Although the animation wasn't as pretty as X (mentioned in a previous post), it certainly had a lot more substance plot-wise. It got me thinking on the concept of the "soul" but all I've come up with are questions. What is the soul (or "ghost" as the movie referred to)? Is it something metaphysical, beyond our bodies? Or is it connected to our brains and their firing synapses (as hypothesized by one of my former neurobiology profs and Francis Crick)? Will we still be who we are if we had different memories? Or is who we are defined by our actions?
I don't have any answers. I don't think anyone now has an answer to the question of the "soul" that everyone (let alone myself) would accept. It's too complex for our current crude tools to examine. Some might argue that we shouldn't try to find out what the soul is--that it should be left to the unknown. But wasn't that what some people in the middle ages said about not exploring the unknown because you would fall off the edge of the world?
Eye-candy and documents don't have to be mutually exclusive: The Guido Mazzoni Collection. It's a gallery of scans of pamphlets and very old books from Duke. These type of sites are fascinating--I was glad I stumbled onto this one because Cornell's online archive had disappeared a while back. Rare Book & Special Collections Reading Room. This is from the Library of Congress (which one day, I hope to visit and just spend the whole day there oogling all the books). There's some very beautiful scans on site, especially check out William Blake's The Book of Urizen. The Barren Lands. It's a digital collection from the University of Toronto of J.B. Tyrrell's Expeditions for the Geological Survey of Canada. It's impressive--both extensive and exhaustive.
