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Comment by jonaldomo | Hacker News Reader

Modeled a worms brain

Yes, the title is misleading. The software runs a simulation of the worm's brain using a software defined mapping between the 302 neurons (which I am assuming are software modeled) of C. elegans brain. The (software and hardware) reacts in a way similar to that which has been observed of C. elegans (the worm).

This brings up a question which I have often wondered - whether our consciousness is just a combinatorial explosion of the echoes of the external world - that our abilities and thoughts are predetermined by our environments. If I believed that, then perhaps I could model the human brain and say it was my own. But there is also the way humans choose to chop up the world, where the line is drawn between 'neuron' and 'neuron connection' and 'stimuli'. So, shrug.

It likely is just a machine. But incredibly complicated. C elegans itself is quite complicated with 300 neurons. It responds to various chemical stimuli, each neuron has thousands of activated genes, it responds to food and nutrition sources, touch, etc. As humans we have over 100 billion neurons.

We do have assumptions to chop up the world, but they only to help give us a place to start exploring (as we know, we find better assumptions that make old assumptions obsolete). I think the chopping up problem is one people run up into a lot with discrete spaces vs continuous spaces.

Exploring the permutation space of 302 elements is one thing (302!), but exploring the permutation space of 20 billion+ elements is another[0].

Though there are some interesting approaches I have seen with exploring such spaces like projecting discrete spaces onto higher dimensional spaces and then using mathematics more suited to continuous spaces for exploring regions of interest [1].

[0] http://www.neurology.org/content/64/12/2004

[1] http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/proceedings/papers/v15/plis11a/pli...

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