Writing a piece of code is mostly seen as telling a computer what to do. How to function under certain circumstances or how to handle certain problems. How to store information and how to use if effectively. This might have been the definition long ago but code is part of everything today. A thought that really hit me hard today was the following:
“Is coding telling a computer what to do OR is coding immortalizing the human mind”. Many people see the computer as a entity with it’s own mind and workings. As if it has its own character outside of us humans. I do not completely agree with this statement. The computer is really just the creation of the human. It operates and performs only on the command of the human. It does not have it’s own thoughts or dreams. It’s own desires and needs. It is very different to other creatures in the sense that it is not a creature at all. It is an extraction of one creature’s mind: The human.
This extraction is captured in binary. Binary being a one or a zero, but not a few of them, millions of billions of them. Random order of these binaries produces nothing else but noise. Putting them in order can create… almost anything today. It can play any music known and unknown to you, show vivid pictures and videos of any place on earth. Capture the beauty of Earth and the Heavens. Teach us new things and connect us across the globe in a few milliseconds. This simple binary code has lead to humanity’s biggest creation yet.
Writing code is therefore more than telling a computer what to do. It is converting your mind into a tangible essence outside of itself. The binary of code has no meaning on their own just like a word has no meaning in it’s individual letters. Each letter is just a combination of different bytes. One bit has two possibilities. 1 or 0. This means that it can keep track of 1 or 0. Two bits together has 4 possibilities: 11, 00, 10, 01. This allows you to allocate 4 outcomes. So it goes onward to extent where 8 bits together will result in a total of 256 possibilities and it is 1 byte. Guess how much possibilities exist in 5 bytes…. 1.1 gillion! (1,1 x 10^12). We now have computers that can store hundreds of Terabytes with ease. As we increase our abilities to store this information and make sense of it, we get closer to capturing the world around us in digital form. Looking at some of the major games we have today, it becomes more difficult to distinguish reality from the virtual. With the Virtual Reality regime almost upon us we are starting to experience the world through these bytes… It is a really interesting phenomena…
If code is a combination of these bytes in specific order, by coding we are manipulating the fabric of physical matter and creating new digital matter. We do this by using words. The more high level the coding the simpler the words become but in essence even basic code is the combination of concepts/words. By using words in specific sequences we can create new things in the digital world. This is very interesting because in the natural world, the basic building blocks of living beings function in a similar way, but with incomprehensible complexity – DNA. On a very simplistic manner the main difference between a DNA component and a “bit” is that bits are binary but the DNA is Quaternary. This means that one DNA component can have 4 different values where bits only have two. This seems like only two more values compared to one bit. The impact thereof however is insane. If we imagine that we had 5 bytes of DNA components, guess how many possibilities we will have now? 1,2 x 10^24! This is 12 zeros more than in binary and it is only 5 bytes. It has therefore been theorized that all of the worlds digital data, every photo ever digitized, videos made, data stored, music, books written, the culmination of human knowledge, will be able to fit into one tablespoon of DNA! It really is astounding.
SO what if binary coding is the early beginnings of ‘coding’ DNA? This would alter everything we know of reality. We can then create any creature but the process would be very costly and extremely dangerous since humanity only learns through trial and error. BUT, what if the computers we are coding today keeps on evolving as they do and surpasses the human ability to perceive, analyse and make sense of the world around us? What if it can do this trial and error for us and come to the solution of re-coding DNA? Then we are inevitably on our way to decoding reality.
Coding is therefore capturing the mind into an object outside of ourselves. Coding is not the first method humans have used to achieve this. We have capturing the mind’s outflows through media sources in the past. Through movies and series. Through music and poems. We have captured mental models and world views and realities exceptionally well considering the little senses they engaged with. The books of Lord of the Rings has the ability to entrance the reader into the world of middle Earth. The movies make it so real that you feel like you are an observer of this reality. Music has the ability to alter the state of mind in such exceptional ways to move people out of depression but also into it. As our tools have evolved over time our ability to capture life and ourselves have as well but the essence of all this remains the same. We are capturing our reality and encoding it for others. One of the oldest forms of this coding is through books. Capturing stories and knowledge that can change us which consequently changes the reality around us. The knowledge in these books were and still are akin to power and freedom.
Taking these thoughts back to how the coder interacts with code, through words, there is another interesting coincidence. The order and structure of the words the coder uses can create new things or at least instruct an object to do something inside the coder’s mind. Sometimes something the coder can’t do but a program can. Just like the concept of magic where a spell is spoken using words with an action like a waving wand is performed and executes this magic spell. In this way, on an extracted level, coding is like casting spells into the virtual world. Although magic is science fiction, it really has strong correlations to coding.
One of the oldest books that trace the story of humanity, is the Bible. This is actually more of a library than a book, as it is the combination of books written over thousands of years. The really interesting part of this book is that although the time between the books are extremely large and the writers are almost all different people, there exists a narrative in every book that reveals the same kind of story. The same kind of Idea. The same kind of code. A code that was true 6000 years ago but which is true still today. As if it is hard coded into reality, but just like you cannot see the bytes behind the pixels of the screen you are reading this on, you cannot directly see this code. This library in it’s earliest forms were not kept as written pieces of symbols but transferred orally through generations. Transferred through the ‘Word of mouth’ until one day we could capture these words into something outside of ourselves. Today we can capture these thoughts, words and actions into code like in no other known time in history. Capturing our extracted consciousness in more detail we ever could.
Another correlation which is very curious is that of Christianity. In Genesis it is written that God ‘spoke’ and there was light. He then continues to use ‘WORDS’ to create everything we see. As if He only needed to cast His Words into time and it will be created. Then in the Gospel of John, John writes that in the beginning was the ‘WORD’ and the ‘WORD’ was with God and the ‘WORD’ was ‘GOD’. That nothing came into being without this ‘Word’. John refers to Jesus here which is both the Son of God and the Word of God. Jesus could control all reality with His words. He ‘SPOKE’ and the sea obeyed Him. He ‘spoke’ and the deaf could hear and the blind could see. He spoke and the dead rose back to life. He constantly spoke to the Father. The Father is Spirit, meaning He is unseen and in-perceivable by the normal senses, yet His One Big characteristic is that He ‘SPEAKS’ Life into creation. What if His ‘WORDS’ are the coding blocks of reality? Each of His Words infinitely dense in complexity from our Understanding but accessible to us. He has sent us His Word, His Son and probably the most intense message we really don’t understand. That this Coder loves this one small little piece of code that He wrote/spoke so much, that He entered into the code Himself. Not so that He can prove He can change anything with a few words but to reveal His intent behind His creation by making Himself suffer at the hands of little pieces of code. Then taking on Himself all the corruption and bugs these little codes have created for themselves. Subjecting Himself to the pain and suffering this corrupted codes have created. It was clearly easier to re-write the code but He instead chose to debug the code, which is us, by becoming one of us and taking the bug in our hearts to the grave forever. When the final anti-virus then comes to destroy the virus in our world, that we can found safely stored in the eternal hard drive of our loving Creator.
I don’t think we know what code truly is. I don’t think we know what the ‘Word’ is. I don’t think we know what consciousness is. If we cannot answer these ‘simple’ questions, how can we possibly think that we know enough about the world to exclude God from it. All I know is that the world is changing constantly.
My Journey in Life 