Last message on previous page: I wouldn't exactly call the brain a heat regulator; it does perform this function, but only in some circumstances. As I have mentioned in my first post, our brains receive around one third of our blood supply; so it can cool or heat the rest of the body depending on the ambient temperature. So if the weather is cold and you don't wear a hat, you radiate up to 33% of your body heat into the air; conversely, if it's hot out and you don't wear a hat (not a winter one of course) you are at a much greater risk of sunstroke.
As for brain size, once you pass a certain size it ceases to be a determining factor in the intelligence of an organism. Humans have a wide range of brain sizes, but it is the complexity of the brain that determines intelligence: i.e. the structure of the brain and the number of axon connections. Size still matters as we realize that a brain half the size of a human's could never be as complex. So the size difference of two brains must be fairly large for brain size to affect intelligence.
**NOTE** When discussing brain size above, I am really talking about the ratio of the brain size to body size; we obviously are aware that while an elephant's brain is several times larger than ours, we possess more intelligence due to a more favorable brain to body size ratio. As it has been pointed out already, the bigger the body the bigger the brain must be to control it.
outstanding 4 pages of text since i started this thread a few hours ago
regarding terms i intentionally left this open ended for the debate that has occurred to take place
a point was raised about balance and here i beleive lies the true power of the brain. imagine a footballer (soccer) running weaving in and out of opposition whilst controlling a ball with his feet, the number of physics equations going on every milisecond is Massive in order to keep him balanced esspecially as he sidesteps and chooses which way to turn in order get past the 3 players his brain processes as an image, these physics calculations are accurate varying upon the individual but i woudl suggest that no supercomputer would be able to perform the physics calculations involved in the action above in the time that they are required.
do humans Render Yes they do!
the eye does not see! it merely converts light into electrical impulses that are rendered by the brain into the display inside our head.which is the process we attribute to sight. what resolution do we see at? the eye does not produce the image.
the hardest calculation currently known is the calculation of fluid dynamics is there an example of where the brain calulates this i cant think of any off hand
For 3 pounds of Gray matter. Which I heard feels like Rice pudding. Anyone want a taste..
I dont think in our time line we will chart the 90 to 100 billion neurons that each connected by near mioroscopic fibers of neighboring neurons. What doctors have done was charted the Major areas of the brain.
I dont think computer will match any animal on earth. Movement, sound, taste, feel, Feed it self. feel danger, see danger. Or adapt in differnt climents. We dont see laptops moving around the house to get shade to cool off or protect the lsd Monitor from sunlight. All there is a fan. We dont see them cleaning them self of dust, Basicly taking a crap.
yeah, if you ahve a ANN with 10 billion of constantly evolving, multi level (not just binary) interconnections, all arranged in the right way, and left long enough to evolve and you stick close by to teah them (ANNs have to be tought you know)..then probably you can make it...but that's no CPU....It's an ANN ....and it's no longer about being fast....but a CPU has to be pretty darn fast to do that ....coz a CPU doesn't learn new responses like an ANN..it calculates
yes I know you are right, we'll need billions of neurons. As I mentioned in my very fist response (the first one on page 2), a CPU can't be compared with a human brain, rather a ANN could be.
Did we just agree on something??? COOL....I just saw a demo (in my lab) of an artificial life creature that learned to do skating (classifiers etc..) I think it'll be in the proceedings of the most recent Artificial life conference.
PS: I think there is much more to the human brain than just interconnected cells...Recently, researchers discovered that the white matter in the brain also plays a role in brain activity...so we still have a lot to do to demystify the intelligence....but i think we'll get there one day...
I wouldn't exactly call the brain a heat regulator; it does perform this function, but only in some circumstances. As I have mentioned in my first post, our brains receive around one third of our blood supply; so it can cool or heat the rest of the body depending on the ambient temperature. So if the weather is cold and you don't wear a hat, you radiate up to 33% of your body heat into the air; conversely, if it's hot out and you don't wear a hat (not a winter one of course) you are at a much greater risk of sunstroke.
As for brain size, once you pass a certain size it ceases to be a determining factor in the intelligence of an organism. Humans have a wide range of brain sizes, but it is the complexity of the brain that determines intelligence: i.e. the structure of the brain and the number of axon connections. Size still matters as we realize that a brain half the size of a human's could never be as complex. So the size difference of two brains must be fairly large for brain size to affect intelligence.
**NOTE** When discussing brain size above, I am really talking about the ratio of the brain size to body size; we obviously are aware that while an elephant's brain is several times larger than ours, we possess more intelligence due to a more favorable brain to body size ratio. As it has been pointed out already, the bigger the body the bigger the brain must be to control it.
The Captain dusts his old cetacean cytoarchitectonics cap out of the closet and puts it on again after all these years.
Sotalia fluviatilis (a small cetacean) has a brain of less than 700g, therefore it's almost half the size of a human one, yet the dendritic differentiation, relative encephalization and organization of the five laminal layers in presence of the startling paralimbic lobe indicates that in light of the five times greater than human cerebral signal velocity, its brain is anywhere between 26 and 530 times smarter than you or me.
When you analyse the virtually identical structures within the brains of the larger cetaceans, some of which are three times the size of your entire head, the multiplication factors become astronomical.
How do we, then, calculate the relative intelligence? If I knew, I'd be dusting off my Nobel prize instead of my old cyto cap. Everything that we know to be intelligence (from a brain structure standpoint) is immeasurably superior in cetaceans than hominids. And while Homo has just developed this sapient brain in the last couple of million years or so, cetaceans have had the benefit of over 60 million years of carrying it around.
The argument usually put forward is that cetaceans cannot be that intelligent as they lack a civilization, technology and all that goes with it.
As we look around at the very likely prospect that hominids have made this planet effectively uninhabitable for our own grandchildren, that argument is seen in a totally different light. So maybe the cetaceans aint dat dumb after all...
I think that there is more to the human conciousness than just a brain. Perhaps it is something non-physical.
If a brain is all that is required to achieve conciousness then someday computers will be able to achieve self awareness. Although this is a scary thought (at least for me), speaking as a computer science PhD student I don't believe it will ever be possible for computers to be self aware.
[As we look around at the very likely prospect that hominids have made this planet effectively uninhabitable for our own grandchildren, that argument is seen in a totally different light. So maybe the cetaceans aint dat dumb after all...
Humorous... You were joking weren't you? I would hope so...
A CPU does nothing which is not ordered by the OS or a software.
It's just idle, doing nothing, then it processes information and computes to achieve whatever a software asked it to do. A brain never stops, never tires (well, sort of).
Brain never stops. When you're not sleeping, it analyses everything you hear, see, touch, smell or taste (that's a lot per second, think about it...). Then you get to work and your attention is focused on that work (for average people I mean...). Phone rings and you get something new to do (alt+tab). A tough case with a dreaded customer. Don't screw. Then it's lunch time (you're hungry, right?)... After work, it's time for some relaxation (hobby if you prefer). Pick one : PC handling / gaming / OCing, sport (neh...) watch TV, get a beer with friends...
Eventually, you get tired and need some sleep.
But your brain is still at work : you're dreaming. Accuratly. Sounds, smells, images more vivid than any simulation ever.
Then you wake up. And it's going all over again.
The amount of data processed in a single day by a human brain is vastly superior to anything a CPU will ever process in the same amount of time.
A CPU is better in pure mathemetics. No one adds 2+2 faster. I's designed to be like that. But feed it the stimuli a brain processes and you get :"Syntax error"
Speaking as a Philosophy PhD student, I'd just like to remind everyone that this whole question is utterly nonsensical. We simply have no idea whatsoever what a machine functionally equivalent to a human brain even looks like, let alone ask questions about it.
All one can say with any degree of assurance is that one cannot rule out, a priori, the logical possibility that a machine could be created that we would be prepared to call conscious, sentient, with emotions etc. But one cannot rule out, a priori, the possibility that one day all humans will smell like cheese. So what?
There are very few reasons for thinking that the computational model of the brain and cognitive science is actually going to produce something of any merit whatsoever. There are no guarantees in science. It may very well be that we can never mimic what the brain does: as an analogy, we cannot mimic what the hummingbird does, or explain how a pigeon homes.
as an analogy, we cannot mimic what the hummingbird does, or explain how a pigeon homes.
Badly chosen.
We have nothing organic usable to produce the SAME sound the humming bird does. Biological non compatibility. But we can spot a humming bird singing among other birds (at least those who know what it likes).
A pigeon homes because it can "feel" and "read" Earth magnetic field. What human brain can not. That did not forbide our European ancestors moving South during the Ice Age.
Man thinks he's the most intelligent creature because he invented : money, cars, food, electricity, gas-oil engine, nuclear power plants, firearms, work, airplanes, war....
on the contrary, dolphins thinks they are the most intelligent specie just because they didn't.
i think this would be the best place to discuss this
in another thread the point was raised that the fastest CPU is the Human Brain not wanting to hijack a thread i thought i would post a new one
The Human Brain is the Fastest Cpu
now thats open to debate. seeing as a brain acts as both a hard drive and CPU also.
also what is 928346*98236? im sure the computer can do that faster than the human brain hell try doing what super pi does in 30s in your brain.
i would suggest that a human brain is more like a 100 core processor with a lot of them dedicated to individual functions that wouldnt be much good at doing other things (cpu cant act as a Gpu)
what makes something the fastest CPU?
Faster than the brain and light, is diarrhea! Because when attacks, you don´t even have time to think or to turn on the light!
Speaking as a Philosophy PhD student, I'd just like to remind everyone that this whole question is utterly nonsensical. We simply have no idea whatsoever what a machine functionally equivalent to a human brain even looks like, let alone ask questions about it.
All one can say with any degree of assurance is that one cannot rule out, a priori, the logical possibility that a machine could be created that we would be prepared to call conscious, sentient, with emotions etc. But one cannot rule out, a priori, the possibility that one day all humans will smell like cheese. So what?
There are very few reasons for thinking that the computational model of the brain and cognitive science is actually going to produce something of any merit whatsoever. There are no guarantees in science. It may very well be that we can never mimic what the brain does: as an analogy, we cannot mimic what the hummingbird does, or explain how a pigeon homes.
read the thread again...We do have some idea..It's you guys in philosophy who have no idea.... of course our idea might be wrong, or partial, but we're trying.
You've conceded my point. There might be plenty of contingent reasons why we stop short of getting anywhere near 'understanding' the brain (I put that in scare quotes because we don't really understand what it would even look like to understand the brain). We might be limited by manufacturing processes, say.
As for homing pigeons, you've given me a rough idea of what it might entail. But that is still currently speculative: no one knows how this is actually done. I take it you're not really claiming that that counts as a genuine explanation?
[As we look around at the very likely prospect that hominids have made this planet effectively uninhabitable for our own grandchildren, that argument is seen in a totally different light. So maybe the cetaceans aint dat dumb after all...
Humorous... You were joking weren't you? I would hope so...
I'm ALWAYS joking but in this case maybe a little less than usual.
Look at it this way. We have come out of the savanna hunkering in a hole to keep the tigers from eating us barely 20,000 years ago. In that merest wink of geological time, we have wrought environmental disaster on this planet that according to some studies, has resulted in the greatest loss of biodiversity since the K-T layer 65 million years ago. Cetaceans have had this magnificent hyperbrain pretty well since the K-T transition and they have managed to live in perfect harmony with their environment all that time. Until we come along and trash the planet.
Man thinks he's the most intelligent creature because he invented : money, cars, food, electricity, gas-oil engine, nuclear power plants, firearms, work, airplanes, war....
on the contrary, dolphins thinks they are the most intelligent specie just because they didn't.
Hmm... of course you're assuming that they didn't. Maybe they did when they lived on land at the end of the Cretaceous and evolved past them...
Interesting forepaws, don't you think... not far from prehensile...
Speaking as a Philosophy PhD student, I'd just like to remind everyone that this whole question is utterly nonsensical. We simply have no idea whatsoever what a machine functionally equivalent to a human brain even looks like, let alone ask questions about it.
All one can say with any degree of assurance is that one cannot rule out, a priori, the logical possibility that a machine could be created that we would be prepared to call conscious, sentient, with emotions etc. But one cannot rule out, a priori, the possibility that one day all humans will smell like cheese. So what?
There are very few reasons for thinking that the computational model of the brain and cognitive science is actually going to produce something of any merit whatsoever. There are no guarantees in science. It may very well be that we can never mimi
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