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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

If you increased the size of the brain 1,000 times it would be about the size of Madison Square Garden.[0] Now take any cubic meter of this mega-brain. There will be about 40,000 neurons in each. Good luck figuring out how these work in tandem by themselves. Now what about in tandem with the rest of our Madison Square Garden brain? Now shrink it back down and fit it in our heads again ...

[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

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To be honest those numbers seem like something we should be able to completely map. They’re high but not astronomical or anything.

Mapping the synapses of a brain is useless without mapping the behaviour of the connections, they have already mapped flea brains etc but that didn't help them create a flea AI.

We can’t even accurately simulate the behaviour of a single neuron on a modern workstation in real time.

Maybe not every molecule in the cell but surely we can map the electrical impulses moving through tens of thousands of synapses/dendritic connections.

I'm just talking about the signalling behaviour.

The problem is less the neurons, more the connections between them: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2778101/

If you will, the wiring between cells, not so much the cells themselves.

wiring and signals that flow through the wires, i.e. the software

while the cells are just switches with memory, i.e. the hardware

Each neuron is unique though, you can't just replace them. So they are more than just switches and memory, they are a part of the brains "software" as you call it.

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