Can you explain which parts of our mental processing systems are hardware, and which are software?
The line is really blurry as you seem to be pointing out, but I think critical thinking in the analogy is somewhat like an application macro. It's a set of thinking habits that turn out to be useful in determining what is important to pay attention to and what is not.
But current computers lack something like neuroplasticity, so no matter how many times your computer runs a program, the hardware will not reconfigure itself to be more efficient; whereas the human brain appears to do so to some extent.
To answer your question, I think the hardware of the brain is any part which is basically hardwired in a specific configuration which is minimally plastic or non-plastic. But instead of hardware vs. non-hardware classifications, you'd use degrees of plasticity, with higher plasticity areas being classified as more software-like / although the substrate might also function as a memory store.
Certain structures of the brain like the face area of the fusiform gyrus are hard-wired to recognize faces, and it's unlikely it will ever be involved in coordination or controlling your feet, because its function is so specific. So that would be the "hardware". The software or memory storage aspect of face recognition might be a higher-level association between certain faces and smell, colors, sounds, or emotions.
So for example, the eyes and ears would qualify as hardware very strongly. The visual cortex is like the opposite of a video card, but software can also take the place of a video card, so I would classify the visual cortex depending on how malleable it is. The closest thing to software would be (or reside) in the frontal cortex (along with the hippocampus, striatum and others), although the software has a very strong physical component, and executes in parallel, at some level, deciding what to do with the image representation.
I agree that there are limits in what critical thinking training can achieve, of course.
Do you think the problems that fall under "mental retardation" are all due to low intelligence?
No. I think those categories overlap, but I don't think one causes the other.
I only ask these questions because I'd like to understand the scope of the theoretical pill, before I answer your question. I think the more you study the human mind, the more interesting and complex your set of definitions for "intelligence" becomes. The word becomes almost meaningless without a healthy-sized working definition along with it.
I tried
