Tim Tyler  wrote in
news:c5ut04$2rpg$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> irr  wrote or quoted:

>> While we might all agree that the primate brain is an incredibly 
>> complex organ, it's not at all agreed upon what it is we mean by
>> this.  For example, a Kolmogorov measure fails miserably in
>> classifying the brain as complex, after all you're really only
>> talking about two dozen or so different recognized cell types stamped
>> out in enormous repetition with iterated connections between them --
>> in other words, a digital representation of the brain is incredibly
>> compressible. 
 
> IMO - this makes no sense at all :-|
 
> An acceptable digital version of the brain would handle the same I/O -
> and produce similar inputs from similar outputs.  This sounds like a
> job for a huge computer with an *extremely* lengthy description to me
> - and of course a correspondingly enormous Kolmogorov complexity.

I agree with Tim that a digital computer that mimics the brain would be 
huge by today's standards. I however also agree that this capability is 
achieved using a relatively small amount of genetic code. Part of the 
secret is that brain development relies on input from the environment - in 
other words much of the data needed to code for a brain resides outside of 
the genes. Trying to capture this complexity entirely in a computer program  
would in fact require specifying a lot of data that the actual developing 
brain doesn't include as different cell types but gathers as input to the 
neural net.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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