A Royal Mess and Babylonian Quackery

"QE II".

For the cognoscenti among us, there is an irony that the euphemism for the monetarist self immolation into which we are now hurtling has the same acronym as Her Royal Highness. How very apropos. The old adage certainly applies that many roads lead to hell, it seems.

The obscurantist practice of substituting symbols for intelligible words is now supposed to substitute for thought... Just today, it has been announced that a project to map some umpteen billions of neural networks into some ballyhooed computerized googol complex. The only problem is that many of these gentlemen seem to have lost their marbles themselves. That is, they ardently believe that the human mind is some sort of unfathomably complex mechanical device.

With this much I will have to agree: to the rank reductionism of artificial intelligence/neural network methodology the truly human mind will forever remain in their lingo a black box.