Utari's Puppies (Formerly Off-Topic Thread)

Expected =/= it actually happens with 100% certainty. Some survive against all odds.

I’m surprised you of all people can’t grasp the bigger picture here. Just because some data is erased does not erase their crime. The whole concept of being absolved of all responsibility through some divine pardon is fairly alien at least to my clans code of ethics and morals. No matter what you do you carry your burdens with you. Nothing absolves your soul from atrocities, if any, you’ve committed.

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Well, first, I don’t believe in souls. I also don’t believe we’re immortal[1]. I believe we’re serial copies. We die, and then someone who looks like us and remembers what we did takes our place. Nobody around us can tell the difference. Even we can’t tell the difference between ourselves and the previous versions of ourself. But we’ll be able to tell the difference between ourselves and future versions.

Because we will experience death. My mind is an emergent property of the electrochemical state of my brain. It is nothing more. And when a new brain is flash-grown and the recording of the state of my brain the moment before death is copied onto it… it won’t be the same one. Just like if I burn a priceless piece of art, and then produce a perfect copy, it’s not the same item. It’s a copy.

The Scimitar I have in my hangar is identical in every way to the last Scimitar I lost. It’s not the same ship. I am not a continuation of a seamless, continuous chain of experience[2] that is ‘Arrendis Culome’. I am the 115th iteration of an Arrendis Culome. And I do wonder, sometimes, what the original would think of me. But I don’t believe I’m her. She died. Just like the 43rd Arrendis Culome died. Am I guilty of the things they did? I remember doing them. I carry that baggage as part of my psyche, just like I carry the scarring that #43 suffered through 21.5h of trying in vain to save lives during B-R.

But I don’t believe for a moment that I was there. I wasn’t. A different Arrendis Culome was there. And she died.

I also don’t believe that I am guilty of all the things future copies of me will do. And that’s critical to this, because Alizabeth stems from a backup made before any of the things Alizabeth Vea did ever happened.

So, right now, are you guilty of all of the things future Teinyhrs will do?

  1. Frankly, I think the insistence that we are immortal is a kind of… bleak desperation. If we’re not, then not only will we end and someone else replace us without anyone mourning us… then what kind of inhuman monsters are we? All the friends we’ve had… who died, and we didn’t mourn. We didn’t even acknowledge it. We just kept on going, accepting the replacement as that person. What the hell is wrong with someone who can do that in the face of people they claim to give a damn about dying, again and again? In the face of that, it’s no wonder most capsuleers feel that need to believe themselves immortal. But we’re not immortal. We’re disposable. We come in six-packs. 12-packs. Buy us by the gross, there’ll always be another one if the one you get breaks. We’re like cheap tissue.

  2. And before anyone trots out the tired (no pun intended) ‘oh, so do you think you’re a new person every time you sleep? It’s not a seamless chain of experience’ nonsense… yes, it is. Just not a conscious one. Your brain keeps experiencing life while you sleep. You’re just not awake for it. You don’t need to be aware of something for that something to be seamless. A seamless ribbon is still seamless, even if part of it is covered by another cloth.

I am rather amused how some people are exempt of judgement and repercussions and others are not. And that the worse, the more extreme things you do the more above reproach you seem to be. But advocate for peace and tolerance and you’ll wade in rivers of literal crap.

Capsuleers sure have some blue and orange morality.

I do.

Neither have I ever.

Speaking of blue and orange morality… One can’t be held accountable for what they will do, until they do it. I’m not guilty of what future me will do until future me does it, in our linear understaning of time.

Now I’m not rightly sure what you mean with her stemming from a clone made before. Is current her some years old soft clone? Certainly complicates things, can you hold someone accountable of what their clone did? I consider it so. The clone is still you, even if they made different choices than you would later do.

If hearing what their bad choices lead to in another life shocked someone into penance and making a better choice, that is commendable. As such I think trying to then forget ones past or unwanted deeds is doing oneself a disservice, to ignore what “scared you straight.”

Ultimately, about calling someone with a “dead name”, if you can’t stand the life you have lived, or in this case one potential life you actually lived though by nature can’t remember, that’s something you need to work on. Is it unfair? Yeah, it is. No one said it wasn’t.

I’d also consider ignoring the suffering of who knows how many people over a capsuleer having a hard time living with the consequences of her past future self, extremely unfair to them.

F*** some of you people get yourself in weird predicaments.


Alizabeth, as I’ve been corrected to know, is a nth-times copy of the infomorph as it existed at graduation, before ‘Alizabeth Vea’ did any of the things she did. When Vea drank the tea, the old backup was activated instead of one that had ever experienced anything after graduating.

The one who committed all those deeds was, in effect, a future version of the infomorph, from the perspective of the person who awoke. And I’ll note: she’s not trying to forget about those deeds. In fact, she operates under the ridiculous notion that she has to atone for things she never did. All because of imaginary crap like ‘souls’.

She’s not trying to forget them. She beats herself up over them far worse than any of you could, and frankly, lives in abject terror of becoming that person, despite all of the differences in circumstances and where she personally is in her life even now.

She just doesn’t want to called by the name of the person who did them.

That isn’t ‘ignoring the suffering of who knows how many people’. Those people who suffer because of what Vea did to them have every right to their pain and their suffering should be taken seriously. That doesn’t mean it has to be compounded by adding one more victim to Vea’s total.

There’s hard science out there that demonstrates that we are just delusions of the meat, lying to ourselves about being anything more. You want to insist on some kind of retarded mob justice based on ‘souls’, first, prove they exist. After all…

I’m not insisting on mob justice you cucumber. You asked my opinion and I gave it.

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No, I didn’t. I questioned the chain of responses you’ve offered in this thread, which included

about a post that included this bit:


And yeah. Insisting that everyone else should be holding her to account for crap she never did in the first place, just because someone else did it who wore the same face… that’s a call for mob justice from the Cartel hypocrite that you’re agreeing with.

At least, that’s how it reads to me. Like I said in the ndokassi discussion:

Off topic, I know, but calling someone a cucumber as an insult made me laugh. I’m going to have to remember that.


Except I haven’t insisted on other people to hold her accountable. Based on what has been told to me here, I too hold her accountable from my own reasoning which is an entirely different thing.

And the clone thing certainly complicates things, but it is a giant can of worms if we can just start claiming “I’m exempted from your moral judgement because it was not me but another clone.” Of course, peer judgement largely means jack among capsuleers.

I dunno, I didn’t take it as an insult, really. S’just me and Tein. We haven’t even gotten as heated as we did in the other thread.

Does it? I kind of think it opens a far larger can of worms to start holding people accountable for things someone else did wearing their face. Clonejacking’s a thing, you know. So are biosculpts. I could make myself into a perfect copy of you, and victimize thousands wearing your face, calling myself by your name… should you be held accountable for that?

S’not the same person. It’s not the same mind. It’s a copy, stored for years.

Future, past, amnesiac, backup, intoxication, peer pressure, whatever. It doesn’t matter. The actions were done by you in some form. Whether it was voluntary or not, with your knowledge or consent or not, it happened, and your not knowing about it or not consciously choosing it does not erase that. You have to take responsibility, because it happened by your hands.

Some amount of forgiveness or sympathy can be spared in some cases, but the deeds can’t be ignored.


We have a fundamental disagreement here in that it is a different person. It is possible, if somewhat unlikely she could become that person again, but not because people call her by her old name, but because whoever is responsible for her religious and emotional support and nurture is a colossal idiot. I assume Mitara Newelle.

And yes I didn’t bother addressing the biosculpt/jacking angle because that is clearly not the case here. Both are also incredibly difficult to pull off. Not impossible, but so pretty damn hard, they’re barely worth considering. And if that does happen to me, then I guess I will be hoist by my own petard.

And for the record, I do not actually hold particular hate or wish harm to her. I barely even know her. I’ve just been discussing the circumstances around her and my stance on them.

I think it’s really not. Who she was had experiences this version doesn’t remember. This sequence of her has had experiences the other never had. Each day, they’re more and more divergent. One was a self-absorbed hedonist. The other’s an insecure wreck who worries more about her kids than anything else, with ‘atonement for everything I can imagine’ coming in a close second. If she could figure out a way to manage it, I’m sure she’d blame herself for the collapse of the EVE Gate, the Day of Darkness, and genetic colorblindness in human beings, just to have more to atone for.

About the only thing they have in common, other than genetics, is the impact their time in the CN Marines had on them.

No limitations eh ?

What if I cloned myself and raised her as my daughter ? Is she responsible for my actions ?

And if we’re going to judge people on their future actions, then wew Samira, what you did in YC125 was horrifying, I don’t know how you can live with yourself.

This really sounds like you’re woobifying her in the extreme. Her thread about Alkabsi pacification certainly shows a far more uncaring and perhaps past future self-like side of her.

No, just someone whose military training lets her compartmentalize well when she needs to.


With the knowledge that my opinion means very little, I agree with Kalaratiri’s general notion. I am responsible for who I was fifty clones ago. I could have (and likely have) changed drastically over the course of those clones but their actions were and still are my own. I doubt my allies or enemies have forgotten my deeds. I can assure you that regardless of clone my brother and I still do not talk. I could have changed in a millions ways from my last clone but regardless, always and forever, I will be all iterations of me.


I’d be interested in seeing the bit where I “called for mob justice”. Also, how am I being hypocritical? I’m not asking people to ignore things I’ve done.


Why are we discussing whether the current “Alizabeth Vea” is to be held accountable for some sins of a doppelganger or whatever, when the current “Alizabeth Vea” has enough “sins” of her own to atone for? Or are you saying the killer for slavers actually died already and this person currently on comms is yet another one?


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I don’t really know, why are we discussing past sins?