turtle?” “Well, it rides on a larger turtle,” replied the lady. “And then,” queried the young student, “What about that turtle?” “Sitting on another turtle,” said the woman, who then concluded the conversation. “I know where you’re going with this young man, and you should know that it’s turtles, all the way down!”

Well, in fact we really do need to understand where the world ends and the turtles begin. Perhaps more important, we need to know where the turtles end; and, what do we find in their ending? Through the ages, as a species we have developed a more rigorous understanding of the world around us. From that understanding, we establish the causality through which we derive trust in the mechanisms around us and in the processes that we engage in. When we reach the boundary of that understanding, we enter the realm of mythical understanding. We will consider the relationship among trust, causality and process in much greater detail in Chapters 7 and 8. In this chapter, we seek to provide a rather succinct appraisal of a bit of what we understand about living organisms and their inherent processes compared and contrasted with what we understand about computers and their processes.

We are all made of star stuff and DNA is the blueprint of our construction. DNA can help us understand something of the history of our journey, albeit without telling us if we found our consciousness in primeval ooze or in celestial grace; “dust thou art to dust returneth,” just add water. Research is beginning to unlock detailed interpretations of DNA sentences and how these sentences are subsequently translated into biophysical entities. Across a very large range of species, the commonality of DNA is startling. There is considerable overlap among seemingly divergent species with respect to their physiological makeup. So, perhaps its not turtles all the way down, but it certainly appears to be turtle parts at least a good part of the way. That brings us to our more specific goal for this chapter, to understand something of the detailed physiology of the human species. It is from this physiology that humankind establishes the metaphorical basis through which the complex interactions of people, including the recurrent appearance of religion throughout history, are made part of the cognizance of the species. Perhaps then we can draw parallels between such occurrences and the development and evolution of computer architectures, thereby providing some insight into what the future evolution of that family of species holds.

Human information processing has evolved over millions of years, whereas computers have evolved over only a few decades. Comparing the human brain, which has been stable in its current form for tens of thousand of years, to the computer, which has existed in something like its current form for about half a century, is bound to be a meaningless exercise unless one is very careful with the details of the comparison. For example, it is quite common to see comparisons between computers and people expressed in terms of software and hardware. Software, it is said, is like the mind, and hardware like the brain. In actuality, this is hardly illustrative, or conducive to elaboration, because the brain and its implementation details and mechanisms are in general only qualitatively understood and their relationship to the mind is still an area of fundamental research. Perhaps more surprising is that the distinction between hardware and software in the computer domain is not clear either, or at least it is becoming less clear. For example, the number of processing elements found in a large scale computer, or in a washing machine for that matter, makes the delineation between hardware and software almost a matter of faith; perhaps an odd juxtaposition of theological bent. The parallels are there; we just need to start at the correct beginning and measure at the correct way posts.

Humans, like computers, can be considered either in isolation or in groups in terms of information architecture. A single person, interacting with the surrounding environment, processes information derived through sensori-motor channels, just as an isolated computer at home might process input

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