If you must fill a gap…

This is in reply to Jack’s recent post…

First, the technical part. I think it’s obvious that our brain are lossy storage.

I mean, who remembers and can photographically recall every second of when they were taking out the trash, or driving to work, etc? What did you eat for lunch last tuesday? Hypnosis may reveal things which we may have forgotten, but the lines of questioning could easily be manipulated to lead the subject, and is most likely vague – you can probably say you had carrots, but not that you had 47 sliced pieces of carrot, and not one more.

Also, as for the comparison between a camera sense element and your eye – the actual focused part of your eye is very small in comparison to your entire field of vision. There are quite a few studies out there that prove that reading speed is increased by putting text in a narrow vertical column, so your eye just has to move straight down the page, instead of side to side and down with a wider column. Thus, why newspapers created narrow columns in their stories, and how Outlook 2003 defaults to having the preview pane as a column to the right of instead of below the message list.

Thus, I think the 47GB figure is off by at least a few orders of magnitude.

For the idiot-savant example, when they say he “knew a book”, was he able to generate it verbatim from memory? I highly doubt that.

But back to the whole spirituality issue. One of the aspects of God that is made so clear to me as I mature is that His presence is plausibly deniable, but also self evident. Faith is defined by the fact that we don’t and can’t have proof that is undeniable when presented to a third party. He want’s our faith to be freely given, and by giving too much evidence of Himself, is that truly what He gets? On some level God designed his relationship with us to depend on these facts.

Looking for this kind of proof of God is a dead end. God gave us minds, and we use those to discover his world – if indeed our heads can hold more than they are physically capable of storing, I don’t think that suggesting that “God is the answer to that gap” is a valid solution, as it then sets up a nice way for people to “disprove God”, when in fact both parties would be utterly inaccurate in their statements.