On 4/4/07, Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
how do you reconcile the fact that babies are very stupid compared to > adults? Babies have no less genetic hardware than adults but the difference
The wiring is not determined by the genome, it's only a facility envelope. Some wiring is genetic, and some is not. On a large scale genes regulate how one part of the neocortex is wired to another part (there are even little tiny crawler things that do the wiring up during the prenatal development of the brain that sound totally science fiction and very cool, though the system isn't exactly perfect as they kill quite a few neurons when they try to craw around the brain hooking all the wiring up). At a micro scale each of the different types of neurons have different dendritic tree structures (which is genetic), and lie in particular layers of cortex (which is also genetic), and various other things. In short, it's not really genetic or due to adaption, it's a complex mixture of genetics and adaption that produces the wiring in the adult brain. The models are not complex. The emulation part is a standard numerics
package.
Heh. Come to Switzerland and talk to the Blue Brain guys at EPFL... Their model is very complex and definitely not simply some standard numerics package. They are working in collaboration with something like 400 researchers all around the world and the project will be going for at least several decades. Simple it is not. Shane ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
