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The duck theory:
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you can be reasonably sure that it’s a duck. Likewise, if is reasons with you (i.e. is sentient / has passed the Turing test) and takes part in society in a meaningful way, then it is almost certain that you are dealing with a person, even if it's mechanical or a biological / mechanical hybrid in nature.
Discuss.
There is no spoon.
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What if the duck is quacking alone in the pond with no other ducks, What is he then?? 
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Quackers? 
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God? 
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A person is a holographic image of the mind which radiates from out of the Planck Space.
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if a cow could talk god would look like a cow!---- 
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Neo wrote:The duck theory:
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you can be reasonably sure that it’s a duck. Likewise, if is reasons with you (i.e. is sentient / has passed the Turing test) and takes part in society in a meaningful way, then it is almost certain that you are dealing with a person, even if it's mechanical or a biological / mechanical hybrid in nature.
Discuss.
According to several people & sources, a persons time on this world might involve several reincarnations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world's_a_stage "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts..." http://www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha9.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#Predating_computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy Back then, no one saw a connection with words like, phone booth, Superman & Reeves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Ted%27s_Excellent_Adventure#Plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)#Plot The Digital Superman Inside The Cyberspace Matrix "Morpheus and his crew belong to a group of free humans who "unplug" others from the Matrix and recruit them to their resistance against the machines. Within the Matrix, they are able to use their understanding of its nature to bend the laws of physics within the simulation, giving them superhuman abilities." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix#Plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Reeveshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reevehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keanu_ReevesThe Superman Matrix http://jf-themultiverse.blogspot.com/2009/03/blog-post_31.htmlhttp://jf-themultiverse.blogspot.com/2008/06/superman-connections.html
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If we are living in a programmed reality, then one might think of a person as being like a type of character in a video game that has a certain base level of abilities - language, intellect,etc, but also the latent ability to achieve "superpowers" (paranormal abilities, astral travel, time travel, immortality) depending on the extent to which one is able to comprehend and transcend true reality, although exceedingly few ever even realize that any state exists above base level. Ultimately, the highest level would be on par with that of our creator (who is only slightly less likely than we are to be itself a computer generated entity), and gain the ability to create our own simulated universes. What interests me most about this are the psycho-social implications. I wonder if society could really handle the idea of the universe being a computer simulation, nested several layers deep inside of simulations that came before us, which would most likely be the case. The sense of insignificance one feels from really comprehending that is pretty scary. I suspect most would prefer to live in denial, as we were programmed to be.
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Greetings, zardoz, and welcome to our forum. And thanks for such a thought-provoking contribution.
I agree with your idea that we have attributes that help to define our experiences. I think of them as positions on a Bell curve of probabilities. For example, one person may be assigned a "musical" ability of .5, which gives them average ability to write or create music. Mozart got .99, at the far right of the curve. Perhaps most everyone in the human race has a psychic ability of .01 or less because we are not evolved enough to handle it yet. In a similar way, I think that macroscopic anomalies may exist in a probability space, in the same way that quantum physicists say that particles do.
I agree also that people would prefer to live in denial. Remember Cipher's statement in The Matrix in that regard: "Ignorance is Bliss." But would the sense of insignificance really be any scarier than peering in outer space and comprehending trillions of stars in billions of galaxies?
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Hi Jim, thanks for the welcome. I wonder if those galaxies that we glimpse are actually being physically "fleshed out", programmed reality-wise, as we gain greater and greater resolution of them (since there would be no practical reason for the program to manifest them before they could be seen)? Then that raises the question of whether we are alone in the universe, which seems a somewhat *more* likely possibility within the context of programmed reality? I was also wondering whether you think it's possible that programmed reality might actually be understood and accepted at elite levels and that an agenda might exist to keep people away from it's realization? I'm thinking in particular of the debate between the rationalists/Darwinists and ID/creationists - it seems that any ID proposal is interpreted, somewhat absurdly, as a kind of Trojan horse for creationism so that it can be marginalized and serious consideration avoided. And is it possible that elites are, in a sense, actually looking out for our welfare (hard as that may be to imagine), if they have determined that people just couldn't handle the concept of programmed reality? Also, have you seen the movie The Thirteenth Floor? It deals with this subject very directly.
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zardoz wrote: have you seen the movie The Thirteenth Floor? Love that film! It's a curious fact that 3 films dealing with quite similiar themes came out in the same year (1999). The Matrix The Thirteenth Floor eXistenZ Millennium fever maybe.
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Hi Neo. Dark City is another excellent one, from 1998. It touches on the idea that, as Jim mentions, for all we know our universe might be 5 minutes or a day old (whenever the computer is turned on, that is).
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Which character are you?This is basically the same question as the other post, but more accurate and cogent. Are you a Holocharacter or a Person inside the program?
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