On Jul 22, 6:25 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: >But that's contradicting your assumption that the "pegs" are transparent >to the neural communication: > >"If the living >cells are able to talk to each other well through the prosthetic >network, then functionality should be retained"
Neurological functionality is retained but there are fewer and fewer actual neurons to comprise the network, so the content of the conversations are degraded, even though that degradation is preserved with high fidelity. > Whatever neurons remain, even it it's only the afferent/efferent >ones, they get exactly the same communication as if there were no "pegs" >and the whole brain was neurons. Think of them like sock puppet/bots multiplying in a closed social network. If you have 100 actual friends on a social network and their accounts are progressively replaced by emulated accounts posting even slightly unconvincing status updates, you rapidly lose interest in those updates and either route around them, focusing on the diminishing group of your original non-bots, or check out of the network altogether. A neuron is more than it's communication. A communicating peg cannot communicate feelings that it doesn't have, it can only emulate computations that are based upon feeling correlates. >You're evading the point by changing examples. Not intentionally. It's just that example is built on fundamental assumptions which I think are not only untrue, but buried in the gap between our understanding of consciousness and our understanding of everything else. The assumption being that our consciousness must work like everything else that our consciousness can examine objectively, whereas my working assumption is to suppose that our consciousness works in exactly the opposite way, and that opposition itself is critically important and fundamental to any understanding of consciousness. Observing our neurons behaviors is like chasing billions of our tails, and assuming that their heads must be our head. Replacing the tails alone doesn't make our head happen magically. The neurons that we see are only the outer half of the neurons that we are. The inside looks like our lives, our society, our evolution as organisms. >It does raise in my mind an interesting pont though. These questions >are usually considered in terms of replacing some part of the brain (a >neuron, or a set of neurons) by an artificial device that implements the >same input/output function. It then seems, absent some intellect >vitale, that the behavior of that brain/person would be unchanged. But >wouldn't it be likely that the person would suffer some slight >impairment in learning/memory simply because the artificial device >always computes the same function, whereas the biological neurons grow >and change in response to stimuli. And those stimuli are external and >cannot be forseen by the doctor. So what he needs to implant is not >just a fixed function but a function that depends on the history of its >inputs (i.e. a function with memory). Now you're getting closer to what I'm looking at. A flat model of a neuron is not a neuron. It's a living thing. It has respiration. It learns and grows. It's us. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
