Wetware

I think that both of my readers know by now that I'm a computer programmer by profession, and a geek by nature. Most of my personally geek nature is not toward computers - working with them all day (and all I still have to use them for in my personal life) tends to mean that they aren't my preferred way of relaxing (instead I like to play non-computer games, and build toy soldiers (pictures are available on my web site - conveniently linked in the menu the right). But that doesn't mean they still don't intrude in some interesting ways.

I have a BS in Mathematics w/ Computer Emphasis, and while I don't really feel I'm a big intellectual, I sometimes enjoy reading a bit of philosophy once in a while, especially when it comes to the nature of intelligence. Douglas R Hofstadter is one of my favorite authors, and I'm currently reading the Anthology "The Mind's I" he co-editted, and have two more of his books lined up to read before I'm going to read GEB for probably the what, 7th? time. So maybe this stuff has influenced me a bit, I don't know.

A few years ago, I had a thought stuck in my head for several days. It was persistent, and kind of annoying, simply because like a song stuck in your head, I couldn't get it to go away. For some reason, the question as to what operating system my (and thus other people's as well) brain was running was stuck in my head. The initial thought was UNIX of course (there is no way I could be running any form of Windows - I don't reboot nearly often enough) and even though I easily dismissed that, the idea of what it was running kept with me.

Then last night, amid the ceaseless tossing and turning, getting up to go to the bathroom nearly every hour, and general failure to get any (so it felt) real sleep, I did have a bit of a recurring dream, or thought going through my head. For some reason, in the brief bits of sleep I did get, I was dreaming that the reason I wasn't sleeping was because the XML for my dreams was incorrectly formatted, and thus not able to parse, preventing me from sleeping. There were no images, thus this recurring idea / thought / dream all night long, between looking at the clock, getting up, and occasionally fighting with my wife for the covers. To top it off, I was starting to be fairly sure that I could come in to work today and fix the bug that was causing my dream XML to be incorrect and thus solve the problem.

Now, if you ask me (though no one ever does) then our brains are all effectively organic computers (i.e. wetware). The difference between our brains and computers are that brains are not hardwired, instead being "wetwired", and the "software" in our brains (i.e. our thoughts) can actually affect the wetware - causing new neural pathways to form as we learn/discover new ideas, thoughts and emotions. No two brains are identical, though their operation is isomorphic to each other at the wetware level. We all have the same biology, that works in the same way, but none of us have the same neural pathways. However we all do have pathways for common items (the sky, colors, words, etc), though of course my concept of something may not match to your concept of something exactly. Kind of like the question is the color that I see as green the same color you see as green. The light frequency is the same, but is how you interpret it the same? And before you say yes, think about people who are color blind - so that they may not be able to see green at all, or be able to distinguish it from red. It reminds me a bit of last stanza of the poem at the end of the Moody Blues classic "Knights in White Satin" which describs the moon:
Cold hearted orb
That rules the night
Removes the colours
From our sight
Red is gray and
Yellow white
But we decide
Which is right
And
Which is an Illusion

So hopefully doing a core dump here will clear my buffers allowing me to actually get some down time tonight.