A Ramble About the Transmigration of the Soul

One of the things I used to like to do in my spare time, though not so much as I get older, is to go back and play old console games. These are the video games I grew up with on the old Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy, and the Sega Genesis. You can usually find them online through various means (some not as reputable as the others).

The main problem with trying to play these kinds of games is that they weren't written for x86 or x86_64 processors, which is what most if not all laptops, desktops, and a fair number of hand-helds use to do the calculations to make the whole thing work. In order to run them on a standard computer, you need what's called an emulator program. An emulator is a piece of software which uses computer code to make the program think it's running on the processor or hardware it was written and compiled for.

Computer code is normally written in human readable “programming language” and then is run through what is called a compiler to turn the human readable instructions into something the processor, which can only understand instructions given to it in binary (1s and 0s), can follow. What is compiled for one kind of processor will not run on a different kind of processor. The arrangement of transistors within the two different kinds of processors are mathematically different from one another. It doesn't matter if the code is binary or not, the different processor will produce gibberish as it tries to run the calculations which the instruction set of the program is trying to give it. This is the reason why, way back when, software companies often would sell two separate versions of the same program, one for the PC and one for the Mac. The PCs ran the Windows OS on an x86 processor, and the Mac ran the Mac OS or OS X on a PowerPC processor. If you tried to install a copy of MS Office for Windows on an old Mac, it would look at you and go “huh?” And that's if it was being polite.

Follow me so far? There is a point this beyond computer geek nostalgia.

Computer processors are made up of billions of transistors. The human brain is essentially a very complex, dynamic organic computer processor. If you've ever seen a picture of a neuron, of which the brain is made up of billions if not trillions, it resembles and functions much like a transistor. A transistor is essentially an electronic switch that uses an electrical impulse to either permit or deny the passage of an electrical current. It forms the basis of all logic circuits, which are the core of all computing devices in existence. Albeit a very highly sophisticated and complex transistor, the neuron is essentially a transistor nonetheless. Like the computer's processor, it functions by the transmission of electrical impulses along pathways of neurons. Inside a computer, these impulses are coded as “1” and “0” for “on” and “off”, if we could describe the internal coding of the neural pathways, it would probably not look much different in its simplest written form.

This internal coding of the human brain (the electrical impulses which course through our neural pathways) is essentially, for all intents and purposes, the human psyche or soul. It is the set of instructions which are formed from the input it receives through the five senses from its experiences and memories. It is programmed, compiled, and run on a single processor which is absolutely unique in terms of the internal arrangement of its “transistors” because every human brain, because of its organic nature and the way in which it forms and grows and changes throughout the course of a person's life, is absolutely unique.

Do you see where this conclusion leads yet?

The human psyche cannot transmigrate from one brain to another. It can only be run on the processor, the brain, in which it was originally compiled and run. Reincarnation, or the transmigration of the soul, in this sense, is impossible. It can however be run on an emulator and preserved, just as those old games could be stored and run on emulators specifically written for that type of program. And it should be able to be reinstalled and run on a processor, a human brain, which is precisely identical to the one in which it was originally compiled.

The Christian faith does not teach the transmigration of the soul. This teaching has always been preached against by the Fathers of the Church. But it does, and has always taught, the resurrection of a body identical to the one the person lost. To continue using our analogy, God is perfectly capable of uploading the human psyche into an emulator within a virtual reality until that new, identical body is completed and ready for reinstallation. Even if God were to recompile the code for a different brain and body, it would change the person completely and it would no longer be the same psyche. The original person would be lost. But no one would be lost from existence if He merely uploaded and stored the psyche and then reinstalled it into a physically identical system. And God is not willing that anyone should perish.

Just some thoughts.