3 ms·

Isn’t that true for transistors as well?

• connicpu 3y ago
  Transistors have some nuance to them, but a transistor can in theory be scaled all the way down to being made out of only a handful of atoms if it was made perfectly with no impurities, and it would still function nearly identically to the slightly larger versions. Of course, packing them tighter still has some problems due to quantum tunneling at the scale of handfuls-of-atoms, but that's a separate issue. Meanwhile a brain cell is still a lot more complicated and has a place in an entire network of cells and the connections between them that cannot be described by the comparatively simpler equations one can use for a transistor.
• bbor 3y ago
  I almost failed Computer Architecture class back in the day so I might be off base here, but I understand most transistors to be organized into discrete functional units - this part forms a register, this part a control layer, this part an adder, and so on. These units are organized hierarchically of course, but the whole system is based around the neat compartmentalization of transistors based on function. I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I would put all my chips on that not being the case for the brain. Thus, my complaint of trying the (IMO) lazy approach of “the smallest unit of the computer — the transistor - will be equivalent to the smallest unit of the brain - the neuron”.