Singularity...or "Stuff to think about"

More from Cory's piece on Kurzweil

"Thought Experiments":

"'It is a sleight of hand in Spiritual Machines,' Kurzweil admits. 'But in The Singularity Is Near, I have an in-depth discussion about what we know about the brain and how to model it. Our tools for understanding the brain are subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns, and we’ve made more progress in reverse-engineering the human brain than most people realize.' This is a tasty Kurzweilism that observes that improvements in technology yield tools for improving technology, round and round, so that the thing that progress begets more than anything is more and yet faster progress.

'Scanning resolution of human tissue–both spatial and temporal–is doubling every year, and so is our knowledge of the workings of the brain. The brain is not one big neural net, the brain is several hundred different regions, and we can understand each region, we can model the regions with mathematics, most of which have some nexus with chaos and self-organizing systems. This has already been done for a couple dozen regions out of the several hundred."

Then I was catching up on "The Economist" and ran across book review of
"In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind" by Eric R.Kandel

Science of the mind | Proustian moments | Economist.com:

"Dr Kandel's life's work has been to try and learn how events are recorded in the brain: the biological basis of “never forget”. Half-autobiography, half a popular account of advances in neuroscience, “In Search of Memory”, his new book, tells the story of his research and how it led to the Nobel prize for medicine in 2000."

Coincidence is weird.
Sensitized to some of this, in part, by having my first "real" experience with anesthesia yesterday (for incarcerated hernia work).

Stuff to think about ...