The human brain has about a 100 billion neurons. That’s an impressive number (it’s greater than the stars in our universe) but it’s not exactly mind-blowing. However, the number of synapses, well, that is mind-blowing. It is exponentially larger, something like 100-500 trillion. And all these neural systems are themselves composed of information processing biological cells, each one acting as its own impossibly complex nano-machine working on an intricate biomolecular level. All told we have something like 39 trillion of them working tirelessly in our bodies.
The weird thing is the stochasticity of the whole shebang. Even our neural processes are invariably stochastic, with order and predictability only emerging as we trade in the microscope for a good pair of binoculars and examine these systems in their macro context.
Beyond intricacy and stochasticity, it appears these systems often operate well beyond our comfortable 3-dimensional model of the world (4 with time thrown in).
We build computers that work great in the 4 dimensional prison of our mind cave, but I suspect our brains are actually processing information hyper-dimensionally, creating conscious awareness and sentience by constructing mathematical models far beyond the 4 dimensions we know and love so well.
So, it’s not just the volume of information, nor how long it takes to process it, nor even the energy necessary for said processing, but it is HOW it’s processed that really matters.
And right now we are just too profoundly ignorant of our own emergent sentience to even make comparisons between the brain and the “smart” tools that we’ve made that mimic thought through artificial simulacrum.
But that’s just my opinion. And I’m just a truck driver. So, don’t mind me.
The human brain has about a 100 billion neurons. That’s an impressive number (it’s greater than the stars in our universe) but it’s not exactly mind-blowing. However, the number of synapses, well, that is mind-blowing. It is exponentially larger, something like 100-500 trillion. And all these neural systems are themselves composed of information processing biological cells, each one acting as its own impossibly complex nano-machine working on an intricate biomolecular level. All told we have something like 39 trillion of them working tirelessly in our bodies.
The weird thing is the stochasticity of the whole shebang. Even our neural processes are invariably stochastic, with order and predictability only emerging as we trade in the microscope for a good pair of binoculars and examine these systems in their macro context.
Beyond intricacy and stochasticity, it appears these systems often operate well beyond our comfortable 3-dimensional model of the world (4 with time thrown in).
We build computers that work great in the 4 dimensional prison of our mind cave, but I suspect our brains are actually processing information hyper-dimensionally, creating conscious awareness and sentience by constructing mathematical models far beyond the 4 dimensions we know and love so well.
So, it’s not just the volume of information, nor how long it takes to process it, nor even the energy necessary for said processing, but it is HOW it’s processed that really matters.
And right now we are just too profoundly ignorant of our own emergent sentience to even make comparisons between the brain and the “smart” tools that we’ve made that mimic thought through artificial simulacrum.
But that’s just my opinion. And I’m just a truck driver. So, don’t mind me.