Idle Analytics

Because I know you all were desperate to know.

David Cook should win. David Archuleta should die in a fire. I'm not particularly invested in what order the other contestants get voted off, though I like Brooke, although I suspect I wouldn't if I knew more about her position on various issues -- does she hate gay people? I bet she does, although I also bet she's one of those people who only hates them in principle, and makes exceptions for the gay people she knows -- "Homosexuality is wrong and a sin, but Jeff is so nice, I can't imagine he's actually going to hell, I'm sure he'll see the error of his ways and repent." That kind of thing. Anyway.

David Cook has only once done something truly execrable -- Our Lady Peace's "Innocent," which is either just a really bad song or was a terrible performance. Most likely both. So emo. But he did a really credible version of "Music of the Night," which was surprising, and has been downright awesome in the past; I loved his emo-rock version of "Hello" and "Billie Jean." I wasn't too thrilled with his interpretation of "Eleanor Rigby," because I think all that emo snarling kind of misses the point of the song, but it sounded ok if you ignore the fact that he was supposed to be singing "Eleanor Rigby." I'm now tempted to discourse about my interpretation of "Eleanor Rigby" and how important it is for the music to reflect her quiet, obscure life and death, but, eh, I'll leave it at that.

I wish I liked Carly Smithson. I try to. I want to. She's so Irish and cute and I think she could sing well, but somehow she never quite does. She always gets shouty or off-key or just chooses a really bad song. There's always something disappointing; I think maybe she tries too hard. Although I really liked Her rendition of "Blackbird," which happens to be one of my favorite Beatles songs -- but I liked Brooke's "Let It Be" better (which might be my absolute favorite Beatles song, I'm not sure). I can see why her album flopped, for sure.

Let me see, who else do I have any feelings at all about -- Jason Castro. He mostly sucks, but every now and then, just when he needs to, he does something so truly awesome that you really want him to stick around, just on the off chance he might do it again. "Hallelujah," for example, which was really, really, really good, and his take on Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's version of "Over the Rainbow" which was quite good. He has maybe the weakest voice of all, but sometimes he just really does something with it -- unlike Carly Smithson; actually maybe the opposite of Carly.

Ok, ok, enough about that. I've exposed enough of my ridiculous Idol obsession (I, uh, bought Blake Lewis's album on iTunes; it kinda rocks, except it also kinda sucks). Yeah.

"So, then, if you're an atheist, where do you think you go when you die? Where do you think your mom is now?"

This sentiment, which was presumably some kind of attempted "gotcha" moment by one of my relatives, is an example of a dualist notion. That is, somewhere inside of me, hiding in my head somewhere, is the true "me" that tells my brain what to do, like my brain is the computer and my mind is a user. This idea is specious for many reasons, not the least of which are that it fails the Occam's Razor criterion, it is untestable, and is arrogant in its apparent assertion that other animals can operate with a hardware neural network, but humans can't.

Human beings are much more like waves than particles. The atoms that composed me are not the atoms that I was composed of when I was younger; yet my interpretation is that I moved continuously from there to here. Indeed, I did. But "I" am not the collection of particles. I am a moving entity in the medium of particles, a complex chemical reaction, like combustion:

except either side is unbelievably complicated. One does not ask where the fire went when it went out (well, ok, some idiotic religions do). It simply stopped. One does not ask where a beam of light went when it strikes a wall. The question is nonsense.

I bring this up because I've recently been having another (blessedly mild) stint of gastrointestinal pain, and frankly I'm looking to medicine to fix it. By fixing it, I believe the best possible option is to turn me into a robot. This could happen in several ways. One way would be a scanner would read and understand my current neural pathways into machine code, and then transfer this code into a robot. Jessica objects: But then YOU don't keep on living, some OTHER guy starts living and you stay where you are. No, I keep living AND I stay where I am. Better to put the one with living flesh out of his misery. "But what good does that do you? You just get digitize and then get killed, and cease to have consciousness."

I disagree with this notion, but ok, let's take a different tack. A more realistic option, anyway, is that nanobots could be released into our bodies for a complete cellular conversion. That is, tiny robots are injected into the body which systematically convert any recognized cell-type to a mechanical analog, one that is impervious to natural cell-death. Then everyone would agree that consciousness is continuous (as this is a gradual process), and that YOU really are being converted to a robot. Whatever. I fail to see the difference, but I'm open to either option.

So, let's get it done. I only have maybe 20-30 years left on this planet. I'd like to become a practically immortal, disease-free robot.