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Comment by soup10 | Hacker News Reader

If you've seen some of the high resolution videos of neural activity captures from even simple fish, the slightest motor movements activate hundreds of thousands of cells in a chaotic pattern. Neural circuitry is not neatly laid out like a silicon chip, its a forest of inter-connectivity that resists analysis even with extremely detailed visualization and data captures.

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I think it’s interesting that people think we’ll be able to make something that does more in a smaller space.

As if there was something other than the laws of physics preventing natural selection from testing smaller structures.

Or that there’s something (other than the demands of the computation itself) constraining the architectures that were tested through natural selection.

Constraints: - No temperatures hot enough to melt silicon or metal. - Everything must unfold from a single cell during the process of reproduction, no factories allowed. - Everything must be made out of what it can find to eat, no mining allowed unless you're a subterranean bacteria.

We out design nature all the time. Evolution doesn't find perfection, it finds whats good enough.

Right. Every tool invented by humans is superior in achieving a certain end than is our inborn equivalent. We don't have to faithfully model nature to surpass it.

Likewise manmade models based in mathematics and statistics have long proved more accurate in predicting outcomes than the human mind, even though we know the mind doesn't employ math.

Human-made machines have made it possible for elephants to fly. Nature never will.

> something (other than the demands of the computation itself) constraining the architectures that were tested through natural selection.

There is. Anything that can't be reached by a small number of genetically small steps that either enhance or at least maintain fitness will never be reached.

If a highly structured action seems to be driven by system whose visualisation looks chaotic, perhaps we are using the wrong visualisation.

I love those videos. We will be getting a lot more, soon, as well with the new voltage-sentitive microscopy.

I think the best story for understanding circuitry in vertebrates comes from the work on hierarchical pattern generators -- where much of the work was done on lampreys.

Grillner, S. (2006). Biological pattern generation: the cellular and computational logic of networks in motion. Neuron, 52(5), 751-766.

Maybe it is DRM

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