From: Robin Lee Powell (rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org)
Date: Mon Nov 30 2009 - 14:00:09 MST
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:56:07PM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> 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).
And now I realize that I misread what you said entirely; you
specified motor neurons. I'd still say hormones are lower info
density than that, but not enough to have bothered replying if I had
read it properly the first time. Sorry.
-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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