Watching "Serial Experiments Lain" opened my philosophical eye for the first time in a while. The story is about the validity and reality of the Wired (an uber internet) and how it affects human in the 'real' world. In the anime it ended up in quite a happy note, with emotions being the anchor to the 'real' world. Here I merely explore the possibility of a philosophy of a human existing as data and information in the web, and how it is actually quite similar to how we are now.

Human.exe

Since the beginning of human existence we strive for knowledge and information. So much so that we did what no animals have ever done before. We drew and wrote, first on stones, to communicate our knowledge to the rest of the world, and also so that when the individual dies his knowledge and information lives on. This is the basis of our civilization and the only reason of our success as a species. We have gone along way from cave paintings and carved writing. Our first breakthrough of the communication of knowledge is the creation of a written language. Our second breakthrough is the creation of books. Our third and most current breakthrough is the invention and mass production of the personal computers (PC) and with it the computer wide area network. The most famous being the Internet.

The Internet is an amazing network consisting of millions of users all around the world existing as data in a new universe. And it is a new universe with its own rules and laws. There are no fundamental particles such as leptons or quarks. No, in the Internet there are only 1s and 0s, that is the Internet's fundamental particles. So, I ask myself, what does that make the characters inside the Internet? Not just the user-based characters, but what gamers would call NPC or Non Player Character. Characters that live purely as data. Not just 'characters', even programs and applications. My friend described human as a process. Even if this is not what he intended to mean, I understand it as 'we are the software' of this universe.

How are we a software? Well what a software essentially do is take in input and process the raw data, and from that effect the environment around us by using hardwares that is available to us (namely our body). Knowledge is power after all. And we are the embodiment of that power. All living things are.

The world is like a giant computer network, where the non-living objects bend knowledge, sort of like how a copper track would act in a circuit, and the living things (simply more complicated non-living things) are those who take in the data from the surroundings process them with a processor (say the mind).

There is one big difference between your everyday system software and living things though. Softwares are not perfect. Not at all. That's why there are useful (or annoying, depends how you look at it) things called updates, where a group of programmers come together and improves the software in question, based on the feedback of the user. This is why they have the pop-up that ask you whether or not you want to send a report on the bug that caused the program to crash every so often. Here we can see that a program is created by a programmer, to solve a desire of the user. In turn the user feedback to the programmer so that the programmer can improve the program.

Living things on the other hand are self updaters. While a computer software need a programmer to actually update it, living things are the user and programmer as well as the program at the same time. Possibly. Or we are the program and the programmer at the same time while god is the user. Nevertheless, the user (if it's not ourself) would be out of our perception.

Humans being programs and the programmer is key to evolution. As the world demand more from us, so we change. We update ourselves. From the most basic bacteria, we have updated so much, that we are now a multi-celled sentient organism.

So if our being is simply a process, it won't be that much difference then if we, for some extraordinary reason, we started living as 1's and 0's in a computer, except we will probably think slower, but will last a longer time.

Our body is the most complicated hardware in the business. This has been proven by our success. Though our body is not exactly the best in anything. We are not the strongest, or the fastest, merely the most flexible, and in this ever changing world, it is a key survival traits.

In that sense, human beings are just computers who are able to upgrade themselves. We are a combination of a hardware and a major software (the OS) while our emotions are more or less application softwares that is attached to the OS. Even the strongest of emotions, such as love, revenge, as well as the sense of duty, are nothing but emotions and thus simple applications controlled by the OS.

There is only one aspect of human nature that does not fit the software look of humans is arts. I'm not very appreciative of the visual arts, paintings and sculpture, however I am no stranger to sitting in my room, spending hours after hours, simply listening to music. Music is amazing. It follows no logical path to pleasure. One could say that it is only random frequency and amplitude of air vibration that vibrates our eardrum. And yet, it creates such a beautiful feeling.

Music is a collection of harmonics and notes that is a certain frequency and a certain amplitude. It is something that is collective through out the human race. Somehow, music seems to vibrate the actual 'tracks' that the universe is built on. It probably started as a background disturbance of programs and develops later on, until it is ingrained into the nature of humans.