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Fragment of a discussion from User talk:Sheldor
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That still isn't a supercomputer, that is just a storage network. But if I recall the storage capacity of the human brain is still in dispute. Some say its incredibly vast (like you did just now), others claim it is just better at storing the information. I am more in the second camp.

It isn't compression exactly. I would say it is more of useless information is discarded, and useful information is only partially stored. Say I may learn something, but if I never use it, i'll forget its meaning. Meaning my brain got rid that useless information because it was never used. Studies show we forget up to 75% of what we learn on a daily basis. Of course if it got used a lot at some point it will stay in there for future use, though the exact details will get fuzzy with disuse.

It will go from "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." to "fox jumped over dogs" to "fox (general notion of going over) dog". That makes no sense, so fox... oh, over the dog. What can we use to go over a dog. Well we could jump, or we could hover, fly. But a fox cannot hover or fly, so it was probably jump. So we reconstruct it to be "the fox jumped over the dog." Information was lost, but the general meaning remained.

To further enforce this, I had forgot part of the original saying above. I had lost 'quick'. But then I remembered that oh, its one of those sentences that uses all the letters. I noticed it didn't have a 'q' in it. So I suddenly recalled, oh, "Quick". Well the dog isn't quick, I don't think it quickly jumped, so the fox must be the one who was quick, as most foxes are.

Chase18:38, 4 March 2013

Okay, so a normal personal computer, with extremely large memory and much more storage, running very smart software could be conscious.

But, why bother? What's so great about consciousness? Really, the only advantage brains have over computers is their ability to recognize patterns.

Sheldor19:51, 4 March 2013