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02/08 — 2022
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<h1>
A Reference Counted Afterlife
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<p>I took interest in the Egyptian rendition of the afterlife
recently.</p>
<h3 id="parts-of-the-soul">Parts of the Soul</h3>
<p>Ancient Egyptians believed that the soul comprised of several
components:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>ren</em></li>
<li><em>ka</em></li>
<li><em>ib</em></li>
<li><em>ba</em></li>
<li><em>sheut</em></li>
</ul>
<p>Egyptians emphasized on preserving the different parts of the soul.
Mummification for example, served to preserve the physical part of the
soul. The other components have their respective preservation
strategies.</p>
<p>Of all of these bits, I find <em>ren</em>, which simply means
<em>name</em>, to be the most interesting. <em>Ba</em>, the human-headed
chicken that represents <em>personality</em>, is a close favourite.</p>
<p><em>Ren</em> is the name given to a person at birth. Egyptians
believed that this portion of the soul would continue to live on for as
long as it was spoken. If you were someone worthy of continued
existence, your name would be inscribed all over the place. If you were
the type to snatch away bread from children, your name would be
condemned from memory, forgotten.</p>
<h3 id="garbage-collection">Garbage-collection</h3>
<p>The concept of <em>ren</em> seems to be perfectly analogous to
reference counted garbage-collection.</p>
<ul>
<li>A name (<em>ren</em>) is assigned to an object (person) on
initialization (at birth)</li>
<li>Names are used to refer to objects</li>
<li>Objects go out of existence when there are no more references to
them</li>
</ul>
<p>The concept of <em>ren</em> seems to model human-memory. The
similarity with garbage-collection is now easily explained, because
garbage-collection models a program’s memory.</p>
<p>Perhaps some cheeky Egyptian has attained immortality by creating a
<em>ren</em>-cycle.</p>
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Hi.
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<p>I'm Akshay, programmer and pixel-artist.</p>
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