You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

D2AEFEA1 comments on Question about brains and big numbers - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: XiXiDu 17 April 2012 11:57AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (24)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: D2AEFEA1 17 April 2012 02:26:54PM *  3 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand your question.

I guess part of my point is that a laptop processor is a very general purpose tool, while the human brain is a collection of specialized modules. Also, the more general a tool is, the less efficient it will be on average for any task.

The human brain might be seen as a generalist, but not in the same way a laptop computer processor is.

Besides, even a laptop processor has certain specializations and advantages over the human brain in certain narrow domains, like for instance among others, number crunching and fast arithmetic operations.