On 08 Aug 2011, at 03:03, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Interesting article: Residents of the brain: Scientists turn up startling diversity among nerve cells http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/332400/title/Residents_of_the_brain_ "No two cells are the same. Zoom in, and the brain’s wrinkly, pinkish- gray exterior becomes a motley collection of billions of cells, each with personalized quirks and idiosyncrasies." "New results suggest, for instance, that a population of nerve cells in which individual responses to an electrical poke differ can process more information than a group in which responses are the same. " "in addition to losing neurons, the brain would lose diversity, a deficit that could usher in even more damage." I would say this tends to support my view that the idea of replacement neurons or normative behavior modeling is likely to be a dead end as far as functionalism is concerned. It's more appropriate to consider your brain a civilization of individual organisms (only some of which are the conscious 'I')
You mean some neuron are me? That is worst that the "grandmother neuron" idea.
rather than a powerful computer executing complicated instructions.
This is just a question of making the comp level lower, and has no incidence on the consequences of comp. The molecules themselves have no individual differences, and in case they have, again, this would only put the level of substitution lower. No machines can know-for-sure its own substitution level, and the obligation to reduce physics to the arithmetical biology and theology of numbers follows only from the *existence* of a level, not on the choice of such a level.
Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.
