yes!

It has become rather tricky now with generative AI. There are enough humans around that could not pass the Turing test to save their lives.

So far the most powerful AI's have restricted domains of applicability but the one which effectively solved Go is truly scary in its potential.

I find some of the captcha challenges just about impossible now. As AI image recognition gets better they keep making them tougher and with multiple layers which makes them rather annoying for a genuine human.

So you understand how brains work?

Where are images stored, and how can one recognize and name one of maybe a million storted images in a fraction of a second?

I've been in several situations where people wanted to use NN's. It never actually worked. It doesn't make sense.

There is a simpler issue. Un-myelinated nerve fibers (axons) are relatively slow, which isn't a problem for small critters and/or brains.

But if a signal has to travel six feet, myelin helps a lot, because the jump from node to node is at electrical speed.

Joe Gwinn

Nobody does, but it is being worked on.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging does give some insight into where the processing happens as various - short - times after the human brain has been exposed to a stimulus. Not a hell of lot so far, but it is being worked on.

They seem to work in speech recognition

Why is it necessary to understand how brains work?

I don't know much about AlphaGo. I doubt it can explain how it works. But it obviously does work.

Who cares? Likely they are distributed throughout a brain in ways that it is not necessary for anyone or anything to understand.

Have you not used Google Images?

NNs remind me of the fuzzy logic fad. A magical way to avoid thinking about hard stuff like control theory.

Good way to kill people on the streets.

Ignorance is appealing.

But electronic design - our topic here - benefits from both imagination and understanding.

I find it helpful, when designing things, to have a working model of how my brain works.

What have you designed lately? Tell us about it.

That isn't any kind of scientific theory - it is too feeble even to be called a conjecture. Wild imagining is still far too polite. Crazy idea perhaps?

Direct sensor input of neuron pulses to the brain using a mesh of micro electrodes to stimulate the visual cortex has already been used to interface limited resolution sight and sound to humans creating in effect cyborgs. Problem is that even with the best biocompatible materials is gets covered in scar tissue and stops working.

Likewise with the latest generation of bionic limbs that the user can control by thought much like they would a real flesh and blood arm.

Consider the timing accuracy required to encode all the information from your foot, given just the obvious electrical nerve pulses.

Now consider what tappens to the relative pulse timings when you flex your limbs and body, when sound and shock waves slam your nerves, when your heart beats.

Too much jitter for simple pulse-time encoding.

Of course they do. You don't understand either concept, so you use them as terms of abuse.

Not as good as the woefully ill-drafted second amendment to the US constitution.

As you persistently remind us.

Not that you've got much of either.

It would be more helpful if you realised how badly your brain works.

You first. You do seem to think that you design circuits, but you don't tell us about them in the kind of way that suggests that you actually designed them.

Who would imagine that it was simple? Design is all about getting the result you want from the hardware you've got, and while our nervous system isn't designed, only those random mutations which lead to a tolerably functional system survived natural selection.

There are objective tests for electronic design.

Does it work? Does it sell?

That's Horowitz and Hill's text-book, and while that may contain their discussion of the design of one of your circuits, it's not your discussion - more an after-the-fact rationalisation of what you ended up doing.

Creationist see intelligent design in the way living beings happen to work, but that's all after-the-fact rationalisation too.

We all know you are a creationist. I was deliberately sending you up there, and you fell for it.

These are objective tests for the quality of the circuit that has been produced. They don't say anything about the process that lead to the selection of that particular circuit.

If you can't say why you did something in a particular way - and you never do - you can't claim to have designed it.

Inspired designers may sometimes get things right first time. Most designers rip up any number of first tries at a design before coming up with an approach that can be made to work reasonably well. You don't tell us about your false starts.

Sometimes those those false starts can become practical when the technology moves on - I thought up one scheme in 1976 which didn't become practical until 1993 (when I got my hands on a big-enough cheap programmable logic device) and it shows up in my 1996 milli-degree thermostat paper (section 2.6).

Meas. Sci. Technol. 7 (1996) 1653–1664.