Hacker News Reader

How does having the connectome get you the mind? Don't you need the weights in the neurons? I thought I also read that neurons are not discrete units, that there might be weights within the dendrites/axons.

View on HN

The connectome includes the weights.

Do you have a reference somewhere that says that? The Wikipedia entry for connectomics does not imply that and I've not read of anything that can get the weights out of neurons.

Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp...

That is because there are no weights to begin with. In actual biological neurons synapses perform a rather complicated biochemical dance involving vesicles, ion channels, second messengers, whenever an action potential arrives. Some of that can be described by simple ODEs which might contain a constant that you could call “weight” but the actual physical synapses know nothing about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com