Why "60 Terahertz" for conciousness ?

[jagec]

Originally posted by: BrownTown
On a completely die note, anyone know how many watts a brain consumes under load, and in idle? Would be kinda funny to know. See what the performance per watt is and such.

The brain requires on the order of 60W, IIRC. Interestingly enough, one of the differences between smart people and dumb people is the EFFICIENCY of their brain...in other words, a smart person will be able to accomplish a certain task without using much of their brain, whereas the dumber person has to "think harder" (and thus consume more glucose) to do the same task, and they don't even do it as quickly or well. So idle/load isn't really valid for the human brain.

edit: found it.

 

[Loki726]

You can't measure the processing power of the brain in terms of clock cycles because it is an asynchronous entity. There is no distributed clock signal that occurs at regular intervals that governs the transition of states.

The clock speed measurement of the brain comes from an era when people ranked the performance of processors in terms of clock speed. It should be obvious that performance is not measured by clock speed by rather by useful work done over a period of time.

Take a look at some neural networks (like atrifical ones created by researchers) and try to find the clock signal. You can't because it isn't there.

Clock speed is a useless metric to measure brain processing power.

 

[everman]

Originally posted by: Loki726
You can't measure the processing power of the brain in terms of clock cycles because it is an asynchronous entity. There is no distributed clock signal that occurs at regular intervals that governs the transition of states.

The clock speed measurement of the brain comes from an era when people ranked the performance of processors in terms of clock speed. It should be obvious that performance is not measured by clock speed by rather by useful work done over a period of time.

Take a look at some neural networks (like atrifical ones created by researchers) and try to find the clock signal. You can't because it isn't there.

Clock speed is a useless metric to measure brain processing power.

I think an appropriate unit of measure would be computations per second. From what I've read, some research says that the brain is somewhere around 10^16 - 10^19 computations per second in terms of computation power.

 

[kevinthenerd]

electrons != photons

 

[kevinthenerd]

60 THz = sci-fi shens, with one quote likely ripped off of the other. I like the theory, however, that THz is sufficiently fast for sci-fi and that 60 came from today's house wiring that they were thinking of

Now, here's MY question.... If I was shaving my face in the morning on board the USS Enterprise D, would my shaver use electricity or some other energy source? Do you think old-world oriented people like Picard would have used a straight razor in order to remain true to old-world roots?

 

[spikespiegal]

a smart person will be able to accomplish a certain task without using much of their brain, whereas the dumber person has to "think harder"

Explains why Republicans here eat so many donuts

 

[joebradshaw2000]

I think terahertz was picked because people have heard of terabytes. I estimate that you would need a petahertz processor:
100 billion neurons
100hz firing frequency
300 connections per neuron
= 3PHz!
I would suppose that the brain is a little inefficient too. Human brains are half the size of elephant brains but we totally kick their butts at Jeopardy and calculus. So if you had a reasonably efficient program to run on your 3PHz processor you ought to be able to get it to be all ironic and believe in God and that sort of thing.

 

[asearchforreason]

Originally posted by: joebradshaw2000
So if you had a reasonably efficient program to run on your 3PHz processor you ought to be able to get it to be all ironic and believe in God and that sort of thing.

Great, that's just what we need....robotic zealots

 

[tinyabs]

Elephants don't understand what each other is talking about. If they could, they will kick our butt instead.

 

[BucsMAN3K]

Originally posted by: dguy6789
I was under the impression that in Terminator 3, they stated that SkyNet was running at 60 teraflops, rather than 60 terahertz.

This would seem more accuracte as they seem to refer to super computer speeds in that light. I heard the 360 runs at 1.8 Teraflops. Anyone got around 30+ Xbox 360s they wanna somehow combine to take over the world?

 

[Polish3d]

My bad, it IS teraflops, but still, the "60 trillion" number is what struck me ... perhaps it is unrelated, perhaps not

I just figured it was some "popular notion" basis that the two stories were drawing from with respect to 'artificial' conciousness

 

[Sk8orDie]

I think reducing human intelligence to computations per second is faulty logic. The brain does a lot more than math and has numerous ways to learn and solve problems. For example, neurotransmitters are used by neurons to pass along singnals. But it's not just a fire or not fire. They can release different amounts I believe. Whether or not the next neuoron in the chain fires is a a result of the input of many neurons and different connectiosn have different strengths (if a neuor has inputs 1-20, 1-5 might be strong and one of them alone may cause the neuron to fire while 6-10 are weaker and would require 2 while 15-20 are inhibatory). Basically, neurons fire if their action potentials are reached. Also the brain rewires itself to learn. I think I'm rambling at this point, but all in all, I don't think it is possible to say the brain works at X cps and if you get a computer to run at X cps, you can mimic the brain. I also agree that the "software" is just as important, if not more so than the "hardware". Being able to create a connection on neurons doesn't equate to being able to make a conscience being.