the hot new programming language

You're wrong - cochlear implants _do_ drive the auditory nerve. The most common maladies that lead to these implants involve a loss of the inner hair cells, which ordinarily transduce the vibration at the basilar membrane into vesicular releases which trigger the auditory nerve. It is these hair cells that are so commonly damaged by drugs, loud sounds, certain diseases, and other physiological insults.

No, we don't _completely_ understand the coding of sound OR light in the auditory or optic nerves. Some researchers have only recently discovered some new cell types in the retina (which is turning out to be more complex than most of us thought). We have learned a lot, enough to have useful cochlear prostheses, and perhaps soon a vestibular prosthetic device (i.e. for balance e.g. for Meniere's patients) :)

It's a mixture. There's greater understanding of how and where a variety of visual features are handled - color, shape, continuity of visual forms, movement, and many other features. It's not a complete understanding, but it's exciting and new things are being discovered all the time!

There are a variety of coding strategies used in peripheral nerves. Since we don't have an absolutely complete understanding of the whole system, we can't assume we completely understand the encoding.

In the same way that hitting your thumb with a hammer drives the sensory nerves. Sticking electrodes into the cochlea requires no understanding of how hearing works; it's just fiddling.

The

I sure agree with that statement.

Just because

QM is magical thinking? Actually, it is, but that's the way this universe works.

Maybe you don't have consciousness or free will, but I do.

I haven't read Penrose's book, but now I'll have to. Sounds like good stuff.

Now THAT is new-age fuzzthink. If everything affects everything, scientific causality and high-end DVMs don't exist.

You'd be half way down the M1 and the dash would display "Google has decided to discontinue Google Bus. Have a nice day! "[1]

San Francisco is now maybe the most expensive city in the world to live in. One reason is Google Busses, which have turned SF into a bedroom/playroom city for Big G in Mountain View.

Who care what would impress you? You are impressed by denialist propaganda.

Neurones know in which order they get their inputs, and react differently to A then B then C from C then B then A, which is to say they've got short term memory, and can do a lot more than "neural networks".

There's no need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain that - or anything else that anybody has seen. The idea gets carved away by Occam's Razor.

Most people appreciate that it can do all that's necessary without invoking magic. You don't know enough to understand this.

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 21:19:00 +0100, Tim Watts Gave us:

They probably authored and gave the NSA their "easy" search engine.

Ockham's Razor.

evolution is lazy, it crawls, it doesn't jump, eg: thers no wheeled animals...

Oh. Then brains must run on steam and rubber bands.

Given the ohserved absense of steam and elastomers inside working brains on what basis do you make that claim.

Ockham's Razor requires the explanation to be simplest. You seem have achieved "simple" instead. It must also agree with the exicence you seem to have forgotten that.

Requires? Is Occam's Razor a law of nature, like conservation of energy?

Is every physical and biological process always the simplest one that you can imagine? What happens if someone else comes along and imagines something simpler?

eally

There's got to be an evolutionary trajectory connecting what exists (or has existed) with what exists now. Error-detecting -correcting codes are prett y simple, but we don't see them in nature. The DNA to amino-acid decoding s cheme is remarkably close to the one that is most insensitive to misreading - about four or five standard deviations away from the mean of all possibl e schemes - but DNA repair is rather clumsier.

On Sun, 12 Jul 2015 02:14:25 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman Gave us:

Yeah... look at the failure that it had when it allowed him to be produced.

On Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 12:58:28 PM UTC+2, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno w rote:

We have about 20,000 genes, capable of being regulated to produce some 100,