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Truly, I believe there are multiple architectures for information processing in the body, and not only in the brain/neurons. Think of the computing landscape wh
by pishpash 6y ago
Truly, I believe there are multiple architectures for information processing in the body, and not only in the brain/neurons. Think of the computing landscape where you have a salad bowl of ANN's implemented on TPU's, some GPU's, some specialized ASIC's, DSP's, some CPU's. There is no reason to believe efficient information encoding through evolution ends up with one architecture. It's going to turn out to be as varied as the differentiated cells in the body, though there may be some unification in foundational units at the equivalent level of transistors of something, maybe some molecular machinery that stores a bit or activates a switch. Presumably that's what Gallistel is looking for. It does seem wasteful for a whole neuron to be the basic unit of information processing, so I agree there should be something more atomic inside.
- seesawtron 6y agoThat is an interesting line of thought. Cortex and non-cortical regions are somewhat different in terms of their cell types composition which could inherently support different computation and learning mechanisms.
- avocad 6y agoI always saw the hormones that regulate our emotions as primitive forms of memory, older than neurons. So an organism can remain in a certain state for a while. There is also the possibility that RNA is used for memory: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44111476 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44111476