Edit: As scientists, I think the best we can do is recognize that we're not input/output machines.

Are we not, though? Or are the inputs and outputs so multitudinously abundant that it's impossible to measure? This reminds me of a Dave Foster Wallace quote.

I know that you know as well as I do how fast

thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the

middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough

material can rush through your head just in the little silences when

people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation

that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting

just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words.

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions

and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so

fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from

or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they

have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-anotherword

English we all communicate with each other with that it could

easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one splitsecond’s

flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem

to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native

country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to

other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking,

when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and

they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too

fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely

sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.