I recently acquired a really interesting book about the human brain titled:

"Mapping the MInd" by Rita Carter

There's a lot in this book but I'm too lazy to write a full book report.

I'm not certain that I believe everything that Carter wrote but her points are still interesting. One theme through out her book is that our brain is essentially an extremely complex machine and that most human behavior can be explained through various mechanistic processes of the brain. A point Carter made repeatedly is our consciousness comes from our frontal lobes. If the frontal lobes are cut away through lobotomy or accident then a person afflicted becomes computer-like and is only able to run canned programs. Carter claims that many criminals and psychopaths actually have damaged frontal lobes and are incapable of empathy or higher consciousness. She tries to make a political point about this but I'm not exactly certain what her point was, e.g. are criminals also vicitims and/or should we execute all criminals because they're physically damaged and beyond repair? However Carter muddles those sorts of arguments when she quotes Penrose who speculated that the brain maybe a quantum computer. Even though I've programmed computers for over 30 years, I have to admit that I don't understand what a quantum computer is or how they operate. However based upon my limited understanding, a quantum computer allows a near instanteous process to extract one solution from the chaos containing an infinite number of possible solutions. One could argue that a quantum computer driven by 10^12 neurons should be almost omniscent. Of course this contradicts everyday experience that most people are "dumb as dirt".

On the subject insect brain power: Supposably an ordinary house fly has something like 50,000 neurons. Assuming 10 neurons have the same compute power as one microprocessor leads to the conclusion that your ordinary fly has the same compute power as a Beowulf cluster with 5000 AMD Opterons in it (that's alot of compute power). We human beings have 100,000,000 times the compute power of a fly. This makes me believe that one does not need the "TV magic" of quantum computers to explain why we can do what we do. This also explains why computers have not yet shown any signs of artificial intelligence.

Gary