X-Message-Number: 26060 Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 11:59:11 -0400 From: Francois <> Subject: To Richard Virtual entities don't actually exist you say. They cannot experience, nor can we experience them, and the virtual dog cannot walk in virtual rain because both are only electrons flowing in networks of transistors. Yet, I know of at least one kind of purely virtual world that we can experience as virtual entities right now. I have been in such a virtual world, so have you and so have almost all humans living or dead throughout history. I'm talking about dreams of course. The dreamworld, by your definition, does not exist. All we really have during dreaming are physical neurons transmitting electrochemical signals to each other. They are the only "hard" observable reality in the dream experience, the only things I would see if I tried to observe a dream with a microscope. I will grant you that it is indeed the case. However, from the point of view of the dreamer, this is very far from the truth. In my dreams, I have walked in magnificent palaces, in exotic gardens, in ruined cities destroyed by war. I visited other times, other places, other worlds and met thousands of people. By your definition, none of that was real, and indeed it wasn't. Yet, when I touched a marble statue in one of my dream gardens, it felt to me like touching a real marble statue in a real garden. There was no marble to be touched, and no flesh and blood hand to touch it, yet the experience I remembered after waking up was of a flesh and blood hand touching cool hard marble. Of course, there was no uploading involved since it was still my own brain experiencing the whole thing. But you cannot denie that dreams are completely virtual experiences that completely feel like real ones. Even though all that was really happening at the time was neurons exchanging signals within the confines of my skull, I still saw and touched a marble statue in a garden. Dreams are a proof of concept that life as a virtual entity in a virtual world is a perfectly valid and satisfactory form of existence. And you could have chosen a less contemptuous location than your toilet as an example of a place where I could already exist in encoded form. This kind of cheap shot coming from an obviously intelligent and educated person really saddens me. Francois The Devil fears those who learn more than those who pray Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26060