In Defense of the Faith
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Jack Kinsella - Omega Letter Editor

Mankind can build computers that can calculate at speeds of billions of calculations per second. Following Moore's Law, by this time next year, the year after at the most, computers capable of making trillions of calculations per second will be routine.


But the smartest computers conceivable, despite the dizzying heights already achieved, pale beside the capabilities of a flesh-and-blood brain.
Consider, for a second, what is involved in reading this column. Your eyes scan the page, recognizing words, assembling the symbols they represent in your mind, to create a mental image.

Computers can read, they can process the symbols the words represent, and may even be able to reproduce a corresponding image, but they cannot CREATE an image.

Five people can read the same passage, and all five of them will get something different from it. No matter how sophisticated the machine, it can only process the raw data.

No passage of Scripture, no poem, no novel, no work of art can move or inspire a computer. Researchers at IBM attempted to simulate the ability of a flesh-and-blood brain by using a computer recently.

A team from the IBM Almaden Research Lab, working with the University of Nevada, ran a simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory.

Not to simulate a human brain. They set their sights on simulating one of God's simplest creations. They tried to simulate the brain of a mouse.


Using the most sophisticated computer systems on the face of the planet, the best they could do was simulate half a mouse's brain.

Half.

According to the researchers, teaching a computer to be as half as smart as a mouse puts, "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform".

The simulation ran for only ten seconds -- at a speed ten times slower -- meaning this vast collection of computer hardware and software took ten seconds to process what takes a real mouse less than a second to absorb.

Four thousand and ninety-six supercomputers, strung together. And the best that all those computers could do was simulate an extremely retarded mouse.

Think about it. A mouse can't write a symphony. Or design a new car. Or tie a shoelace. An extremely brilliant mouse can figure out how to push a button to gain access to a piece of cheese.

IBM's retarded mouse brain would take ten seconds to figure out that there WAS a piece of cheese. Another ten seconds to process how to push the button. And it could NEVER figure out that it was hungry, let alone that a mouse prefers cheese to, say, a rock.

Yet there are idiots who would argue that life is the product of random chance.

These same idiots find no inconsistency in the fact that thousands of humans working feverishly for thousands of hours, programming thousands of supercomputers, were barely able to simulate the mental capacity of a retarded mouse with a simulated frontal lobotomy.

And, when successfully simulating even half a mouse's brain working ten times as slowly as a real mouse, almost crashing the computer in the process, the simple accomplishment of simulating one of God's least brilliant creatures is hailed as a major scientific achievement.

They can't simulate even a whole mouse's brain, let alone a smart one, but the human brain that conceived of the computer in the first place, they argue, came into being by accident, a product of random chance with no Designer.

"I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well." (Psalms 139:14)

Three thousand years ago, before modern technology mapped the human genome, before modern medicine had any explanation for what it is that makes us tick, the Psalmist knew, "in his soul" that his existence could not have been the product of random chance.

Everything about life is unique and beyond the scope of human comprehension. NASA once estimated that it would cost a billion dollars to 'build' a tree.

Yet from a tiny acorn, the mighty oak doth grow, said the poet. The humanist would argue that man is his own supreme being, and that the world is what we make of it.

Really? Build a tree. Assemble an elephant. Or, even a mouse. Even half a mouse.

Even half a RETARDED mouse.

(my bold)

http://www.omegaletter.com/articles/...ArticleID=6106