As you may suspect from these wordy presentations, I also like to talk. Until recently if someone asked me a question, thinking that they wanted to know something,  I would expound.  That was when teaching medical students and residents but also on other occasions.  When I found people easily distracted or they would stop listening…

Computer scientists seek to create an artificial brain every bit as powerful as the human brain, maybe even more powerful, without the drawbacks of the human body, a disembodied brain. But the brain is quintessentially biological, an organ among organs. It is intimately and immanently connected with bodily function. Demise of the body immediately leads…

In previous posts I remarked that computers are taking over cognitive functions and how in many ways they have surpassed human abilities, especially with rapid calculations and data storage.  Computers have beaten human champions in such games as chess and Jeopardy. Given computers’ superior abilities in certain cognitive spheres,  it is fair to ask whether…

Recently, I asked college graduates to estimate the age of the earth. They had no idea. One initially gave an answer of thousands of years and wondered if humans had been on earth all that time. I am not talking about people who take the Bible literally. Although they may function well in their daily…

You must know where I am headed after discussions of death and Dante and Egyptian mummies that my next topic has to be the clash of cultures between Egypt and the Children of Israel especially at this time of year. The story of Passover is billed as a deliverance of the Children of Israel from…

In the previous section on the Dantean Cosmos we saw that in considering the Afterlife, it was necessary for Dante to examine the Whole World as he knew it. This gave him widest berth possible in his masterwork, The Divine Comedy. When I consider all of the ramifications, I find it impossible to fully comprehend…

It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of him. -Francis Bacon as quoted by Martin Gardner in The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener The consignment of souls to eternal torment and damnation not only of what may be viewed as evil persons, but unbelievers,…

Some of my previous posts had featured the limits of human cognition. It seems to me that every thinking machine has finite capacity. Our brains of limited size. Working memory utilizes a finite number or engrams, units of memory, which can only be organized and related in a finite number of ways. A larger brain…

My previous essay on Carbon and Silicon, I hoped, turned round the oft-asked question about whether computers are like brains. I worried more about human cyborgs and people forced to act like computers and robots. Are human (and animal) brains really just complex computers? Ifso then simply as a matter of time, computers and robots…

Below is sane totally practical fallout of my readings. I treat a lot of stroke patients and my other medical colleagues turn the latest technologies on consumers of the American, more properly, the industrial diet in hopes of saving them.  The industrial diet contains huge amounts of simple carbohydrates (sugars) such as is contained in…