July 20, 2006: Ray Kurzweil and Charmaine Brooks

The first day of humanities brought a number of surprises. Being able to listen in on a presentation by Ray Kurzweil was a great opportunity. His talk was interesting to say the least. His discussion about the exponential growth of technology and the fact that the paradigm shift rate doubles every decade produced mixed emotions in me. It's exciting to talk about all the amazing advancements of technology and how it affects our lives, but it certainly also brought up a bunch of concerns for me as well. The mention of cell phones being to translate into other languages in real time was very intriguing and sounded very practical. But, when Ray started to talk about the human body and the brain and how some day we will be able to upload information into the brain and perhaps even replace ourselves with something more complex, he lost me. This reasoning was great, except it assumes that there is nothing else, but the body. There is no soul and no God. I will not ramble on about why I would disagree with Ray, but, I will say that I believe he is a brilliant man who knows a lot and his research is very neat, but lacking in it's acceptance of other possibilities.
It was also a privelege to have Charmaine with us to present. I did find it interesting to discuss the direction of the Province and to understand more how it works, as some day I would love to be able to start a school out in the country for behavioural youth. All in all, a good first day.