Thursday, October 1, 2015

Instantiation: Constructors and Comparison

I realized I have posted very little on here, mostly due to other life stress, and every time I sit down to commit something I get halfway through it and then save it as a draft. Well, I figured with how many times I've rehashed this idea across various drafts, I should just commit an initial version of it and move forward. Perfection is the enemy of progress in my life.

There's the common saying of "you're one in a million" indicating someone's uniqueness, and recently the caveat to that has been "that means there are 7000 people just like you in the world." Though I haven't literally gone around and compared every person to every other person, I feel confident I can assert that it is nonsense. Even people who would be similar, coming from same backgrounds, worldviews, times, and economic status are nothing alike. We as people are more than just the collection of statistics.

We are not the same, but we can be similar, and have some portions of us that can be compared. Like objects in code, a direct comparison is not really possible unless you specify the values to compare, and in which case you're not asserting that Object A is equal to Object B, you are comparing attributes of Objects A and B to see if they are equivalent.

This is sort of a carry-on from the idea I put in my explanation of this blog name, that we're object-oriented. I am an instantiation of the human model, an object named Eric. And this instance has lots of components. It has skin, and eyes, and ears, and a brain, and all of those fundamental pieces that make us part of the Animalia's "Homo sapiens sapiens" subspecies. (Yeah, no joke, according to Wikipedia H. S. Sapiens is modern man's subspecies. I wonder what post-human will be?)

Along with the collection of the physical traits, I also have a fill range of spiritual, intangible, mental traits. To our current knowledge, there's nothing in our DNA that specifies the brain, the intellectual prowess, the relative skill with langauges or numbers or three-dimensional models. It's something in how the system grows, but it is something that makes me me. And it's difficult to codify in words, but I find it's easier to explain in programming concepts.

So I am an instance of human, and I have all the traits that compose me. I have a wealth of habits, past state, and desires that are all loaded into my being. And this object moves along, interacts with others, it can share and help and nurture others, or it could be used to harm and conflict with the structure of nearby objects. I attempt to do the former, using the traits and skills I have for the benefit of the system, like the cells that compose me I try to work within and improve the system of the work around me.

And most objects carry some inheritance model for where they came from. Humans are a little more complicated. We know, or long to know, the parents, the man and woman (or whatever else as science progresses) who combine their 23 chromosomes into the randomization pot to produce us. They are our physical constructors. But we're also given enough consciousness to wonder about us as a species, about the universe, to ask the big questions of why were are here and what we are. 

God is the constructor. He instantiated us all, everyone and everything in the universe we inhabit. And not only did He put us into motion, but He gave us our composition. Our components are unique, a specific index of attributes. Even if there were another person with all our same elements, same cells, same skin patterns and hair style and clothing, they are not us. There is more to life than the atoms. Even the atoms are subject to the Constructor.

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