I remember when I was in the womb! I have never felt so safe or at peace. It was so wonderful, that I have dedicated my whole life to trying to get back into the womb! So far I have been unsuccessful. But I’m no quiter! So I keep on trying.
Consciences, because they are trying to help you avoid mistakes, often come across as quite rude–they don’t have the time to be more gentle and polite.
Then again, CLG’s naturally grouchy. She’s been rather hostile to everyone she’s met so far (sans Bud) in comic. Probably a good thing though, that hostility likely kept Shelly safer in the Forest than anything else (aka Sphinxes = “I don’t know what that thing is but it seems irritable. I’ll just let it guard that tree for now.”).
It’s also kind of funny how CLG frequently uses breasts cracks for a majority of her insults (beyond simple cussing). Calling Monica “Jugs” and now the Tina = “Padded Pushup Bras” comment. Kind of sounds more like Amanda than Shelly in that regard.
If a Connie mini-sphinx were to hack up a hairball, it would probably catch fire, divide itself into eight parts, and leap for your throat while insulting you…
I bet she could make the full transformation if she wanted to. She made a visual aid of Monica’s head appear out of thin air. A little shapeshifiting shouldn’t be too hard. Especially since her existence isn’t exactly physical, it seems. Since not everybody can see her unless she wants them to.
We’re up to Tina 2.1 now, but her Nudge-ectomy didn’t result in any memory loss. With any luck there won’t be any major barista reboots in the near future.
Pretty unusual to have a supernatural world with such a materialist view of human existence. You don’t expect a world filled with “Demons” and “Demi-Gods” to deny the existence of souls. Though I do wonder if it will turn out that things aren’t as simple as Connie thinks they are.
Monica’s “grandmother” was May communicating from the demon realm. And ghosts, and the GGs, may simply be copies of the originals. May’s comment that she didn’t want to think about sticking her hands in the remains of her dead daughter kind of bears that out.
Transporters in star trek used to bug me when I realized they essentially scanned and disintegrated the target then rebuilt an exact copy somewhere else. The trek community has come up with all sorts of metaphysical techno babble bullshit to explain why the primary transportation device of the series isn’t a murder machine.
heh, if you really want to be freaked, do some research on scifi teleportation… ST:NG has some nice ones, but some larry niven ones are much better.. 🙂
Realizing that, there was a lot of unexplored potential in those things. Member of the landing party/away team badly injured? Fix him/her during beam-up, with a doctor looking over the transporter chief’s shoulder saying, fix that, and now that, and … Your redshirt dies seconds after beaming down into the Menace O’The Week? His instructions are still in the buffer memory; beam him down again! “Hi guys, what’s going on. Oh, hey, is that me? Oh shiiiii …”
I think they would function like “moving” computer files: the file gets copied elsewhere, then the computer verifies the copy is accurate, then the original is wiped out. In TNG a copy of Riker wasn’t wiped out, and was unknowingly left behind for years. He had a part in at least two episodes.
Every new copy would feel like, and act like, the original, but they’d be new people, every time. I explained this to my daughter and she just shrugged. “Yeah, of course. So what?” Kids today – they’re creepy. [shudder]
That’s how the concept of the Replicators came about. Someone (Spock perhaps) determined that they could dematerialize (perhaps) a bag of really good coffee beans, and then save the pattern from the buffer (slightly lower resolution than what was needed to transport living tissue), then they could rematerialize that bag of coffee beans over and over, given a store of basic energy that would be converted into matter. Then they just started creating libraries of patterns of things. Voila! Replicator.
Monica’s grandma’s ghost was played by Maya in order to teach Monica to speak Glyph.
Wapsiworld has been heavily Greek of late, so one shouldn’t assume Paul is sticking with postpagan European philosophy of continuance. The shades of people in Hades considered memory a burden and a torture, or perhaps since their memories were lost, it was easier to imagine a river that took these experiences out of the world.
Nudge claimed to have never met an angel, and the collective was amused at Monica’s belief in ghosts. But the collective has a Madonna in the public area of the shop and a memorial to Tina 1.0 in the basement. Lost peoples fascinate us, and imagining the possibilities of immortality have been a part of nearly every major civilization.
Maya took quite the mad scientist leap in allowing herself to be golemed. Her memories were reconstructed perfectly. The GGs had enough “signal” that they were separable after years as an amalgamated monster.
But this is not the same as assuming inviolable individual souls. If persistence is a process measurable by science, then by definition it can reproduced, and therefore industrialized. If it is all just chemical processes, what’s to keep someone from making identical copies of Maya, Bud, Brandi and Jin?
Yes, that’s my point. The Mayahuel we know is the continuation of an ordinary human; the same for the three golem girls. But there seems to have been no human soul before Tepoztecotl the golem alcohol god was created, yet Topoz is a functional person.
That presumes animals have no souls. If they do, then it’s just a matter of modifying the shell they are transferred to for greater processing power . If there aren’t any souls and it’s all biomechanics, then modifying the base “program” and hardware during golem creation gives us Tepoz and the chimera. May appears to be the only golem whose memories weren’t heavily modified initially. Even the GGs had to be restored, and it took Monica becoming their glyph reader to restore their free will.
Perhaps the “Soul” of one of those Inter-dimensional Visitors?
There would be precedence for that in the Viking Mythology.
Baldr (Baldur/Balder) is killed by way of a Mistletoe spear/arrow, yet according to their prophecies he’d arise again, post Ragnarok and lead the survivors to a new Golden Age.
Now if one of the Celtic* “Deities” can pop into the Wapsiverse, then what is to say the Viking ones couldn’t as well.
*: That bearded “friend” of Tepoz, seem to recall him both being a Celtic and Aztec deity at once, can’t find the strip with him in it though. Also has a helmet and a kind of feathery shirt.
If you ask the cats, they’d probably assert that if you’re a particularly good and responsible “cat person”, you are granted a small portion of the cat’s soul to use as your own 🙂
The impression I get is that Lanthian society was never industrialized. They created incredible technology, but didn’t have the means to mass produce it, like a skilled craftsman rather than a production line. Copying the GGs is probably impossible. They are more like works of art than mass produced items. That’s my read on it anyway.
All of us are looking at a different file of this episode in the cache of our hard drives, for instance.
I understand your point. They weren’t mass produced, any more than the Antikythera computer was.
But that same device can be mass produced now.
This may be why Phix was getting cat markings while letting Tina in on the “tiny secret”. Having studied Shelly’s experiences for 80,000 years, she may be using the knowledge of the Companion to create “souls”.
Why just kill demons when you can roll them up like Play-Doh and make a whole new friend?
@SoWhyMe – Euryale provided at least some of the timeline and back-story on the technology issues, and Bud clarified it a bit more, although much of what they said is still somewhat ambiguous.
All of what they said does seem to be consistent with your idea that the basic technology may have been pre- or non-Lanthian, and that the majority of the Lanthian population didn’t have access or use or understanding of it (except as “magic”).
Euryale referred to the Vimana cells being “Lakhenaten tech”. “Lakhenaten” seems to have referred to a group of the “long-living” Lanthians (presumably the ones immortalized by the activation of the Calendar Machine) who were setting up a separate under-sea habitat at the time of the Chimera disaster. Bud said that the V-cells were innocently developed as a power source, and then “weaponized” and used… and this latter use clearly took place quite some time after the Chimera burned the main Lanthian civilization down to bedrock.
And, finally, the V-cell which powered the artifact used to repair Jin was made outside of our timeline (and Shelly was told “not to ask”)… so the Lanthians may not have played any direct role in it.
All of this (plus the mention of some of the “gods” being interdimensional visitors) does lend support to the idea that the advanced technologies originated “elsewhere”, and used (and perhaps further developed) by some of the Lanthians or their successors. Could be either Vorlon or Shadow tech, I suppose 🙂
Forgot about Maya’s part in the whole Ghost thing. Point conceded.
But even Greek Mythology had Souls, see Orpheus’ attempt to rescue his wife’s soul from the Afterlife.
Plus the concept of Souls and reincarnation feature heavily in the Hindu Beliefs, to which the Vimana power cells are also a reference.
As for reproducing the Soul. Not sure that can be done, as the Soul wouldn’t be biochemical in nature, but rather be a form of energy, a specific bioelectric/biomagnetic pattern if you will.
And it wouldn’t just be an issue of replicating the pattern, but every electron, neutron and proton, in the exact same positions.
And according to the Heisenberg principle, that just isn’t possible. Hence why they use Technobabble: The Heisenberg compensator, to get around that in Star Trek to explain why the Transporters work.
The Golem Girls and May would just be a form of moving the soul from one container to another. Extremely risky, high likelihood of failure, but possible.
Heck, Magic might just be the only way to get around the Heisenberg principle, as Magic tends to violate the laws of physics anyway. Hence why poiting is possible, but “mechanical” teleportation isn’t.
But in all the various magical traditions from around the world, that I’ve read about, there’s absolutely nothing about copying the soul. Breaking a piece off of it, and then putting it into something else to give it life (homunculus), yes. But copying? Nope.
The concept of the soul in various cultures is/was to describe individuality’s place in a wider cosmology. But plenty of genre writers and technologists have treated it as a placeholder idea like phlogiston, and more primitive than geocentrism. A suitable copy of a person need not violate Heisenberg any more than twins or downloading do.
Even in the context of Wapsi alone, the issue is on the table: Shelly has had her ancient friendships, fears and loves all suddenly regrafted upon her after millennia of forgetting every bit of what she was. What are we supposed to draw from that?
Speaking of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Magic, one system did take it into account–the Deathgate series, where runes could be combined into spells, but at some point the sub-runes would interfere with one another, so that magic was inherently chaotic.
Except that the attempted retrieval by Orpheus is quite similar to the attempt by Izanagi to retrieve Izanami from the Japanese Netherworld version.
One story is more Orpheus like, the other has to do with her eating the food from the realm of the Dead, thus being tainted.
And the Kojiki also deals with souls in that regard, although not a lot is said about her for the rest in that work.
But twins don’t share the same soul, and even then if they did, one could argue that this would be a case of breaking the original soul into two, see the homunculus concept that I mentioned before. So no copying taking place.
As for downloads, the type of machinery we make use of today do not have quantum level needs/requirements, so the Heisenberg principle isn’t applicable. All those machines care for are the rough equivalents of coordinates. So, whether a data fragment is located at 0.1 or 0.2 is irrelevant, as all the machine needs is the 0 (trying to keep this as simple as possible, and with as few a numbers as possible, but I hope you get what I mean.)
Shelly wasn’t dead though, so the knowledge of her Soul is irrelevant, as it’s still her conscious mind in control. Think of the Soul more as a back up medium for knowledge, and one that one doesn’t always have access to.
So if you cannot access a partition on your HD, due to an OS issue, would this mean that the information is gone and never existed in the first place? Or is it still there, and useable again, once the OS issue is resolved?
From yesterday – KrameGame – thanks for the fresh coffee ; GreyWolf – I’ll hold off on the neckbrace for now ; The Old Wolf – fresh from the over Madeleins sound wonderful with the fresh coffee. Many thanks to all.
“You’re *just* chemical processes” sounds pretty clear to me. And she says there’s *nothing there* that maintains any memories. Not that they are not recycled, but that they can’t be maintained. Now, you could argue that a soul doesn’t maintain memories. Which still leaves the “just” bit.
but if you put the emphasis on the “that MAINTAINS any memories” part of that panel, that implies that there “IS” SOMETHING that gets recycled, it’s just not something that retains a sense of “self” as known by the prior person; but it ends up as an entirely new entity.
I think Connie can appear “solid”when needed. Mostly, I think, she stays tucked away inside Shellys’ mind and comes out only if Shelly summons her or Connie thinks it neccessary to ‘pop in’. So she may meet Justin – unless he already knows about her. 😉
Possibly, but how the bits are used might not be entirely the way we would prefer.
“I hope the demons pluck your eyes out and use them for marbles! and use your ribcage for a trampoline! and may they use your pelvic bone to scrape the slime from off their paws!!”
(the Madonna Vampyra, speaking to Jack Flanders… well, shouting actually)
Little Sister is being cranky, but that is the way of her functioning. Now Shelly is starting to contemplate a new situation she may have the Wisdom to contribute to somewhere along the way. So, who’s next?
So Connie knows about Tina, but doesn’t know about Tina.
nope… she’s being snarky. remember, she’s Shelly’s Conscience… she knows EVERYTHING that Shelly knows as per here: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/take-this-and-do-this/
‘before you are born’? well there are people that remember the womb…
and a lot of therapies rely on your subconscious memory of that.. 🙂
I remember when I was in the womb! I have never felt so safe or at peace. It was so wonderful, that I have dedicated my whole life to trying to get back into the womb! So far I have been unsuccessful. But I’m no quiter! So I keep on trying.
just hope your mum understands!!! 😀
So is Bon Jovi, that doesn’t make it right.
I don’t even know what I meant by that and it came off surprisingly hostile. Apologies!
lol!
spot on mate!
I “remember” lives before this one, I also “remember” what it is like to be god, stood outside time choosing where/when to incarnate.
Imagination’s a wonderful thing.
Lucky for us there are medications for that. ;-p
Why do I get the image of Swamp Thing guarding the entrance to Punk Yoga, declaring, “Do not bring your power ballads here.”
Heh. Two strips after that one, Monica says to Tina “Still, you appear to have a tight rein on your resources, and I’m not talking about your bra…”
Connie might be correct (but still a bit on the rude side)!
Consciences, because they are trying to help you avoid mistakes, often come across as quite rude–they don’t have the time to be more gentle and polite.
Actually it’s Tina that says that to Monica, not the other way around.
Dang…there are some that have memories of before they were born? Here I am, with my first memory being a nightmare when I was 3!
Hmmm. Just a little hostility there in Frame 3… a demon/demon rivalry? And, Connie is showing sphinx facial markings!
Even if there wasn’t originally, the way Tina reacted to CLG upon first ‘meeting’ her (might have seen her in Shelly prior to http://wapsisquare.com/comic/wormholes/ & http://wapsisquare.com/comic/hate-that-word/) was probably distasteful to CLG to say the least.
Then again, CLG’s naturally grouchy. She’s been rather hostile to everyone she’s met so far (sans Bud) in comic. Probably a good thing though, that hostility likely kept Shelly safer in the Forest than anything else (aka Sphinxes = “I don’t know what that thing is but it seems irritable. I’ll just let it guard that tree for now.”).
It’s also kind of funny how CLG frequently uses breasts cracks for a majority of her insults (beyond simple cussing). Calling Monica “Jugs” and now the Tina = “Padded Pushup Bras” comment. Kind of sounds more like Amanda than Shelly in that regard.
I believe that the first time Tina acknowledged seeing Connie was the night Tina accidentally got locked into Shelly’s “boiler room”.
When Monica poits while drunk, hilarity ensues!
I wonder if that means she’s uncomfortable/threatened by the current line of questioning… 🙂
In any event… <3 snarky Connie!
And Connie gets the cat markings when she gets mad just like Shelly, but I don’t think she does the entire transformation.
But a cranky mini-sphinx would be so cute!
Until it hacked up a hairball on the carpet. Ick .
(Hey SoWhyMe, could you lend me a hand with this one?)
–>in theory, this is a link to the comic where Amanda’s little kitten horks up half a skein of goop. But I can’t find it…
Well, I’m not SoWhyMe, but I have your link.
Ewwww! I was quite happy to have forgotten that strip! 🙁
Thank you Casey!
*Plink* pays pun jar in advance for Casey’s next pun
We’ve never seen a sphinx kitten before, so sure; let’s see Connie transform.
If a Connie mini-sphinx were to hack up a hairball, it would probably catch fire, divide itself into eight parts, and leap for your throat while insulting you…
Cat markings and a lil catty if you ask me! *ffffft* *hisssssssss*
I bet she could make the full transformation if she wanted to. She made a visual aid of Monica’s head appear out of thin air. A little shapeshifiting shouldn’t be too hard. Especially since her existence isn’t exactly physical, it seems. Since not everybody can see her unless she wants them to.
This could be one of those conversations that ends up explaining a great deal about the wapsiverse, or it could go nowhere. Any bets?
Even if it does go nowhere, it should be an interesting ride.
There is no such place as “nowhere” in the wapsiverse!
hmmm, one of those definitions of “nowhere” that means “boring, pointless, nothing interesting at all..” 🙂
I just want to know how the two are facing one another, yet their hair is blowing in opposite directions.
Dammit CLG. Obey Physics and stop mirroring Shelly for kicks. (>^_^)>
They’re looking aside to one another in panels 1 & 2. Both of their hair are floating toward the door.
But Connie physics may be very unique, as the conversation suggests.
nah, connie looks how she *wants* to look.. 🙂
she liked how shelly played with her hair… 😛
Or they’re looking away from each other, standing to either side of a fan? 😉
“I’ll take ‘Both’ for $100, Pat.”
Alex.
Pat was “Wheel of Fortune”, Alex does “Jeopardy”.
*Drops all remaining geek cred in the pun jar and trudges slowly away*
Wow, looks kinda windy in the ol’ kitchen today….
….Or maybe they’re just driving with the windows open….
it looks rather like one of those ‘hair product’ adverts… 🙂
If Tina 2.0 becomes Tina 3.0… and thus has no memories of Tinas 1 and 2… this could get very, um, spooky.
We’re up to Tina 2.1 now, but her Nudge-ectomy didn’t result in any memory loss. With any luck there won’t be any major barista reboots in the near future.
Pretty unusual to have a supernatural world with such a materialist view of human existence. You don’t expect a world filled with “Demons” and “Demi-Gods” to deny the existence of souls. Though I do wonder if it will turn out that things aren’t as simple as Connie thinks they are.
Pretty much. No Souls, no Golem Girls. Plus, there’s the small matter of Monica’s Grandma’s Ghost.
Ghosts got to come from someone/somewhere, and Souls stuck on the Mortal Plane for whatever reason explains that situation nicely.
Monica’s “grandmother” was May communicating from the demon realm. And ghosts, and the GGs, may simply be copies of the originals. May’s comment that she didn’t want to think about sticking her hands in the remains of her dead daughter kind of bears that out.
Transporters in star trek used to bug me when I realized they essentially scanned and disintegrated the target then rebuilt an exact copy somewhere else. The trek community has come up with all sorts of metaphysical techno babble bullshit to explain why the primary transportation device of the series isn’t a murder machine.
heh, if you really want to be freaked, do some research on scifi teleportation… ST:NG has some nice ones, but some larry niven ones are much better.. 🙂
Realizing that, there was a lot of unexplored potential in those things. Member of the landing party/away team badly injured? Fix him/her during beam-up, with a doctor looking over the transporter chief’s shoulder saying, fix that, and now that, and … Your redshirt dies seconds after beaming down into the Menace O’The Week? His instructions are still in the buffer memory; beam him down again! “Hi guys, what’s going on. Oh, hey, is that me? Oh shiiiii …”
IIRC, Bones objected to them on just that grounds, as did many others while they were being developed.
I think they would function like “moving” computer files: the file gets copied elsewhere, then the computer verifies the copy is accurate, then the original is wiped out. In TNG a copy of Riker wasn’t wiped out, and was unknowingly left behind for years. He had a part in at least two episodes.
Every new copy would feel like, and act like, the original, but they’d be new people, every time. I explained this to my daughter and she just shrugged. “Yeah, of course. So what?” Kids today – they’re creepy. [shudder]
That’s how the concept of the Replicators came about. Someone (Spock perhaps) determined that they could dematerialize (perhaps) a bag of really good coffee beans, and then save the pattern from the buffer (slightly lower resolution than what was needed to transport living tissue), then they could rematerialize that bag of coffee beans over and over, given a store of basic energy that would be converted into matter. Then they just started creating libraries of patterns of things. Voila! Replicator.
Monica’s grandma’s ghost was played by Maya in order to teach Monica to speak Glyph.
Wapsiworld has been heavily Greek of late, so one shouldn’t assume Paul is sticking with postpagan European philosophy of continuance. The shades of people in Hades considered memory a burden and a torture, or perhaps since their memories were lost, it was easier to imagine a river that took these experiences out of the world.
Nudge claimed to have never met an angel, and the collective was amused at Monica’s belief in ghosts. But the collective has a Madonna in the public area of the shop and a memorial to Tina 1.0 in the basement. Lost peoples fascinate us, and imagining the possibilities of immortality have been a part of nearly every major civilization.
Maya took quite the mad scientist leap in allowing herself to be golemed. Her memories were reconstructed perfectly. The GGs had enough “signal” that they were separable after years as an amalgamated monster.
But this is not the same as assuming inviolable individual souls. If persistence is a process measurable by science, then by definition it can reproduced, and therefore industrialized. If it is all just chemical processes, what’s to keep someone from making identical copies of Maya, Bud, Brandi and Jin?
Or for that matter, of Connie?
On the other hand, if the golems captured the souls of the people who died to make them…where did Tepoz come from?
He thinks he’s one of May’s early experiments, maybe a weasel or other small animal.
Yes, that’s my point. The Mayahuel we know is the continuation of an ordinary human; the same for the three golem girls. But there seems to have been no human soul before Tepoztecotl the golem alcohol god was created, yet Topoz is a functional person.
That presumes animals have no souls. If they do, then it’s just a matter of modifying the shell they are transferred to for greater processing power . If there aren’t any souls and it’s all biomechanics, then modifying the base “program” and hardware during golem creation gives us Tepoz and the chimera. May appears to be the only golem whose memories weren’t heavily modified initially. Even the GGs had to be restored, and it took Monica becoming their glyph reader to restore their free will.
Perhaps the “Soul” of one of those Inter-dimensional Visitors?
There would be precedence for that in the Viking Mythology.
Baldr (Baldur/Balder) is killed by way of a Mistletoe spear/arrow, yet according to their prophecies he’d arise again, post Ragnarok and lead the survivors to a new Golden Age.
Now if one of the Celtic* “Deities” can pop into the Wapsiverse, then what is to say the Viking ones couldn’t as well.
*: That bearded “friend” of Tepoz, seem to recall him both being a Celtic and Aztec deity at once, can’t find the strip with him in it though. Also has a helmet and a kind of feathery shirt.
If you ask the cats, they’d probably assert that if you’re a particularly good and responsible “cat person”, you are granted a small portion of the cat’s soul to use as your own 🙂
The impression I get is that Lanthian society was never industrialized. They created incredible technology, but didn’t have the means to mass produce it, like a skilled craftsman rather than a production line. Copying the GGs is probably impossible. They are more like works of art than mass produced items. That’s my read on it anyway.
You can mass produce works of art.
All of us are looking at a different file of this episode in the cache of our hard drives, for instance.
I understand your point. They weren’t mass produced, any more than the Antikythera computer was.
But that same device can be mass produced now.
This may be why Phix was getting cat markings while letting Tina in on the “tiny secret”. Having studied Shelly’s experiences for 80,000 years, she may be using the knowledge of the Companion to create “souls”.
Why just kill demons when you can roll them up like Play-Doh and make a whole new friend?
@Yamara… I like it. Demons as raw materials. Demons as spiritual Legos. Demons as “soul food” 🙂
@SoWhyMe – Euryale provided at least some of the timeline and back-story on the technology issues, and Bud clarified it a bit more, although much of what they said is still somewhat ambiguous.
All of what they said does seem to be consistent with your idea that the basic technology may have been pre- or non-Lanthian, and that the majority of the Lanthian population didn’t have access or use or understanding of it (except as “magic”).
Euryale referred to the Vimana cells being “Lakhenaten tech”. “Lakhenaten” seems to have referred to a group of the “long-living” Lanthians (presumably the ones immortalized by the activation of the Calendar Machine) who were setting up a separate under-sea habitat at the time of the Chimera disaster. Bud said that the V-cells were innocently developed as a power source, and then “weaponized” and used… and this latter use clearly took place quite some time after the Chimera burned the main Lanthian civilization down to bedrock.
And, finally, the V-cell which powered the artifact used to repair Jin was made outside of our timeline (and Shelly was told “not to ask”)… so the Lanthians may not have played any direct role in it.
All of this (plus the mention of some of the “gods” being interdimensional visitors) does lend support to the idea that the advanced technologies originated “elsewhere”, and used (and perhaps further developed) by some of the Lanthians or their successors. Could be either Vorlon or Shadow tech, I suppose 🙂
Forgot about Maya’s part in the whole Ghost thing. Point conceded.
But even Greek Mythology had Souls, see Orpheus’ attempt to rescue his wife’s soul from the Afterlife.
Plus the concept of Souls and reincarnation feature heavily in the Hindu Beliefs, to which the Vimana power cells are also a reference.
As for reproducing the Soul. Not sure that can be done, as the Soul wouldn’t be biochemical in nature, but rather be a form of energy, a specific bioelectric/biomagnetic pattern if you will.
And it wouldn’t just be an issue of replicating the pattern, but every electron, neutron and proton, in the exact same positions.
And according to the Heisenberg principle, that just isn’t possible. Hence why they use Technobabble: The Heisenberg compensator, to get around that in Star Trek to explain why the Transporters work.
The Golem Girls and May would just be a form of moving the soul from one container to another. Extremely risky, high likelihood of failure, but possible.
Heck, Magic might just be the only way to get around the Heisenberg principle, as Magic tends to violate the laws of physics anyway. Hence why poiting is possible, but “mechanical” teleportation isn’t.
But in all the various magical traditions from around the world, that I’ve read about, there’s absolutely nothing about copying the soul. Breaking a piece off of it, and then putting it into something else to give it life (homunculus), yes. But copying? Nope.
Orpheus’ attempt to fetch Eurydice was to get her back alive. What state she was in was contested by ancient authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus#Death_of_Eurydice
The concept of the soul in various cultures is/was to describe individuality’s place in a wider cosmology. But plenty of genre writers and technologists have treated it as a placeholder idea like phlogiston, and more primitive than geocentrism. A suitable copy of a person need not violate Heisenberg any more than twins or downloading do.
Even in the context of Wapsi alone, the issue is on the table: Shelly has had her ancient friendships, fears and loves all suddenly regrafted upon her after millennia of forgetting every bit of what she was. What are we supposed to draw from that?
Speaking of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Magic, one system did take it into account–the Deathgate series, where runes could be combined into spells, but at some point the sub-runes would interfere with one another, so that magic was inherently chaotic.
Except that the attempted retrieval by Orpheus is quite similar to the attempt by Izanagi to retrieve Izanami from the Japanese Netherworld version.
One story is more Orpheus like, the other has to do with her eating the food from the realm of the Dead, thus being tainted.
And the Kojiki also deals with souls in that regard, although not a lot is said about her for the rest in that work.
But twins don’t share the same soul, and even then if they did, one could argue that this would be a case of breaking the original soul into two, see the homunculus concept that I mentioned before. So no copying taking place.
As for downloads, the type of machinery we make use of today do not have quantum level needs/requirements, so the Heisenberg principle isn’t applicable. All those machines care for are the rough equivalents of coordinates. So, whether a data fragment is located at 0.1 or 0.2 is irrelevant, as all the machine needs is the 0 (trying to keep this as simple as possible, and with as few a numbers as possible, but I hope you get what I mean.)
Shelly wasn’t dead though, so the knowledge of her Soul is irrelevant, as it’s still her conscious mind in control. Think of the Soul more as a back up medium for knowledge, and one that one doesn’t always have access to.
So if you cannot access a partition on your HD, due to an OS issue, would this mean that the information is gone and never existed in the first place? Or is it still there, and useable again, once the OS issue is resolved?
How do womens hairdos act the way they do? ahem…
Only they’re hairdressers know for sure…
groan…..
“Padded push-up bras?” On MY TINA?!!?
BURN THE HERETIC
Christina Hendricks wears a push up bra on occasion and she hardly needs the help.
LMFAO – she just likes to see the guys go crazy… 🙂 🙂
The evidence to date suggests not. Connie, being less developed than the other females in the strip, may be a bit touchy on the subject.
She’s merely average, among a crew of overachievers?
Connie basically has Shelly’s body when she was fourteen.
As Shelly said, “Hey, you look like me!“
Which explains why she ‘went off’ on Monica:http://wapsisquare.com/comic/little-elemental/
See http://wapsisquare.com/comic/you-have-a-tight-rein/ – Connie might even be correct.
That’s more likely to be a reference by Tina towards Monica making use of industrial strength bras to keep the twins under control.
And considering the outfit she was wearing, they were being emphasized, hence the comment.
You’re right… I misread the second panel.
From yesterday – KrameGame – thanks for the fresh coffee ; GreyWolf – I’ll hold off on the neckbrace for now ; The Old Wolf – fresh from the over Madeleins sound wonderful with the fresh coffee. Many thanks to all.
:: sips on Costa Rican blend ::
They sure know how to treat you nice around here, don’t you worry. 🙂
:: nibbles on biscotti ::
Sipps tea quietly on the couch. “Indeed sir, Quite! Tollhouses cookie for you sir?”
So Connie is caporeal. Does that means she’s roomates with Shelly?
I don’t see any solid evidence that she is corporeal…pun NOT intended! *eyes the pun vault nervously*
Ah, but now they’re out of the Time Forest and back in the normal world. they have new subjects for conversation…
“Padded push up bras.” I love Connie so much.
The ‘no souls’ revelation is a bit of a shock, though. O_O
Remember, Paul said characters can be wrong.
Well, she never said there’s no such thing as a soul — only that memories don’t get recycled. Take that however you see fit.
well do you think an android has a soul? eg Data in ST:NG ..
I would think that it depended upon how one defines a ‘soul.’ If you look at Shinto, Data might have one. 神
“You’re *just* chemical processes” sounds pretty clear to me. And she says there’s *nothing there* that maintains any memories. Not that they are not recycled, but that they can’t be maintained. Now, you could argue that a soul doesn’t maintain memories. Which still leaves the “just” bit.
but if you put the emphasis on the “that MAINTAINS any memories” part of that panel, that implies that there “IS” SOMETHING that gets recycled, it’s just not something that retains a sense of “self” as known by the prior person; but it ends up as an entirely new entity.
No one seemed to notice the symmetrically flowing hair. So I do 🙂 Nice artwork, Paul (as usual, but a little compliment never hurts)
BTW, has Officer Tight Buns been officially introduced to Connie yet?
I think Connie can appear “solid”when needed. Mostly, I think, she stays tucked away inside Shellys’ mind and comes out only if Shelly summons her or Connie thinks it neccessary to ‘pop in’. So she may meet Justin – unless he already knows about her. 😉
Just as warm and cuddly as a bobcat in a burlap sack. LOL
Now THERE’s an image. 😮
Friend of mine had a bobcat in the house when she was a kid, or so she claims. Raised from a kitten, he was about as tame as any cat ever gets.
OTOH, I recall a description (used at least twice in a series) of a woman strutting, from the back, looking like two cats in a sack fighting.
Hmmm. And yet, our personal demons are clearly real, if not necessarily corporeal. After death, are the various parts recycled?
“Oh please don’t bury me,
Down in that cold, cold ground.
No, I’d rather that they cut me up
And passed me all around.
Throw my brain in a hurricane;
The blind can have my eyes.
[…]
Send my mouth way down South
And kiss my ass goodbye.”
– John Prine
Possibly, but how the bits are used might not be entirely the way we would prefer.
“I hope the demons pluck your eyes out and use them for marbles! and use your ribcage for a trampoline! and may they use your pelvic bone to scrape the slime from off their paws!!”
(the Madonna Vampyra, speaking to Jack Flanders… well, shouting actually)
Little Sister is being cranky, but that is the way of her functioning. Now Shelly is starting to contemplate a new situation she may have the Wisdom to contribute to somewhere along the way. So, who’s next?
Padded pushup bra. Well, that does explain a lot…snicker 🙂