I just got a job, and it is a 40 minute commute, so I've been thinking about moving. Whenever I move, I use the opportunity to throw out stuff I haven't used in a while. This hurts my Dutch/Packrat side, but I have built an elaborate philosophical reasoning to allow me to throw things out.
- Things don't matter, memories matter.
Matter = Energy + Information
All matter in the universe is essentially energy. This is what E=mc2 means, (though the formula doesn't show that information is lost in the transition). The only difference between gold and lead is the information that the energy contains. If the information in the matter could be extracted, then that matter could be reconstructed with "different" energy and still be the same matter.
This theory also solves the dilemma about ressurection. The body is made of matter which is really energy and information. When we die, the energy from our bodies is returned to the system to be reused (some of the information remains), but a complete copy of the information is saved by God to allow our bodies to be reconstructed at the last day. Thus the resurrected body is the
same body, even though it may not be the same information. This is just like saving your word document on a floppy, and storing it for a few years, and then restoring it later. It isn't like the document takes up the same physical sectors of the hard drive after restore, but it
is the
same document.
Information is not a soul, though. The soul goes to God from whence it came, but a soul is not of this natural world, and therefore can't be quantified by natural mathematical theories.
Ok, back to my original point... I don't have to be a packrat and hold onto things that have sentimental value, because the formula can be restated as:
The boxes and boxes of pictures of old friends are only valuable because of the memories they contain. If we save the memories, or save the information contained in them (like digitizing them) then the pictures are worthless. The only other use is as a back-up to our mental or digital memories, as well as a form of pointer that allows us to retrieve information from our brains, that we have lost our reference to. Forgetting is not really losing the information from our brains, but rather losing references to it. I don't think the brain is limited in space, so there isn't any reason to run any garbage collector. The information stays there, but there is no way to get to it, unless we have an external pointer to it. More on this later...
2 Comments:
Cosmic Backup Tapes versus Redundant Hardware.
When I started thinking about how, technically, God pulls off this life-after-death trick, I formed two competing theories:
1) the cosmic backup tape wherein all the interconnects of the neural network between the ears are recorded to be restored to some kind of temporary or resurrection body. Trouble with this notion is that it makes the Resurrection a redundancy.
2) Suppose, on the other hand, that our consciousness is mirrored someplace on redundant hardware. We go thru that tunnel of light thing and our consciousness does a failover to spirit-hardware. How can this be? Let's suppose Hawking is right about reality being 10-dimensional and the material dimensions we see are a four-dimensional subspace projection, but those remaining 6 dimensions in the theory that we don't see are a distinct subspace projection (orthagonal to the material subspace projection) and that's the realm of ghosts and angels and demons.
When our bodies break and the pattern of our material brains is disrupted, it could be that the disruption does not extend beyond the material subspace projection, and the spirit-stuff pattern coheres. It is thus able to sustain continued operation allowing us to experience the stuff of near death experience stories. The Resurrection is thus a restoration of the coherence of the material pattern after some time spent in the heavenlies playing harps or what-not.
The problem with your two theories is that they are limited to this natural world. What if the real me and you was not something that dwelled in hardware, and wasn't even software, (or wetware...) but rather a controlling entity that was from the supernatural realm, and the human experience is simply an integration of spirit and body.
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