Re: Causing Death by Accident

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:14:31 -0000, "Peter McLelland"
<peter.mclelland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>If such lapses were common and acceptable we would be killing thousands more
>on the roads.

Yes, we would. But the reason they are not so common is not
necessarily anything to do with a person's ability or degree of care
etc.

To imagine the brain as a self-programming computer is imprecise, but
there are sufficient similarities in the way the two devices operate
to make it possible to use as an analogy.

A program in a computer may respond correctly to everything you throw
at it for years. And then comes an occasion when a particular set of
data exposes a hitherto unknown bug in the program, and you get an
error condition.

When a program in a computer "crashes", you often find that the
computer "freezes" and no longer responds to inputs or provides any
change to its outputs. The brain's reaction upon encountering a "bug"
in one of its programs is very similar. The brain however has a
built-in resident programmer, which although it normally only carries
out its programming when we are offline (asleep), is also capable of
writing temporary ad-hoc programs in real time and patching existing
programs on the fly. So instead of requiring a re-boot (although that
can also happen in a very extreme circumstance), the faulty program
contacts the programmer, which analyses the bug and provides a patch.
It still has to take us offline for a short while whilst it formulates
and applies the patch. The programmer can only work on one patch at a
time, and so if the circumstances are such that several programs throw
up an "exception error" at the same time, the patches can take several
tens of seconds to complete, and in the meantime the computer is
"frozen".

--
Cynic

.

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