Wednesday 20 August 2008

Entry 37: in which Lucy waxes strange

Lucy has been surprisingly useful lately, and clearly knows it. Thus he has felt free to bend my ear about his latest hare-brained scheme, to wit, going into the soul business.

Allow me to explain. Many biological entities have a degree of consciousness and self-awareness. This consciousness is an emergent property of neural complexity and floats, as a kind of metastructure, above the neural net that gives rise to it.

If this is confusing, consider this parallel. Biological entities are "alive", yet are composed of elements and molecules that are not themselves alive. In the same way conscious entities achieve their consciousness through the aggregate activity of neurons which are themselves not conscious.

Now all consciousness resonates with deions. This is in itself pretty trivial and "just one of those things". However, anyone in the Realm can, if they can be bothered that is, "read" that resonance and learn something of the nature of the biological entity that gave rise to it. Such resonance has a half-life of perhaps 20 billion years, so some traces usually last all the way through to the next collapse.

Now you may feel, with the number of conscious entities around in the universe, that the deion field would get pretty saturated; but with a inverse 4D Fourier Transform it is simple enough to pick out the pattern characteristic of any particular entity. But who could be arsed?

Well, it appears that Lucy could; he calls the patterns "souls".

"Why souls?" I ask.

"Well" he says "it stands for Self-aware Organic Unredeemed Lifeforms".

"You've lost me there Lucy" I say "In what sense Unredeemed?"

"Ah" he says, all smug as per, "once we run the Transform and capture a pattern, we have redeemed it. Much as you might redeem a coupon. I think we should set up a working party, we could call them Redeemers, whose job it would be systematically to find and redeem souls".

Reluctant to confess that I don't know what a coupon is, so press on.

"Wouldn't that make them sorls?" I ask. Lucy looks utterly baffled. "Well" I say, in the manner of one producing a trump card, "they'd be Self-aware Organic Redeemed Lifeforms, n'est-ce pas?"

Alas he fails to rise to this so I ask the blindingly obvious question "But Lucy, why bother?".

Now it's his turn to produce the trump, or so he thinks, for he declares some souls / sorls have been 'good' in the course of their biological lives and others have been 'bad'.

"Well, almost certainly ... your point being?"

"We could divide them. You could keep the good ones who would sing your praises and stuff and I'd take the bad ones. I could set up a kind of correctional facility, put them straight, that sort of thing. I'm thinking of calling it 'Holistic Education for Life after Life', or hell for short. I think it would be a jolly wheeze".

By now I had a blinding headache, made my excuses and left. Lucy worries me. He has this quite unhealthy obsession with right and wrong, and especially wrong. Never happier than when there is a spot of fornication going on.

Me? I'm more of a live and let live type. But if I know Lucy, he's not about to let this one drop.

How utterly dull.

[Editor's note: Can this be a reference to Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830)? According to Wiki he did develop some interesting mathematics to do frequency analysis. Or just another cosmic coincidence?]

6 comments:

Miranda said...

heh heh. Brilliant. Love it

John said...

Thank you kindly miranda!

Anonymous said...

Now all consciousness resonates with deions. This is in itself pretty trivial and "just one of those things".

Pretty trivial, eh? Dang!

I'm still hanging onto your every word, by the way. Will definitely buy your book, when it comes to pass. Or Mrs G's book, if she can be persuaded to write one. But not Lucy's book. I've read too many of that ilk.

It's always a joy when I come here and find new posts. I guess they must resonate with my deions, or something....

John said...

Why hello pam and welcome. Glad you like it - I like the writing thereof when I get time. Having to steal it at the moment, but there are episodes dying to appear!

Anonymous said...

Tee hee, now I can point out to God's diarist that he may have temporarily misplaced his omniscience. I'm the same Pam who commented on Entry 28. At least, most of the cells in my body are the same. Ah, but given that some of them are different, obviously I'm not the same Pam after all. Voila, omniscience restored!

Next time I stop by, should I leave a sign? I believe crosses and/or fish symbols might become popular at some point....

John said...

pam - and I see you were most generous then. Sadly I've reached the stage of my life where many of my neurons have been replaced, not with other neurons, but with sludge. Remembering back to Entry 28 takes some doing.

But I won't miss you twice! Try me. (And leave a fish).