Paperless office of the mind

I was thinking last night about blogging. I was thinking about what it is that appeals to me. Thank heaven that it's not the publicity, because among the few hits I do get on this blog, the majority of them still seem to be looking for penguin sex.

See, I've always done this, even before the world wide web existed. I used to journal. You know, I'd get one of those little books with blank pages, and write whatever was on my mind in it whenever the mood took me. It even had some limited amount of readership, as I would always encourage friends who visited me to feel free to pick up a journal and peruse it. (I girl I was dating once read one cover-to-cover, which led to a few interesting conversations.) Someone once told me that largely what computer technology does is not so much make new things, but make electronic versions of things that already existed. Blogs are really electronic diaries.

But there's a difference that for me is key. I think what started me thinking about this last night was hearing someone say something like, "There's nothing scary about an empty piece of paper." I have no recollection of where I heard it or if that was anything like an exact quote. But I remembered that back in my journaling days, there was indeed something quite scary to me about a blank piece of paper.

I actually even once wrote a journal entry about it, and while I don't have it with me now, I remember it pretty well. I'd bought a new journal, and I began to write about an intense fear I had at the very moment the pen touched the paper. Here was a whole book full of empty pages, and while I tended to think those journals were overpriced, the actual value of the thing was as yet to be determined. An empty book held infinite promise, like a block of marble, waiting for the artist's chisel. It could be a book of recipes, a novel, a scientific thesis, a portfolio of sketches, an autobiography, anything was possible. However, once the pen met the paper and the writing began, all those infinite possibilities would disappear, and the result, no matter how great it might possibly be, could never possibly live up to the infinite promise of the empty page.

Of course, there's nothing rational about it. An empty page is, in a more tangible sense, nothing at all. To say that an empty page is somehow better would of course make no sense, the promise of anything without actualization is the delivery of nothing at all. Yet it stuck with me, every time I went to write.

There also was the fact that I felt since the page was a certain size, my writing had to fill it. It always surprised me how many times I ended up writing a snippet of fiction or a personal reflection that was worded so that it would just exactly fit the page size allotted. I was a slave to the physical medium of my writing.

And THAT'S what makes blogging so great. The medium of the web is pure information. There is no paper sitting there before me with the promise of anything. When I start a new blog entry, there is no space to fill: you can't scroll down the page to see the blank space below, as there is a presentation of nothing but a cursor, blinking and waiting. There's no permanence of the medium, and if I'm not happy with my writing, There's no ripping out of pages, crumpling them up and throwing them in the waste basket, there's just the click of a button, and all is gone! Or better yet, I simply can decide not to press the "Publish post" button.

There's no pressure to create greatness when nothing is being wasted but time. The internet is pure information. Our writing need not be stacks of dusty forgotten journals, our music need not be piles of CDs in cracked jewel cases, our photos are not limited by the quantity of film we can afford to buy. Hey, how many times have you seen this?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Who would bother to write that out longhand? But in an electronic medium, we toss out a page of gibberish just to fill imaginary space. Here; I'll do it again, just because I can:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There's something oddly freeing about that.

And what's my point? (Does it matter if I have one?) This blog is a journal in a sense, yes, but it is a journal that shares very little in the way of the physical properties of a "journal" as was known in the classic sense. Just as Scott McCloud wrote years ago about the idea of comics on an "infinite canvas", so all electronic forms of media have no limits in the digital world. Isn't a blog a journal with an infinite number of pages? Isn't a live webcam a documentary film of infinite length? Isn't 3D modeling sculpture with an infinite-sized lump of clay? The web allows media within it to be everything or nothing, all at once. It's exciting, but perhaps most of all, it's fun.

What is the soul?

There is a question that has plagued people for all of history, in one form or another: What is the soul? I thought I'd take some time to muse on the topic, not that I necessarily have some great insight into the matter, but simply that it was on my mind this morning for some unknown reason.

Firstly, I'd like to lift from a comment I left in Hellbound Alleee's blog (italics are H.A.'s words) :

Brucker, what reason to you have for believing that there is an essence of who we are?
I think Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" is rather convincing. I don't know that the sorts of conclusions Descartes inferred from this position follow so logically as he might hope, but the central concept is there.

I feel that I can know that I exist, despite the fact that I can perform no experiment to tell me if my true essence is the sum parts of my body, just the brain, a disembodied spirit, or the hallucination of Hindu's Brahman. From a radically skeptical perspective I can doubt just about anything other than the basic fact that I exist as a conscious entity.

How about this: we have a body that perceives, metabolizes, feels emotion, and has a memory?

Who is this "we" that owns this body? Do you "have" a body, or are you a body? Choose your words carefully when talking about consciousness and self-identity.

There is no reason to believe in an "essence," a "soul," a "spook," a "homunculous," or a "self." If there is a reason, you should be able to point to something other than a body.

Is there reason to believe in your blog? I read some words on my computer screen, but is your blog on my computer? If so, does it cease to exist when I turn my computer off? Perhaps it's on a web server somewhere? If you took me to this server, would see your blog, or would I just see some boxes sitting in a room humming softly to themselves as electrical impulses passed through them?

The world has room enough for things that are not located spatially such that one can "point" to them, without having to even consider the spiritual realm. Indeed, where is the Internet? If you can't point to it, does that mean it doesn't exist?

There isn't a little man inside feeling and seeing. We already have everything we need in our bodies to do those things.

I agree. I would in no way advocate the concept that the soul is some sort of smaller self contained within the larger self. The soul is frankly something that I cannot define, but suspect resides in the physical body in much the way software resides on one's computer.

Since the discussion came to an end after my comment (I doubt I "stumped" her, she probably got bored and moved on.), I figured I might as well continue it here, since there are concepts I think are worth mulling over.

As I said, there are some things that Alleee said that I agree with. Our physical bodies are in no way lacking anything needed in order to function. (Well, one might argue that there is that mysterious "spark" of life that makes us alive, and is the difference between a live body and a dead one.) Despite what some philosophers have said about the soul being attached to the body via the pineal gland, it seems to me that if the soul is an entirely discorporate entity, a specific spot for the soul to attach itself to the physical body seems like a strange concept. Indeed, in Hindu philosophy, the purusha (soul?) is in no way connected to the prakriti (body?), and as such, when studying that religion, it was hard for me to understand the relationship between them, if indeed there was one at all.

As I said, I think there may be a possibility that what we term the "soul" may in fact be as much a part of the physical world as the "mind" is, or the "sense of self". That is to say, they exist, and in some way are localized within the brain, but rather than being a specific tangible object are instead an abstract concept that is an outgrowth of the function of that organ. (If I haven't made this clear, I'm not claiming it to be the case, only speculating it as a possibility that has merit to me.) I think the Internet comparison is a good starting point. The computer that I am now using has internal memory and a hard drive. To some extent, both of these are currently storing information about the program "Internet Explorer 6.0" which I often use to access this web site and create posts. Is IE6 a real thing? Most computer users with a good amount of knowledge know exactly what IE6 is when I refer to it, which suggests it is a real thing. Yet it has no mass, nor does it (as a concept) occupy physical space. Before my computer was set up with all of its software, the hard drive and the memory chips started out empty of information. After the software was installed, these components of my computer had the exact same gross physical characteristics they did before the installation. No mass was added, the shape did not change, and everything stayed in pretty much the same location until it was time to ship it off somewhere to eventually end up under my desk. If I wiped the memory clean, then like a dead body without a soul, it would still be there, looking exactly the same, but no longer functioning.

It's weird to me, but 100 posts into my other blog, after writing thoughts for a year (and more elsewhere) and creating page after page of information, I really have "created" nothing. Electrons have shuffled around, disks have spun, photons have fired out from monitors, but indeed, nothing was created. Go back to those hundred posts and replace every character with a "space", and in the purely physical sense of "you should be able to point to something", all would be the same as it was before.

Years back, I had a computer that had some serious problems, and ceased to function. When this happens, you've got a hunk of largely useless plastic and silicon. I got a new computer, a bigger (memory-wise), faster, and generally better one; and what did I do with the old computer? I opened it up, removed its hard drive, and hooked it up to the new computer. I cleaned out any viruses or spyware, took off the files and programs I wished to keep and voila, I had a new computer that carried all of the pertinent information from my old computer! Could the soul function like that?

But Brucker, you say, when you die, there is no hard drive to remove and plug in, your brain deteriorates like the rest of your body. True, but on the computer I am using now, most of my files are kept on a server down the hall. I could shut down my computer, smash it with a sledgehammer, come to work tomorrow with a new computer and pretty much pick up right where I left off. A lot of my personal stuff is kept on the Internet in places like this site. All of these storage sites are backed up repeatedly with redundancy. The building I am in could burn down, blogger.com could go offline, and I'd probably be able to get all this stuff back in a matter of days. Who says our souls, as "software" are not being constantly "backed up" on another plane of existence?

Software concept aside (as much as I obviously enjoy toying with it), who said the soul has to be "other than the body"? Most sane people believe in the "mind", but this thing is not floating somewhere out in space, but accepted by just about everyone to be located between one's ears. But the mind is more than that. My mind is here in my writing, and as such, pervades wherever someone logs on to one of my blogs, anywhere in the world. My mind is in the words that I speak through my mouth, and thus is experienced by anyone within a certain range when I talk. My mind is in the people that I influence through communication. It is part of my body, and it is filling out my sphere of influence. If my "mind" and "soul" may in fact be the same thing, then no wonder the soul is such an important thing for God and other "spiritual" forces to control.

Perhaps the thing that most fascinates me about the soul as information, be it static (like a file) or dynamic (like a program) is that knowing what we do about how flexible information is in the physical world, I see no reason that the concept of a soul has to defy materialist philosophy. A materialist would strive to deny that souls exist, based on the premise that things which you cannot clearly define, point to, and perform scientific experiments on are not real. (This is probably an oversimplification.) If the concept of a "soul" is only suffering from a bad reputation afforded it by inaccurate definition, then it may be no more or less real than the "mind". A materialist of course may deny the existence of "mind", but I think that puts them on shaky ground, as so many people are more than prepared to accept that concept, and not prepared to deny it.