Back to me, me, me...

I know it is simply repeating the work of others, although, to be fair, I have not read the other work but I am aware of the work and have read some short books that cover the work, I do like to think about I!

That said, I am also aware that for every piece of work that has ever been written on the subject of ‘I’, the soul, the psyche, the spark inside us all… there are other works which challenge the assumptions in the first book. And, so it seems, the merry dance goes on and on and on. I suspect it will continue to go on and on until some form of proof is arrived at and then the discussion might stop. Although I doubt it, probably it will simply head in another direction in light of the scientific certainty that is arrived at.

And, of course, even when scientific proof is arrived at there will still be multitudes of camps that will not believe it. Just as there are today still ‘flat earthers’ and all manner of religions that don’t care too much about science and, some of them, even persecute of kill anybody that gets too big for their boots and starts challenging the ‘accepted order of things’ as their persecutors will judge (and then jury and execute!)

Anyhows, moving on…

I seem to be convinced that there are two parts to all of us. I believe this is termed dualism. But today I am toying with the thought of us being like computers. Now I am certain there are a dozen books that already draw on this analogy but I have not read them so I can write unfettered by the thoughts and conclusions of others for now.

If the body is simply a vessel which carries the spark of life around and then the memories held physiologically in the brain then the body is like the peripheral devices of the computer like the screen of the keyboard or mouse or camera. 

The brain is, or contains, the memory devices like an hdd or ssd and also comprises the RAM where computations are made on everything that comes in from the peripheral devices and uses the stored information in the brain to make determinations about what happens next via the CPU which is also the, or part of the, brain. But only from a physical perspective, like a machine.

But what about the o/s and the rest of the software. That’s where the spark comes in. the spark is the proverbial ghost in the machine (if only I knew what The Police were getting at all those years ago, those guys were far too clever for their own good).

But maybe the spark is just that, only a spark, just like the boot code that resides hardcoded into a chip on the computer that kicks the machine into life when power is switched on or a button pressed.

Which would mean that the part of us that is ‘I’ is actually dumb. If and of itself it is nothing. Just the spark. All it knows is how to start the machine and collect information from the memory and then to start gathering more information and storing that information alongside the information already gathered.

Then what are dreams.

So maybe the machine does not switch off completely, instead it goes into a sort of hibernation mode where most of the peripherals are closed down for rest and repair and the CPU continues operating in a reduced energy mode doing other things.

Which all might imply that once the CPU stops operating it cannot start again so it has to keep going. Surely it has to be one or the other. Either the CPU, I, keeps going so that once it comes into existence it never stops until the spark goes out, death, followed by the rest of the physical body which cannot exist without the spark, I!

Or

The spark continues but itself goes into a nightly hibernation and the dreams and other things like involuntary movements or necessary movements like bodily functions all still continue but the consciousness is not there. Which might explain why dreams disappear like smoke when we wake up. 

They are not memories so are not stored as experiences. Instead they are the memories being stored and ordered and appearing to us as dreams while the nightly housekeeping functions of the memory store these actual experiences.

That in turn might mean the body starts up with a boot routine every day when we wake up. The I awakes from its sleep mode and starts the boot mode to gather all the necessary memories to function and then starts a day of experience gathering again.

Why might I conclude the ‘I’ stops fully functioning and goes into a sleep mode. I guess because it does not do much, or anything, it does not start up the processes that have to take information and start making a determination about what it, I together with the body, should do with that gathered information.

So right now, I am sitting on a sofa, acknowledging that I might do well to invest in a new heating system in the house as it is still a little chilly and at the same time I am half watching, half listening to a football game being streamed via cast on the tv from my phone from Amazon Prime and while all that is going on, I am thinking about what I am! 

I am thinking about everything that I have written thus far and struggling through the logic of things and finding blind alleys and more questions than answers and at the same time I am translating these thoughts from my brain to the blog entry via a keyboard using my fingers. 

None of which happens when I sleep! Which is why I might suggest, ‘I’ go into a sleep mode when I sleep and dreams are not the result of thought but simple functions of physiology, or is it biology… whatever!

But it goes even deeper and off to a tangent or five all at the same time.

If I effectively reboot every morning when I wake up and then the boot process starts up other processes which call up memories about who I am, what I am doing, where I am etc. Then. What exactly am ‘I’.

Then if the memory data is damaged one night then ‘I’ am no longer the same thing, unless ‘I’ is not the data that ‘I’ uses but the boot process that starts the processes that call on the memory every day to rebuild the software that makes me, or I!

We see every day evidence of this, as far as we can tell! We see people with brain damage which could be a physical injury or a biological/chemical injury such as dementia which I guess might also be called a physical injury and with these people we see there is a functioning body, with fleeting memories that fade slightly every day either because the software trying to access them is faulty or the memory storage itself is corrupt. But what of ‘I’. 

Is ‘I’ still in there trying to figure things out and understand the position it now finds itself in or did ‘I’ go. Maybe the spark is still there and the body is still functioning after a fashion and will continue to do so as it is still a viable operating machine with the brain still functioning to an extent but the thinking part has gone. Maybe.

Or maybe the ‘I’ sticks around because it has no choice. Not only has it no choice, it does not have anything except the functions, processes and memories that it has built up over a period of time and does not know that there was a better functioning version of itself before or indeed does the process that allows that thought even start up any more. So new thinking, like I am doing now, does not happen.

For today, I am going to conclude like this. It is possible to consider, for me, that the spark of life that starts us all of, comes with a boot process that has pretty much a simple single question built into it, the built in question is ‘but why?’ And that’s all there is. The body forms around the spark and the question and the rest is built upon those two things. A spark of life and a simple question. 

Everything that follows is built upon that and everything that is learned is stored in memory. And in addition to the memories of experience there is also a library of questions that are built up from the simple basis of ‘buy why?’ 

The questions get more complex as every day passes and one in a million of us might add something to the greater knowledgebase that actually takes human knowledge as a collective forward one step. And one way or another, each of the questions comes back to something else, what am ‘I’? In which case maybe the inbuilt question is ‘what am I?’ rather than why!

Confused yet. Join the club.