On The Fly

In this episode - Experience . . . Have you ever considered the details your brain retains from an experience? Recently during a visit to the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles, CA., vivid experiences from the past exploded into my minds-eye. First, a bit of housekeeping. In preparing to visit the Observatory, check the website https://griffithobservatory.org before leaving home. (Chuckle) . . . What am I thinking? With wireless cellular transmission and a smartphone, your traveling partner can plan your visit on the way. Since COVID 19, the Observatory has limited hours, Friday - Sunday 10 am. - 10 pm. We arrived at the parking lot about 9:30 Saturday morning. It was foggy, early November; fall was in the air, step out of the car, close your eyes, take a deep breath, feel the damp air on your face, smell the cool familiar clouds. Hidden in the thick fog, the Hollywood sign was not visible. Surprisingly, everything looked the same - except for pay stations that require you to pa...

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...