Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk… - Dennis E. Taylor

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Now, the big one. Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of meat. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The meat was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In me. I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob.

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About Dennis E. Taylor

Dennis Taylor, writing as Dennis E. Taylor, is a Canadian novelist and former computer programmer known for his largescale hard science fiction stories exploring the interaction between artificial intelligence and the human condition.

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"We'd gotten onto the concept or morality and Frida had just asked Theresa how she could have any sense of morality without a deity to define what was or was not moral.
[...]
"What deities give you aren't rules of morality," Theresa responded. "They are just rules. Do this and you will be rewarded. Do that and you will be punished. That's how we teach our pets not to relieve themselves in the house. One would hope that true morality involved more than learning not to poop on the rug by being rapped on the nose!"
[...]
"In fact", Theresa continued, "I believe that it is only possible to acquire true morality without input from a deity. It is only when you do something because you believe it is the right thing to do, instead of because of any moral desserts, that you are acting morally. Likewise, it is only when you refuse to do something because of the golden rule, rather than because of a threat of punishment, that you are behaving in a moral manner.

And anyway, far-left and far-right extremists can be hard to tell apart. Once you reach the point where you believe that you have the right to enforce your stance by lies, intimidation, and violence, it really doesn’t matter that much what label you apply.

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Sadly, it was like most political arguments. No one was willing to debate their base assumptions or justify them or compromise on them. The simple tactic being that if you repeated your assertion often enough, with enough emotion and volume, the opponents would somehow be forced to see things your way. Never worked, of course.

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