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by pixl97 1043 days ago
If instead of saying brain you say "The most complicated structure found in the known universe so far" it starts to make a little more sense on the enormity of the problem at hand.

Most organs are composed of one or only a few types of cells and their particular arrangement doesn't matter that much. For example swapping kidneys between people doesn't change who they are (mostly, smaller edge conditions apply here). But we can't swap brains because the brain encodes your 'youness'.

1 comments

You can also think of "the brain" as a collection of 10-20 separate organs, rather than one super complex one.
While true, the complexity of each organelle in the brain is still much higher than that of the typical organ elsewhere in the body. That and there is a high degree of connectivity and feedback between components where the API is completely and totally undocumented. It's not that you don't know what the known API calls do, you don't have any clue on how many API calls there even are. Accidently emulating one of these calls when attempting to trigger a different behavior can lead to wildly unexpected outcomes.
The fact that these APIa are undocumented clearly disproves the existence of a (benevolent) God.
I just love the programmer's analogy here.
Those 10-20 organs are all individually super complex…