This was a very interesting week for me! We were concerned with the relationship between brains, minds, and computers – something that I have thought about for a long time.
I remembered our family cat when the professor was talking about the level of consciousness of animals. Many times over the years I shared with our cat, I thought I caught a glimpse of her thoughts – especially when they were not very complimentary of me. She very definitely had a “mind of her own!”
When the lecture moved on to computers, I remembered my first ventures in the early 1980s into programing in Commodore Basic on our first home computer, a Commodore 64. I thought that it seemed like there was a very fast, very tiny person inside running to get the letter or symbol that I typed and putting it up on the screen or performing the computation that I had so laboriously typed in. The quickly-blinking cursor seemed to say, “Hurry up, hurry up, tell me what you want next. You are so slow!” Fanciful I know, but somehow … ? I should add that very often my iMac seems to have a “mind of its own.” Guess I need to keep thinking …
Live & Learn! 