Common wisdom might say, the truth is the the truth, facts are facts, and storytelling is storytelling. Yet, when we look again, we see something that we didn’t before, glimmers of new ideas spring from stone, fiction shifts to fact and facts shift to fiction. So much of who we are and how we see the world is on how we look at things. Yet, curiosity, empathy, ambition and countless other emotions drive us through the day, changing the perspective with which we view the world.
The Newest Musings
Fantasy? Maybe Not for Long
The New York Times yesterday morning (8/24/2023), like most days, has news of politics and war. Depressing to say the least. But that’s not what caught my eye. A front-page report was about new technology in which a young woman had a stroke 10 years ago that left her with multiple disabilities, including the inability to speak. She has been fed intravenously for a decade. Recently, she received electrode implants in her brain, and these were connected to a computer. And here’s the amazing part: the computer interpreted the brain waves into what she was trying to say, and then an avatar showed her on a screen resembling how she looked before the stroke and speaking with her recognizable tone of voice! She could communicate by speaking via artificial intelligence, which interprets her brain activity trying to say something. She was restored in a fashion. The article was careful to note that the interpretations were of sounds and muscle movements, not brain waves and thoughts alone. Fascinating. I immediately thought of my collection of essays, Truth and Fantasy, in which I fantasize about downloading information into the human brain as if the brain was analogous to [...]
