B. U. G. S.

One dream we have long had was the ability to control things directly from the brain.

If you could do that, a man who is totally unable to move could surf the Internet.

A Practical Man would say it can never be done. We don’t know where exactly to put the elctrode into the brain. In fact I like to ask Practical Scientists about that. They explain to me how complex the brain is and why this cannot be done in the foreseable future.

What amazes me is that not one of the Practical Latest Science people I have talked to know knew that it has already been done.

As I say, the Practical Man and the social scientists lack one gift I have: seeing things that are so obvious we miss them. Seeing the obvious is not The Latest News. Seeing the obvious is not publishable.

Seeing the obvious doesn’t sound Really Sophisticated.

So the Practical Man thinks he is the exact opposite of the social scientist, some pie-in-the-sky egghead, but they are exactly alike.

Which is like today’s conservative, who thinks exactly like a liberal does and believes he is the opposite of a liberal.

But all of them, liberals, conservatives, social scientists and practical men have less intelligence than an insect. They are the Everready men. They just keep going and going and going…

You see, if an Everready Man runs into a chair leg, he will just keep going and going and going and staying in the same spot.

An insect will go around.

Neither the liberal nor the conservative nor the social scientist nor the Practical Man ever look around.

Their Latest Thing is the chair leg. Almost all academic journals consist almost entirely of detailed discussions of chair legs.

This is “the academic literature” one is supposed to keep abreast of.

They just keep going and going and going…

The Practical Man said that a completely immobile, unspeaking person who was aware could not surf the internet because The Latest News from Science does not include the specifications as to where the electrode would be placed. That was the chair leg.

What the people who accomplished this did was to step back and notice that the person putting in the electrode was not the only person involved. The man’s brain is also a living organism. It has been getting around chair legs for a billion years.

So they let the man’s brain grow around the electrode.

And the Practical Man?

Shoulder to shoulder with liberals and conservatives and social scientists, the Practical Man just keeps going and going and going …

And he gets paid for it.

Billions of dollars will be spent this year publishing articles about how social science SHOULD work. Billions more will be spent on articles by Practical men showing how things can’t work.

The people who made it possible for a vegetating man to surf the internet probably didn’t have their grant renewed.