Sunday, January 27, 2013

Quo Vadis

The mind is an organ of inexplicable complexities. It's known to work about a billion times faster at parallel computing than the fastest computing systems at home. And guess what? The mind, doesn't even have a basic parallel computing capability, it's just a super awhsum serial computer as per current understanding.

But humans have some pretty fast ones, called super computers, running at a whopping 16.32 petaflops, or 16 thousand trillion calculations per second!(at the time of writing this.)
Now allow me to clue you in. 1 petaflop is 1 quadrillion(three zeros after trillion, 10^15) floating point operations per SECOND. 1 floating point operation indicates how many mathematical operations, involving decimal fractions, the computer (or microprocessor) can handle.
Some world renowned experts claim the brains power is limitless and cannot be calculated. But the reality remains that eventually, it's just a matter of time before we get there. If and when we do, do you think we'll be able to just plug in that alternative reality that the machines could create? If we did, could we unwind into a plugged in, but virtually alternate reality where we could have our own world with customized reality? That would bring in the much needed faux pas in our imagined universe. Its like the Matrix revisited, except, this one would probably be the one we want.

Some basic research on the internet gave the following information about the human brain.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/howfast.html

"About the raw speed of a brain in terms of cycles per second. A human being has about 100 billion brain cells. Although different neurons fire at different speeds, as a rough estimate it is reasonable to estimate that a neuron can fire about once every 5 milliseconds, or about 200 times a second. The number of cells each neuron is connected to also varies, but as a rough estimate it is reasonable to say that each neuron connects to 1000 other neurons- so every time a neuron fires, about 1000 other neurons get information about that firing. If we multiply all this out we get 100 billion neurons X 200 firings per second X 1000 connections per firing = 20 million billion calculations per second. This estimate might easily be off by an order of magnitude- that is, it might be 10 times too high or low."

"The second question was about the storage capacity of the brain. Some people have estimated that the storage capacity of the human brain is functionally infinite- that is, we can essentially always find room to store more information if we want to, so no practical limit exists."

All of this and further speculation eventually brings to forth the question, if this brain thing is doing this and that, storing and processing, what or who exactly is it doing it for? Is it for a purpose in itself or is it a tool for something which is beyond our understanding and comprehension as yet? If it is a purpose in itself, then why do we continuously keep looking for a purpose to everything? Why should everything have a reason? Then again, maybe we are just bits and characters in someones game and this whole world is just a video game where we are simply supposed to live without having to know what is not needed to be known. If so, why this ability in the first place to understand things around us? We might as well just have been animals!
Since we are not, I am just presuming there's something out there or else this all seems like a cruel joke.

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