But it seems to me, maybe naively so, that most of my human abilities involve massive amounts of number crunching that no desktop computer could do.
I think it’s an unfair comparison because you are allowed to cheat. You don’t have to produce 1500×1000 pixels, 25 times per second, consistently, with correct lights and reflections, etc. Different minds may work differently, but I suspect there is a lot of cheating. A bad result may seem OK, because you are allowed to fix any detail at the moment you start paying attention to it; you don’t even have to notice that you are doing this.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if human brain would be really faster in some tasks—those we are optimized for by evolution, such as image processing. Visual part of brain does some massive parallel computation, and if a task allows parallel computation, many slow computers can outperfom one fast computer (or a smaller group of fast computers).
Both effects may work together—we have parallel hardware optimization for image processing and we are allowed to give imprecise answers and even cheat.
I think it’s an unfair comparison because you are allowed to cheat. You don’t have to produce 1500×1000 pixels, 25 times per second, consistently, with correct lights and reflections, etc. Different minds may work differently, but I suspect there is a lot of cheating. A bad result may seem OK, because you are allowed to fix any detail at the moment you start paying attention to it; you don’t even have to notice that you are doing this.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if human brain would be really faster in some tasks—those we are optimized for by evolution, such as image processing. Visual part of brain does some massive parallel computation, and if a task allows parallel computation, many slow computers can outperfom one fast computer (or a smaller group of fast computers).
Both effects may work together—we have parallel hardware optimization for image processing and we are allowed to give imprecise answers and even cheat.