I saw this line in your nerd profile, "I am endlessly arrested at the idea that I am a piece of machinery equiped with the ability to communicate (at best fuzzily) with other moving, speaking machines."

I assume that means to some degree that you must think our cognitive process is very function oriented … a simple process made complicated only by the sheer number of associated functions and the variable weights assigned to their importance.

Ultimately, I am disturbed by the idea because it really does take away an essence of poetry from being human, or even animal. There’s not much exciting or whimsical in the notion that we are just complex, variable state machines.

What I really wonder is whether there is a measurable "clock speed" to the human brain that could be used deterministically with the conscious vs. subconscious decision making theory. But I especially wonder if such a measurable indicator of brain speed would correlate to people of subjective intelligence and be a factor in determining whether "slow kids" are simply slow geniuses or actually cognitively retarded.