Your inner software and outer hardware.
By: Aaliyah Sacoor - Nce
Tags: Hardware, Software Engineering, Curiousity, Enlightenment, Flow

Your inner software and outer hardware.

1 October 2021|Balance and Buildings

What about you? You have software; your mind, emotions, thoughts, feelings… And you have hardware; your body and organs… How do they interact efficiently or how can they interact for you optimal benefit and well-being? Is your most popular operating system your brain or your heart? This is my take on your reality…

Who am I and who are you? Are we the hardware that surrounds us? Our bodies, our skin, and our organs…The physical… all that we can see and touch… our fingerprints…our uniqueness, our skin colour, the wrinkles on our eyes that form as we smile deeply… or the tears that dance out of our eyes when we feel intense emotion… Or are we that emotion…. … those thoughts that flow through our minds. Simply “software” that is coded in our DNA, telling electricity to flow through and stimulate different parts of our brains, for example, the hippocampus. This is a part of our brain strongly associated with memory, and therefore can initiate and start the chain or code of flow of sadness or happiness throughout out being. The “feeling centre” of the brain is the amygdala. But what initiates these feelings? Is it thoughts or memories? And if so what initiates those thoughts and those memories? Science has many explanations of it, and one of them is the concept of the subconscious mind…

“Neurons release brain chemicals, known as neurotransmitters, which generate these electrical signals in neighbouring neurons. The electrical signals propagate like a wave to thousands of neurons, which leads to thought formation. One theory explains that thoughts are generated when neurons fire.” – – Lina Begdache, Ask a scientist

But what initiates these neurons to release brain chemicals? Are all our thoughts simply just a heavy concoction of chemical energy turned electrical energy? Is that why we are how we are, and we think the way we think?

I’ve tried to simplify these concepts by thinking of the way hardware and software interact in the machine world… Different bits, carry different voltage levels, which ultimately just control the electric current flowing through the computers’ electric circuit board. Or instruct one path to open and another to close. It’s just as simple as turning a light switch on and off. Hardware “carrying-out” instructions therefore simply means the central processing unit sending electricity through one path instead of the other, which in turn results in an operation occurring… Just as neurotransmitters in our brain simply send electrical signals down one pathway instead of the other.

Hence, if it is this simple why are we not then just as easy to understand as machines. Where does the humanity come in? This is a question many people battle with, myself included… What makes a meaningful life? Is it to understand who we are or why we are here? Or is it to find ourselves both friends with life and death… Where does the harmony come in where both inner software and outer hardware interact in the most optimal, way with the most optimal understanding of beyond both of them?

Someone who tackles these questions gracefully is neurosurgeon and neuroscientist Paul Kalanithi in his book When Breath Becomes Air. Paul states in his book that “Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

Maybe that statement simply is the answer to the question: to ask questions. To strive to be the best versions or latest update of your personal software and hardware. Although true perfection is found in accepting imperfection, the striving can be compared to chasing something just as the asymptote in mathematics does. Knowing well it will never be reached. You still run towards it whole heartedly, and mindfully, embracing all numbers and co-ordinates you find yourself in. Until you come so close, that the gap between the line and the asymptote cannot even be seen with the naked eye. To be curious and to struggle to find that balance of life, purpose, understanding, truth and ultimately the reality that encompasses all understanding. To make peace through finding hardships. And to understand the delicacy of thought through the arbitrariness of some electric flow.

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air