Brent Meeker writes:
[quoting Stathis Papaioannou]
> >In the case of the heart the
> >simpler artificial pump might be just as good, but in the case of a
>brain,
> >the electrical activity of each and every neuron is intrinsically
>important
> >in the final result.
>
>That last seems extremely dubious. What evidence is there for it?
>
They're completely different things: one is information processing, the
other is... pumping. If we went back to ancient Greece, we could do much
better in terms of transportation than horses and chariots, but if we wanted
to know what was in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we would have to copy, word
for word, what the ancient manuscripts said, even if we decided to put the
whole thing on a hard disk as a text file or whatever. It's not that there
is anything special about papyrus; Homer would probably have used a computer
if he had one, especially since he was blind. But just as we have to pay
loving attention to the crumbly old ancient documents if we want to know
what they said, so we have to pay loving attention to the crumbly old
neurons if we want to know what *they* say, before transferring their
contents to a more modern and durable medium.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue Jul 12 2005 - 04:18:10 PDT