Funny you should bring up the fallibility of brain scans – I just came across this hysterical, deadpan study of the brain scans of a dead salmon

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

“as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it ‘a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.’ To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, ‘was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.’”

What kind of flash mob could play the dead salmon to CitySense?

Don’t you think this kind of analysis and prediction provokes many of the same questions that brain scanning and neuroscience does on the scale of the individual nervous system, with the difference that the later, despite the French, has a more easily acceptable identifiable unity, which can be demonstrated through its capacity to organize both conscious and autonomic behavior,while the former requires begging many of the questions you raise about what exactly is being identified and for what purpose? As always, thanks for the intellectual nourishment.

Frank