I'm a psychologist and work for a large clinic (93 clinicians, 25 support staff, five clinic locations and a lot of "out in the field" services). My specialty is nursing home services; there are about 15 of us in the nursing home division and we work in about 150 nursing homes. Often a client is referred to me and it turns out they were seen by a colleague in another nursing home. If we had an EMR that I could query remotely, I could find that out and streamline the delivery of services and provide better care. This would be the "added power" part of the discussion and the rosy picture that EMRs present

The flip side is that computer security is not reliable. Any system connected to the outside world can be hacked remotely one way or another. We have thousands of clients with a lot of sensitive data sitting in our files, currently in locked cabinets behind two locked doors with limited access to maximize security as much as we can. The risk of data exposure is minimal and happens as a result of sloppiness by practitioners (e.g. leaving a file sitting on a desk unwatched). With an EMR, however, the risk of exposure is potentially much higher (e.g., downloading *all* the files instead of swiping or reading just one).

We have made no provisions for using an EMR in our clinic. We have a computerized billing system which contains insurance information and diagnostic codes- only the information required to send out a bill- but none of our clinical records are in an EMR. AFAIK we are not required to do so.

"After years of boasting about the Mac's near invincibility..." I've been a Mac user for over 22 years. While I have heard many of my fellow Mac users boast about the lack of viruses and other malware for Macs- mainly out of ignorance or just to taunt Windows users- there have been Mac viruses in the past (e.g., nVIR) and there will be Mac viruses in the future. I've always been concerned that complacency regarding Mac malware would eventually result in heinousness once some bad actor sunk their teeth into it.

The result of these years of complacency is that there are no good Mac antivirus applications. There are some passable ones and there are some awful ones. One of the better ones is ClamXAV but it is only as good as its virus definitions.

morgan greywolf replied before me but I don't know where this will be placed in the thread, so I wanted to mention that.

One of the tenets of Buddhism is that things are "empty" meaning that they lack a separate self. Things are made up of non-self elements, to paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh- for example, a tree is made up of soil, rain, sun, carbon dioxide, etc. The tree exists as a confluence of conditions; change one of those conditions and there would be no tree or at least a different tree. If you burn the tree, what happens? The things the tree is made up of are released and eventually become part of something else. This is rebirth (by the way, the Buddhist term is "rebirth" rather than "reincarnation"); I think if it as being closer to recycling than to the transmission of a soul from one body to another.

It is fundamental to human experience, most of the time anyway, to perceive ourselves as having an ongoing constancy- an "I" which is the foundation of the idea of the soul. This is probably an illusion, since who change throughout our lives- if we did not, we could neither grow nor learn.

Upstream, Kazoo mentioned brain injuries and memory problems. Memory is critical to a sense of a lasting self, of course. It may even be that memory *is* the sense of being a lasting self. But memories can be faked, can be lost, can be twisted beyond recognition. Memory is as much imagination as it is recollection. Disorders that affect cognitive functions can significantly alter the sense of self and, in the case of diseases like Alzheimer's, seem to destroy the sense of self in the long run. (Disclosure: I am a psychologist and one of my specialties is dementing illnesses). Diseases like depression and bipolar disorder distort the perception of being a self.

You've tossed the baby out with the bathwater in your list of where consciousness is not. It's clear from observation that consciousness exists in interaction between the nervous system and the world around it (and also the nervous system and the rest of the material of the body). It is an emergent property. Subjectively consciousness is unitary although this may not in fact be the case- there are multiple systems of consciousness (vision, hearing, haptic, cognition, etc). The works of James J. Gibson and Edward Reed- among others- are worth checking out in this regard.

The conceptual difficulty comes from the popular notions of "soul" present in various mythologies, especially the notion of an immortal soul that is somehow placed into the body at some point and which leaves the body at some point. The existence of this soul is non-demonstrable and its existence is an article of faith not observation; it becomes problematic when faith attempts to trump observable reality.

Interestingly the Buddhist conception of human functioning avoids these difficulties. It denies the existence of an immortal individual soul and identifies all aspects of existence as mutually emergent properties which are conditional, constantly changing and ultimately temporary. Over-simplistically, Buddhism proposes six types of consciousness: sight, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and mental formations. Each arises as an interaction between the properties of the organism and the properties of its environment. No permanent, immortal and highly problematic soul (which violates the laws of physics) is needed.

Not all religions postulate a soul, so some non-atheists could argue that there is no such thing as a soul.

That's an interesting point. It also begs the question of whether or how we'd be able to recognize that emergent property.

...other than Planet Earth, right? And, how many other human outposts in space are there?

Who writes this stuff?