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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Day 19: The Soul
Tuesday. 2.19.13 6:24 pm
Ok so it's late and I have to get up early tomorrow, so I'll just copy and paste part of an email that I was writing to someone about how I conceptualize the human soul. Because I write emails about that kind of stuff.

Within a mathematical context, I tend to think of people as finite volumes with continuous properties (easily explainable according to ordinary physical laws) except for a single, discontinuous point which goes to infinity-- this would be the equivalent of the "soul". In complex theory, when we have such a discontinuous point it often represents a "source" or a "sink". An example is your bathtub. If we want to describe fluid flow inside the bathtub, we can describe it with continuous equations until we get to the drain. We can't deal easily with the drain, so what we tend to do is to draw a circle around the drain and then to calculate the flux of water passing through the circle to quantify the strength of the drain. I feel like the soul is a such a discontinuous, infinitesimal point: it represents a "source", and in that way, our link to Infinity. While you cannot point to your soul physically in your body, you can understand its effect because of the flow of [spiritual] material outwards. I think of this as just another way to phrase the common analogy that a Christian is like a candle burning. You can tell that you are a Christian because your "light is shining": the Holy Spirit is shining through you.

I started thinking about this kind of stuff, as you might imagine, when I was taking a course in complex mathematics (real and imaginary numbers). I started writing an adventure novel about the interaction between imaginary concepts and real concepts, based on an analogy with the delightfully rich vocabulary and theoretical framework provided by the math I was learning in class. As I continued writing the novel, I started to see how I could clarify my understanding of the Universe if I thought about it within a more mathematical framework. Before I did this, I often felt like I wore two hats, my "Christian hat" and my "scientist hat". I felt like I held two sets of somewhat conflicting beliefs in my mind at the same time. Then I read the book "Flatland", written by Edwin Abbott in 1884. It is a short and rather strange book about a square who lives in two dimensions who is visited by a sphere who lives in three dimensions. It opened my mind to think about the possible geometries of Heaven and Earth and how that fits into the context of modern physics. It is not in the least a "religious" book, and it has a lot of other stuff in it about Victorian society and stuff, but I think that makes it a very good way to allow scientifically-minded people to consider a broader picture of reality without having to sweat the details of the historical development of the Christian religion.
1 Comments.


"I started to see how I could clarify my understanding of the Universe if I thought about it within a more mathematical framework."

This is beyond my math-retarded brain's comprehension.
» randomjunk on 2013-02-19 10:17:08

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