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I can't shake the feel that this parallelism thing will be nothing but a wild goose chase, because nature seems to be highly serial in all but the most macrosco

I can't shake the feel that this parallelism thing will be nothing but a wild goose chase, because nature seems to be highly serial in all but the most macroscopic of senses.

pjc50 9y ago
All of your cells and neurons operate in parallel.
- adwn 9y ago
  And yet you only have a single train of thought [1] – or multiple interleaved trains, but that's concurrency, not parallelism. [1] Plus a couple of background processes, like breathing, that execute in parallel.
  - boomlinde 9y ago
    That's a huge simplification not pertaining to the fundamental nature of the brain. Maybe it is in the nature of our consciousness (which in itself is probably only an abstract concept) to perceive the processes it emerges from as a sequence of single trains of thought rather than a chaotic, continuous consolidation of processes both internal to the brain/body and outside of it. You could look at society as a whole and see the zeitgeist as a singular "train of thought", but you'd probably still recognize humans as individual agents. I think we have a bias towards thinking of ourselves as the ultimate individuals, neither recognizing the processes within us (like those of our cells) or the processes beyond us (like those of a group of people, animals, plants etc.) as having a similar nature. This is probably a genetically advantageous trait.
    - adwn 9y ago
      > That's a huge simplification not pertaining to the fundamental nature of the brain. I disagree. Conscious thinking is a crucial process that's inherently single-threaded, even though it runs on highly parallel hardware (the billions of neurons). However, I must admit that my point doesn't necessarily contradict pjc's point, and I don't really agree with digi_owl's claim that parallelism is a "wild goose chase".
      - boomlinde 9y ago
        > I disagree. Conscious thinking is a crucial process that's inherently single-threaded, even though it runs on highly parallel hardware (the billions of neurons). I don't even know what to make of that. What do you mean by "single-threaded" if at the same time you recognize that it "runs on highly parallel hardware"? If you actually mean that our consciousness emerges from a purely sequential process that happens to go on in a highly parallel system, no, that's clearly wrong. Experience, the fundamental basis of consciousness, actuates many parts of the brain at the same time. They process this information largely independently in different ways, and sometimes those processes result in a clear "train of thought" but most of the time they do not. You can not reason about the inherent nature of our consciousness in terms of trains of thought if you recognize any subjectivity to our experience that exists without reasoning or language. That's a matter of definition, of course, and without agreeing on a precise definition it's probably no use talking about what is inherent about it. If that's not what you mean, CPU execution models are probably not a very helpful metaphor to explain your idea. The clearly defined layer of abstraction that separates a fully pipelined CPU design built with simultaneously operating logic gates from "single threaded" programs being executed on it doesn't exist in brains. I guess that's what bugs me most about this type of discussion on HN. It seems developers are very fond of taking their (admittedly versatile) hammers and hammer away at anything they can think of, for better or for worse.
        adwn 9y ago
        > If you actually mean that our consciousness [...] I'm not talking about consciousness (as in qualia or subjective experience), but about conscious thinking as in train of thought or intentionally thinking about something. For me, this process itself feels very sequential.
simonh 9y ago
How can you say that? Almost every part of every organism functions simultaneously all the time. At the community scale, organisms cooperate and communicate continuously in real time. My eldest daughter is going through an ant obsession phase at the moment, their communities and how they coordinate hundreds of individuals simultaneously are amazing. Nature and natural selection are the ultimate optimizers - if there is any way for an organism or species to extract even the tiniest survival or reproductive advantage, nature ruthlessly optimises for it. Parallel function and behaviour is one of it's primary tools.

I can't shake the feel that this parallelism thing will be nothing but a wild goose chase, because nature seems to be highly serial in all but the most macroscopic of senses.

pjc50 9y ago

All of your cells and neurons operate in parallel.

adwn 9y ago
And yet you only have a single train of thought [1] – or multiple interleaved trains, but that's concurrency, not parallelism. [1] Plus a couple of background processes, like breathing, that execute in parallel.
- boomlinde 9y ago
  That's a huge simplification not pertaining to the fundamental nature of the brain. Maybe it is in the nature of our consciousness (which in itself is probably only an abstract concept) to perceive the processes it emerges from as a sequence of single trains of thought rather than a chaotic, continuous consolidation of processes both internal to the brain/body and outside of it. You could look at society as a whole and see the zeitgeist as a singular "train of thought", but you'd probably still recognize humans as individual agents. I think we have a bias towards thinking of ourselves as the ultimate individuals, neither recognizing the processes within us (like those of our cells) or the processes beyond us (like those of a group of people, animals, plants etc.) as having a similar nature. This is probably a genetically advantageous trait.
  - adwn 9y ago
    > That's a huge simplification not pertaining to the fundamental nature of the brain. I disagree. Conscious thinking is a crucial process that's inherently single-threaded, even though it runs on highly parallel hardware (the billions of neurons). However, I must admit that my point doesn't necessarily contradict pjc's point, and I don't really agree with digi_owl's claim that parallelism is a "wild goose chase".
    - boomlinde 9y ago
      > I disagree. Conscious thinking is a crucial process that's inherently single-threaded, even though it runs on highly parallel hardware (the billions of neurons). I don't even know what to make of that. What do you mean by "single-threaded" if at the same time you recognize that it "runs on highly parallel hardware"? If you actually mean that our consciousness emerges from a purely sequential process that happens to go on in a highly parallel system, no, that's clearly wrong. Experience, the fundamental basis of consciousness, actuates many parts of the brain at the same time. They process this information largely independently in different ways, and sometimes those processes result in a clear "train of thought" but most of the time they do not. You can not reason about the inherent nature of our consciousness in terms of trains of thought if you recognize any subjectivity to our experience that exists without reasoning or language. That's a matter of definition, of course, and without agreeing on a precise definition it's probably no use talking about what is inherent about it. If that's not what you mean, CPU execution models are probably not a very helpful metaphor to explain your idea. The clearly defined layer of abstraction that separates a fully pipelined CPU design built with simultaneously operating logic gates from "single threaded" programs being executed on it doesn't exist in brains. I guess that's what bugs me most about this type of discussion on HN. It seems developers are very fond of taking their (admittedly versatile) hammers and hammer away at anything they can think of, for better or for worse.
      - adwn 9y ago
        > If you actually mean that our consciousness [...] I'm not talking about consciousness (as in qualia or subjective experience), but about conscious thinking as in train of thought or intentionally thinking about something. For me, this process itself feels very sequential.

simonh 9y ago

How can you say that? Almost every part of every organism functions simultaneously all the time. At the community scale, organisms cooperate and communicate continuously in real time. My eldest daughter is going through an ant obsession phase at the moment, their communities and how they coordinate hundreds of individuals simultaneously are amazing. Nature and natural selection are the ultimate optimizers - if there is any way for an organism or species to extract even the tiniest survival or reproductive advantage, nature ruthlessly optimises for it. Parallel function and behaviour is one of it's primary tools.