Friday, January 14, 2005

Metaphors 7 and 8 - Skeleton Programs and the Tree in the Water

For this next metaphor, I’m going to turn back again to my long experience as a computer programmer.

When I was a young junior programmer, I had a fanciful notion that computer programmers spent all their time writing new programs from scratch, each a realization of a given stage of his expertise and personality. Little did I know.

In point of fact, what professional programmers do is write a basic skeleton program that does a variety of commonly done things, and then whenever a new program is required, they grab the skeleton program, make few changes to it, and then install that changed version of the skeleton into production as a brand new program. This is efficiency. The idea is now called "code reusability," and there are now whole programming languages based on this idea. It is marvelously efficient, but has one defect.

Imagine that, one night, a programmer at a company is called in because four payroll systems crashed in the same place in their runs on the mainframe. (I am dating myself with this example. Let me date myself further. These kinds of crashes were called "Abends" for "abnormal end").

The poor programmer comes in and starts sifting through the cybernetic wreckage like an investigator for the Federal Transportation Safety Board. He discovers that all four payroll systems crashed in the same place because all four different systems used a program that had been created from the same skeleton program. A defect in the original skeleton program (for example, an incorrect leap year calculation that shows up once every four years) had years later caused four different computer programs for four different payroll systems to fail.

This makes it easier for the programmer to fix, because the problem is localized in one place, but he still has to correct every program that was based on that same original skeleton program.

Now, let’s think back again to living in Paris while truly residing in Chicagoland.

Another way to think about this is to consider the robot’s body in Paris to be, as it actually would be, hardware, just like a personal computer that sits on a persons desk at home is a piece of electrical hardware no different from a television.

Then think about Chicagoland as being a piece of software that runs on that hardware. Chicagoland Version 1.0 running on RobotBody Version 1.0. That can be a picture, however strange, of all of us. Some of the cyberpunk science fiction authors think along those lines, referring to human beings as "meatmachines" running "wetware."

Admittedly, this is not a pretty metaphor, but it does get us closer to a crucial truth, which is, namely, if Chicagoland Version 1.0 has a defect in it, every meatmachine running it will have that same defect.

Now, lets step back a minute and consider this.

A while back ago, I said that the key thing about Chicagoland was that you could not observe it, because the thing you would be observing it with was in fact Chicagoland itself. And if its true location happened not to be located solely within your head, you would not be able to know that. And if it had some kind of structure, components, function or parts, just as your physical body does; you wouldn’t know that either. Consider now, if Chicagoland does indeed have parts, structures, and maybe a history that precedes your own personal existence.

For a good part of medical history, human beings had an inkling about the idea of genetics. There were expressions like "blood will tell", "the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree," and "a chip off the old block." There were inklings about heredity before there was any knowledge of DNA, chromosomes, and the like.

It was only with the advent of modern science that the physical mechanisms of heredity were finally uncovered. With the discovery that 50% of our genetic material comes from each parent at our conception, we now understand that within each of us, there was, in the past, a vast tree of many many branches (human beings of many different kinds) that grew in reverse, consolidating downward into a single trunk that became us, and that we in turn become the trunk of another vast tree going upward and onward into the future (provided, of course, that we are able to convince a member of the opposite sex to help us reproduce).

Science has even discovered that there is in fact a "Mitochondrial Eve." I.e. there is a piece of physical genetics that all humans in the world have, that seems to have come from a single human female. [Footnote 3-8]

Now, most people today, who are educated about our modern concepts of heredity by DNA, would have no intellectual problem with the idea that they might have a hereditary disease transmitted to them by the DNA of one or both of their parents. (Though assuredly they might have an emotional problem) And even uneducated people understand and accept that a hereditary disease is a dubious gift of nature. But the one thing both educated people and uneducated people have a really hard time accepting is the idea that their "souls," their "spirits," their "psyches," their "personalities", their "Chicagolands" might have a hereditary disease that affects the part of them that they can’t examine.

The attitude is very much that of the atheist philosopher Ayn Rand who is on record as saying "I can account for every emotion I have." Just so. The response is "Call me a leper. Call me a hemophiliac. Even call me a schizophrenic. But do not even imply that there might be anything wrong with the part of me that’s not my body." That might be your response. But consider that your bias to the idea of owing your own soul (which you did not by yourself bring into being) may be just the thing that may prevent you from getting a grasp on eternal happiness.

Consider. Suppose it is true. Suppose your Chicagoland has a history, heredity, and a DNA just like your physical body does? Suppose that in our Chicagoland, as with our bodies, there is besides the stuff the makes us personally our own selves, also stuff that is part of all the people who have ever been?

I was once driving by a pond and noticed that some kind of pretty water plants I had never seen before were dotting out of the pond in a noticeable pattern that didn’t look natural. So I pulled over and walked over to the pond and found out what it really was: a tree in blossom that had been cut down and thrown into the pond. What I saw as individual water plants in a pattern were actually branches of a tree that, below the water line, went down into a common trunk.

Suppose that our "souls," our "spirits," our "Chicagolands" are actually the branches of a tree leading down into a common origin that can affect us all even while we think we are autonomous individuals? Well, we can start to understand where our Chicagoland’s defects of blindness, deafness, deadness, and aloneness may have come from. They may have originated with the first people who were on the planet.

Does science have any inkling about such a thing as a spiritual heredity? Believe it or not, there is some science lying in this direction. The depth psychologist Carl Jung wrote about the existence of something called the Collective Unconscious whereby collective ideas residing in a collective human psyche can affect the behavior of autonomous individual humans.

The physicist Rupert Sheldrake has proposed that there may be something that can be called a "human morphic field," which is a field in the sense of a "magnetic field," in which collective human behavior can have influences on individual human behavior.

There are also depth psychologists who examine peoples reported dreams, who see certain patterns over and over again that appear to have an archaic origin, as if they were artifacts from great-great-great-great-great grandma’s own spiritual attic.

And then there are scholars who study the myths of the many primitive (and not so primitive) peoples of many lands, who have noticed that some of the myths are like some of those re-occurring dreams, and have observed re-occurring themes in those myths.

And then lastly, there is the phenomenon of inventions and scientific discoveries being made by several different people at about the same time in different parts of the world.

Personally, I do not endorse some these researchers, because I have noticed a tendency for their studies to degenerate into studies of the occult. (This is especially true of C.G. Jung’s). There is a reason for this, but that is a topic I will address later.

So, we have the possibility that Chicagoland may have a hereditary element to it. Where does that bring us?

Recall, if you will, that one of the design criteria for a being who can worship is that it be responsible. It can start out with a perfectly fine Chicagoland and thereby receive the responsibility for the continued maintenance of its ability to relate to the Creator who created it.

Having engendered a creature of free will and responsibility, the Creator must then, in line with certain personal attributes I will soon describe, test these new creatures. For the Creator is a wise hunter who tests whoever he takes his next hunting trip. And that’s my next metaphor.
---------------
(3-8) I have a niece who as of this writing has four little boys. Each of them looks completely different from the other. But all of them look unmistakably like their father. I would have to say, of a woman, that spamming her man into the gene pool is the highest compliment she can pay him.

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