From: Sean Williams (lad@seanwilliams.com.au)
Date: Sat Apr 06 2002 - 17:31:17 MST
As an observer to the list, I'm getting a weird sense of double vision
while trying to assimilate the two current main topics of
conversation: (1) the difficulty of simulating the behaviour of a
single neuron and (2) the cause and effects of conflicts present and
past. It seems to me that if even extraordinarily powerful computers
are having difficulty accomplishing the former, how can we expect any
genuine accuracy to creep into our personal models of the behaviour of
immensely large numbers of neurons far removed from us (i.e.
politicians past and present, from our cultures and others)? I know
that the brain is a powerful neural net designed, in part, to
recognise emergent properties in other such nets (i.e. the behaviour
of
people around us), but I think it's worth bearing in mind that no
simulation we can run is likely to tease out the motives or
aspirations of anyone in the Palestine/Israeli conflict with any great
accuracy. It's all guesswork, and getting incensed because someone
else's guesswork disagrees with yours seems no different (to me) to
two neuron modellers bickering over the outputs of their
simulations -- especially when neither model may in fact bear much
resemblance to what occurs in a real neuron itself.
Cheers,
Sean
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:17 MST