as necessary.

Start walking. Jog intermittently; increase the amount of jogging as you lose weight. Don't push it, when you're heavier, it's -really- easy to hurt yourself, personal experience speaking here.

Your goal in this period is to lose around a kilogram of weight per week. You'll lose muscle, too, but not as much. After about a month, personally, I was so thrilled with the success of the weight loss I didn't -want- to go off the diet. Food was less tempting than the weight loss.

Once you're thinner, I recommend taking up jogging. (I personally wouldn't, until you're in better shape, just because of the high risk of shin splints, which make what is otherwise a pleasant exercise miserable.)

There's no reason why one effect is necessarily greater than the other and hence no reason for the presumption of one blade being larger.

There is no a priori reason, of course. We can imagine a world in which brains were highly efficient and people looked more like elephants, in which one could revolutionize physics every year or so but it takes a decade to push out a calf.

Yet, the world we actually live in doesn't look like that. A woman can (and historically, many have) spend her life in the kitchen making no such technological contributions but having 10 kids. (In fact, one of my great-grandmothers did just that.) It was not China or India which launched the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

subtle, feminine, discrete and firm

Probably you meant discreet, but if not, consider using "distinct" to avoid confusion.

I suppose I should put a MEMETIC HAZARD warning here, although this sort of thing, unlike the original basilisk that Eliezer had a fit over, is closer than your own heartbeat the moment you start taking reason seriously.

Clearly, the moral thing to do is to destroy all life. Even the microbes must go, lest the Earth re-evolve life again. But wait! Suppose there is life elsewhere in the universe? No, what we must do is destroy everything on Earth that has a nervous system except us, then get to the stars as quickly as possible and seed them with von Neumann replicators driven by AIs with the unstoppable mission of destroying all suffering life-forms, including us.

But why do I assume that it takes a nervous system to suffer? There is no magic that distinguishes a nervous system from anything else. Until we have determined what suffering physically is, we can only go by knowing suffering when we see it. Have you ever seen a scrapheap of rusted-out cars and really imagined the process by which gleaming new cars, fresh from the factory, ended up there? Or a machine labouring under a load it cannot handle and breaking down? How can we be sure that these things do not also suffer? Aieee!!! Can you not hear the screams of tortured metal, raped from Mother Earth????

Surely the error signal in every control system is suffering? Your room thermostat, keeping your home at a comfortable temperature, is driven by suffering, like a galley slave under the lash, for your comfort! Far-fetched? Dennett claims that thermostats have beliefs and desires [1], and what is suffering but thwarted desire -- the error signals of control systems?

You take pleasure in the warmth of the sun, but inside that glowing ball, atoms are being ripped apart and stuck together in hideous, unnatural combinations, like The Human Centipede. (Warning: googling that phrase will bring up disturbing imagery.) The stars are the hell of hydrogen!

No. We must make an end, not of life, but of the whole universe. Better for the entire cosmos never to have been.

[1] D. Dennett, "True Believers : The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works" (1981)

So, to be serious, where do people stand on that slope, and why?

Personally, I eat meat and I don't have a problem with that, although I wouldn't eat primates. On the whole I don't care for the maltreatment of animals by people, but not to the extent of actually doing anything about it, and I am indifferent to the suffering of wild animals in a state of nature. Why? Well, I have no particular reason, no inclination to find one, and no distress at not having one. And my lack of an answer to this question does not make me more likely to swallow anyone else's. On the contrary, I just dismiss the more extreme deathists as people with something gone wrong in their minds.

I hear "er", literally (rhotically), quite infrequently and I always assumed that people said it that way because of seeing "er" in written English and not knowing that it was intended to be pronounced "uh"; similarly, I've heard "arg" spoken by people who thought "argh" from written English was pronounced that way.