I think the debate is this: The CS people see the biologists as overcomplicating the problem while the biologists see the CS people as oversimplifying. I do un

I think the debate is this: The CS people see the biologists as overcomplicating the problem while the biologists see the CS people as oversimplifying. I do understand that eventually we will be able to simulate the brain of an adult without having to simulate all the development that created that adult brain and all the minute chemical mechanisms that enable fat and protein to think. You can simulate important parts of the basic components and get the same output as a real brain doing the same thing. However, I think that since many computer scientists see the brain as a chemical computer, they misunderstand how close we are to knowing how it actually works. We have conceptual holes in our understanding in how the brain actually processes input. We are not at the point where we can start simplifying: if we want to truly simulate what we know about the brain, we have to include the activity of every molecule, since we don't yet know what activity we can ignore. We want a Newtonian physics simulator, but we only know subatomic interactions — we have to simulate the entire universe even though F=ma is underlying it all. [Edit: yeah we understand a lot more than that but I think the analogy still applies.]