Imagine the world: all the countries, all the towns, all the cities, all the mega cities, and all the 6 billion people living in them. Think about all the places you’ve been too, and all the places you haven’t been to, and just try to get a sense of the vastness of this for a moment…ok?
Now, try to imagine 20 times this scale. A street with 100 people on it now has 2,000 people. Regular two story family homes are now 40 story apartment blocks. Big skyscrapers now have 2,000 floors and are 10 km high, taller than Mt. Everest. Or if you prefer to go out, rather than up, take New York and drop another 19 of them around the United States. Then do the same for Los Angeles… and so on for every city and every town, and continue this way across the whole world. The planet would be burried under a seething mass of humanity.
That’s 120 billion people, approximately the number of neurons in your brain.
Now give each of these 120 billion people a cell phone, and load each one up with something like 5,000 phone numbers, mostly of people who live in the individual’s area. Get everybody on this planet to start sending messages to each other. Some only slowly send messages, others are busy sending 200 messages a second to all 5,000 people that they know. Now let this system start to adapt in order to control which messages go where and when…
That’s about the scale of your brain.
When people say they can’t believe that the human brain is “just a machine”, I suspect they are suffering from a lack of imagination — have they seriously tried to wrap their mind around how unbelievably profoundly gigantic this machine actually is?
Strong AI and FTL // Aug 15, 2008 at 11:25 pm
[...] of “could it possibly exist?”; it is evidently only an engineering problem (albeit a complex one). Maybe we will need molecular biology for it (meaning that AI will only run on proteins and not on [...]
CAS-Group Blog » Mindless Intelligence // Oct 4, 2008 at 9:36 pm
[...] the sense of “could it possibly exist?”; it is evidently an engineering problem (see here and here). Since we all agree on AI’s fundamental hypothesis, that physical machines have the capacity for [...]
Unbelievably profoundly gigantic indeed! Stumbled.
Considering human history as well as the tribulations and carnage currently created by humanity one might wonder if humans are not some sort of defective monsters without potential for intelligent life. Our greatest accomplishments tend to be in bashing others over the head and stealing their lands etc..
Yes, the brain is just a machine. Just like the Earth is just a planet. The Earth may very well be the most amazingly unique planet in the regard that it can support life, but that does not change that it is just a planet. I’m not lacking any imagination by making these statements.
That being said: good analogy.
I agree with degen. Our bodies and this whole earth are biological machines. Psychedelic substances make your brain function on different levels, but function is possible and new realities discovered. Our minds are just programmed to be in this state that they are in now
I don’t want to directly compare computers with the brain but if you want to wrap your mind around an unbelievably profoundly gigantic machine, IBM’ new petaflop barrier breaking machine can perform over 150 ops/sec for every person on the planet!
@Fred, you’re out by a factor of over 1,000:
Roadrunner = 1.105 peta FLOPS = 1.105 x 10^15 ops per second
Humanity = 6 x 10^9 people
Thus, 184,000 ops/sec for every person on the planet.
Balderdash. As if being alive is a function of the quantity of zero and one operations you can perform! A machine needs something more to be an animal - like an ability to feel. And when a machine does become endowed with such an ability it ceases to be a machine. Lets keep our concepts differentiated!
My brain (metaphorically) exploded, trying to imagine this concept.
“Profoundly gigantic”, indeed.
I both agree an disagree at the same time… (”U know my machine tells me to do that !”)
The reason is that although i accept the fact that human brain is an engineering marvel, i think it would be too ludicrous to classify it as simple as machine. It is a biological entity of no parallel. Its capabilities are quite not fully understood. Comparing it is one thing and labeling it another.
I agree with Pratik in that it is wrong to classify the brain as a machine. In addition, I am going to make a distinction between the brain and the mind. You can speak all day long about the number of neurons in the brain but that does nothing to speak to the quality of the mind that resides within the brain. Please note that there are still a huge number (the majority?) of ignorant, bigoted people who have no more intelligence than a box of rocks. If it is not used to a good degree, what good is all the potential in the universe?