Critically evaluate a TED talk...

Before you check out this amazing TEDTalk:

Questions to ask to be able to critically evaluate this talk:

1. What is the academic status of reductionism?  I would consider Thomas Nagel and Jerry Fodor
2. What is a pattern in a purely natural sense? Simmetrie (Afrikaans)
3. What is the lifetime of neural patterns? Neuroplasticity
4. What is the process to keep track of neural pattern changes to maintain the meanings of patterns?

Ray Kurzweil: Get ready for hybrid thinking
http://on.ted.com/sumZ

My afterthoughts:

It seems to be a quite fundamental and primitive state of any consciousness to interact with the physical world using man made aids to improve our "interface".  The scale to which our brain will become directly interfaced to "Big Data" is truly an amazing reality to expect in our technologically advanced future, but not at all an uncommon advance.  Neither can these technological advances be adequately described in terms of matter in motion.

It will take a mind to ask what the moral value of "Big Data" is?
A manipulated collective mind that belief their mind and "Big Data" is the same thing does not seem to me utopian in any sense...