The original comment you were in defence of was suggesting that artificial neurons were somehow very close to biological ones, since supposedly that’s where the

The original comment you were in defence of was suggesting that artificial neurons were somehow very close to biological ones, since supposedly that’s where their inspiration came from. If you’re interested in pure computational ‘power’, then if the brain is nothing more than a Turing machine (which, as you agree, it might not be), fine. You can call them ‘equivalent’. It’s just not very meaningful. What’s interesting about neural nets has nothing to do with what they can compute; indeed they can compute anything any other Turing machine can, and nothing more. What’s interesting is how they do it, since they can ‘learn’ and hence allow us to produce solutions to hard problems without any explicit programming or traditional analysis of the problem. > that would overturn quite a bit of physics Our physics is currently woefully incomplete, so… yes. That would be welcome.