19-Sep-2006

Class starts tomorrow… Strangely, I’m far more excited for this year than I was for my freshmen year. For one, its the first year that I’ve started with no attachments to pretty much anything. I think more importantly, I’ve realized what a waste my last 3 years have been. Sure academically and professionally I’ve done pretty well, but socially I’ve been severely lacking (ok, thats an exaggeration, but still). Hopefully I’ll be able to balance everything I want to do without sacrificing much.

No bricks yet… very aggravating.

17-Sep-2006

Ever thought you understood something that was extremely hard for you only to find out you were wrong? Like calculus or particle physics… just something that is inherently difficult to get your head around. Its amazing how in moment of realization when you think you have it figured out you want to go tell the world but when you see how wrong you were you want to go hide.

In my case, I’m very angry. I asked a friend a question the other day because I had no idea how to deal with something (well, 2 things but the first can wait). His answer was cryptic at best, although the topic wasn’t something I think anyone can claim to be an expert on, but he made me think about what I had been doing and should be doing. I have yet to come up with any constructive thoughts on the matter.

So… my question was, “How do you leave everything in God’s hands?” As my friend told me, I’m not so important that I can mess up God’s plan, but I still don’t know where to go from here. If I do nothing about anything and just sit and wait, I’m starting and ending in the same place and will have gained (and hopefully lost) nothing. If I push either of the issues I know I’ll just be exacerbating the problems and while I don’t have much to lose in the latter of the two, I’d prefer not to lose any more than I already have. I find myself asking God, “what am I supposed to do?” every day now and I can’t help but wait around for a brick to fall out of the sky with a note attached to it and addressed to me.

The night has many demons… some I thought had long disappeared.

“…To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…”

“… I pray the lord my soul to take.”

The brain is an amazing machine. It can understand input from millions of tactile sensors and discern in microseconds feelings of heat and coarseness. The brain can process in real time images from our eyes and signals from our auditory nerves without so much as a stutter. A human being’s brain can identify objects and distance despite the ever changing environments of color and shadow, it can adapt to new levels of sound and heat, it can deduce and predict, and analyze and solve… Humans aren’t the only creatures with these abilities (although our complex thought is far more evolved), so what makes us different?

A friend of mine a few years ago pointed out to me that the human brain is based entirely on physics. If you think in a purely scientific view, that is an intriguing thought. The molecular, chemical, and electrical make up of our brains MUST follow the laws of physics. Meaning… given the makeup of a human brain and an exact biochemical analysis of the brain it would be possible to know the exactly thought and subsequent thought of a person given certain preconditions of the environment (since particles only act randomly at the subatomic scale)… By that standard… sentience is fake. We have no thought, only chemical reactions. We are nothing more than a predictable (albeit adaptive) race in which the nature of everything can be deduced and predicted given a complete stocastic model of the environment. So what happens when someone reduces everything to an equation… Think about it… your entire existence, beginning to end, is an equation that someone has yet to think up.

Who wants to admit that to themselves? But where does thought come from? To me, I can seemingly create random thoughts in my head. I can hear my own voice and replay conversations. I bring forward images of the past and play them like a movie in my conciousness. Sometimes I can hear my own voice multiple times saying different things… having conversations with unknowns (no I’m not schizophrenic). Am I to believe that this is the product of physics… something predictable given enough information? The brain is an amazing machine, but there has to be something more. Something unpredictable and unseen. Something that is a part of but separate from the physical self. Without that… all of existence is just an equation that in time someone will know (and probably manipulate)… without that there is no mystery to life… without that there is nothing beyond this existence since there is nothing there to survive the corporeal.