Physics students have probably heard their teachers refer to matter as "frozen energy", i.e. matter is really energy that has been "compacted" to take solid form, somewhat like rain drops are condensed water vapor. It was one of Einstein's great insights that matter and energy are interconvertible, a relationship he famously expressed in the equation E=mc2.
The mass/energy relationship came to mind the other day as I was reading a paper in which the author somewhat in passing suggested that our bodies may in fact be congealed soul. This is, to me at least, an interesting thought because my view of the soul is that it's not a substance of any kind but is rather information.
I think that our soul is our essence. It's the sum of every true proposition about us. It's like a data file that contains an exhaustive description of our personal history, our personality, our likes and dislikes, our physical appearance at every moment of our lives, and so on. I envision this information existing eternally in the mind of God. Perhaps upon death this information is "downloaded" in such a way that it forms a new body of some sort in some other reality. Somewhat like the teleportation device in Star Trek reassembled atoms to reform the teleported crew of the Enterprise, perhaps bodies can be formed, at least in part, from the information comprising our soul.
Taking this thought a step further, maybe everything, the whole world, is really a manifestation of information. Perhaps God's mind is like a vast supercomputer with near infinite data storage capability. All the information about the world exists in His mind and in some corner of that Divine intellect there's a module that acts something like a computer monitor. We might imagine God, at the moment of creation, performing a mental keystroke and the data describing the world expressing itself in images on the monitor, just as the images you're viewing right now are really manifestations of the information stored on your hard drive and on the server which hosts Viewpoint. The images on the monitor in God's mind include us. Our physical bodies are, in this view, actually "congealed" information.
In any event, I think one of the manifold blessings of modern technology is that it affords us new metaphors and rich resources to help us understand better than our ancestors ever could the nature of God and the world He has created.
RLC
