Computer architecture represents the latest technology supporting some trends that go back a long, long way. Whatever one might think of Jaynes' version of human history, he does get us thinking about the emergence of language. Obviously, there was a time when it was simpler and, if we don't blow ourselves up, it gets more rich and complex as we go along. I have a whole blog about " programming " the mind. Language plays a key part. Imagine language in software terms. There are about 180,000 words in the English language. On the "back of a napkin", allowing for 10 bytes (characters) per word, that's 1.8 megabytes. If we imagine the Oxford English Dictionary to be equivalent to the "database software", it's 22,000 pages. allowing 1000 characters per page, that's 22 megabytes. In a very rough way, we could say that the "software" of the English Language is implemented in less than 50 megabytes - far less in any particular brain

According to Wilczek , symmetry is "Change without change" - the most powerful single principle underlying the laws of both aesthetics and physics. In Wilczek's books, he provides simple examples and a few mind bending ones (such as the symmetry involved in the strong nuclear force - the rules governing quarks). For some reason, he neglects the most common example of symmetry that is always quite literally right in our face. This is the ability of our perceptual system to recognize "objects" in the world - "things" that seem to be the same no matter how they are oriented, how far away they are, or how they are illuminated. Sometimes we only need to hear or smell the "thing" to "see" it in our minds. Anyone who has attempted to "teach" a computer to do anything like this knows how incredible this ability is. And it's totally natural, totally automatic. What's more all "higher" animals (maybe all living th