You're right. The human brain's serial computing ability is very restricted, but its parallel computing capabilities are tremendously powerful. A good example of this, contrasting with artificial computing devices, its their limitation in processing speech and vision data as well as learning!
I agree with you. But my point is the following: from the localization of the brain's coordinating area it cannot be inferred that -as it was afirmed in the original post- the human brain is the most powerful computing device in the Universe. Well, for some functions it is and for others it isn't; and that's for computing those functions for wich it doesn't have much computing power to effectively solve in a useful period of time, that computers were developed. and that is precisely the problem that Pascal, Leibniz, Babbage, Church, Turing, Von Neumann, Zuse, Atanasoff and many others atacked with their machines (logical or physical), or their blueprints.
Now, this leads us to other question: will the development of Artificial Neural Networks lead to the production of such machines that exceed those of the human in what regards paralell processing, learning, vision and speech recognition/synthesis? I don't know. But 50 years ago who would know that a Von Neumann machine would play chess ABOVE grandmaster status?
Of course the human brain is a very powerful computer: just consider its awesome ability to process vision and speech data -amongst others- wich it's due to the power of its 100 billions of neurons and 100 trillions of synaptic connections (cf. Paul Churchland's "The Engine of Reason, the Seat of Soul", MIT Press). On the other hand, the human brain can compute functions not computable by Turing-complete machines (such as our PC's).
But to claim that the human brain is "THE most powerful computer" based on the news that, finally, the coordinating center of brain activities has been found is too much daring, in my opinion. Please do mind that the human brain isn't as powerful a computer as Von Neumann machines: just consider chess!
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You're right. The human brain's serial computing ability is very restricted, but its parallel computing capabilities are tremendously powerful. A good example of this, contrasting with artificial computing devices, its their limitation in processing speech and vision data as well as learning!
I agree with you. But my point is the following: from the localization of the brain's coordinating area it cannot be inferred that -as it was afirmed in the original post- the human brain is the most powerful computing device in the Universe. Well, for some functions it is and for others it isn't; and that's for computing those functions for wich it doesn't have much computing power to effectively solve in a useful period of time, that computers were developed. and that is precisely the problem that Pascal, Leibniz, Babbage, Church, Turing, Von Neumann, Zuse, Atanasoff and many others atacked with their machines (logical or physical), or their blueprints.
Now, this leads us to other question: will the development of Artificial Neural Networks lead to the production of such machines that exceed those of the human in what regards paralell processing, learning, vision and speech recognition/synthesis? I don't know. But 50 years ago who would know that a Von Neumann machine would play chess ABOVE grandmaster status?
Of course the human brain is a very powerful computer: just consider its awesome ability to process vision and speech data -amongst others- wich it's due to the power of its 100 billions of neurons and 100 trillions of synaptic connections (cf. Paul Churchland's "The Engine of Reason, the Seat of Soul", MIT Press). On the other hand, the human brain can compute functions not computable by Turing-complete machines (such as our PC's).
But to claim that the human brain is "THE most powerful computer" based on the news that, finally, the coordinating center of brain activities has been found is too much daring, in my opinion. Please do mind that the human brain isn't as powerful a computer as Von Neumann machines: just consider chess!