Pete6

That is NOT what that word is generally used to refer to.

Why, because it's a meaningful definition - and people are generally referring to something utterly meaningless? If you want me to define what people, in general, are talking about then of course I can't give a meaningful definition.

But I contend that this is meaningful, and it is what people are referring to - even if they don't know how to properly talk about it.

Imagine person A says that negative numbers are not even conceptually possible, or that arithmetic or whatever can't be performed with them. Person B contends otherwise. Person A asks how one could possibly add negative numbers, and B... (read more)

So you don't think you could catch up? If you had been frozen somewhere between -10000 and -100 years and revived now, don't you think you could start learning what the heck it is people are doing and understand nowadays? Besides a lot of the pre-freeze life-experience would be fully applicable to present. Everyone starts learning from the point of birth. You'd have headway compared to those who just start out from nothing.
There are things we can meaningfully contribute to even in a Sysop universe, filled with Minds. We, after all, are minds, too, which have the inherent quality of creativity - creating new, evermore elegant and intricate patterns - at whatever... (read more)

"You can't enslave something by creating it with a certain set of desires which you then allow it to follow.

So if Africans were engineered to believe that they existed in order to be servants to Europeans, Europeans wouldn't actually be enslaving them in the process? And the daughter whose father treated her in such a way as for her to actually want to have sex with him, what about her? These things aren't so far off from reality. You're saying there is no real moral significance to either event. It's not slavery, black people just know their place - and it's not abuse, she's just been raised to have a genuine sexual... (read more)