X-Message-Number: 25176
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 08:01:41 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #25173 - #25175

Some more comnents to Yvan and Henri Kluytmanns:

When I contacted a technical rep of AMD, I was adamantly told that
they do not make FPGAs themselves, but buy them to use in making
their own hardware. I haven't been able to obtain the Nketsa book
(as a mathematician I got lots of practice reading technical French
but to my surprise when I began, virtually everything was translated
from Russian. Little from French, not that French mathematicians
didn't have good things to say).

For Henri: I also got onto the web site you gave, and printed
out some of deGaris's papers. Comments: "neurons" as they occur in
neural nets are very far from those occurring even in primitive
brains, not to mention our own. Moreover, unless I missed something,
growth of new connections and new neurons occurred only in the
sense that this guy had worked out genetic methods to create new
"neural net brains" from  old ones. Our brains as individual
brains grow both new neurons and new connections. This isn't a 
matter of giving birth somehow to a new brain, it's something 
your brain and mine do constantly.

Incidentally, to anyone reading this, the 14 October issue of
NATURE has a nice set of articles on how brains work. They actually
discuss some of these issues.

For Scott Badger: As someone who's been following work on brains,
memory, consciousness, etc for some time, I knew of the things 
in your message. But I think they deserved to be discussed, if
only because many Cryonetters come from a background which 
doesn't involve much biology at all. Not that being a mathematician
involves much biology, either, but years ago when I got interested
in cryonics I also realized that biology, particularly 
neurobiology, had very important things to say to any cryonicist.
So congratulations and good work.

             Best wishes and long long life to all,

                Thomas Donaldson

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