06-29-2017, 02:49 PM | #11 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
This is essentially the p-zombie thought experiment, yes? So it might range from a zero point feature (which presumably makes you susceptible to some supernatural effects and immune to others) to full on Automaton.
Last edited by sir_pudding; 06-29-2017 at 02:56 PM. |
06-29-2017, 02:56 PM | #12 | |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
Quote:
Souls, and the existence, nonexistence, and nature thereof, are setting dependent. |
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06-29-2017, 03:02 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
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06-29-2017, 04:13 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: T'Pol's Ready Room
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
Just as interesting to me is why? Obviously, this is a sinister conspiracy by some secretive cabal, but what are their goals? Are they purely demonic in nature or is this wizardly action intended to breed an army of easily controlled thralls? Does the universe spin out means to undo this? Can a freed soul be grafted upon one of the Soulless and create a whole person or does this only exacerbate the problem?
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06-29-2017, 05:14 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
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Well, unless children born by IVF are clearly better than other children. But that's its own rather special variety of horror. |
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06-29-2017, 05:48 PM | #16 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
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06-29-2017, 06:11 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
Ooh, that's a good one. It explains both why no-one has noticed anything distinctive about IVF children, and why the secretive cabal started up the IVF thing in the first place. Plus it's super-creepy.
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06-29-2017, 06:43 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
Though if the only thing something does is protect you from possession, calling it a 'soul' seems like a stretch (really, anything other than full-up dualism seems problematic for calling it a soul, meaning the soulless would probably lack free will and a sense of self).
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06-29-2017, 06:53 PM | #19 |
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
There was a neat version of the "soulless" in a book called The Flicker Men. A protagonist found some people who could not collapse the waveform by observing the photons passing through a slit in the double-slit experiment. Apparently, according to the universe the soulless didn't count as observers...
That's incredibly deep when you think about it. You could use it to build more of a cosmic science rather than religious atmosphere. The soulless in the book were sort of running on autopilot, mimicking humanity. Stimulus-response on a very complex algorithm, but they didn't have real free will. They were the mooks in reality. Animals, not humans. Space-fillers for the souls around them. Maybe sociopaths. Anyway, eventually the protagonists developed a detector based upon the double-slit experiment. Then the book sort of goes off the rails, frankly. The first half is the most interesting. Also, at some point some smartguy gets the idea to insert the detector into pregnant wombs to figure out when souls "attach" to a fetus, but the book doesn't explore this (deeply disturbing) aspect of the plot.
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 06-29-2017 at 07:16 PM. |
06-29-2017, 07:13 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Horror Scenario: Babies without souls
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Tags |
horror, ivf |
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