Moving!

So those color choices a couple of posts back... that is what I chose for my new condo. I'm moving this weekend. Packing tonight, first trip tomorrow (GR to Holland!). Much thanks to a good friend from work for tomorrow's trip.

Then an old friend is borrowing his dad's pickup and I can move my queen-size bed (its a monster, but my feet still hang off the edge... I sleep diagonally... thanks to my dutch heritage.)

Gotta pack.

(I'll be offline for a bit during the move, but I doubt I'll let that last too long.)

Soul as Software

What if soul is software? If the soul is software, then it can be much more integrated with the rest of the human body. Software includes functions, data, and configurations. The soul would then include skills, memories, and personality. Software is infinitely malleable, and the same would then be said for the soul. Ever new memory would change a soul. Every new skill would add dimensions to the soul. Harmful happenings could cause the personality to change. If the soul is software, then immortality could be implemented by a perfect backup system. Every skill, memory, and personality quirk would have to be backed up for the soul to be recreated at resurrection. Immortality would then be a sort of data integrity guarantee. Perhaps then the transfer of a soul to heaven is simply an awakening of the backup copy, as the primary copy disintegrates into electrical noise. In this case, heaven could be a sort of cold storage of the tape backups, or a reunion of the saints, in some sort of temporary memory, or a time for reflection on the life that has been stored. Resurrection would be a download to new hardware, and a chance to add new experiences to the ones already stored. Comments?

Soul as Supernatural Other: What about Memory?

See my earlier post on the soul. For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming that the soul is a supernatural thing, separable from the physical dimension. If the soul and body are separate, where are memories stored? Are they stored in the physical body, or in the soul. I don't think all memory is stored in the soul, because if the soul contained all memory, then Alzheimers would be different. Alzheimers patients are not soul-less people. They are simply people that have lost memories. If all memories were stored in the soul, then the act of losing memories would involve the loss of contact with the soul. If memories are stored in the physical body then this opens up some interesting possibilities:

1. Memories and computer data are only different in their storage medium.
2. Memories can be erased by removal of parts of they physical storage medium.
3. Destruction of the physical storage medium causes permanent loss of the memory/data unless a backup copy is made.
4. Without a physical storage medium there is no memory/data.

When we apply these computer data principles to the human soul, we see some interesting conclusions emerging:

1. The disembodied soul (upon death) has no memory (or at least loses some memory)
2. We can't remember each other in heaven.
3. The dead soul does not have state, and thus has no concept of time.
4. The resurrection means so much more, because a soul without a body is actually missing something.

I assume that God keeps a backup copy of our memories... Perhaps that is what is meant by the final judgment - the soul was temporarily experiencing the results of their lives on earth, but at ressurection reunites with the body, and remembers all the sins of their life, and then God can lead them through them all, and give them their final review. (By the way, I doubt their will be a wait before the final judgement. God is infinite in processing power, so the final judgement probably happens in a massively parallel fashion.)

Soul and Consciousness

I am reading a book by William H. Calvin called "How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now" (It is part of a Science Masters series), and Calvin is talking about human consciousness. I am a Christian, and am firmly convinced about the idea that the soul is immortal. However, given this new data, I may have to change how I percieve the soul. I always thought of the soul as an other element. This is supported by C.S. Lewis's strong metaphysical construct of the difference between Nature and the Supernatural. This sort of thinking brings one to believe that the mind is like a radio for the soul... or perhaps a spiritual access point from which the soul can retrieve information, and through which it can interact with the external world.... but... What if the soul is like software. Software is not something separate or magical, but more a configuration of ordinary atoms into an idea that can then be transferred to another set of ordinary atoms unchanged, and still the same software. Then, perhaps when God says the soul is immortal, he means that he is taking an incremental backup of our soul's software, so that the data can then be transferred back into another body. There is the obvious problem that comes with software.. which is that it can be copied... but no sense confusing the issue... I think however, that we don't have to choose between the two. I think the will is more than mere matter, but the soul is not human unless it is in contact with a physical body. This brings up another interesting question... Is memory stored in the soul or in the body?

Dollars per gallon (or the silly cost of living...)

If you click on the header of this post, you will be taken to a Google search that uses Google's amazingly useful unit handling calculator built into their search engine to tell you what I pay per mile I drive. (I love my toyota... 36 mpg yeah!... and it isn't even a hybrid) For all you poor saps with old domestic beaters... well why don't you tell me how much it sux. Here's what you do.

1. Reset your trip meter next time you fill up (assuming it works..).
2. Drive for a while.
3. Note what the trip meter says the very next time you fill up.
4. Note how many gallons you bought.
5. Replace the 372.9 miles with the number on the trip meter.
6. Replace the 10.334 gallons with the number of gallons you bought.
7. Click Search.

What comes back is how many cents per mile driving costs (I got 8 cents per mile). Then you can multiply by the number of miles you drive in a week (currently 300 for me), and you can find out how much it costs to maintain the American love affair with the automobile... (I got $24.941)

All this figgerin' is assuming the cost of gas is $3/gallon. Adjust that part as you wish.

Perhaps these prices will finally get public transportation properly funded in America! But still... we need a better energy source than oil.

V

I am a technophile...

I always have been, and probably always will be... but recently I have been rethinking technology and its influence on the world around us. A while ago I finally watched Braveheart... this is a story about a man in a very backwards time where there was very little technology, but still there was enough to produce an unbridgeable gap between the peasant and the noble. But the tyranny that existed could not be tolerated by the people, and with the crystallizing power of a great leader, the people turned their world around. The technology of the day meant that many had to die, but eventually the people prevailed. Today we have much more powerful technology, and a much larger gap between the people and the rulers. The great technology I am thinking about is not the great nuclear weapons or laser guided bombs, or chemical warfare or biological vectors. The weapons I am talking about are much more fluid. I am talking about the incredible advances in the power of persuasion. In the days of Braveheart, the people may have been bound, but their minds were always free. Now we have the powers of advertising... these are the powers that can shape the way we feel. And those who control the minds of the people are already in control of their actions. Utopian novels and movies like Aldous Huxley's brave new world, or 1984, or even V is for Vendetta are attempting to warn us against this sort of control, but the problem is that they paint a picture where those in authority have absolute and draconian control.. but these people don't really need to have absolute control, to change the way things happen. They only need to make sure that what the people trust is what they tell them. Allowing a story to leak out into an untrusted source is actually better than trying to keep the story from leaking at all.... because that source, by telling the story, reduces the story to what that source always says, and the common man (the one who actually rules this country) dismisses it as gossip, and nothing more needs to be said. The source may even have evidence, but since the story originally came from an untrustworthy source, it will forever be an "untrue" story. Image is everything. How something is spun is reality. What the people believe is reality (or it will be soon enough). You shape the mind of the people, you shape the world. The absolute rulers have never been those who have the most swords, or the most money, or the most power, but those who have the most influence over the minds of the people.

Color Choices

Kitchen Colors

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Bathroom Colors

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Languages

I think I'm going to learn spanish... just to be able to understand Shakira...

Does anyone else think that Whenever, Wherever (an English song by the way) has a positively Australian twist to it? When I heard it first, I didn't think Hispanic... I thought Crocodile Dundee...

Anyway, I took 2 years of spanish in High School, and very little stuck with me, but listening to spanish lyrics, like in La Tortura helps to bring it back (It helps to NOT be watching the music video though... I've always found thinking rather difficult in the presence of beautiful women...