Rachlin (2012) makes two general assertions: (a) "To be human is to behave as humans behave, and to function in society as humans function," and (b) "essential human attributes such as consciousness, the ability to love, to feel pain, to sense, to perceive, and to imagine may all be possessed by a computer'. Although Rachlin's article is an…

Compares machine code with assembler languages, explains the difference between low and high level computer languages, and traces the historical development and special features of the general purpose languages--BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, ALGOL, Pascal, APL, and PL/1--and special purpose languages--C, FORTH, Modula 2, Smalltalk, PILOT, and…

This essay considers whether the brain can accelerate the speed with which it absorbs or dispenses information in ways similar to those of a computer, and, if so, whether any of these speed-up approaches increase the speed of the processing of the information in the brain. It is suggested that there are tasks for which speed is important in both…