How to Build a Computer Model of God
Capital of Nasty, an Electronic Magazine - ISSN 1482-0471
Sunday, November 20, 2011 at 11:00 (6075/19)
In order to see if souls existed, why they can't be detected and how they could possibly affect consciousness, the author behind the Bootstrapping Independence blog decided to build a computer model to simulate souls, the afterlife, and a spiritual model which requires no visible physical component.
[...] in the model system described above, where earth is represented by a virtual operating system with no knowledge of any other possible systems, I represent life with a simple process which runs in a loop for some specified time, after which it ceases to function. The programs are allocated a certain set of memory when they are initialized, which will never increase until they stop running. This represents the space we take up physically in the world. The program has internal states, which are never saved to disk, but are stored only in memory, and represent our changing mental states. When a process is killed or dies of its own accord, its memory is returned to the virtual environment for use by other programs, and nothing is ever saved about it’s existence. This process represents death in the real world.As a result, we now have a simple, layered model of life (processes), the universe (virtual machine), all sitting atop an unknowable God (Hypervisor).
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