And so, once again, I’ve completed my Holy Thursday tradition of walking to the Santuario de Chimayo. It takes me about seven hours to walk the 22 or so miles from my starting point to arrive at the mystical little church. It’s never fun nor is it easy, but it’s something I have to do. Good Friday is my own personal new year’s day and regardless of what life is throwing at me, the pain of the pilgrimage is both cleansing and informing to my soul.
Part of the experience of walking the difficult path to what could be considered a tourist site is working on Good Friday, in spite of the throbbing in my legs and the blisters that will surely bust by the end of the day. There’s something very sterile about working, seeing how I spend much of my time designing software applications. There’s no relationship between the cold and calculated computer world and a pilgrimage through which the human spirit must overcome the body. I think that separation is what has long frustrated me: Although I write and teach about ways and means to find Recovery from Addiction, I have been a professional software guy since I was able to work legally.
Over the long years I’ve spent within the software development world, I’ve often felt split within myself. My goal was always to become an author, yet computer work is what has always paid to the bills. It’s always been this interplay between Caesar and God. Computer work is seemingly unhuman and I can get pain for it (rendering unto Caesar), while being a writer is the most human thing I could do (rendering unto God). Now, some might argue that developing software and writing are both activities that involve manipulating symbols and perhaps those arguments are correct. However, for me, writing is an exploration of the soul and developing software, to me, is pretty much soul-less.
The computer doesn’t have a soul. Regardless of the mass paranoia about computers and robots becoming self-aware, the computer could never understand the physical pain associated with an activity that deepens my relationship with my own soul. Now amount of “nested if” statements could deliver an understanding of the meaning of the pain. No amount of atomized functional requirements could ever deliver a connection to ancestors whom history has forgotten.
My bottom line is that, while even if a computer system became self-aware and could exist on its own accord, it would never feel pain and process that pain in such a way that connects it to any computer that came before it. I mean, it’s not like a Surface could ever pay respects to a Commodore 64. Yet, I am connected to all of those who have proceeded me in death with every painful step I take along my pilgrimage. So, I will continue to explore the soul and teach as much as I can about why it’s something worth protecting. And I will continue to develop soul-less software because I can. But I will never believe that Artificial Intelligence could compete with, or understand, our human soul.
