Our Minds: "Such Manifold Variety"

Every so often I run across a thought that resonates not only because I happen to believe it but because it is expressed with such clarity and grace. I found the one below while reading an extended review of futurist, Ray Kurzweil’s new book, “The Singularity is Near,” in which he predicts the imminent fusion of computer technology with the human brain through a combination of powerful computing power, reverse brain engineering, and the integration of chips and neural networks. In cautioning the reader to be wary of many of Kurzweil’s rather cavalier predictions, he quotes the pioneering neurophysiologist, Charles Sherrington (1857-1952), who wrote in 1940:
“The mind is a something with such manifold variety, such fleeting changes, such countless nuances, such wealth of combinations, such heights and depths of mood, such sweeps of passion, such vistas of imagination, that the bald submission of some electrical potentials recognizable in nerve-centers as correlative to all these may seem to the special student of mind almost derisory. It is, further, more than mere lack of corresponding complexity which frustrates the comparison.”
Amazing that so many advances on so many fronts, do not really change the truth of Sherrington’s statement made 65 years ago.