• Why Your Brain is Really Cool
    164 replies, posted
2x cooler on drugs :science:
[QUOTE=U.S.S.R;27574020]Yes, but do they actually experience the emotions instead of just displaying them?[/QUOTE] I don't know, do you?
I'm pretty sure the brain doesn't store information the way a computer does. A brain is more abstract and fuzzy, only keeping things that it considers to be important.
[QUOTE=U.S.S.R;27574020]Yes, but do they actually experience the emotions instead of just displaying them?[/QUOTE] They could process it. something humans do.
[QUOTE=Robbobin;27575331]I believe in quite hard functionalism, so I believe that a huge team of flag-wavers, when performing the same functions as a brain, in themselves have consciousness/phenomenological states/what-is-it-likeness/whatever you want to call it. I read a really fascinating essay on consciousness earlier (because I'm studying for an exam on the self, mind and body tomorrow): [url]http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/E4/eb4.html[/url] I believe relativism is the most defensible position, so I hold the view that "Everything has some consciousness. An atom has only a little of it. Bigger things must have it in larger degrees— right up to the stars and the galaxies." Quite a warming thought, that the cosmos may itself have some form of sentience, far above our own.[/QUOTE] Well so much for the whole philosophy of "We are the universes way of observing itself" Pack it up boys.
[QUOTE=BANNED USER;27571714]Your brain is a piece of meat that functions using electrical and neural impulses, how is that not impressive? We're walking meat computers, biological machines.[/QUOTE] organs are not meat
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;27578918]organs are not meat[/QUOTE] [quote=wikipedia]Meat is animal flesh[/quote]
[QUOTE=imasillypiggy;27578967][/QUOTE] im not talking about flesh DO I HAVE TO MAKE THIS CLEARER also you can't compare compression to anything the brain does because we don't understand it that well. this is all nonsense
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;27579004]im not talking about flesh DO I HAVE TO MAKE THIS CLEARER also you can't compare compression to anything the brain does because we don't understand it that well. this is all nonsense[/QUOTE] How can you not be talking about flesh if your talking about organs?
[QUOTE=imasillypiggy;27579122]How can you not be talking about flesh if your talking aboutorgans?[/QUOTE] because I'm talking about all the other ones
I'm honestly surprised that it took 2 pages to bring up "you only use x% of your brain" I'll say it again. It's BS. The brain is fucking amazing, and it deserves to be said over and over again.
The view that the brain can be seen as a type of computer has gained general acceptance in the philosophical and computer science community. Just as we ask how many mips or megaflops an IBM PC or a Cray can perform, we can ask how many operations the human brain can perform. Neither the mip nor the megaflop seems quite appropriate, though; we need something new. One possibility is the number of synapse operations per second. A second possible "basic operation" is inspired by the observation that signal propagation is a major limit. As gates become faster, smaller, and cheaper, simply getting a signal from one gate to another becomes a major issue. The brain couldn't compute if nerve impulses didn't carry information from one synapse to the next, and propagating a nerve impulse using the electrochemical technology of the brain requires a measurable amount of energy. Thus, instead of measuring synapse operations per second, we might measure the total distance that all nerve impulses combined can travel per second, e.g., total nerve-impulse-distance per second. There are other ways to estimate the brain's computational power. We might count the number of synapses, guess their speed of operation, and determine synapse operations per second. There are roughly 10**15 synapses operating at about 10 impulses/second [2], giving roughly 10**16 synapse operations per second. A second approach is to estimate the computational power of the retina, and then multiply this estimate by the ratio of brain size to retinal size. The retina is relatively well understood so we can make a reasonable estimate of its computational power. The output of the retina -- carried by the optic nerve -- is primarily from retinal ganglion cells that perform "center surround" computations (or related computations of roughly similar complexity). If we assume that a typical center surround computation requires about 100 analog adds and is done about 100 times per second [3], then computation of the axonal output of each ganglion cell requires about 10,000 analog adds per second. There are about 1,000,000 axons in the optic nerve [5, page 21], so the retina as a whole performs about 10**10 analog adds per second. There are about 10**8 nerve cells in the retina [5, page 26], and between 10**10 and 10**12 nerve cells in the brain [5, 343 Špage 7], so the brain is roughly 100 to 10,000 times larger than the retina. By this logic, the brain should be able to do about 10**12 to 10**14 operations per second (in good agreement with the estimate of Moravec, who considers this approach in more detail [4, page 57 and 163]). A third approach is to measure the total energy used by the brain each second, and then determine the energy used for each "basic operation." Dividing the former by the latter gives the maximum number of basic operations per second. We need two pieces of information: the total energy consumed by the brain each second, and the energy used by a "basic operation." The total energy consumption of the brain is about 25 watts [2]. Inasmuch as a significant fraction of this energy will not be used for "useful computation," we can reasonably round this to 10 watts. Nerve impulses are carried by either myelinated or un-myelinated axons. Myelinated axons are wrapped in a fatty insulating myelin sheath, interrupted at intervals of about 1 millimeter to expose the axon. These interruptions are called "nodes of Ranvier." Propagation of a nerve impulse in a myelinated axon is from one node of Ranvier to the next -- jumping over the insulated portion. A nerve cell has a "resting potential" -- the outside of the nerve cell is 0 volts (by definition), while the inside is about -60 millivolts. There is more Na+ outside a nerve cell than inside, and this chemical concentration gradient effectively adds about 50 extra millivolts to the voltage acting on the Na+ ions, for a total of about 110 millivolts [1, page 15]. When a nerve impulse passes by, the internal voltage briefly rises above 0 volts because of an inrush of Na+ ions. Nerve cell membranes have a capacitance of 1 microfarad per square centimeter, so the capacitance of a relatively small 30 square micron node of Ranvier is 3 x 10**-13 farads (assuming small nodes tends to overestimate the computational power of the brain). The internodal region is about 1,000 microns in length, 500 times longer than the 2 micron node, but because of the myelin sheath its capacitance is about 250 times lower per square micron [5, page 180; 7, page 126] or only twice that of the node. The total capacitance of a single node and internodal gap is thus about 9 x 10**-13 farads. The total energy in joules held by such a capacitor at 0.11 volts is 1/2 V**2 x C, or 1/2 x 0.11**2 x 9 x 10**-13, or 5 x 10**-15 joules. This capacitor is discharged and then recharged whenever a nerve impulse passes, dissipating 5 x 10**-15 joules. A 10 watt brain can therefore do at most 2 x 10**15 such "Ranvier ops" per second. Both larger myelinated fibers and unmyelinated fibers dissipate more energy. Various other factors not considered here increase the total energy per nerve impulse [8], causing us to somewhat overestimate the number of "Ranvier ops" the brain can perform. It still provides a useful upper bound and is unlikely to be in error by more than an order of magnitude. 3k3 ŠTo translate "Ranvier ops" (1-millimeter jumps) into synapse opons we must know the average distance between synapses, which is not normally given in neuroscience texts. We can estimate it: a human can recognize an image in about 100 milliseconds, which can take at most 100 one-millisecond synapse delays. A single signal probably travels 100 millimeters in that time (from the eye to the back of the brain, and then some). If it passes 100 synapses in 100 millimeters then it passes one synapse every millimeter -- which means one "synapse operation" is about one "Ranvier operation." Both "synapse ops" and "Ranvier ops" are quite low-level. The higher level "analog addition ops" seem intuitively more powerful, so it is perhaps not surprising that the brain can perform fewer of them. While the software remains a major challenge, we will soon be able to build hardware powerful enough to perform more such operations per second than can the human brain. There is already a massively parallel multi-processor being built at IBM Yorktown with a raw computational power of 10**12 floating point operations per second: the TF-1. It should be working in 1991 [6]. When we can build a desktop computer able to deliver 10**25 gate operations per second and more (as we will surely be able to do with a mature nanotechnology) and when we can write software to take advantage of that hardware (as we will also eventually be able to do), a single computer with abilities equivalent to a billion to a trillion human beings will be a reality. If a problem might today be solved by freeing all humanity from all mundane cares and concerns, and focusing all their combined intellectual energies upon it, then that problem can be solved in the future by a personal computer. No field will be left unchanged by this staggering increase in our abilities. The total computational power of the brain is limited by several factors, including the ability to propagate nerve impulses from one place in the brain to another. Propagating a nerve impulse a distance of 1 millimeter requires about 5 x 10**-15 joules. Because the total energy dissipated by the brain is about 10 watts, this means nerve impulses can collectively travel at most 2 x 10**15 millimeters per second. By estimating the distance between synapses we can in turn estimate how many synapse operations per second the brain can do. This estimate is only slightly smaller than one based on multiplying the estimated number of synapses by the average firing rate, and two orders of magnitude greater than one based on functional estimates of retinal computational power. It seems reasonable to conclude that the human brain has a "raw" computational power between 10**13 and 10**16 "operations" per second. [url]http://www.textfiles.com/science/merkle2.txt[/url] [editline]22nd January 2011[/editline] Your argument is invalid. Even a mere AMD Radeon 5970 has 4.64 terraflops of power.
Did you just found it out?
I don't like my brain, I'll trade anyone. Actually, I'll settle for a dog even.
OutOfPop good ridance, if you think like that you are likely to fail more than if you think "Good damn I am the best"
[QUOTE=U.S.S.R;27571772]The brain surprisingly resembles a mechanical computer, lucky us. Imagine playing ArmA 2 in your mind.[/QUOTE] That's possible with imagination. Not quite the same though.
[QUOTE=Robbobin;27575331]Quite a warming thought, that the cosmos may itself have some form of sentience, far above our own.[/QUOTE] Look up "pantheism", hehe. [editline]22nd January 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Greenen72;27579285]I'm honestly surprised that it took 2 pages to bring up "you only use x% of your brain" I'll say it again. It's BS. The brain is fucking amazing, and it deserves to be said over and over again.[/QUOTE] I have heard about using only X% of your brain. It's bullshit, but I think I heard something about only using X% of it at any one particular time. Might be completely wrong though, I'd have to look it up again.
If I understood this right, it's sort of like emulating something on something which barely has any instruction the guest architecture has?
[QUOTE=nigfops;27575364]wait.....so, god?[/QUOTE] Not necessarily. It wouldn't necessarily have omnipotence or even omniscience, it just means that there is something like to [i]be[/i] the universe.
Computer: 519085365987646089 + 24357089569384963780494 = 2.43576087 × 1022 Person: 519085365987646089 + 24357089569384963780494 = Fuck off, couldn't do this if I tried.
Thank you for teaching us nolife nerds with only games in our heads... Heart for you!
And yet all of this "power" is overridden with the desire to reproduce, leaving me with and I.Q. of 85. Sigh.
what about brians
Am i the only programmer who thinks it would be probably the coolest feeling in the world to execute homebrew brain codes on yourself? or some one else? </madscience>
[b]Ubraintu[/b] - the Linux distro for direct installation into the brain.
Where can I buy more memory for my brain? In all seriousness, no computer will [I]ever[/I] surpass the human brain, as like OP said, computers just do what we tell them to, so really it's just us doing it the entire time.
[QUOTE=Nightsure;27606931]Where can I buy more memory for my brain? In all seriousness, no computer will [I]ever[/I] surpass the human brain, as like OP said, computers just do what we tell them to, so really it's just us doing it the entire time.[/QUOTE] oh they will, and then AI will come. It's a real possibility. While the brain has amazing potential for storage it's functions aren't too hard to understand, then the robot revolution will come, man :tinfoil:
[QUOTE=s0beit;27607009]oh they will, and then AI will come. It's a real possibility. While the brain has amazing potential for storage it's functions aren't too hard to understand, then the robot revolution will come, man :tinfoil:[/QUOTE] But we're the people who construct them bro :psypop:
People always forget that the biggest part f the brains "work" is stuff like holding temperature, balance, heartbeat etc. etc. and that are VERY data intensive tasks.
This maked me feel better about myself. Thank you OP, i learnt something and i feel less like shit. :buddy:
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