The Ghostly Machine



the strangest thing about me is that i don't know how i work. sure, like many out there, i've read about biology, heard long-winded lectures on the beauty of evolution, even looked at my cheek cells through special glass that, well, does something else i don't understand. but still, beneath it all, there's no way for me to quantify what i am and how i function. all i can say, the only consolation i have, is that there exists some sort of organizing force, some special entity that forces out chaos, that keeps everthing together despite my lack of understanding. something everyone claims to have and no one can explain: a soul.


is that the soul? the quantification of the horrid complexity and simple beauty that exists within each of us?



is soul just the admission that i don't, and never will understand?





i sit and stare into glass. i move my fingers faster than i could say each letter that i type. i transmit a message to this machine and, it passes the message on to the rest of the world. without knowing howanything in front of me works, without understanding one lick of computer science, let alone unravelling the mystery of the hardware, without grasping what this painfully complex machine in front of me truly is, I turn it on. i give it life. does the computer itself know how it works?



does the machine have a soul?




i couldn't build a computer myself. hell, i'd bet that, given only raw materials and without anything produced by humans, there's not a person on this earth who could construct a computer in a lifetime. as machinery attains higher levels of complexity, as more equipment 'goes digital', as farther places reach closer to my space, i wonder what it is that humans seem to be building?

will a worldwide spread of networked computer knowledge one day replace the human's limited neural network of personal knowledge? And if that's the direction in which we're heading, why does a machine's soul seem so creepy?