Re:Bag of words, have mercy on us
by Kim_Bruning on Monday December 08, 2025 @06:46AM
(#46191190)
All three appear to be technically correct, but are (normally) only incidental to the operation of neurons as neurons. We know this because we can test what aspects of neurons actually lead to practical real world effects. Neurophysiology is not a particularly obscure or occult field, so there are many many papers and textbooks on the topic.(And there's a large subset you can test on yourself, besides, though I wouldn't recommend patch-clamping!)
> We know this because we can test what aspects of neurons actually lead to practical real world effects.
What is wonderful here is that contemporary electronics wizardry that allowed us to have machines that mimic some of thinking, also is very concerned of the quantum-level electromagnetic effects at the transistor level.
Re:Bag of words, have mercy on us
by Kim_Bruning on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:03PM
(#46194741)
On reread, if your actual argument is that SNN are surprisingly sophisticated and powerful, and we might be underestimating how complex the brain's circuits really are, then maybe we're in violent agreement.
They are extremely complex, but is that complexity required for building a thinking machine? We don't understand bird physiology enough to build a bird from scratch, but an airplane flies just the same.
Are we not just getting lost in semantics when we say "fly"? An airplane does not at all perform the same behavior as a bird. Do we say that boats or submarines "swim"?
Planes and boats disrupt the environments they move through and air and sea freight are massive contributors to pollution.
You seem to have really gone off the rails midway through that post...
The complexities of contemporary computers and complexities of computing-related infrastructure (consider ASML and electricity) are orders of magnitudes higher than what was needed for first computers. The difference? We have something that mimics some aspects of (human) thinking.
How complex our everything computing-related should be to mimic thinking (of humans) little more closely?
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62539-5
As the result, all living cells with DNA emit coherent (as in lasers) light [2]. There is a theory that this light also facilitates intercellular communication.
[2] https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-va...
Chemical structures in dendrites, not even neurons, are capable to compute XOR [3] which require multilevel artificial neural network with at least 9 parameters. Some neurons in brain have hundredths of thousands of dendrites, we are now talking of millions of parameters only in single neuron's dendrites functionality.
[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax6239
So, while human brains aren't magic, special or different, they are just extremely complex.
Imagine building a computer with 85 billions of superconducting quantum computers, optically and electrically connected, each capable of performing computations of a non-negligibly complex artificial neural network.