Tonight two boys from Pat’s choir join us for dinner.  Both of them are university students.   To my surprise I got a very intellectual conversation from one of the guy.  Rarely I can find anyone who know enough theology, religion or philosophy knowledge to engage in a deep conversation.  He is a psychology major, so his point of view is quite different from my engineers point of view.  Our chat shed me new lights on how to see many things.

I finally have a clear understanding of the difference between innocent and ignorance.  Many people use these two words interchangeably, but they have different meaning.  Using book as an analogy.  Being innocent means you don’t know there exists such a book.  Being ignorance is you know the title of a book, but knows nothing about the content.

I learn the minimum requirement for Catholic mass is 2 people, the priest plus an audience.  The priest by myself cannot have a mass in law’s definition.  Then I pose the question what about a priest with a split personality, does it count as one person or 2 people.

We talked about what-if scenario, what if African conquer Europe in early centuries.  This leads to whether history has determine course of action or history is accidental.  I am defending our life will be pretty much the same using Hegel and he disagree.  Well, the fact that he knows the name of Hegel is quite impressive.

In addition, he explain some psychology to me.  One school of thoughts in psychology thinks how the human mind works are just reinforcements.  However main stream psychology reject this idea because the mind clearly able to change states, say from happy to sad, without any sensory inputs.  I try to defend the reinforcement theory using analogy from CPU design.  In semiconductor, alpha particulars can toggle the state of the electrons which causing bit error in the memory.  How about alpha particulars is the reason for human mind changing states without any reason.  The alpha particular excite an electron in a neuron, which cause a chain reaction eventually turn you from happy to sad.

I really enjoy tonight’s conversation.  However, Pat and the other boy said this involve too much thinking, and they got a headache just from listening to our talks.