one potato, two potatoes

Thank you michael for the wonderful article ;-)


Tor Nørretranders on Permanent Reincarnation

I have changed my mind about my body. I used to think of it
as a kind of hardware on which my mental and behavioral
software was running. Now, I primarily think of my body as
software.

My body is not like a typical material object, a stable
thing. It is more like a flame, a river or an eddie.
Matter is flowing through it all the time. The constituents
are being replaced over and over again.

A chair or a table is stable because the atoms stay where
they are. The stability of a river stems from the constant
flow of water through it.

98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced every
year. 98 percent! Water molecules stays in your body for
two weeks (and for an even shorter time in a hot climate),
the atoms in your bones stays there for a few months. Some
atoms stay for years. But almost not one single atom stay
with you in your body from cradle to grave.

What is constant in you is not material. An average person
takes in 1.5 ton of matter every year as food, drinks and
oxygen. All this matter has to learn to be you. Every year.
New atoms will have to learn to remember your childhood.

These numbers has been known for half a century or more,
mostly from studies of radioactive isotopes. Physicist
Richard Feynman said in 1955: "Last week's potatoes! They
now can remember what was going on in your mind a year
ago."

But why is this simple insight not on the all-time Top 10
list of important discoveries? Perhaps because it tastes a
little like spiritualism and idealism? Only the ghosts are
for real? Wandering souls?

But digital media now makes it possible to think of all
this in a simple way. The music I danced to as a teenager
has been moved from vinyl-LPs to magnetic audio tapes to
CDs to Pods and whatnot. The physical representation can
change and is not important — as long as it is there. The
music can jump from medium to medium, but it is lost if it
does not have a representation. This physics of information
was sorted out by Rolf Landauer in the 1960'ies. Likewise,
out memories can move from potato-atoms to burger-atoms to
banana-atoms. But the moment they are on their own, they
are lost.

We reincarnate ourselves all the time. We constantly give
our personality new flesh. I keep my mental life alive by
making it jump from atom to atom. A constant flow. Never
the same atoms, always the same river. No flow, no river.
No flow, no me.

This is what I call permanent reincarnation: Software
replacing its hardware all the time. Atoms replacing atoms
all the time. Life. This is very different from religious
reincarnation with souls jumping from body to body (and
souls sitting out there waiting for a body to take home
in).

There has to be material continuity for permanent
reincarnation to be possible. The software is what is
preserved, but it cannot live on its own. It has to jump
from molecule to molecule, always in carnation.

I have changed my mind about the stability of my body: It
keeps changing all the time. Or I could not stay the same.