On Friday, 24 May 2019 at 08:46:06 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
I am not an expert in this, but would a neuron (from whatever beastie) ever behave like a slime mould? Is a sigmoid function sufficient? The era of treating a neuron as purely a single dimensional (electrical) state has, I believe, long past. Neurons do trigger, but they also have a biochemical aspect as well as an electrical one. I am not up to date with modelling neurons, and neither am I an expert in neurochemistry, and whilst investigating a network of sigmoid function triggers is still valid as a fun thing to do, I am not sure it can now be seen as a model of a collection of neurons. A model that started up in the mid to late 1970s but didn't take off then, but I believe is being picked up again recently, is to treat a network of neurons embedded in a biochemical system as a set of fields. The background was relativistic quantum field theory, but I suspect the technique as applied to networks of neurons has evolved away from that background. But maybe this is still not a mainstream approach? Does anyone have any connection with people working on Blue Brain. Over decade ago they were modelling the neocortex and neurons with apparently good success.
I found your reply very knowledgeable and very intelligent. I will take a look later at the blue brain project. The reason I compared a neuron with the slime mold is because it grows dentrites to form synapses and therefore it creates intelligence.
