gurrier said:
..................... Also, neurons tend to be tightly coupled to other neurons in functional clusters, but there are seemingly random interconnections all over the place - stray connections into some deep part of the brain from a visual-processing neuron. In computer programming terms, this is the equivalent of letting the state of all of your variables depend simultaneously on the state of hundreds of other variables, occasionally being influenced by a few million more - not exactly easy to figure all that out when writing code.
Interesting, the feedback links and links across seperate sections is new to me, I was not aware of that.
I think humans (and other complex animals) are quite amazing for all the sensory inputs that are available to them and the nervous system that transmits it all.
We have sight colour, hearing, smell, balance, taste, temperature, weight, pressure, pain, millions of hair sensors, skin sensors etc and derive pleasure etc etc and somehow all these sensor or sensor systems manage to stay quiet when we do not need them or we are able to tune out the noise of unnecessary sensor inputs.
Indeed, mind over matter when that facility can be learnt, and I have managed to tune out real pain altogether on one occassion myself.
When we try to connect together the different systems on a modern car we increasingly use multiplex or bus systems rather than direct wiring and we often end up building a lot more intelligence into each sensing device such that it only sends data under certain conditions. But we arguably afaikr build a lot more intelligence into each sensing device and more complexity into the transmission system than exists in a single human nerve cell attached to a hair and the nervous system that takes its signal to the brain.
Arguably if you built a computer connected to all the manmade sensor devices that we have these days and a way of getting around it could be made to learn things on its own, indeed is it asimov the Japanese robot that does just that. It could be aware and it could learn but still arguably only within the parameters set by its programmers, thus aware it might be but conscious, for me that is another question.