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To: Snowshoe who wrote (74265)	12/15/2016 12:57:52 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

<<For example, beginning more modestly, a world-wide consortium has simulated the already-known 302 neuron ‘brain’ of a simple round worm called C elegans. The biological worm is fairly active, swimming nimbly and purposefully, but the simulated C elegans just lies there, with no functional behavior. Something is missing. Funding agencies are getting nervous. Bring in the ‘P.R. guys.’>> I guess that their simulation of the worm is like the simulations of climate by climate models. They do a bad job so the model behaves nothing like the thing they claim to have copied. They then make up some mumbo jumbo to explain the difference. Computers are just lots of switches. And they have magnetic memory or other memory. A better analogy with neurons is that neurons are like capacitors, not switches. When one of the wires gets reduced voltage, electrons flow out that wire. Lots of capacitors and switches acting together = hey presto, consciousness. But there's something very suspicious about it all. I'm inclined to think along the lines of Roger Penrose. en.wikipedia.org I guess it's more the hunt for the smallest thing. Only 100 years ago [plus a bit] it was the atom. But once peering inside the atom was doable, a whole new world opened up. Then right before our eyes it vanished into a maze of wave functions which only became real if observed. Not only that, but a supposedly randomized swarm of wave functions emitted from quantum soup hiding in nothing. I guess that consciousness will be like that. Sort of real-looking but on closer and closer inspection it does an Alice in Wonderland disappearing act, leaving only the smile, which only exists if there's an observer there to grin back. There's definitely something going on. Unless there isn't and it's no more real than the dream I had from which I woke to realize it wasn't real. Except that I was actually still dreaming and only dreamed that I had woken. I got such a fright that then I really did wake up. Or so I think. How many layers of dreams can there be and how long can they last? Can a dream last all our lives? "Row row row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream." That's what we used to sing in the car as children to pass the miles by. Penrose and co have got better qualifications than I do. Some people such as Richard Branson and Elon Musk, are still gung ho for outer space 3D rocketry. There's nowhere to go out there. Not with any mechanism involving lumps of metal. Exploration needs to be done in the wave function realm. That's where the real action is. Go small and even an atom looks huge like a planet. A neuron looks like a galaxy. A brain like a cosmos. We don't know where we're going but we're on our way. Mqurice