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Encoding

On my daily rounds of favorite places, I visit Arts & Letters Daily, where today I found a link to this American Scientist article touching upon what it is to be human. The author's main topic is how having a sense of purpose is integral to humanity and one of the prime movers in the development of humans, which is not really a new idea, but is nicely stated here. The part that grabbed me was the statement of a problem of identity, that our constituent parts (atoms, cells, etc.) turn over periodically, but we still remain who we are. We are information encoded in a self-renewing biological storage medium, which is interesting to think about even if you're not into logic design.

The idea of how an entity's parts can all be changed, but the entity remain the same is paralleled in some of the practices of Shinto. I've been reading A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (here's a review, the link to which I'm including because it was written by the father of a friend from when I lived in California and how's that for a small world?) and today I hit the bit where he mentions the tradition, not so widely practiced now, of periodically dismantling and reconstructing shrines. This "continues most noticeably at Ise Grand Shrine, where every twenty years the main shrine buildings are entirely rebuilt on an adjoining site. This tradition of tearing down and rebuilding has actually been instrumental in ensuring a continuity of form and ancient construction techniques that would otherwise have been lost."

Interesting how patterns repeat. And that I should find both these texts on the same day.