How do you think human intelligence works? Perhaps by doing a massive parallel search to approximate the best solution?
This is just an educated guess, but to me massive parallel search feels very unlikely for human intelligence. To do something “massive parallel”, you need a lot of (almost) identical hardware. If you want to run the same algorithm 100 times in parallel, you need 100 instances of the (almost) same hardware. Otherwise—how can you run that in parallel?
Some parts of human brain work like that, as far as I know. The visual part of the brain, specifically. There are many neurons implementing the same task: scanning an input from a part of retina, detecting lines, edges, and whatever. This is why image recognition is extremely fast and requires a large part of the brain dedicated to this task.
Seems to me (but I am not an expert) that most of the brain functionality is not like this. Especially the parts related to thinking. Thinking is usually slow and needs to be learned—which is the exact opposite of how the massively parallelized parts work.
EDIT: Unless by massive parallel human intelligence you meant multiple people working on the same problem.
Seems to me (but I am not an expert) that most of the brain functionality is not like this. Especially the parts related to thinking. Thinking is usually slow and needs to be learned—which is the exact opposite of how the massively parallelized parts work.
I’m not an expert either, but from what I’ve read on the subject, most of the neocortex does work like this. The architecture used in the visual cortex is largely the same as that used in the rest of the cortex, with some minor variations. This is suggested by the fact that people who lose an area of their neocortex are often able to recover, with another area filling in for it. I’m on a phone, so I can’t go into as much detail as I’d like, but I recommend investigating the work of Mountcastle, and more recently Markram.
Edit: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins explains this principle in more depth, it’s an interesting read.
This is just an educated guess, but to me massive parallel search feels very unlikely for human intelligence. To do something “massive parallel”, you need a lot of (almost) identical hardware. If you want to run the same algorithm 100 times in parallel, you need 100 instances of the (almost) same hardware. Otherwise—how can you run that in parallel?
Some parts of human brain work like that, as far as I know. The visual part of the brain, specifically. There are many neurons implementing the same task: scanning an input from a part of retina, detecting lines, edges, and whatever. This is why image recognition is extremely fast and requires a large part of the brain dedicated to this task.
Seems to me (but I am not an expert) that most of the brain functionality is not like this. Especially the parts related to thinking. Thinking is usually slow and needs to be learned—which is the exact opposite of how the massively parallelized parts work.
EDIT: Unless by massive parallel human intelligence you meant multiple people working on the same problem.
I’m not an expert either, but from what I’ve read on the subject, most of the neocortex does work like this. The architecture used in the visual cortex is largely the same as that used in the rest of the cortex, with some minor variations. This is suggested by the fact that people who lose an area of their neocortex are often able to recover, with another area filling in for it. I’m on a phone, so I can’t go into as much detail as I’d like, but I recommend investigating the work of Mountcastle, and more recently Markram.
Edit: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins explains this principle in more depth, it’s an interesting read.