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[DPRG] SRS thread
Subject: [DPRG] SRS thread
From: R. Steven Rainwater
srainwater at ncc.com
Date: Fri Apr 27 17:53:37 CDT 2007
On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 16:34, William Harold Newman wrote:
> > There are 10^15 neuron synapses in the 10^11 neurons of the
> > brain. These are - literally - astronomical numbers. This is
> > equivalent to 1,000,000 gigabytes at 8-bits of resolution per
> > synapse.
> And note that the brain at birth seems to be completely
> specified by the genome, and while the raw human genome is
> very complicated (on the order of a CDROM of data required
> to store it after using a basic compression algorithm), it is
> not astronomically complicated
That was my first thought too. He wants to say it's impossible to
understand or replicate the brain because the final product is so
complex. But the final product emerges from the genome and interactions
with the environment.
His argument strikes me as a bit like saying it would be impossible for
our primitive computers to render a mandelbrot set because it's so
mind-bogglingly complex. But all you really need to do is iterate over
two dozen lines of C code and the complexity of the mandelbrot set
emerges on its own.
In the same way, our human bodies have no trouble reading and
interpreting a simple of set of gentetic rules to build a brain.
The complex emergent behavior you get from a simple set of subsumption
rules seems like a perfect example of this idea.
It probably just boils down to some people being optimists and some
being pessimists. :)
-Steve
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