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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Roger Penrose's assertion in Shadows of the Mind that the microtubules within the neurons might be doing the work - making each Neuron into a metaphorical computer with millions of transistors. This is a different idea but the same conclusion - Neurons aren't the lowest level of computational structure in the brain, which means we have been underestimating the complexity and power of the brain by many orders of magnitude.

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We've always known that we need to model the 10^14 synapses (and their strengths) that connect neurons. The dendrite trees that connect these synapses to a soma have at most another 10^14 branching points, so modeling them all explicitly, in the worst case, only doubles the model size; but it might also give also significant possibilities for optimization, if these 'dendritic' calculations can be modelled as a simple formula.

And this is, somewhat ironically, very bad news for Mr. Kurzweil.

I think it's actually quite promising. We're good at cell biology but poor at systems biology. If we can convert neuroscience to understanding what types of neurons exist and how they function, that is probably very tractable. In comparison, even measuring the connectome is an insane problem, and modeling trillions of neurons to reveal brain function seems intractable.

Actually, this may be very good news for Kurzweil. In his last book "How to Create a Mind", he lays out a theory centered around a "pattern-recognizer" unit that is repeated throughout the columns and regions of the neocortex. In his book, he assumed it to be made up of several neurons wired in a specific manner, but if each neuron can do some hierarchical processing of its own then the pattern-recognizer might be reducible to a single neuron.

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