Life (split from New studies on the brains of flys with an interesting animation)

[Luc Turpin]

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

No one is claiming we do. Mapping the connections is the first step in learning how it works. That's all. 

We have been mapping the brain for ages and not getting closer to how it works.

3 hours ago, MigL said:

It's not the small number of cells involved, but the 50 Million connections.
Our best supercomputers are currently massively paralleled simple compute engines.
The difficult part is the programming that executes on these simple computers for one or many processes to take advantage of the massive parallelism efficiently.
Nature and evolution have been 'working' on the brain of insects like the fly, for about 480 Million years.
It won't happen anytime soon, but give our guys a little time to figure out true AI.

I don't share your optimisim.

In the 480 million life span, nature and evolution advocated intelligence and consciousness only to the living, not the non-living.

We have still not figured out how to take matter and turn it into living matter.

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, Luc Turpin said:

We have been mapping the brain for ages and not getting closer to how it works.

 

What makes you say we have not been getting closer? This latest piece of work shows the contrary, surely? 

And your remark about not being able to create life is a complete non-sequitur.

-1

 

Edited 16 hours ago by exchemist

[geordief]

1 hour ago, Luc Turpin said:

We have been mapping the brain for ages and not getting closer to how it works.

I don't share your optimisim.

In the 480 million life span, nature and evolution advocated intelligence and consciousness only to the living, not the non-living.

We have still not figured out how to take matter and turn it into living matter.

As they say ,it is the journey that counts more than the destination.

One of our most rewarding activities is acquiring and assimilating new information.

With this particular project  there are likely to be endless  detours and stopovers -if we can manage not  to destroy ourselves as a species before we get anywhere along this particular path.

[Luc Turpin]

10 minutes ago, exchemist said:

What makes you say we have not been getting closer?

Discussions from neuroscientists saying that we are not getting closer! There are more theories now than before, with none being generally accepted by the neuroscientific community. 

13 minutes ago, exchemist said:

 This latest piece of work shows the contrary, surely?

It's just more mapping, of the "hardware"; it does not show very much about how matter produces thinking, except that the brain changes configuration for every type of thinking. It's a"software" issue then and this will not be resolved through more mapping.

16 minutes ago, exchemist said:

And your remark about not being able to create life is a complete non-sequitur.

We have not been able to transform non-living matter into living matter. What makes us so sure that we can get a computer to think?

I do not then see it as a complete non-sequitur.

15 minutes ago, geordief said:

As they say ,it is the journey that counts more than the destination.

One of our most rewarding activities is acquiring and assimilating new information.

With this particular project  there are likely to be endless  detours and stopovers -if we can manage not  to destroy ourselves as a species before we get anywhere along this particular path.

Agree, entirely agree.

[MigL]

2 hours ago, Luc Turpin said:

We have still not figured out how to take matter and turn it into living matter.

Life is not simply matter, living or non-living ( please define these terms as they are nonsensical).
Life is matter undergoing a process, that happens to be self-replicating.

[Luc Turpin]

3 hours ago, MigL said:

Life is not simply matter, living or non-living ( please define these terms as they are nonsensical).
Life is matter undergoing a process, that happens to be self-replicating.

Nonlife: atoms, molecules, chemicals

Life: cells, organisms

Properties: cellular with its own outer membrane and containing a full set of instructions necessary for its operation and reproduction.