this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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How anyone holds onto the notion that our minds aren't simply squishy, organic computers is beyond me.
I guess you could say that but brains are orders of magnitude more complex than any computer. Saying that they're "simply" organic computers is a huge understatement.
A TI-82, an Apple II, and a 48 core Xeon rack Server are all simply computers. It isn't insulting the rack server to declare that it and an Apple II are both simply computers, despite their orders of magnitude difference in processing power, capacity, utility, etc.
Humans are far too self-important and self-reverential. We think too much of ourselves. Just barely smart enough to split the Atom, after a couple hundred thousand years of build up throwing rocks and sticks at each other in the dirt, yet still dumb enough to immediately want to use it to boomie boom rival monkey tribe, ooh ooh, aah aah!
No. The human brain is not 1 and O. It is "analog" meaning the state can be any number between 1 and 0 because neurons are fired biochemically and linked to each other in multiple connections. This means the human brain or any animal brain can carry, process and store more info than any computer yet invented for the given size and mass. Non-biologists don't know how complex biological sytems are. Go and google about the rotor-stator system of bacterial flagellum. That's right, some bacteria have an electrical motor to propel themselves, long before humans invented the electric motor.
Neurons are very much binary. They receive enough simulation to fire or they don't. They don't fire with variable strengths.
Brains are literally just biologically grown electrochemical computers.
They fire at different rates are though.
Any logic gate will fire a different rates depending on how frequently it's fire conditions are met.
Still binary.
That's just plainly wrong. If neurons are "activated" (the binary analogy) it starts firing, but at varying rates depending on how far above it's threshold the activation happened. A bit like an activation level to frequency converter, but non-linear.
I think we just have different interpretations of the same behavior. I feel like we're describing the exact same thing, just with different definitions.
It's common for binary systems to pulse at different frequencies. That's how binary data transmission works.
Yes, but a binary gate reacts to a change in inputs exactly once by adjusting its own state. If the inputs change faster the frequency will change of course, but that's not the point. Neurons will fire pulse trains with different rates for two different inputs that a binary system would both interpret as "on". It's a much more analog and continuous system in that regard.
Anybody who believes that out brains are simple organic computers seriously needs to try acid.
Devil's advocate: Maybe acid just disables the "noise filtering" part of you organic computer.