EndOfMysteries: Are our actions really random? Our moods are based upon a release of chemicals in our brain, dopamine, etc. Our actions and reactions are based upon past experience, memories, stimulus of the senses, etc. A robot could be programmed to learn like a human, and if a reward system was programmed to match a human, then I think it's very possible for it to become self aware and learn as a person, but even exceed our intelligence.No, our actions are not random at all. They may be affected by various brain chemicals and systems, but I don't believe they cause intelligence as much as simply affect it. In recent studies, molecular imaging in conjunction with positron emission tomography are enabling researchers to now track levels of serotonin and endogenous opioids (naturally-occurring pain killers), determining how the brain functions (and malfunctions) when responding to environmental disruptions of a person's work, social, and family life. It also allows researchers to gague the effects of various treatments of abnormal brain functions.
Just today there's news that man's brain is far more comprehensive in its abilities than previously thought.
In an attempt to understand and measure the brain’s synapses, whose shape and size have remained mysterious to scientists, researchers at the University of Texas, Austin and the Salk Institute worked together to determine that the brain’s memory capacity is much larger than previously understood. The results, published in the journal eLife, estimate that an individual human brain may store as much as a petabyte of information—perhaps 10 times more than previously estimated, and about the equivalent of the World Wide Web.All that horsepower and nowhere to crank it up!
This raises an interesting field of study for evolutionists who must now consider just why that horsepower exists and how it developed. I'm just fascinated that it's there.Not only is the diversity of synapses they observed in such a small brain region surprising, the storage capacity of each is “markedly higher than previous suggestions,” write the authors. Prior to this, researchers believed an individual synapse was only capable of storing 1 to 2 bits of information. This suggests we may have underestimated the memory capacity of the brain, which has trillions of synapses, "by an order of magnitude."
According to lead author Terry Sejnowski, in whose lab the study was conducted, "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."