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by euccastro 6840 days ago
Better? What does that mean in this context? How do you compare a consciousness to a 'supreme state of existence', for value or otherwise? Who can perceive both, to perform such a comparison?

Hate to be unpoetic, but how is a star anything more than a big ball of burning gas? I don't feel humans are 'better' than stars. The only loosely related comparison I can think of is complexity: there is more to know about humans than about stars.
1 comments
rms 6840 days ago
>Who can perceive both, to perform such a comparison?

Our fourth dimensional overlords.

It's really tough to go anywhere with this conversation because it quickly hits the limits of what our consciousness can express. I feel that our consciousness is missing something that would allow us to understand why the big ball of burning gas exists on a higher plane of existence than us. This is of course completely impossible to justify.

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euccastro 6840 days ago
Yes, our reasoning platform is not made to deal with this kind of stuff, but it's fun, in a perverse way, to see where can it take us.

Kinda like passing a bitmap image to an audio player, or passing it through a mp3 compressor and loading the resulting data in an image viewer, trying to discover anything interesting in the output.

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