Topic: Dark Enlightenment - page 4. (Read 69319 times)

realized everything they believed about themselves and their craft had changed forever

... [detailed history]...

In short, I've been through 10 - 11 years of hell (or 22 years if you include the mistake of finding my ex in the Philippines), mostly because I decided to travel and live in a 3rd world country and also took pride/solace in being like Jesus and living amongst some of the most indigent people on earth. Big mistake!

Atheists can't admit their sins and that's why they have to attack against others to protect their own mental health from collapsing. That's basically what this is all about  

edit. Atheists are too prideful to admit their sins.

The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows.

The efficiency of the two systems depends on what SNR (signal to noise) ratio you need to maintain within the system.

One of the other differences between existing supercomputers and the brain is that neurons aren’t all the same size and they don’t all perform the same function. If you’ve done high school biology you may remember that neurons are broadly classified as either motor neurons, sensory neurons, and interneurons. This type of grouping ignores the subtle differences between the various structures — the actual number of different types of neurons in the brain is estimated between several hundred and perhaps as many as 10,000 — depending on how you classify them.

Compare that to a modern supercomputer that uses two or three (at the very most) CPU architectures to perform calculations and you’ll start to see the difference between our own efforts to reach exascale-level computing and simulate the brain, and the actual biological structure.

...

All three charts are interesting, but it’s the chart on the far right that intrigues me most. Relative efficiency is graphed along the vertical axis while the horizontal axis has bits-per-second. Looking at it, you’ll notice that the most efficient neurons in terms of bits transferred per ATP molecule (ATP is a biological unit of energy equivalent to bits-per-watt in computing) is also one of the slowest in terms of bits per second. The neurons that can transfer the most data in terms of bits-per-second are also the least efficient.

So a typical adult human brain runs on around 12 watts—a fifth of the power required by a standard 60 watt lightbulb. Compared with most other organs, the brain is greedy; pitted against man-made electronics, it is astoundingly efficient. IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that defeated Jeopardy! champions, depends on ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which requires around one thousand watts.

A recent psychological study concluded that moral outrage is sometimes a symptom of personal guilt rather than genuine empathy for the situation of others.
The study, which was conducted by Bowdoin psychology Professor Zachary Rothschild and University of Southern Mississippi psychology Professor Lucas A. Keefer, concludes that the research on guilt suggests that moral outrage over hot-button issues is sometimes self-serving.

According to the study:

Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one’s sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt finds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one’s actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group’s moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity.

Rothschild and Keefer conducted an experiment in which they assessed the relationship of various emotions. The first portion of their research concluded that the level of a subject’s personal guilt uniquely predicted that individual’s level of moral outrage in response to a controversial stimulus. “Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment,” the research concludes.

Based on their findings, the study’s authors argue that “outrage driven by moral identity concerns serves to compensate for the threat of personal or collective immorality.”

According to the research’s abstract, one of the several studies conducted by Rothschild and Keefer concluded that outrage is often driven by a desire to affirm a certain moral identity in an unrelated societal context: “Study 5 showed that guilt-driven outrage was attenuated by an affirmation of moral identity in an unrelated context.”