Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. In a recent viral social media post, a podcaster named Akash Gupta shared results from a 2024 study of the human brain. Study, he said, should mass humble every AI lab on the planet. That's a quote. In it, scientists digitally mapped a cubic millimeter of the human brain, equivalent to two grains of sand.
And the results, mind-boggling. The abstract for the paper described the spec as containing, and I quote, about 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and about 150 million synapses, comprising 1.4 petabytes.
Now, a petabyte is a measure of memory capacity.
So, as one website described it, a typical DVD holds 4.7 gigs of data. That means a single terabyte of storage would hold 217 DVD quality movies, while a single petabyte of storage Would hold over 220,000 DVD quality movies.
Now, since the whole human brain is much, much larger than a cubic millimeter, this spec, that means that every person is walking around with a few hundred million DVDs worth of data in their heads. And that, Gupta concluded, puts our work with AI within a much larger context. Quote, we're building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we're trying to imitate. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that. The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull.
The data center required to merely describe one millionth of it would span 140 acres. In other words, as impressive as their work is, the very best brains working in IT have a long way to go before their creations come close to what's inside an ordinary person's head. And yet it's notable that our very best creations are indeed imitations. Of what we find in biology. That is enough to paraphrase Aslan to erect the head of the poorest beggar and to bow the shoulders of the greatest AI engineer on earth.
In fact, every single one of us should always bow in amazement at what the great designer of the universe accomplishes each and every day. But instead, such neurological discoveries like this will often lead our brightest minds further into their own hubris. The amazing storage and calculating capacities of the human mind are just another gap in our understanding, they think, a gap that we've traditionally filled by the religious. The more we learn, the thinking goes, the less we'll need the placeholder fantasy of a creator god, a higher order, ultimate meaning to life. What's often missed in this analysis, however, are the reductionistic implications of a godless world.
In a materialist vision of the human person, the need for community is just herd instinct. Our love for our spouse, Bioprogramming to reproduce. We don't really love our children. What we feel is something that Richard Dawkins called the selfish gene. Not only is such a worldview morbid, it's a fallacy that begs the question.
As Brian Sickler noted in his book, God on the Brain, and I quote, before we start doing science, can we know ahead of time that no intelligent mind is behind the structures we're going to study? It seems the only way we could know that is if we have reason to think the only things that exist are the very natural objects we are setting out to study. But how would science show us that?
Well, it cannot. Instead, it's kind of like saying that once someone understands how the rotors on a drone work, there's no need for an operator behind it. It's to make the same mistake Eustace did in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader when he said that stars are made of gas. He's quickly corrected. Even in your world, my son, that's not what a star is, only what it's made of.
The truth is, like artificial intelligence, human intelligence is just far too complex to have ever happened by chance. Like a series of icebergs where there's always more under the surface, the deeper we go in our understanding of creation, especially the human brain, but from brain mechanics to quantum theory, the bigger all those gaps become. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Before I go today, I want to say thanks to Kelly of Friday Harbor, Washington. Thank you for being a Cornerstone Monthly partner of the Colson Center.
You helped make this episode of Breakpoint possible. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org.
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