The Thursday Thought - Intelligence

There's soo much to say about the human brain and intelligence I hope you don't mind if I first off just tell you a few things about it that I find ...interesting and then I'll get to all the questions that you know I have sitting in my head just waiting to come out.

Intelligence. It’s something everyone seams to claim to have. …though really only the few odd ones do. Our brain is made up of some 3.000.000.000 cells, a whole network of nerves, in a constant flow of communication, sending and receiving impulses to and from your body. A woderus thing if you think about it. That soo many ..or so few (depending on the way you look at it) cells can make up that huge control panel sending information out at the very same minuet and yet you don’t get all jumbled up and start to taste what you heard or heard what you tasted or something totally different. By definition the brain that uses less energy to solve a question is the brighter brain. say for example Professor Paul's brain would only have a tiny bit of his brain showing up in red on a infa red camera (showing that there is little activity) to answer the question of what Q*Q is and Professor ****** (this name has been censured) would have two times as much activity showing up on the infa red camera (while answering the same question). Professor Paul's brain would then be considered the 'brighter' one.

If you place a child who is between 18 and 24 months old in front of a mirror then it will recognise it self in the mirror. The thing is though that most of them believe that there are two of themselves and if asked to look for the other will infact start a search for the other them. Two and a half year olds and three year olds no longer do this. From that we conclude that the self - identity (me viedo ergo sum) is then fully formed. But how would a child react who hasn't grown up with mirrors? Tests have shown that children approximately the same age react the same everywhere and no matter how often they had been able to see their own reflection. If however one were to place a child in front of a mirror who hasn't been raised with them and then places an object above their head, they will not realize that the object is indeed there. How can that possibly be? how would the child even know what they look like? not being blind or having been blind I doubt the child would be able to use their other senses (say touch) to try to work that out for themselves but never the less they know who they are. ...how?!!! how could that possibly be? and it obviously isn't because they comprehend the way a mirror works (for they did not identify the object as 'real').

Some doctors believe that we are only under the elusion of actually acting and reacting ourselves. In truth it is a "egoistical Gene" that controls us. What is meant is that we don’t control ourselves and that we, as in the matrix are moved and generally controlled by something else.
Benjamin Libet, a Neuropsychologist, did an experiment that underlines that theory. He told the volunteers to close their hands. When to do this however was left up to them. While they were doing this he measured the brain activity. He noticed and could show that at the moment where the test person had decided to close their hand the signal had already been sent out and was on it's way to their hand.

It's that simple to compare us to a machine ...and really where is the difference between us and a machine? We can make a computer talk. We could make a computer learn and that's something that we really believe makes humans special right, to learn and develop things at such speed (in comparison to other animals)? Yet a computer could do that. Could do quite a few things even faster infact. So who can prove to me that this computer doesn't live? and that in the exact same way as you and I? If you can make a computer act like a person …is it then only acting like a person, miming feelings or is it actually feeling them? What about us? Could it be possible that humans don’t actually ‘feel’ feelings but much more believe that they do?

o the questions that arise and all of them merely because of those few paragraphs.