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She had discovered long ago that you could use a computer without understanding how it worked. Just as you could use an automobile, a vacuum cleaner—or your own brain.
The brain could not feel pain; it lacked pain sensors. It was one of the freaks of evolution that the organ which sensed pain throughout the body could feel nothing itself.
Goedel’s Theorem: that no system could explain itself, and no machine could understand its own workings.
His reaction was so stereotyped—the pathologist drawn to violence and death—that she found herself thinking of the other stereotypes in medicine: the sadistic surgeons and the childish pediatricians and the woman-hating gynecologists. And the crazy psychiatrists.
That cortex, which could feel love, and worry about ethical conduct, and write poetry, had to make an uneasy peace with the crocodile brain at its core.
An uneasy alliance indeed.
“The Watershed. Computer scientists all over the world knew it was coming, and they watched for it. It happened in July of 1969. The information-handling capacity of all the computers in the world exceeded the information-handling capacity of all the human brains in the world. Computers could receive and store more information than the 3.5 billion human brains in the world.”
Wonder how much data would modern computers possess. Tonight I read that the company which did the digitisation of The X Files had to deal with 18 TB of data per episode (and they scanned the 35 mm film in just 1080p resolution). That was back in 2015 so it’s mind boggling what even more data intensive institutions (e.g., NASA) would be handling today.
Male pubic hair as you know is more circular, less elliptical in cross section than female hair.”
Okay, I’m not going to bother with the references here.
He remembered a funny little Englishman who had lectured at the hospital and told the surgeons that soon operations would be done with the surgeon on another continent—he would work using robot hands, the signals being transmitted via satellite. The idea had seemed crazy, but his surgical colleagues had squirmed at the thought.
A distinct possibility now.
He remembered, as a kind of final proof of the idiocy of it all, that an astronomer had once said that if Martians looked at Los Angeles, they would probably conclude that the automobile was the dominant life form of the area. And, in a sense, they would be right.
I've heard this from somewhere else too.
The truth was that everybody’s mind was controlled, and everybody was glad for it. The most powerful mind controllers in the world were parents, and they did the most damage. Theorists usually forgot that nobody was born prejudiced, neurotic, or hung-up; those traits required a helping hand.
Never thought about parents this way but Crichton is right here.
“A match may start a fire, but once the fire is burning, putting out the match won’t stop it. The problem is no longer the match. It’s the fire.”
Doesn't mean that the match is not a big problem here.
And then she began to realize that there were limits to her own energy, skills, and knowledge. Mrs. Crail was not improving; her suicidal attempts became more crafty; eventually she succeeded in killing herself. But by that time, Ross had—fortunately—detached herself from the patient.
I’ve always thought that it’s important that shrinks detach from their patients — to an extent, of course.
