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From: kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov ( Scott Dorsey)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: CoOntinuous vs discrete
Message-ID: <1991Mar25.141743.21124@news.larc.nasa.gov>
Date: 25 Mar 91 14:17:43 GMT
References: <91082.223501DOCTORJ@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>
Sender: news@news.larc.nasa.gov (USENET Network News)
Reply-To: kludge@grissom.larc.nasa.gov ( Scott Dorsey)
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In article <91082.223501DOCTORJ@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> DOCTORJ@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU (Jon J Thaler) writes:
>One thing that has always bothered me about the comparison between
>computers and brains is that (most) computers are finite state machines,
>while it is not obvious to me that brains are.  It is well known that
>mathematical modelling of continuous systems on disctrete lattices
>will miss some classes of solutions entirely, so I have trouble following
>the arguments based on analogies between computers and brains.  Can someone
>out there shed some light on this for me?

   Maybe in the real world everything is discrete.  For example, the current
flowing along a wire is not a continuous value, because it's actually the
flow of individual electrons, each with a fixed charge.  And since all
neurotransmitters consist of individual molecules, perhaps the brain is also
really a discrete system.
  That's not to say that it's not a very fine-grained one, though, that would
be very difficult to model.  But if it were an easy problem, it wouldn't be
quite as enjoyable to work on.
--scott