When I had focal dystonia diagnosed, my neurologist suggested I participate in a functional MRI (FMRI) study. I thought it fascinating but couldn't spend the time to go to New York for a week.

What does this say of our current paradigm? That we're all reducible to neurons firing? The thought in the 70's at the dawn of the computer era was that the human brain was analagous to a computer chip, and that eventually, a computer would be able to mimic the human brain with such accuracy that a human would never be able to tell the difference. The Turing challenge was formed, where each year, hundreds of hopeful geeks would try to fool a human. Using the assumption that the brain was just a vast reservoir of knowledge, various projects such as Doug Lenat's LISP project and the Japanese fifth generation project (of which I was involved in a small manner) sought to unlock the secrets of the brain via the use of logic software. The failure of these projects and the work of John Searle, who came up with the ingenious and powerful Chinese room argument turned the tide. People actually stopped thinking of the brain as hardware and started to view it as something special, even human!

Today we have neuroscience. The evidence seems convincing, but have we once again come full circle, only this time, with more detail?

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman