Alex Alexander's Blog - Posts Tagged "alex-alexander"

Divergence, this aspect of the story goes back to one of my areas of specialty. In the real world, I'm a special type of counselor, not the touchy feely kind. I'm an SME in neuro-psyc. One day I'm teaching a class and started talking about how memories and such can deteriorate with organic dysfunction or damage, especially long term drug use due to the nature of the participants. Someone asked a question along the lines of, if we can destroy knowledge with physical force, why can't we add it the same way.

So with this class, most of which weren't even high school graduates, we began to "create" a fake brain. We talked about what we would add in the way of knowledge and experience. A fun little exercise which got the class excited about science as well as looking at their own priorities in life.

The scientist in me then said, if wee create 2 identical brains at the molecular level, they should theoretically work, well identically. How would you test this. Every single brain would need to be exposed to identical stimuli.

The non-scientist side said what if there is something intangible to the human psyche, i.e. a soul (assuming personality is a quantifiable effect of neural structure). What would be the scientific and philosophical consequence of such a discovery. If there is an intangible piece, should there only be one. If there's more than one, what would it mean?

That actually comes up in the second book as the idea and ramifications are explored more in depth. Flight is really just an introduction to the universe.