On Jun 1, 2008, at 5:02 PM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
But.... this statement is such a blatant contradiction of all the known facts about neurons, that I am surprised that abyone would try to defend it. Real neurons are complicated, and their actual functional role in the brain is still quite unknown.
So you are asserting (1) that you know very little about neurons *and* (2) that they are fantastically complex devices at a computational model level. Remarkable that you are simultaneously deeply knowledgeable and ignorant at the same time. I see a lot of handwaving and cries of "Complex! Complex!" but I don't see a lot of evidence of that fact in the abstract computational sense. Even if one were to assert Penrosian magic, the result is pretty obviously simple in the theoretical sense, and we are back to algorithmic equivalence.
Let's cut through the double-talk. Prove that neurons are not a simple set of functions in a hideously ugly and complex package. Obviously a lot of people think this is a real possibility, why there was a thread posted just this afternoon about how powerful and universal PEC bucket brigade logic is at predicting wetware neural network characteristics. And those were neuroscientists who presumably understand the wetware (though hadn't figured out you can implement that whole schemata in about a hundred lines of Python).
You say all neuroscientists know neurons are complex, and yet we just had an article about how simple an effective computational description is that a lot of neuroscientists subscribe to. If that model is "simple", then neurons are ipso facto "simple". The description *is* the complexity from a computational standpoint.
J. Andrew Rogers ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
