Is life a source code running on a computer over and over?
I am over 40 and I am giving ‘death’ a lot of thought. Not in a scary sense; rather a philosophical one.
Death is the inevitable. The only thing I am sure of that like hell. I never knew if I was destined to be born, or who I am, or why I am me and not you or anybody else, but I am sure that I’ll be dead one day.
My childhood big “why” is back again. Why “I” see the world through my eyes? Why this is me that feels the pain? Of billions living on the planet, and of all zillions who have ever lived why this should be me sitting here in 2016 writing these, and thinking of death.
What is life and what is death?
I have thought about ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘myself’. They collectively form the center of my existence. As long as they exist I exist. Once gone the whole world collapses. ‘You’ and ‘yours’, has nothing to do with me...
To make along story short, I felt tired and bored of thinking. To distract myself, I started playing my favorite game – Resident Evil on my laptop.
I was so drown in the game that I thought everything was real: sounds, vibe and the fear. Zombies caught me and the game was over. I decided to play again. And all of the sudden a light was shed:
What if life is just a source code in a DVD with an ‘exe’ file that can be run over and over? The DVD is run and the game starts. You just chose a character, you plan, you run and you fight. You love, you hate and you die. At the end you remain a source code on a DVD that can be rerun and rerun until God knows. Can this code be broken or changed?
If so, who puts the DVD into the DVD player? Whose computer is used to play?
Any comments?
This is an interesting question.
I will try and answer this in perhaps a slightly unorthodox way.
First, let us examine what we know about life. A human being is only 10% human, 90% of the cells are useful bacteria. Being human, then, is not quite what it first appears. Those bacteria handle digestion, program your immune system, even regulate some functions of your brain. Some of those bacteria first appeared long before humans evolved. This raises a few questions as to what a human even is. However, I'll set that aside.
Cells, whether bacteria or human, consist of DNA (a sequence of base 4 instructions that are poorly understood and are likely a lot more complicated than imagined), viruses edited and enslaved by the cell to perform various functions, and chemical messengers. Human cells and some bacteria also have mitochondria, which are also enslaved organisms.
I could continue, but it's not necessary. The upshot is that - at every level - you have a hybrid organism. It's a gestalt, a superorganism of many different creatures, the fact that some have more power than others isn't important. Ok, organism is perhaps not the right word, but how else to describe entities that are confined but exist otherwise independently? They're all borderline on "living", yet unquestionably are alive in their own sense.
We are therefore a superorganism that is comprised of superorganisms. The fact that it's all confined to a frame is of no more importance than it is for the components of a cell. It doesn't change anything of substance.
Now, I'm going to change tack entirely. There have been many cases, now, of patients having their blood replaced with a salt water solution, having their heart stopped, and being cooled to 5'C (about 40'F, I think). They have no brain function. The bioelectrical field has stopped. There is no metabolism. Cells are not using oxygen to gain energy. Is this death?
By any medical standards, it is. There is no detectable indication of any kind of life at any kind of level. There isn't any blood to carry oxygen and therefore all cells have shut down.
This state can be maintained for four hours without harm. It can then be reversed and the patient returns to life. This is now fairly routine in some hospitals for cases where operations would otherwise be too dangerous.
What does this mean? It means pretty much what you might expect it to mean, if you are a superorganism. The cells have adapted to such conditions, so they survive just fine. The patient vanishes when the cells disconnect and reappears when the cells reconnect.
This makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Every cell in your body has been replaced at least once. Including brain cells. Yet "you" have existed throughout all of that.
Are you a computer program? In a way, yes. Everything that happens in you is "computable", that is to say any computer could simulate you, perfectly, if given the same sensory data and enough time to process it.
But you are a computer program in another sense, too. It is a fundamental law of nature that information cannot be created or destroyed. All the information that has ever passed between all the cells that influence you still exists. It was emitted by each cell as electromagnetic radiation. If you replay that information, you would get a person behaving in exactly the same way. Since physics is time-reversible, it is just as legitimate to consider your body as being programmed by that electromagnetic radiation. There is no physical experiment you can perform that can prove which way round it is.
That also means, of course, that death becomes curious. Unless every brain cell and every microorganism in you dies at the same time, whatever is alive at the point of death can't be you. You are simply the product of the imagination of every cell in your body. If half the cells have gone, whatever is being imagined isn't you.
Indeed, since you are a product of the imagination of all the cells, a byproduct of being a superorganism, as shown by the medical procedure described and the DNA research on the microbiome, and since the cells themselves are superorganisms of things that aren't strictly alive, is life itself just a product of the imagination of the non-living? (And does that make us undead?)
very interesting theory. I like your original thinking on the subject , will be doing some more research on this.
Wow. Awesome. Steemit is wonderful because i can find people like you. I need to read it over and over to suck in every single word and then i get back to you for more discission. In the meanwhile one thing to mention. Like u said our cells are replaced at certain paces. Once some are dead their memory has to remaim and emit. Right? As we know central nervous system is non-regenarating. The point i am trying to make is thag some copy of you as an identity should be saved. Is the hard disk the brain or ...?
I'm not 100% sure what you're asking, so apologies if I have misunderstood.
First, there were reports (sorry, I googled and can't find the links) that there were mysterious proteins at the junction of a synapse and a neuron. It was suggested at the time that synapses were not permanent, as often thought, but regularly replaced, with these proteins telling the neuron what to do to actually rebuild a synapse. As I said, I can't find the cite or a link to this theory, so I can't offer evidence of whether it is correct or whether it was falsified. What I can say is that this may be part of the storage.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/neurons_constantly_rewrite_their_dna
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16879837
http://www.salk.edu/news-release/study-finds-a-patchwork-of-genetic-variation-in-the-brain/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3083085/
What has been repeatedly verified is that each neuron has unique DNA. It has been reorganized and then modified. Systematically. Different regions show different types of modification. Further, the brain has extensive mechanisms for repairing changes due to damage that do not repair these other modifications. There are far more changes (running into the thousands) than there are types of neuron, but if you multiply the number of neuron types by the maximum number of synapses, you get a number that is about right to describe what the neuron is remembering, what it is all about.
The obvious conclusion is that the DNA must be being used as storage of the state of the neuron. Unexpected changes would lead to all kinds of new synapses forming, so neurons would want to stop that.
I'm not convinced neurons don't divide, juvenile neurons must for the brain to build and there simply aren't enough stem cells to explain the structural changes observed. If neurons divide, they can preserve their state from one generation of brain cell to another. If this is the case, DNA would be the hard drive. The brain would back itself up onto an 87-billion drive striped-mode RAID array inside its own genetic code.
This could be tested, although it would take a while. If all you need to replace a brain is the DNA, then if you took a group of adaptive brains, mapped their connectome in full, then sequenced each neuron in each, you should see a perfect 1:1 relationship between each bit of connectome and the DNA in the neurons. Hard-coded brains wouldn't tell you much.
If I am correct, that this is the backup store, then things get far more lively. Tracing synapses is hard (there's an online project where you can give it a go with actual brain cells - my accuracy was horrible). Sequencing DNA is easier, reliable and faster. If all you need to define the brain is the set of changes, it's a lot less data than the full genome. (The whole human genome consists of about 3 billion pairs of nucleic acid, so a few thousand changes is about one millionth as much in terms of data volume, whether the changes are mutations or wholesale rearranging of genes.)
The rest of the DNA likely does a lot that is important and the changes may well turn other bits of the DNA on and off. But that part of the data is more-or-less fixed.
Understanding that reorganization will, I suspect, be key to the Human Brain Project and the Connectome Project. It may also be key to repairing the brain, as DNA from cells crushed into oblivion by tau protein plaques might be protected by those plaques. If you could recover it and insert it into lab-grown cells, those cells should try to reform the connections of the original cells.
http://tbistemcellstudy.ucsf.edu/
http://www.stemedica.com/info/allogeneic-adult-stem-cells/stem-cell-clinical-trials/2016-05-18-FDA-Grants-IND-Approval-to-Stemedica-for-Traumatic-Brain-Injury-Phase-IIa-Clinical-Trial.asp
Basically, similar to what these guys are actually doing in medical trials, only with preprogrammed specializations they aren't using. I wish the researchers luck, and expect them to have some success, but those changes aren't cosmetic and without them, you're missing something although nobody knows what.
Block Linear Self Dual Error Correcting Code was found to be at the heart of string theory, which is supposedly what makes up everything in our universe, It was first discovered by theoretical Physicist James Gates and his researchers. It isn’t just random 1’s and 0’s either. Bizarrely, the code they found is code which is used in computer browser operating system software.
This is an interesting thought - that life is on a DVD. I've been thinking about the nature of time lately and one wonders if on a physics level it's possible that everything that happens exists, and humans are some kind of metaphysical machine that moves through space-time one-point-in-time-at-a-time. Also, if you haven't already you should check out buddhism and stoicism.
I have think about time as a fake physical dimension. What is time? just a contract? We don't have a sense of time unless our heartbeat starts. Once we are dead and the heart stops everything freezes. At least based on our scientific approach. And I think we are in the same both as what I was trying to convey by using 'the source code' is that everything might have happened or programmed. If so, is it possible for some sort of hacker to break the code?
Stephen Hawking famously discusses 'imaginary time' in his book A Brief History of Time - I think it's relevant here. When asked by Colbert (paraphrasing here) "If there's one thing you want people to understand in your work ... what would that be?", he pointed to Imaginary Time
(one minute and 20 second mark about)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_time
Time is nothing but movement through space - its a phenomenon of cognition, lending hand to complete the awareness experience. Time as we know it on a clock is completely made up. Time is relative to your position to other objects and your position in Space-Time. If you really break it all down - everything we experience is illusory and nothing is "real." Everything is experienced in our minds, and only our minds are able to decide that it is real - thus giving birth to the cognitive reality we experience as real.
I view time as a point, a dot, a filled in circle - where everything that has happened, is happening, will happen, and could happen all exist as one. Through the experience of cognitive reality, time becomes linear as we move through "space."
Death is inevitable but one should not focus on it. I am 32 and still young but even at 50 or 60 you still have a life to live and should go out and live it. Thinking about death is not bad but dont let it consume you.
I have no problem with death. Like I said it is inevitable. My biggest question is in fact life. Most of us live our lives without thinking about it. We don't even remember since when life began for us. Birth? the very moment you had the self-consciousness, or...? I hope I am clear.
I don't see why death is inevitable. Life is nothing more than information and information will last beyond the heat-death of the universe itself. Doing anything useful with those facts is beyond modern science, although anyone in their 30s or younger may well live to see the day when full-body regeneration and/or full brain simulations are a reality. The longest a human can live biologically is about 120 years and Moore's Law dictates that it won't take 90 years to achieve the necessary sophistication.
Of course, that pre-supposes that humans are getting smarter at the same speed. Machines don't invent themselves. The last 20 years hasn't been good to education, which extends the longest possible time to 110 years from now. That's the longest. If it can be done, it will be by then.
We, as a species, need to let go of all "certainties" that may only be temporary possibilities.
I've thought about this quite a bit myself and wonder who does the choosing.
Perhaps its all at random? I view time as cyclic, and so all of this will repeat itself again - probably in a slightly different pattern though. That being said, perhaps everything is set on random when it comes to the awareness held by an "individual" aspect of the grand scale fractal machine. At some point your individual awareness shall experience everything there is to experience. You will be the rock outside your house at some point. In another instance you'll be the keyboard I am typing on. Yet another you'll be a molecule making up a foreign planet to our own.