Our brains are wonderful, parallel processing computers operating at a scale that never will be matched by machines.
If you look into the IBM supercomputer, Watson, that won on Jeopardy, you’ll find that it used parallel computing to split the clues up, searching millions of documents, coming up with hundreds of possible answers, and then dividing itself again, sending out hundreds of thousands of processes tasked to find evidence supporting each conclusion. Then it weighed up the most likely answer, measuring its confidence level using statistics gathered during all of the preceding steps.
Watson has its own population of processes who go out, investigate, compare notes, and then report back. It splits itself into armies, those into divisions, and those into teams.
Your brain works in the same way, sort of, except it doesn’t settle with ones and zeros. Each neuron measures its confidence level based on what its hearing and then makes a decision about what it will say to its followers.
The brain is split into armies — huge sections, each tasked with a global task, like memory, like eyesight, etc. And each army is split into divisions — smaller units that deal with specifics, like seeing color, or catching motion.
God works in this way, except you are one of His independent processing units — a neuron in a brain as large as the Universe itself.
The same philosophical wonder applies to the God and the Universe as does to our own quest. We’re using our brains to understand our brains.
I hope you’ll hook it up that you are your brain. Your friends with brains are helping you understand your brain. Essentially, we’re all different instances of the same thing trying to understand itself.
I hope you’ll also hook it up that God and humans, for all practical purposes except scale, are instances of the same thing.
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