It is actually pretty interesting: the software that tries to do something highly parallelizable that brain does, always ends up requiring within the ballpark of how many operations per second neurons do in parallel. If we are to talk Avatar, more interesting is the fact that this much computing power is necessary to fool you, within the ballpark of the power of visual cortex, 'naively' computed. Likewise for other things. Even for things that are pretty narrow, where brain performs badly, like Chess, the computing power required is quite formidable. Much moreso for something like Go.
The belief that your abilities are doable without immense number crunching is the notion of overly optimistic AI researchers of the 1960s. It's been obsoleted everywhere but here. Here you have this notion that brain hardware is somehow very 'badly designed' by evolution, never mind that it packs immense operations per second into small volume and small power consumption, with the only major failure being the use of organic materials rather than silicon. And you have the notion that the software is equally very bad. And total lack of awareness why world doesn't think its true any more.
From time to time I encounter people who claim that our brains are really slow compared to even an average laptop computer and can't process big numbers.
At the risk of revealing my complete lack of knowledge of neural networks and how the brain works, I want to ask if this is actually true?
It took massive amounts of number crunching to create movies like James Cameron's Avatar. Yet I am able to create more realistic and genuine worlds in front of my minds eye, on the fly. I can even simulate other agents. For example, I can easily simulate sexual intercourse between me and another human. Which includes tactile and olfactory information.
I am further able to run real-time egocentric world-simulations to extrapolate and predict the behavior of physical systems and other agents. You can do that too. Having a discussion or playing football are two examples.
Yet any computer can outperform me at simple calculations.
But it seems to me, maybe naively so, that most of my human abilities involve massive amounts of number crunching that no desktop computer could do.
So what's the difference? Can someone point me to some digestible material that I can read up on to dissolve possible confusions I have with respect to my question?