drwells123 wrote...
Ieldra2 wrote...
ME2 - Miranda Lawson. There are so many cautionary tales about genetic engineering I'm thoroughly sick of it. It was such a relief to see a functional genetically engineered character with desirable traits. Add that she's got a personality I can immediately relate to so much that it's not hard to write fanfic about her, and she's the main reason my mind has stayed on ME2 for more than a year. I can only hope they don't ruin all that by canonically confirming her infertility.
jtav had a nice bit in Persistence of Memory where Liara tells Miranda an Asari myth akin to that of Icarus - i.e. someone reaches for some knowledge or ability that people "shouldn't" have and it destroys them. (I'm butchering the details, but I believe that was the gist.) Of course, Miranda is disgusted and angered by this story. (And I can only imagine her reaction to Flowers For Algernon.)
There was a debate on the Liara thread a while back about whether the Lazarus project was "right", and whether Liara was right to go look for Shepard's body rather than let the dead rest. As I recall, more than one person suggested that death is not for humans to tamper with, or that refusing to accept it reflects some sort of God complex or delusional withdrawal from reality.
Whenever I used to read about some religion, philosophy, or other belief system that suggests death is merely part of a cycle, or that "it's our mortality that defines us", I coudn't help thinking, "This is just high-flown bulls--- trying to evade or reconcile people to a fundamentally rotten aspect of the world." It struck me as the same kind of thinking used to justify human sacrifice or the deaths of people from diseases that, later, proved easily curable - in other words, thinking used as an excuse for the failings of, or unwillingness to apply, reason.
Then I read something in Atlas Shrugged that really nailed this for me. Animals - i.e. beings that can't reason - are defined by a circle. They live and die, or are killed. They are forced into an equilibrium with their environment. But the shape for humans is a straight line - going forward, changing their environment to better suit them. Looked at this way, death is just one more obstacle to be overcome, not passively yielded to. The same goes for the human limitations that are overcome by Miranda's engineering.
This isn't meant as some blanket argument that everything humans do is right, or that they're somehow apart from or better than nature, or that all inventions represent progress, or that it's okay to despoil the earth for our own pleasure, etc. We have some ways of looking at the world that were useful once but are dangerous liabilities now, and become more so as our capabilities increase - Nassim Taleb has made a career out of talking about this. Likewise, there are things in nature and in human society that reason can't be used to replace (and Hayek made a career out of talking about that).
If the wages of reason are still subject to misuse by the lizard brain (and if I recall we already had the debate here about using reason to simply engineer out the lizard brain, versus letting people make that choice as individuals), I'm glad we don't have to listen to any in-game sermonizing about playing God, eating the forbidden fruit, or using the Lazarus project to resurrect Hitler. Instead, it's taken for granted that overcoming human limitations is inherently a good thing and that that's where our hope lies.
nice post. i'd like to point out that some evolutionary theories suggest that there was actually an advantage to early life being mortal, hence death being part of the cycle. humans, having surpassed basic survival traits (in most cases) could easily re-conquer death in the future.
Retour en haut
And a few hundred years ought to be enough for most guilty memories to fade. Meanwhile, think how much more knowledge and experience you could accumulate living forever. Imagine if we still had Einstein around, for instance. The knowledge can be written down for other people to learn, but that takes time, and the experience of applying that knowledge takes even longer.
