Shannon and the brain..

Jeff Johnson:

The drive to procreate is another thing. I was talking about the way to attract one or, possibly, more females.

That's just because of pensions. It is a well known fact that, once you introduce pensions (much more than antibiotics) people don't have the incentive to have tens of sons to be sure that somebody will care for them when old.

Evolution does not work that fast. And, mainly, it works because one genome destroys the others. To do so you either do a genocide, or you f*ck all of their females. Or both, as it was routinely done in any war before few centuries ago in Europe, and the way it is still done in the Balkans and most of the world.

John Larkin:

That's because of industrial production. A song can be distributed in millions of copies in every corner of the planet, so you can choose among the very best musicians in the world. Otherwise you would have paid your local, "lower grade" piano player, or kept the spinster aunt at home because she could play the piano.

By the way, have you noted that most artists (and the best ones) are male? You cannot say it's a cultural thing, given the fact that, traditionally there were much more females that could play the piano than men.

Same reasoning applies to engineering: if you have a brilliant idea, it can be replicated millions of times, so that, by getting just one dollar per instance, you became rich. It you were an artisan, you would be able to charge 1.000 dollars for your idea, but just to few tens of rich people, and you could only make a decent living.

LOL

Because they attract the females in some other way. Our brain is unique, as the peacock tail is unique, because our women prefer to be softly spoken at than shown a colorful tail.

By all means. But if your IQ is below 80, you have very little chances.

Joel Koltner:

Not with Larkin. :D

I would not call it a technology, but an architecture, and it's the architecture of living brains, including ours. Unless you believe that there is some sort of ghost in the machine.

This doesn't constitute proof, but it does indicate the idea is shared

The right half of the hippocampus in London taxi drivers is larger than in average brains, and the difference increases with the lenght of time they've been a raxi driver in London

which does suggest that new brain cells are being forned in that area.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not true. I've seen many cases where the girl likes to be man handled, talked to dirty and out right handled by the guy like it was yesterdays garbage.

Again, not true, it seems around here, all those below an 80 IQ do nothing more than reproduce like rabbits, increasing the welfare participants.

You need to get out of that closet a little more.

Jamie.

Jamie:

Ok, delete the "softly".

I'm not talking about procreation, but about attracting a derisable female. Would you ever touch one of those women? Would you ever spend half an hour talking with them?

I don't see why. I live in a nice house in a good neighborhood, my girlfriend is gorgeous and I don't want to be arrested for indecent conduct. ;-)

The best musicians tend to write their own music.

That's certainly not true in the US.

Musicians have millions of their widgets made. Authors, likewise. I don't get a royalty on what I design.

No that's simply not true. Here, they prefer green.

Below 80, maybe. Above 120, perhaps, too.

(snip)

Or molecules.

How do bacteria move, hunt, mate, and learn, when they have no synapses?

John

The last time I've seen any girl with an exceptional high IQ, I would think twice about admitting that I engaged any sexual activities with her. Normally, they find those like themselves, just as goofy looking and twisted in thinking. Yeah, this isn't sex, it's a biological process of cleansing the mind of distractible thoughts that get in the way of progress.

Removing those milk bottle glasses so they can not do any mathematical analyst while getting a little, does not appeal to me, unless you want to be their eyes and guide them, now that could be interesting.

Jamie

Well, you better write in and tell them now! Could save them a lot of trouble.

The same way the brainless welfare replicators do here. As for learning, they exercise that cranium to learn ways to get even more, for free.

Jamie.

They exhibit chemotaxis - ability to move along chemical gradients in search of food and away from noxious chemicals. There is no evidence that bacteria "learn". Their behaviour is determined by their genome and any stress proteins they inherit from their parents. Bacteria do sometimes engage in genetic exchange but it is nothing like "mating".

Details online at

You would have slightly more of an argument for protozoa. Paramecium and amoebae are pretty good scavengers for single celled organisms. Bacteria are the pastures that they graze on.

Regards, Martin Brown

Sure, bub. It's called re-arranged molecules. We are analog, chemical devices. You still haven't said where or how though. Nor how many (storage units), math boy. Much less the method. Do we store events as some kind of data stream? Or??

Bacteria mate?

Bwuahahahahahaha!

No. Stem cells are the source of new adult neurons.

DNA does a lot more than lay around waiting for a cell to reproduce. DNA is the constantly-used recipe for protein synthesis.

neuron.

Likely. Memory might be stored in DNA itself.

Right. Nature is so clever that very little about actual cell machinery is well understood.

John

In compressed format, with the compression being more "conceptual". For example, I have grass in my back garden. When I remember I think "patch of grass", with very little besides the general outline, average height etc. Certainly not some kind of jpg where individual blades are still rendered. And the eye itself does something like a 10:1 data compression on what it sees. data rates of around 10Mb/s have been suggested.

If all that data were being stored in (say) 10^16 bits of memory, it would fill up in 10^9 seconds, or around 100 years.

That's so silly. Nobody has a clue about how the brain works at the lowest, or even the highest levels. If anybody did, they could cure all sorts of mental illnesses, manufacture weight-loss drugs, prevent addictions, increase our IQs, all sorts of things. As-is, most nervous system therapies are found by trial and error, or by tweaking naturally psychoactive substances, or by sheer luck.

"It is not impossible to

Predictions of artificial intelligence have been around for literally thousands of years. Predictions of computer intelligence are about as old as computers.

John

I think of it as a plug in (receptor), Net interFace, into a much larger operating system.

I know, I am way out there !:)

Jamie...

Not true. There is a great deal of knowledge of the lowest levels eg neurons, axons etc. That's why the output from Blue Brain simulations seems to match experimental determinations of neocortical columns.

And it would come as a surprise that Human level intelligence might need Human level processing power?