From: Robin Lee Powell (rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org)
Date: Mon Nov 30 2009 - 13:56:07 MST
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 03:49:40PM -0500, Luke wrote:
> >Hormones are just signals that have a very small informational content
> >and travel extraordinarily slowly, if electronics can send information
> >in gargantuan quantities at the speed of light down a fiber optic cable
> >I fail to understand why hormone smoke signals would stump it.
>
> If hormones have a "very small informational content" then so do motor
> neuron impulses coming from the brain.
I hate to defend JKC, but, umm, no. Simulating the presence of a
hormone requires "only" two things: which hormone, and how much.
Now, simulating the brains *response* to the hormone means touching
each and every neuron that responds to that hormone. But hormones
themselves are just chemicals released into the blood stream; the
actual informational content is extremely limited.
I suppose you could argue that to be full fidelity you need to
simulate the actual molecules being released and travelling around
in the blood stream; that's still pretty simple (it's just fluid
physics :D) compared to simulating a neuron at the same level of
fidelity (the molecular level).
-Robin
-- They say: "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons." And I'm thinking: "Does it even occur to you to try for something other than the default outcome?" See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/
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