> A fruit fly has more processing power than a fungus, by orders of magnitude.
My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. Can you please explain to me the relationship between processing power and consciousness?
> My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds.
The classic counter-point to the speed difference here is that biological brains are massively parallel - no synchronized system clock, every logical element acting async and in parallel - so that the number of operations per second per element may be tiny (say 10s per second) while the throughput of the entire system is massive.
It's similar logic to deeply pipe-lined processor architectures - pipelining may slow down execution of a particular instruction but allow greater global throughput.
Also, the logical operations performed by neurons (I believe neuron behavior is modeled using differential equations) appear significantly more complex than the boolean switching behavior of the logic gates in CPUs. So the amount of computation may be significantly larger than it appears.
Ignoring confounding algorithmic factors, the very rough consensus for human brain appears to be 10^16 FLOPS. A modern RTX3090 GPU has 10^13 FLOPS. I doubt your laptop has 1000x the compute of a high-end desktop GPU.
My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds. Can you please explain to me the relationship between processing power and consciousness?