X-Message-Number: 15427
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 23:43:05 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: More Computers and Brains

Thomas Donaldson, #15401, says
...
>Would anyone who believes that N^2 connections would represent us
>completely please explain? 

What do you mean by "represent us completely"? We are, I think, talking
about whether a computer could basically imitate a human being. I allow the
computer to be probablistic (unpredictable) rather than deterministic, and
of course the computer can receive inputs from the outside just like a
person--why not? The computer in its "imitation" of a human brain is not
necessarily going through exactly the same mental events (in a suitably
isomorphic sense) as some specific brain but neither would another,
initially identical brain. With these thoughts in mind, it should not be too
hard to see how the time and space requirements of said computer might be no
more than a polynomial of that of the brain. I've also said that the
computer, to carry out its work longterm, may need more memory, which could
effectively circumvent any fixed bound N on the number of neurons that are
imitated.

Mike Perry

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