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A neuron uses far more than electricity to communicate. The number of neurotransmitters and receptor types alone is staggering. There’s a reason why biology evo
by tbenst 7y ago
A neuron uses far more than electricity to communicate. The number of neurotransmitters and receptor types alone is staggering. There’s a reason why biology evolved past using gap junctions. The computer science view of the brain compares how the brain works to FLOPS, much like how previous generations compared the brain to horsepower from the steam engine. Better analogy, but still naive.
- ben_w 7y agoThis is an important thing that optimists often miss. If you naively apply simple estimates of how many flops it takes to simulate a mind… well, I have and it would be possible to put ~35,000 real-time human minds onto all the iPhones Apple sold this year: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brains/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brai... There’s also the problem that we don’t yet know how ignorant we are about our minds. I’m sure neuroscientists do at least have a rough idea by now of how much there is left to learn, but I’d be surprised if they are confident enough to be able to estimate the cost of the remaining required research to less than a factor of 10, especially as we necessarily started with the easy-to-learn knowledge.
- jbob2000 7y agoAren't neurotransmitters and receptors just smaller forms of electrical connections? A neurotransmitter is a chemical that causes a reaction in the receptor. You could argue that a chemical reaction is a data exchange, and a data exchange is just a type of electrical connection. I'm getting a bit reductionist with my theory, admittedly...