this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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If you ever study biochemistry, it leaves you absolutely in awe. The best engineering we can do is pretty amazing, we have computers and airplanes and all this magic stuff, but the stuff in you is a hundred, a thousand times better made. It's stunning. Comparatively speaking, it is perfect. And that's only the stuff we understand. The stuff in your brain, we do not.
The fact that we only recently mapped out the brain really tells you a lot about its complexity.
And that was only a fruit fly brain! Human brain still hasn't been mapped.
Hold my nanostructured beer.
But there was no switcharoo
Where’s the switcharoo? There’s supposed to be a Lemmy shattering switcharoo‽
I remember a quote from Civ along the lines of "if the brain was simple enough for us to understand, our minds would be to simple to understand it."
It's a pretty trivial informational paradox for a mind to comprehend itself -- comprehension of its comprehension of itself then needs further comprehension... So yeah. Only a much more complex mind can understand a given mind
We don't need a single mind to understand the entirety of how the brain works. One of the powers of human knowledge is its distributed nature arising from our ability to write things down and create abstractions. What matters in the end is that we as a collective understand the brain.
But then you just have the same paradox writ large. Maybe we, as a collective, can entertain understanding of a single mind - but the generalisation of us as 'the mind' rather than 'a mind' includes all of us, and must therefore be left wanting
Actually wait this is glib as fuck and probably wrong, I retract it. You could have the capability to understand, given specific allocation of resources but only do it rarely, without violating any information theory fundamentals
I think this might be a case of expecting a fish to climb a tree. Brains are terrible in fp32 performance, and computers are so far not great at reasoning. But that's mostly because they are made for different things. I'm not sure of this, but i would expect a single neuron firing costing a similar amount of energy as a single transistor firing. The difference is in part that they work differently, but I think the most important part is that they are put together differently. Computers were made for arithmetic while brains evolved for socialising and survival. For most other things you are 100% correct though, we could not recreate a bee or an ant even if we wanted to.
I can create real time visual imagery with no apparent resolution limit or perceptible frame rate including audio and a soundtrack.
Oh, your brain is amazing, sure. Buuuut get Neuralink and let me plug my game in while you try to render the raytracing from foliage collision and I'm pretty sure you would crash like a Windows RT.
Apparent and perceptible are the key words here. Your brain makes up pretty much everything and pretends it's the real deal. Detail and consistency really aren't all that great actually, much like ai video generation
A lotta people have a resolution limit and use glasses to compensate
Not in their minds.
Antivirus protection could be better, though. Oh, and the built in self destruct is kind of a bummer, too.
It is a planned obsolescence.
Figernails are so annoying
Rip them off.
If you ever need to claw your way out of a heap of rubble, you'll be thankful for them.
Natural selection is essentially just a massively parallel Monte Carlo optimization algorithm that's been running for billions of years. It's so simple yet produces such amazing complexity.
That was one of the better QoS settings on my router back in the day.
Give it a few more billion and we'll finally have an intelligence, that's not hell bent on destroying itself.
Watch this whenever you think humans have rivalled nature in building stuff that works.
Nature's crafts in unrivaled
In the relatively short amount of time we've had with computers we've made pretty astounding progress though. If we had had a few million years to improve those silicon brains I think we'd give evolution a run for its money!
Yea, our engineered stuff might be simplistic compared to the brain and biology, but evolution is just a combination of luck, randomness and "unguided" trial and error. There's no "thought" to evolution and that's why we end up with all these....weird quirks and flaws LMAO
those quirks are all features, i swear
It makes me wish I believed in God.
You're allowed to have a type of awe and reverence for the natural world, very much akin to religion, without needing to buy into any bullshit along with it.
It used to be pretty standard, and then the Christians (among others) fucked that up for everyone, and now you can't be anything other than an aggressive humanist atheist without people starting to make assumptions about you.
careful what you wish for. year's not over...
If Christ returned, I'd be an instant convert
I'd personally want to kill them for creating such evil and suffering in the world.
In the end, humans choose evil. Most people don't want to be a robot. So there is free will, free to choose. But when they could use free-will to do good they choose and do evil.
Babies get cancer. That's not humans choosing evil. If there is a god that created a baby just to get cancer and die before age 3, that god is evil.
That’s free will after Adam and Eve.
If you’re into that.
There are hospitals trying their best to help with that, and you have people bombing hospitals for babies with cancer.
Animals eat animals. Isn't that evil? By that entire life is cruel, and I don't get why a god should have to take blame for it. It just seems to push away responsibility of doing good vs evil.
Those people bombing hospitals are also evil. Stopping them from bombing hospitals wont stop babies from getting cancer. There can be (and are) multiple evil things and beings in life.
You seem to have forgotten the context of the comment chain. The grandparent comment of your comment that I replied to said that if Christ returned, the commenter would instantly convert. Christ returning would strongly imply that Christianity is correct. In Christianity, God is all knowing (omniscient) and all powerful (omnipotent). Being such a powerful god, if He doesn't stop babies from getting cancer in the first place, He is either evil or impotent.
Sounds like agnosticism to me 🤝🤝
But would you mind if it turned out to be a immensely powerful alien disguised as a guy from our own past ?
At least, that seems more likely to me...
If Batman appeared I would also immediately start believing in him.
That doesn't make me Batman-agnostic though.
Most atheists fall under the agnostic atheist banner
I've met a few gnostic atheists. They can be weird. Their non-believing can look very much like theism.
I once met an actual gnostic atheist missionary. He was standing on a Tesco parking lot with a self-made mobile display handing out hand-drawn leaflets about atheism. He was literally preaching on the street corner. Looked like one of them jehovas whitnesses until you got up close.
I really really do not want to be an atheist. But where is God?
Why?
what do you mean?
Because I don't wanna be a grumpy redditor with fingers covered in cheeto dust, jacking off to James Randi and Richard Dawkins arguing over who thinks the Bible is faker and gayer, with no magic to console me about the cruelty of the world, no afterlife to look forward to, stuck with the knowledge that this is all there is ever going to be.
I mean, I don't want to disbelieve in miracles and mystery, but we live in a society laugh track where God cannot be found. Everyone with magic gets debunked, every study that confirms a supernatural power seems to get slapped with accusations of fraud and "The File Drawer Effect", and the evidence continues to pile up for a Materialistic view of the universe where nothing is immaterial and everything is ultimately matter or springs up from it...
I don't want to be an Atheist, but if God's here I can't find him.
if that’s your idea of an atheist then i don’t want to imagine what you think muslims are like 😂
tbh most people in australia are atheists but have nothing to do with reddit
god etc just doesn’t come up
This is all? We live in a wonderland compared to even 100 years ago
Well it's what they tend to be here in Burgerland. The whole "rationalist" movement...
Seriously back on Facebook I couldn't even say I thought crystals looked pretty without fedoras telling me to "Go win the Randi prize!".. years after it stopped being offered..
As for Muslims.... since you asked...
I didn't really vibe with the Quran when I tried to read it but my experiences with those of the Islamic faith is that they're good people with good food, who'd like white people to stop blaming them for 9/11 (Which we all know Bush did anyway)
As long as he's capable of saving my soul.....
As long as I have a soul.....
After all, science distinguishable from magic is merely insufficiently advanced