Hey everyone, I'm starting a new topic here so as not to derail any conversations on other threads -- the original thread I am commenting on seems to have some interesting stuff about computer simulations etc. and I don't want to bother others about it.
Edgar has repeatedly posted links to both his business and personal website, and his "life companion" request is there right on the front page, so I'm not sure how that constitutes snooping. For Edgar, if it is true that you did lose your wife to cancer recently, I am very sorry for your loss. My father died of cancer when I was young, and I lost a close friend last Christmas to cancer as well, so I know how that feels. Just digging down to nuts and bolts for a second, though, for those members on the list that subscribe to some version of "Everything Theory," (Bruno's UD, various forms of "computer simulation universe," Craig's multisense realism), I'd like to ask a serious and honest question in good faith: what is the place of grief and mourning given belief in one of these theories? Is it even appropriate to grieve in a universe where "Everything exists" and the self is simply a computation on a deeper eternal substrate and where time is an illusion? Indeed, isn't the whole humanistic, existentialist "point" of these theories to offer us a bit of succor in the face of inevitable death? That is why I am interested in this stuff -- not simply for the intellectual fun and games of it all, but because I am truly terrified of oblivion and of losing everything I love to that oblivion, and yet everything in my observed world tells me that when we die, we are basically "broken machines" and our world completely and permanently disappears for us. That is why I desperately want to be convinced of any of the Everything theories that are discussed here, although I admit that the degree to which any of them offer any comfort at all is relative to how one is able to interpret the consequences of such theories to find a place for your personality in "the Everything." I didn't think pasting quite publicly available text from Edgar's website constitutes a "personal attack." Edgar seems quite happy to keep that information up on the web for anyone to see, so I hardly think it constitutes snooping to cite it in a different forum. And my original observation that I could understand why he was alone was motivated by his continued truculence and seeming inability to incorporate and respond to the many pieces of feedback he had been given about his "theory"... I wouldn't want to be around somebody in real life who demonstrated such regular and fatuous disregard for what I was saying. So, just to sum up, I apologize, Edgar, for any pain that my copying and pasting of the text on your website caused you, and I apologize for suggesting that the reason you are alone is because you are probably a difficult person to live with in real life. I don't know anything about you in real life (aside from what you've put on your website, assuming it is all true), and I realize that this forum is not the place to engage in personal attacks. I'll be more thoughtful in the future. Best regards, Dan Menon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
