Hard Drives and Humans

I didn’t realize how exactly hard drives worked until I joined the Navy and started working with ITs. A while back, we updated a lot of our hardware, and as a result, we ended up getting rid of a lot of equipment. Question: How do you get rid of a classified computer tower?

Answer: You take out the hard drive, and the tower becomes nothing but a hunk of metal. You can then dispose of the frame in the normal manner while you safeguard the classified hard drives through more stringent protocols. The classification follows the hard drive, not the tower. Keep that in the back of your mind as I switch topics for a bit.

The Ghost in the Machine

I distinctly remember a philosophy seminar at Harvard where a fellow student described the idea of a soul as b***s***. My philosophy teaching fellow (TF) informed me that the idea of body-mind/soul duality was “effectively dead – has been for decades now.”

I was unconvinced, as are many Christian philosophers and those ordinary people who still believe in common sense as a means to truth. But secular philosophers have what they consider a knock-down argument, an argument they have entitled “The Ghost in the Machine.”

It goes something like this: a non-physical entity cannot influence things in the physical world. And if something cannot influence the physical world, it might as well not exist at all.

This is where we return to hard drives and towers.

How Machines Work

You see, the tower, while it is very cleverly made and extremely useful (and expensive), is worthless without the hard drive. You can use it to sit on when you run out of chairs, but as far as its intended purpose, the tower is useless unless it has a hard drive in it.

This doesn’t work the other way around. A hard drive isn’t worthless without a tower. It can’t be accessed properly; it can’t interact properly; it can’t transfer information properly. But it remains classified even when it’s on its own, because it still holds the information that was placed on it. And information is the heart and soul of Information Technology; it is the purpose around which all these fancy physical systems are built.

This is very, very important. Because some of you are about to say, “well, that’s all very nice, but what does that prove when it comes to the mind/soul and the body? After all, this is just one piece of physical equipment physically affecting another piece of physical equipment.”

But if the tower is only important because of the hard drive, and the hard drive is only important because of the information, then we are not talking about something physical after all. The classification level doesn’t have anything to do with the configuration of the tower. It has everything to do with information – more to the point, with the significance of certain pieces of information combined in certain ways. That’s not a thing that can be pointed to on a map or found with a microscope. But it’s the only thing that matters in the end; everything else is built around it.

How Ghosts Work

The mind/soul/spirit is the same way.

It’s true that souls were never designed to exist without bodies, or minds without brains. Bodies and brains were designed to be the way that souls and minds interact with the world around them and with each other. But that is not to say that the two cannot be separated. And when they are, it is the soul/mind, the part that holds the non-physical significance, which will matter. However useful or well-maintained or beautiful the vessel is, it is ultimately worthless when empty.

Of course, there is a simpler way to say this, one I have discussed before. Who says that physical things can only be affected by other physical things? The motion of my hands right now is decided by the content of my thoughts, which is non-physical. My thoughts are being shaped by beliefs and memories and ideals and ethics and individual experiential data, all non-physical.*

One last thought: Funnily enough, the word “ghost” actually just means “spirit,” which is why it’s so similar to the German word for spirit, geist. So if the tower depends on the hard drive, and the hard drive depends on the significance of information, and the significance of the information ultimately depends on the decisions of the people with access to it – people with spirits/souls – then maybe there really is a ghostly aspect to our machines.

*How exactly does this interaction happen? I don’t know. But then, to be honest, I don’t really know how the software and hardware on our systems interact, either. To answer those questions, you’d have to ask the designer.

Photo from Google Images under fair use policy.