Software is the "soul" of a computer, that is...

I've come to realize that we are not the "sum of our parts".  Its a fairly big revelation for me, because I've held to that idea since first officially calling myself an atheist.  As I've come to understand the concept of what thought is, what memory is, in the context of my programming career, its become increasingly clear that our "sense of self" is not literally brain tissue or neurons, it is further abstracted to the communication between the neurons.  This is analgous to the idea that a mathematical forumla is not literally composed of graphite scrapings on a piece of paper, and if you remove Microsoft Windows from a computer, it doesnt "weigh any less".  A full hard disk weighs exactly as much as an empty one.

So, in essence, what constitutes a human is not the "hardware", rather the software.  I am convinced of this, that if it were possible to slowly replace each neuron in our brain with a fully functioning but silicon based substitute that used standard electricity instead of the complex of chemicals required by our biological neurons to function, we could, quite literally, replace our "brains" with new hardware probably without noticing anything, except perhaps increased clarity of thought and significantly better memory.  We'd also stop needing to eat and breath oxygen and be able to last much longer, presumably.  The point is, each of us, our "ego", the I...would simply continue on because we are the software, not the hardware.  You can replace an organ, an arm, an eye, a leg.  We remain.

Ergo, if we are just software contained inside a relatively complex machine, we actually are "souls" in the sense that we are, to put it very primitively, software running on hardware just like a computer.

Continuing on that thread, we then, if it were technically possible, could be "downloaded" on to other hardware, say, smaller hardware that is miniaturized, or hardware that exists in a smaller paradigm such as using quarks, or if the string theorists are correct, as strings. 

That tangent leads us to realize that since we know quarks and strings do not exist as we do, in a material plane, and can pop in and out of our universe, presumably if our conciousness could be contained by these things where they were functioning as neurons do currently on the macro [sic] scale, living with "brains" spread across strings would mean we could coexist in several planes, several dimensions.  It would also mean we could simultaneously perceive across vast regions of space in several places at once, only as long as communication could occur between strings via hopping in and out of planes in a multi-dimensional space.

The short answer is, then, that the idea of God, souls, heaven, all of these universally held but as yet un observed and unproven phenomena become more possible.  Given our limited perspective, however, it is still no more likely that that Christian explaination of all things is any more accurate than the flying spaghetti monster.  A grand unification theory would explain a potential mechanism for this "spiritual software existence" to manifest itself across the universe, but until we managed to cross over by "upgrading our hardware" it would be impossible to know.

Another interesting point is speed/time.  When you dream, you can experience days, weeks, or months in the space of a few minutes during what we clumsily refer to as "REM" sleep, 5-15 minutes of real (our physical perspective) time.  To software though, time is not a constraint.  A computer can process 1 Billion calculations in 1 second or less.  Presumably our brains do something similar or much faster but in less easy to quantify ways as far as we can tell.

So, if we return to our "string" powered brains, we end up having the capability to live thousands of lifetimes in a nanosecond, and perhaps our physical 3d neighbours in universe 45Tg4b (ours), become rather like statues that take millenia just to move a finger.  Impossible or at least completely uninteresting to even try to relate to.  Have you ever tried to sit down and have a conversation with a mountain?  Its simply moved 2-3 inches and you have lived and died 900 times.  Talking to a physical person might be as boring as watching grass grow.

That said, of course, in our dreams, we escape to a world where we can experience the vastness of the universe in a blink of an eye, travel at the speed of thought , and defy our physical reality.  Perhaps our less "land locked" neighbours do communicate with us in dream, their software interfaces with ours, and they show us sights.  Who knows. If you assume our conciousness is effectively software locked in some relatively crude, large hardware (think a vaccuum tube computer the size of a warehouse compared to a digital PDA), there could be something to it.

Of course, this kind of olive branch makes one vulnerable again to the pitfalls of religion, that is, if all this is quite possible, who is to say that Joel Osteen is a quack?  That L.Ron Hubbard wasnt making up his fanciful stories of aliens?  That Joseph Smith actually did talk to Moroni and wasn't simply a moron.  It becomes thorny for certain.  Thus it is clear that we need to be vigilant in maintaining an intellectual clarity and openness to questioning everything, avoiding "sacred unquestionable knowledge" which I can still say I am an "a" to.  "Asacrist" perhaps..."adogma", "asuperstitious"...it continues.

Egg Nog for the holidays! or is it?

Growing up I always loved egg nog.  I looked forward to it every year and couldnt get enough of it.

Since I saw this movie "food inc." I've been paying closer attention to the ingredients of things, and to my massive disappointment, discovered that I could find no egg nog with either eggs or milk in it at any supermarket.

The ingredients are quite startling actually.  Usually leading with "Modified Milk Ingredients" - which Ive come to discover can be absolutely anything chemically derived from milk or milk products. The advantage seems to allow producers to ship the dry flakes or whatever then combine them later with other chemicals to produce things as they need them without having to worry about local labour and farm restrictions, and the dry protein derivatives can last for many years unlike real milk which has a relatively short shelf life.  Ever had powdered milk?  Canned milk?  like that.  So, you could be eating 30 year old milk combined with some goats milk from china combined with some milk powdered casien solids from india in that icecream or eggnog.

But I digress.  The Frankensteinian ingredients of eggnog notwithstanding, I defy anyone to find eggnog in a local grocer that does actually contain milk or eggs, or vanilla, or nutmeg.   What I came to realize is that in my entire life, I've probably never actually tasted real eggnog because we've always bought it at the store.  So, I decided to find a recipe on the internet and voila, found one that used cooked eggs so I didnt have to be as paranoid about salmonella from the raw eggs (almost unheard of but still)

So mixing my 1 litre of whole, 3.8% organic milk with local, 6 farm fresh eggs, some vanilla, regular white sugar (only 1/4 cup per quart surprisingly - so about 1/8th of whats in Coca cola typically) and tomorrow when its all chilled, I'll actually have my first "nog" of "egg nog"!  Its exciting.

I went a bit further to try to find Modified Milk Ingredients on wikipedia, but couldnt, so I've requested the article and added a list of ingredients to the existing EggNog article there.  Here is what I put in case some dairy dept. stooge comes along to delete it:

Commercially produced eggnog in North America rarely contains milk or eggs, and is typically a mixture that can include Modified milk ingredients, Glucose Solids, Hydrogenated Canola Oil, Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Sodium Caseinate, Tricalcium Phosphate,Modified Cellulose Gel, Dipotassium Phosphate, Mono and Diglycerides, Silicon Dioxide, Artificial Flavor and Maltol. In spite of this the product continues to be marketed as "Eggnog" and typically appears on supermarket shelves around the winter season in the United States and Canada.

Pretty gross huh?  Well, I have to admit, in spite of the grossness, its the taste that drew me to it in the first place so I guess it worked.  (As well as with ice cream), so I cant fault the scientists for making it cheap and taste good, but I can fault the companies and shareholders for letting profit dictate ethics.   Thats what they do though, I suppose.  For me, I'm just going to look for whole foods IE products with milk, eggs, and those kinds of real ingredients, and avoid "modified milk ingredients" while I still can.  Modified cellulose gel?  Ewwww.. folks, I like my cellulose gel the way nature intended it!

was that my email being read on the radio? I suppose it was...oops.

Listening to an angry guest on a local radio show broadcast by our Canadian public broadcaster "CBC", I developed some rather angry emotions about the major current conservative viewpoints of "anti marijuana", "anti climate/science" and "anti homosexual", and decided to send this rather unloving, poorly thought out letter to the station.

Hemp competes with corn, cotton, and other major corporate centralized industries, as well as disrupting clear corporate pharmaceutical interests as pointed out by the guest you had on the phone.

The Harper government represents an extremist, delusional, religious agenda that, like the clerics in the Muslim theocracies, makes use of "their sacred unquestionable values" to prevent our society from making use of hemp, doing something about alternative energy research, and eroding the rights of our homosexual minorities.  Under the guise of "doing their god's will", they are, in fact, performing the will of corporate interests, because it is so easy to make the gullible religious masses believe whatever they want as long as it comes from one of the pulpits in their closed, dark halls. 

As Voltaire said, "get them to believe absurdities and you can make them commit atrocities".

Thinking to myself, ah, I got that off my chest and chances are they will never read something like that on air.  But, they did.  I didnt hear it, but my evangelical conservative mother mentioned it to me that one of her fellow churchgoing friends pointed out my "rather hateful" rant was played on the radio and asked her if that was indeed "her son??"

I should point out that while many of my posts on this blog site are very anti religious, in this case my rant is not against all religions, or even against Christianity.  For the most part, Christians are relatively benign, reasonable people with little to differentiate them from anyone else.  They largely do not dispute (or even care about) evolution or the climate issues, and generally do a lot to make the world a better place at least when it comes to helping people in poverty, and many of them probably partake in the odd toke now and again like most people.  This letter  was aimed squarely at James Dobson & Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionist politics.  I see those movements as a direct threat to our secular democracy, and its important to remember, modern democracy is not a biblical ideology in the least, it has no roots in biblical teaching - nor does a "republic" either.  This movement that somehow has managed to twist the bible into being in lockstep with 4 key principals while ignoring others that are clearly mandated in the bible.  The three are anti-hemp, anti gay, anti abortion, and anti science (evolution in particular)

The bible says nothing about hemp, drugs, marijuanna specifically.  Nothing.  The bible is also silent on abortion, except for clearly condoning it in a few circumstances.  There is no dispute the bible is anti gay, but its also anti a lot of things that are routinely practiced by James Dobson and his ilk.  (eating meat, sacrificing animals, women allowed to speak in church etc).  There was no "science" as we know it at the time of the bible, evolution was not an existing theory, and the bible is truly vague at best when it comes to the origin of the universe.

That said, the bible is EXTREMELY clear about one thing.  Poverty.  Jesus seems to have no tolerance for the rich.  He says at one point it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  It is incredibly ironic that the greatest concentration of these "fundamentalist christians" are in the parts of the earth where the worlds wealth is the most concentrated. (Texas, New York, Southern California etc).

Anyway, the 4 non poverty related things like being anti homosexual, anti science, anti hemp, and anti climate/science/evolution play very well into the hands of the largest corporations in the world IE Exxon, Gilead Pharmaseuticals (controlled by one of the most powerful Christian Reconstructionists, Donald Rumsfeld) etc.  Hence my email.  Could I have included all this explanation and context, I would have been more comfortable hitting send the other day but I posted it here instead on the off chance some people heard the broadcast and know my blog.

Thanks for reading!

How Christian absurdism threatens humanity.

http://www.stormfront.org

As its been said, teach them absurdities and you can get them to commit atrocities.  Once you get people to embrace the absurd premise that an invisible man lives in space, loves us, but sends everyone who doubts his invisible existence to eternal torment, and he needs money...you can get them to commit atrocities or contribute to the subjegation of others or themselves as we see in poor but highly religious parts of the world.  One absurdity trumpeted by this self styled Christian web community "stormfront" is that diversity is actually bad for evolution.

Evolution has made it unmistakeably clear that diversity always wins, in every instance, without fail.  If you only ate potatoes, you would actually suffer disease and likely die from malnutrition.  Monocultured farms (growing only one crop constistently) are extremely succeptible to disease.  Inbreeding causes many hereditary problems simply due to the fact that only 1 gene pool is tapped and recycled, making the offspring vastly more likely to develop health complications and genetic defects.  When two "races" cross breed, the resulting offspring invariably gains the positive aspects that aid the survival of the parents and recessive genes are left behind.  This is patently obvious and the medical and sceintific record stands  behind it.

Stormfront.org seems to be made up of folks who accept some common absurd premises based on ignorance of science, and a common thread of "Christian faith". 

Clearly most Christians are not racist and largely embrace science and evolutionary theory, depending on how inclusive the term is used and in what context.  That said, the danger with all faith is that it encourages the "blind acceptance" of certain things that are "unquestionable".  By teaching that certain concepts and even leaders are infallible, you lose all accountability for those concepts and leaders, and ascribe them to the divine.  Since no one actually has seen or heard from the divine in a way others can independently verify, it is nearly impossible to determine whether a claim of divine inspiration is true or not.  So if I claim "god told me that I need to be racist" in spite of the fact that science demonstrates that racism is absurd, theology does not have a valid rebuttal.  Science of course does, as stated simply above, but in religious context, the belief in something that is absurd (IE a human walking on water or turning water into wine) is ascribed the term "great faith" and "super natural acceptance", implying that the more your premise disagrees with science, the greater the opportunity for faith.

So you have a group of people, the most "faithful" of which are diametrically opposed to what science would term as "intelligent behavior", and therefore are ripe for conscription by unscrupulous leaders into committing various atrocities on their behalf, such as racist violence, terrorism, suicide bombing, and in less extreme instances, rallying against postive world movements such as eco-responsibility (as evidenced by Stormfronts clear anti-environment stance by twisting the Copenhagen summit into something "sinister"), or supporting a corporately owned government that exists to prop up the wealthy and subjegate the poor.

"Get them to believe absurdities and they will commit atrocities" has been attributed to Voltaire, and in spite of the fact that Atheism by definition really implies no antagonism at all, has been viewed  by the "disciples of the absurd" who are legion, to brand us with epithets like "godless commies", "satanists" which, in their tangled web of apologetics and paranoia fueled world view, is the worst possible thing a person can be.

In summary, religious faith is clearly insanity.  It is a cancer on society that provides nourishment for negative, self destructive human behaviour and will either be the death of our species, or nearly eliminate us in its fantasy of apocalypse and rivers of blood.   It feeds on hate, poverty, ignorance and violence, and can only be eliminated within a culture that fosters education, honest debate, rational thinking, compassion, generosity and logic.

The story of it all - an original second skeleton sketch

This is a story that ends in almost nothing, starts in almost nothing, and contains everything. Everything you know anyway, everything that matters to you.

You all are familiar with the claims of evolution, about all we know as life on this thin varnish covering the planet we know as home. Microscopic elements coming together to form the first cells, the first flesh, the first life. Our microscopic ancestors journey from the sea to land that is mimicked in every womb tens of thousands of times a second every day across our planet. We rapidly grow from tiniest of nothing to self aware complexity unrivaled in the known universe.

This story isn't about that. It is about our future, our return to nothing. It was our beginning, and it will be our final destiny. Its happened several times before and we will see it happen again. We are just now at the point of seeing the very beginning of the miniaturization, the compression, the Great Smallening.

The year is 2745, or 2,090,567 BCE as we would know it from our time. Life has evolved to form many plant and aquatic species for which there are records today, but another path of evolution, some 300,000,000 years in length, is coming to its final destination, its Great Smallening.

Lets back up a little, some explanation is in order. We have watched in the past 90 years as machines have grown smaller, more efficient. Because we have such short lifespans, we see this Smallening as gradual, barely noticable, at least until very recently when the speed of Smallening has become so that we can literally see a hard disk drive that was 35 pounds 10 years ago become a few grams today, both storing equal amounts of data.

Now, it is known that if you were to take 1 gram of DNA, you would be able to store 1000 times all the data currently stored on all earth's human inhabitant's computers, which would include all "entered" data into the record of civilization. This data is mostly vague, descriptive data, so one quickly realizes that packing every single experience, every memory, every observance of every human from every millisecond of every lifetime PLUS a complete simulation of every living and non living thing in our thin varnish of an existence would be staggering by today's standards.

On top of all that person specific data, one can further extrapolate that the very gathering and interconnecting of it would form an enormous amount of incidental data, data that could not exist without the neural network of interconnectedness, data that forms its own kind of existence upon the matricies of combined experience.

All that data is staggering, but lets say it could, for the sake of argument, theoretically be stored in several pounds of DNA, say, about the size of a human brain. That would be 1000 times 1000 times all the data currently stored on all computers in all the world. A million civilizations literary works built over milenia, A million descriptions of all the known biological life on a million planets. A million personal financial records of billions of people for their lifetimes. A million different civilization's views, observations, and perspectives of the universe.

Seems staggering, but interestingly, not unfathomable, and certainly not dependent on our modern silicon based technology. DNA. What we see today is an old, aging, inefficient version of something perfected around 2745, or 2,090,567 BCE as we would know it from our time.

Up to the time of the ancestors, what you know as RNA was the primary means of life propagating itself, passing information from father to son, mother to daughter, progenitor to progeny. Eventually one species came to know itself, to know themselves, and become self aware. The agents. And in 2745, the Agents history, like ours, had become an information age. That is where the similarity ends.

The technology of the Agents was different than ours in that it was entirely organic, chemical based manipulation that they came to be able to use to communicate and store information. How they managed to discover and manipulate this may have come from another planet or some kind of teachings from previous cultures, but the point is, by 2745 they had discovered the ability to store and retrieve information by organic, electro-chemical means. They erected great cities, incredible structures, and buildings all based on this technology but the only thing that remains for us to see today are the vast quantities of petroleum we find underground. Oh, and our own DNA. The evidence of a massive, earth dominating civilization only represented by those two things. Two things that are crucial to our way of life, more than monuments, like the pyramids or The Sphinx, something far more that we take for granted.

But DNA was nothing more than a means to an end, a footnote in the rapid Smallening of the Agents. As the agents became aware of their ability to store and retrieve data using RNA, it was quickly discovered that RNA could be improved into DNA, to store more complex data. DNA was rapidly developed and installed into every cell, every living organism, and subsequently Evolution took on a completely new dimension, new capabilities, and life itself became far more interesting.

The Agents subsequently discovered that DNA could be improved, but the cells of every living thing could not work with the optimized DNA, the compressed, efficient DNA, so they could only implant it into certain, optimized substrates. These substrates then became the vehicles for an information age that far surpasses even the most grandiose dreams of our modern science fiction. We might call them Super-Super-Super computers, but the substrates allowed the Agents to pass their very beings into pure information, and the improved DNA allowed them to store all this information in a matrix the size of a pea.

So at this point, 2945, the Agents had all but entirely translated their population into a completely simulated world, a matrix that stored all their personalities, their perceptions, and their ongoing existence in an elaborate, evolving and indescribably beautiful world that they perceived as avatars inside a virtual world, and the miniaturization, the smallening, resulted in them distilling their entire existence, and all they could possibly hope to experience and perceive into a physical structure about the size of a sugar cube.

Of course, this tiny structure could not possibly hope to survive for any length of time on our volatile planet, so at an imperceptibly small energy cost, the structure was sent into orbit, an orbit exactly 3 times further from the sun as our planet, to ensure survival for a very long time. Being so small, of course, the structure can change its orbit to move with the sun, so it would survive the red giant phase, and when the sun goes to dwarf, the structure could use stored energy to leave the Solar System and move to the next suitable one, using the coolness of space to operate at peak performance. The anaerobic aspect of space also made it optimal for the structure to exist in perpetuity.

So, now, the Agents continue their existence. Being small does not diminish their power of observation, however. Are we not a pea in the great Milky Way Galaxy yet can observe it and beyond from our pin-prick of existence? No, the noisy neighbour and founding planet earth is a constant source of entertainment for the Agents. Earth is observed using means of perception impossible for us to comprehend or understand, but the energy we require just for listening, just to move our giant, un-optimized eardrums is completely impossible for the Agents to muster. In fact, the very energy it takes to power the movement of 1 ear drum to hear 1 call for dinner from a passionate food preperation specialist could power the matrix for several years.

The Agents do not comprehend our use of energy as wasteful particularly since energy abounds to such an extreme in our galaxy, but regards us as a rather clumsy, thumb-fisted evolution towards their smallening using electro-physical means and this rather silly step of silicon towards the process.

The really interesting part is that from the Agents perspective, the earthlings have longed for and searched for intelligent life beyond the Solar system, and the Agents are there, just beyond the moon, just beyond mars, ever watching, listening, and knowing so much, so much they could share but no means to do so until the earthings have reached their own smallening. Sorry about the DNA mistakes, but interested to see the result of them.

What is this world of the Agents like? I am not here to rewrite the story of the popular Matrix movies, or snowcrash, or other great novels about possible computer simulated worlds, but you get the idea. Start with the ideal of existence in all possible dimensions, then evolve from there. No hardship, no war, no religion, no violence. No cruelty, no hate, no greed. It is hard to understand how life could be "interesting" without these things because of our context as humans, how we have triumphed in adversity, sprung forth as new flowers grow from the remains of forest fires. That is what we know. We have never known existence without evil, without these kinds of pain. Suffice it to say that absent these things, life not only thrives, it thrives beyond imagination in every possible direction.

To the physical world, the Agent's universe is naught but a tiny frozen crystal, a miniature, very dense thing that if observed under a microscope would be increasingly complex down to its fundamental particles. The information is stored across multiple dimensions and its interconnectedness is compressed in ways yet inconceivable by humans. You could almost say the Agents exist in theory as the "thoughts" of a computer chip, only the computer chip is so vast, so powerful that its individual thoughts could actually be self aware and simultaneously perceive and create their own universe.

Second Life is an example that might help picture what it is like to be an Agent, only in the most crude, primitive way. One visits Second life as an avatar, perceives islands, vast oceans, buildings, and other avatars, chats with them, and interacts with them. The physical "version" is just a rack of servers in SanFrancisco, a bunch of CPU's and hard disks. Two leaps from this. 1. imagine the world in Second Life as indistinguishable from reality, you view it not on a monitor, but with closed eyes as in a dream. 2. imagine the servers are so big, so powerful, that you can actually download your brain into them, so your physical body is no longer required for you to "exist" outside of the servers.

Now 3. imagine the servers were shrunk to the size of a 1 cm cubed computer. Thats probably the easiest part given what we have observed in the past 100 years of technological smallening.


What of food, what of clothing, global warming, greenhouse gasses? If we observe our society, we can gather that all our necessities, our transportation, our massive food industries, our roadways, our electrical distribution systems, or need for so much energy are all geared towards our need to exchange information. Imagine making this ability efficient, that is, making all of our existence as interconnected as our individual neurons are. No need for food, no need for clothes, no physical needs at all, and suddenly all the limits of communication disappear. I dont have to drive 5 miles to see my daughter's graduation ceremony. I dont have to drive a car to see my son's play. I dont have to fly to Japan to breath in the cool, crisp air on top of Mount Fuji. If I can think about it, I can do it. Experience is as simple as changing one's mind. I can be skiing and the next thing I am swimming in a tropical paradise. I can be in a crowded party on top of a building in downtown Manhatten, then in an instant be observing the birth of a star in a multicolored nebulae. This is the life of the Agents. This is what they exist, and experience. If you are familiar with the "Q" in Star Trek, that is pretty close to a description of life as an Agent.

The Substrate is the home of the Agent. I have previously referred to it as matrix for ease of description, but the Agents call home the Substrate, and it has been home since their departure from earth in 2955, or 2,090,357 BCE as we would know it from our time. And believe me, the Agents know everything we know, everything we experience, and perceive it all and have even created a full simulation of our entire civilization inside their tiny, frozen existence, the Substrate.

Contact with the Agents is quite impossible as I previously stated, until we acheive our own smallening. Eventually we will discover, in our own clumsy way, that form of modified DNA that makes up the Substrate, or perhaps, as some of the Agents hope, discover something better, or at least something that provides new insight. Once we have acheived the smallening, the Agents will contact us and we will add ourselves to the network of smallened civilizations currently circling the Sun, and there are quite a few, some from other systems in the Milky way that have naturally gravitated towards our solarsystem, but the reality is, smallened civilizations far outnumber the very mass of the observable, lightened universe, and account for what baffles our current scientists as "dark matter" that they agree must exist to account for the universe.

On their way to becoming smallened, many civilizations fail, as must be. Ours may succeed, may fail, but in the many hundreds of millions of years to come for our planet, there will be many more to come as came before us.

The Agents wish us the best of luck in our journey, and look forward to meeting us in what they observe as the near future.

the end.