On Computing - The Philosophical Gap Between Computer and Medical Science

On Computing is an entry in the On ——ing series — a sequence of lyric-philosophical essays. Moving from a childhood memory of a first home computer and an Encarta entry on the Apollo 11 landing, the essay traces the processor's lineage from Babbage's imagined gears through the 1947 transistor and the integrated circuit to the first microprocessor, and sets the architecture of the machine — hard drive, RAM, processor — beside the architecture of the brain — cortex, prefrontal cortex, thalamus, and the Cartesian pineal. It argues that the computer has only ever run the logic; the equations that reached the moon were a product of the human mind. Reading Armstrong's "one small step" as a meditation on the seam between man and mankind, and closing on the Boolean grammar of IF / AND / OR / THEN, the piece holds to the series' load-bearing distinction between philosophical framework and empirical claim, and to the call to keep our creations under control.