On The Fly

IBM's Watson For a moment, imagine your mind as a blank slate, an amazing Supercomputer waiting to be programmed. Is it possible to re-write the firmware that is your brains operating system? Is your firmware open source code or a closed system? The social and psychological sciences tend to take the view that Human Beings are 'formed' socially and psychologically by nature as well as by nurture and that there are inherited traits that society can build on and to some extent modify. Early in the seventeenth century, it was statesman-philosopher Francis Bacon who, first strongly established the claims of Empiricism - the reliance on the experience of the senses - over those speculation or deduction in the pursuit of knowledge. John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding restated the importance of the experience of the senses over speculation and sets out the case that the human mind at birth is a complete, but receptive, blank slate (tabula r...