behalf of many different people and on many different problems simultaneously. We tend to characterize the ability to work on behalf of many different people as a multi-user capability of a computer and we tend to characterize the ability to work on many different problems as a multi-tasking capability of a computer. A central facility of operating systems is to provide a coarse-grained establishment of context along these two axes, for multiple users and for multiple problems. Contrasting this back to the brain, multi-tasking seems a rather standard capability of a normal brain. A multi-user facility within the brain is slightly more abstractly plausible if we consider that we tend to live our lives within more than one social construct and we may present a different persona in each. We might be mothers or fathers within a family. We might be workers within a company. We might be part of the congregation of a church. Each of these invites a different establishment of context within the mind. How often have we seen someone in the wrong context and been unable to apply a name to the face? Of course, in the most literal interpretation of multi-user we might recognize the relatively unusual situation in which the mind gives rise to a multiple personality disorder.

Within most current computer architectures, operating system software is very tightly bound to the hardware platforms on which it resides. Perhaps it best finds its human analogue in the reflexive and cognitive features of the more primitive components of the central and autonomic nervous systems. Operating system software strives to provide a consistent interface to applications software that presents a uniform view of the computer sensori-motor system of the platform on which it is running. Application software, on the other hand, tends towards presenting a consistent appearance across the full range of the human sensori-motor system, independent of the operating system on which it is run at any particular time. The end result is that computer systems encompassing both operating system and application software sit astride the connection between the human sensori-motor system and technology based extensions to that system.

We noted in Chapter 4 that the sensori-motor environment of a generic computer was essentially an ordered set of memory locations, each filled with a set of switches that could be used to indicate the binary quantities, zero and one. Beyond just the vestigial components of such a generic computer, over time a large variety of peripheral devices has been incorporated into computer architectures. This has been done largely for conveying the sensori-motor environment of humans into or out of that of the computer. Hence, we see writing devices through which a computer can print characters, plot figures and graphs and project images. On the input side, we have keyboards, microphones and digital scanners. All of these elements are represented internally within the computer system as an ordered collection of words filled with bits. Through the establishment of context within the computer system, it is possible to relate through translation and conversion by the peripheral devices this collection of binary information into the forms that can be assimilated by the human sensori-motor system. In a like fashion, the physical environment to which the human senses can respond can also be conveyed into the computer system. Audio transducers in the form of microphones can transform the acoustic vibrations constituting sound into continuously varying levels of electrical currents and voltages. By sampling the levels of current or voltage at precise time intervals, the electrical signal can be represented as a continuous string of binary values. Thus, sound can be brought into a contextual domain within a computer such that it can be manipulated by stored programs that effect state changes of the computer’s central processing unit.

Other peripheral devices connected to computers are able to store the sensori-motor experiences of the computer for subsequent examination and processing. A variety of memory types ranging from solid-state representations to magnetic domains on physically rotating media give the

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)