• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • MHLoppy@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      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!

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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

    • flippinfreebird@lemmy.today
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      4 months ago

      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.”

    • 8baanknexer@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • Pulptastic@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        I can create real time visual imagery with no apparent resolution limit or perceptible frame rate including audio and a soundtrack.

        • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
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          4 months ago

          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

        • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          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.

    • Nangijala@feddit.dk
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      4 months ago

      The fact that we only recently mapped out the brain really tells you a lot about its complexity.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        4 months ago

        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.

          • mEEGal@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            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…

              • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                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.

                • ikt@aussie.zone
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                  4 months ago

                  I really really do not want to be an atheist

                  Why?

                  But where is God?

                  what do you mean?

                  • QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works
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                    4 months ago
                    1. 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.

                    2. 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.

            • QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works
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              4 months ago

              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

          • Deceptichum@quokk.au
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            4 months ago

            I’d personally want to kill them for creating such evil and suffering in the world.