The Electric Brain

I think you would like Pim's book, possibly better than I did, if you gave it half a chance. It's not written from a religious point of view, although he does bring quantum physics into it, which has as much hocus pocus in it as any religion.

When you think about it, everything runs on electricity, doesn't it. Well, maybe not everything. Electricity doesn't hold atoms together, does it? Seems like the positive protons and the negative electrons would repel each other and everything would fall apart. I seem to remember there is something called the "strong force", and that electricity is called the "weak force". Then there's something called a "covalent bond", which sounds like electricity to me.

Of course they already have man-made electric brains, but they're not the same as organic brains, at least not yet. No matter how smart they make the next generation of computers, they still would need consciousness to be on a level with natural brains. I understand there are people working on that, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea. They keep fooling around with that stuff and, the next thing you know, we've got a whole new race of people demanding civil rights and getting themselves elected President of the United States. Mark my words, no good will come of it!

I don't think that dreams are products of the conscious mind. It's a little confusing because the words "unconscious" and "subconscious" are often used interchangeably. I think that "unconscious" is what you are when you're asleep or in a coma. Your subconscious mind, on the other hand, works both when you are asleep and when you are awake. It controls things like breathing and anything else that works automatically without you thinking about it, and it also controls dreaming. Your subconscious also has something to do with your memory. When you consciously try to remember something, but can't, your subconscious initiates a search of your memory banks, which may take some time. That's why you may wake up hours later in the middle of the night and say, "That's it!"

One theory about dreams is that they represent your subconscious mind trying to make sense of all the stuff your conscious mind feeds into it. Well, I mean subconscious sense, which is different from conscious sense. It's like your subconscious speaks a different language than you conscious mind and has to reformat everything before it can file it away for future reference. The conscious and subconscious must communicate with each other, though, or nothing would work. Maybe they have something like HTTP or HTML code for that. You think?

Interesting that you believe you have a soul, but don't believe that it's immortal. I understand that the old Greek word for "spirit" is the same word for "wind" or "breath". I suppose ancient people noticed that one difference between a living creature and a dead creature is breathing, or lack thereof. When somebody died, they would say something like, "His spirit has left his body". They must have wondered where that spirit went when it left the body, one thing led to another, and before you know it, they had religion. What you seem to be saying is that the spirit was created when the body was created and, when the body dies, the spirit dies with it. I think this is an interesting concept that merits further discussion.

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Silly me! Opposite charges attract each other, it's the like charges that repel each other. I knew that, but I seem to have momentarily forgotten it. Then, when I went out into the garage and lit up a cigarette, it came back to me. This illustrates the point I made about how your subconscious mind interacts with you conscious mind to recall memories, which is probably why my subconscious mind made me forget it in the first place.