Sometimes you have these thoughts…

So, about that whole mind-body divide thing.

What if we go with the assumption that it’s a kind of hardware/software situation: that the chemistry and the organics are a machine that manipulates a something else–a pattern of energy, an emergent system. The changes in this pattern result in what we perceive as consciousness. Hell, maybe the pattern can even exert some kind of influence on the hardware–something parallel to how software can raise the temperature of the CPU, etc.

(I’m not seriously positing this as a philosophical argument or anything–I’m pretty much in the soft machine camp–just run with it.)

So we’ve got this non-physical thing in a tightly coupled relationship with the body. So what happens to it when the body stops working–what happens to the pattern/energy/emergent system when the inputs from the body stop?

One obvious answer would be that the thing also ends. This makes sense if it’s something sustained by the body.

Another would be that it slowly fades without new input. This makes sense if accepts input energy from the body, but uses some to sustain itself.

But the thing I was thinking about, and if I were a writer I would totally work this into a story, is that it’s also entirely possible that all the process keeps going, but without input from the body it no longer changes state. That the pattern just stays in the state it was in at the time of the last input forever. This would make sense if altering the pattern took energy, but maintaining state doesn’t.

So the mind of anyone who dies in pain… well, it would just stay in that instant of pain, forever. So that’s the punch line to the dark story.

This would, of course, lead to a black market economy among the people on the inside, in arranging your own death–to ensure that you either die completely by surprise, or maybe even at a moment of complete pleasure or joy.

That’s the punchline to black comedy story–the joy hitman who follows people planning to assassinate them at the moment of their most complete happiness. Hired, of course, by their targets.