ChatGPT still can't compete with human brain

 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!

Psalm 139:14 NLT

"The public release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, astonished the world. 

The spell was hard to resist. Bill Gates said that ChatGPT was “every bit as important as the PC, as the internet.”
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick predicted that the productivity gains might be larger than the gains from steam power.
In a seeming competition for the most exaggerated claims, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, proclaimed that, it is “more profound than fire” and Turing winner Geoffrey Hinton declared, “I think it’s comparable in scale with the Industrial Revolution or electricity — or maybe the wheel.”

Marc Andreessen spoke for many when he described it as, “Pure, absolute, indescribable magic.”

ChatGPT and its competitors, in all their iterations, 

--are still just text-generators based on statistical patterns in the text databases they train on. 

--They do not know how words relate to the real world. 

They are consequently unable to do many of the things human brains can do 

--including assessing the validity of the text they input and output, 

--engaging in critical thinking, 

--and applying common sense. 

Human trainers may clean up some of the obvious mistakes made by large language models (LLMs) but such cleansing does not give LLMs human powers of reasoning and understanding.el.

There will continue to be modest improvements in their responses (assisted by human trainers), but the identification of statistical patterns in text they do not understand is not going to give us AGI, let alone superintelligence." 

MindMatters

All Things "By Him" via His MATHEMATICS

 And He is before all things, 

and by Him all things consist. 

Colossians 1:17

"A team of scientists at Australia’s Monash University has “discovered a new universal rule of biological growth that explains surprising similarities in the shapes of sharp structures” across a vast array of living things.

It seems that the growth of all sharp biological structures follows the same mathematical law, called a ‘power law’. 

*This defines the relationship between the width and length of a structure as it grows—for example, an elephant’s tusk.

Such a huge sweep across vastly different life forms means evolutionists cannot use a common ancestor as an explanation. Rather, it suggests some pervasive physical reason.
Our universe is governed by many precise and universal physical-mathematical laws, reflecting its lawgiving Creator. Many medieval founders of science, such as Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, and Thomas Bradwardine taught that the Creator upheld the creation in the language of mathematics." 

CMI

Between Our Ears

I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:

Psalm 139:14

"The human brain is an engineering marvel that evokes comments from researchers like “beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief”.

Q: Why do discoveries about the brain evoke such startling

statements from secular scientists? 

---The main reason is that random, purposeless evolution and its imaginary processes are entirely unable to account for the brain’s seemingly infinite complexity.

The scientists found that at multiple hierarchical levels in the whole brain, nerve cell clusters (ganglion), and even at the individual cell level, the positioning of neural units achieved a goal that human engineers strive for but find difficult to achieve—the perfect minimizing of connection costs among all the system’s components.

Researchers discovered that a single synapse is like a computer’s microprocessor containing both 

--memory-storage and 

--information-processing features. 

The previous oversimplified belief was that synapses acted like basic on/off switches—but nothing could be further from the truth since the brain acts more like a quantum computer than a digital computer. Just one synapse alone can contain about 1,000 molecular-scale microprocessor units acting in a quantum computing environment. An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses. 

Scientists discovered that the branched projections of neurons

(dendrites) are not merely passive conduits but are electrically active in animal brains and generate nearly 10 times more electrical spikes than the main body of the neuron cell (called a soma).
These new results overturned the long-held belief that electrical spikes in the soma are the primary way in which the mental processes of perception, learning, and memory formation occur. While the somas produce all-or-nothing spikes of electricity like a digital signal, the dendrites are hybrid systems performing both analog and digital transactions. 

Once again, this is more evidence of quantum computer-like brain engineering operating at warp speed levels. The large number of dendritic spikes also means the brain has more than 100 times the computational capabilities than was previously believed. 

While humans are only beginning to develop quantum computing devices, the Creator engineered our brains at a much more complicated, compact, and efficient level at the beginning of creation.

Yet another recent discovery revealed incredible levels of memory storage in the human brain. Dr. Sejnowski perhaps also unwittingly framed the results using designed-based thinking when he explained:
"We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."

What a mighty Creator we have who can engineer

 that much memory between our ears. 

Nothing engineered by humans even comes close." 

ICR

What the Brain Can't Do Tells Us.....

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7

"Penfield could find no part of the brain that, when stimulated, caused patients to think abstractly—to reason, think logically, do mathematics or philosophy or exercise free will.

He noticed the same thing about epileptic seizures as about stimulation during surgery. Patients who were having seizures did all sorts of things—they jerked their muscles, they saw flashes of light or had unusual sensations on their skin. They even occasionally had specific memories and emotions. Then they fell unconscious.
But patients never had intellectual seizures. That is, they never had seizures that caused them to reason, think logically, or do mathematics or philosophy.

Penfield asked the obvious question: why did brain stimulation only cause certain mental operations, like movement, perception, memory and emotion to happen, but not other ones, like abstract thought and free will?

Penfield started out as a materialist, like most scientists do, but, as he learned more about the mind and the brain he became a dualist. He concluded in his book Mystery of the Mind (1975) that the mind is something separate from the brain, and that there are aspects of the mind that don’t come from the brain but are spiritual in nature. As he put it, “The mind must be viewed as a basic element in itself . . .” (p. xxi.)

Neuroscience shows us that the brain is an organ, like the heart or the liver, that has specific jobs to do. The brain orchestrates our bodily processes (sometimes called vegetative functions)—our heart rate, our blood pressure, our hormone levels and so on. The brain is the source of our ability to move, to perceive, to remember and to have emotions.

But the brain is not the source of our intellect or our free will.

We are created by God with some abilities that are physical and some abilities that are not strictly physical—i.e., that are spiritual, created in His Image."
Michael Egnor

Hierarchical Organization for Music

 I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: 

Psalm 139:14

The Brain---Made for Music.....

"Ever heard a snippet of a song and instantly known what comesnext? 

Or picked up the rhythm of a chorus after just a few notes? 

New research from the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University has found that our brains process music through a specific hierarchical activation of several regions.

Bonetti and his colleagues found that when participants recognized the original memorized sequences, their brain activity followed a specific hierarchical pattern. 

This pattern began 

---in the auditory cortex, the region responsible for processing basic sound information, 

---and progressed to the hippocampus and cingulate gyrus, areas associated with memory and cognitive evaluation.

When variations were introduced into the sequences, the brain generated prediction errors. 

These errors started in the auditory cortex and then spread to the hippocampus, anterior cingulate gyrus, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. 

Notably, the anterior cingulate gyrus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex exhibited their strongest responses when the variations were introduced.

The study also uncovered a consistent brain hierarchy characterized

by feedforward and feedback connections. Feedforward connections from the auditory cortices to the hippocampus and cingulate gyrus, along with simultaneous feedback connections in the opposite direction, were observed.

This hierarchical organization was consistent for both previously memorized and varied sequences, although the strength and timing of the brain responses varied. This suggests that while the overall structure of brain processing remains stable, the dynamics change depending on whether the sequence is familiar or novel.

“Our study shows that the brain processes music by activating several brain regions in a specific, hierarchical order,” 

Bonetti told PsyPost. “Initially, sensory regions like the auditory cortex handle basic sound features. Then, this information is passed to a larger network of regions that arguably analyze the sounds more deeply, including the relationships between them (such as musical intervals). This process helps the brain determine if the sequence of sounds is familiar or new.”
PsyPost

Your Spatio-Temporal Brain Dynamics

 Thank You for making me so wonderfully complex!

Psalm 139:14

"MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have been seeking to uncover why certain images persist in people's minds, while many others fade. To do this, they set out to map the spatio-temporal brain dynamics involved in recognizing a visual image.

"We've identified a brain signature of visual memorability that

emerges around 300 milliseconds after seeing an image, 

---involving areas across the ventral occipital cortex and temporal cortex, 

---which processes information like color perception and object recognition. 

This signature indicates that highly memorable images prompt stronger and more sustained brain responses, especially in regions like the early visual cortex, which we previously underestimated in memory processing."

"These findings are exciting because they give us insight into what is happening in the brain between seeing something and saving it into memory," says Wilma Bainbridge. "The researchers here are picking up on a cortical signal that reflects what's important to remember, and what can be forgotten early on." 

MedicalXpress

Metals of Life

 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

Romans 1:21

"A look at the periodic table of the elements and examination of the elemental make-up of living organisms can quickly confirm Genesis 1 which states that man is formed from the dust of the earth. 

There are about 92 naturally occurring elements in the periodic table. Approximately 25% of these are considered essential to life.  

The use of metals by life is so prevalent and important that, as stated by Robert J. P. Williams of Oxford University, “there is no biology without metal ions.” 

At least a third of all enzymes use one or more metal ions to catalyze their reactions. Metal ions are used to help position substrates in enzyme active sites, to provide electron “sinks,” and/or serve as a source of electrons during catalysis. 

They function as structural support for many proteins and conduct electrons to oxygen within the electron transport chain in mitochondria for energy production.

Iron (Fe2+/3+)
The electron configuration of iron makes it more effective than other metals for the reversible binding of oxygen in hemoglobin. This property allows hemoglobin not only to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood, but also to release sufficient quantities of oxygen to the tissues as needed. Perhaps one of the most important roles for iron is its participation in the electron transport chain (ETC) of the mitochondrial inner membrane. 

The ETC consists of several iron-sulfur complexes, which conduct electrons from reduced molecules ultimately to oxygen to form water. In this process an electrochemical gradient of H+s is generated across the inner membrane. The potential energy in this gradient is used to synthesize the high-energy compound known as adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. While ATP is not the only high-energy compound in the cell, it is the main energy currency for virtually all cells.

Molybdenum (Mo)
Molybdenum has multiple oxidation states from 0 to +6. Together with two other transition metals, iron and cobalt, molybdenum is

uniquely configured to serve in the catalytic center of two enzymes, nitrogenase and nitrogen reductase. These two enzymatic activities are essential to all life as these function in the fixation of nitrogen into organic compounds. As stated in the previous article on gases, animals and humans obtain all their nitrogen needs through food. If not for these two specifically designed enzymes, plants, animals, and humans would not be able to make DNA, proteins, and the many other molecules critical for life.

Cobalt (Co2+)
As stated above, Co2+ plays significant roles in nitrogen fixation. However, humans use it for very different purposes. We obtain Co2+ in the form of vitamin B12, or cobalamin. Without this vitamin, and the cobalt component, we could not resynthesize the amino acid

methionine from what we ingest and other compounds. When proteins are made by the cell, the first amino acid to be incorporated is methionine. This is true for bacteria as well as humans. Thus without the ability to resynthesize methionine, we would have to obtain much more of it in our diet; protein synthesis could be severely compromised. Insufficient amounts of B12/Co2+ in the diet can lead to a potentially fatal condition known as pernicious anemia. Not only could we not resynthesize methionine without cobalt, but we also could not completely metabolize certain fatty acids we get when we eat plants.

Copper (Cu2+/3+)
Copper, another transition metal, is best suited for use by superoxide

dismutase, an enzyme critical for the destruction of toxic oxygen free radicals. An iron-copper center also serves as the final electron donor to oxygen in the cytochrome oxidase complex, the final component of the electron transport chain in mitochondria. 

The process of photosynthesis also requires copper to be complexed to various proteins serving as electron carriers.

Manganese (Mn2+)
Manganese is not as commonly used as some of the other transition metals, but where it is used is of extreme importance. 

The enzyme superoxide dismutase has a mitochondrial form of the enzyme, which uses Mn2+ rather than a copper-zinc complex used by the cytoplasmic form.
Manganese, along with calcium, plays an integral role in the photolysis of water molecules by photosystem II in plants undergoing the “light” reactions of photosynthesis. This set of reactions long baffled scientists because they knew it takes a lot of energy to photolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen. Yet God, in his infinite wisdom, devised a mechanism using a specific arrangement of Ca2+ and Mn2+ atoms and the energy from sunlight.

Calcium (Ca2+)
With few exceptions, no metal plays such an integral role in so many diverse processes of a cell as calcium. Calcium is an essential structural component of bone, providing it with the rigid strength necessary for supporting body weight and for muscle attachment involved in movement and locomotion. 

It is the essential metal used in blood clotting, binding to and

activating the various clotting factors involved in this process. All neural transmission across a synapse is dependent upon the intracellular Ca2+ concentration. Low Ca2+ would compromise neural transmission. Likewise, too much Ca2+ would also adversely affect neural transmission. Many cells use calcium as an intracellular “second messenger.” 

A second messenger is a small, diffusible molecule, or ion, found inside cells. Certain hormones, when bound to their target cells, will elicit the release of Ca2+ inside the cell. Calcium then binds to a protein known as calmodulin, and the Ca2+-calmodulin complex then binds to and activates various other proteins, leading to a cascade of cellular events, culminating in a response by the cell. The calcium second messenger also aids in activating a protein kinase C, which adds phosphoryl groups to other proteins, leading to either their activation or their inhibition. 

Calcium is absolutely essential for muscle contraction. All three types of muscle (skeletal, smooth, and cardiac) rely on proper Ca2+ concentrations in the cells. In the heart the strength of contraction is directly dependent upon the Ca2+ concentration; the higher the concentration, the stronger the contraction.

Not all metals are designed to be integral parts of living organisms. Indeed, part of the habitability of earth is the fact that many of the elements have more than one purpose and are designed to be used by man to construct buildings for shelter, vehicles for transportation and countless other items which together extend habitability of various regions on earth that would otherwise not be very hospitable to life.
However, a study of the roles that metals play in life shows that each has been uniquely designed by a wise Creator to carry out specific and complex functions essential for life.

To deny this is to be willfully ignorant of the many “fingerprints” God has left for us to find throughout His creation." 

AIG

DESIGN of Smell Process

 See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD hath blessed... Genesis 27:27

 

"The human nose is designed to detect a trillion smells......Sensory neurons in the nose 

--detect odor molecules 

--and relay signals to the olfactory bulb, a structure in the forebrain where initial odor processing occurs. 

--The olfactory bulb primarily transmits information to the piriform cortex, the main structure of the olfactory cortex, for more comprehensive processing.

As a person inhales through the nose, the air with the ordorant molecules goes across millions of olfactory neurons in the nasal cavity. 

These specially-designed neurons have surface receptors called GPCRs (G-Protein Coupled Receptors). 

The odorant molecule—called a ligand—specifically binds with a G-protein receptor and immediately causes a biochemical cascade of reactions (intracellular adenyl cyclase components) within the neuron.
When a volatile molecule [ligand] is recognized by a [G-protein] receptor, it is activated 

---and generates a signal that is transmitted to the olfactory bulb in the brain, 

---a signal that is then translated into an odor.....olfactory neurons are not to be considered as sensors simply passing from a resting state to a stimulated state, but that their identity is in permanent [change], not only according to the expressed receptor but also according to past experiences. 

This discovery adds another level to the complexity and flexibility of the olfactory system...."

ICR

The Brains Dividing Line Between Order & Chaos

 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! 

Psalm 139:14

"By walking a tightrope between order and chaos, researchers could one day make computer chips work more like the human brain.
Researchers created conditions at the "edge of chaos," a transition point between order and disorder that allows for rapid information transmission, in an electronic device.

It allowed the scientists to amplify a signal transmitted across a wire without using a separate amplifier — overcoming any signal loss due to electrical resistance.
But many researchers have theorized that the human brain operates on a similar principle.
---Each neuron has an axon, a cable-like appendage that transmits electrical signals to nearby neurons. 

---Those electrical signals help your brain perceive your surroundings and control your body.
Axons range from 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) to more than 3 feet (1 meter) in length. Transmitting an electrical signal across a wire of the same length leads to signal loss, caused by the resistance of the wire. Computer chip designers get around that issue by inserting amplifiers between shorter wires to boost the signal.
But axons don’t need separate amplifiers — they’re self-amplifying and can transmit electrical signals without much signal loss. Some researchers think that they exist at the edge of chaos, which allows them to amplify small fluctuations in electrical signals without letting those signals grow out of control." 

Live Science