Ok, agreed with you all =). I just think there are some restrictions above the arguments, but Jonathan already said it in details.
Thanks for putting this together. I do however caution people from making assumptions as to what the nature/design of hardware and software systems may be ten years from now. That’s adequate time for a whole new technology/discoveries to come to being and alter our definition of a human brain or a computer is.
Forgive me if this seems high-level and uninformed, but entirely new circuit materials and design *might* be right around the corner. Just the devil’s advocate in me.
Parallelism, concurrency and distribution are huge areas of research now of days, primarily due to the fact that the hardware industry has reached a plateau with the serial arch
Chris, I agree with all your points, but I can’t help thinking ‚straw man‘ as I read this. I mean, that may not be quite the right word for it, but isn’t most of this already pretty well assimilated into common thinking about the brain? You have to go back pretty far in time for Minksy Papert. With the exception of #7 (I do think a lot of writers equate neurons with big wet transistors), I don’t think I’ve read anything that compares brain functions with computer circuitry in any kind of a literal sense. (Of course, I’m excluding certain philosophers when I say that – there’s just no accounting for what some of them will argue. )
Now, I will admit that I’m not really that well-read on the subject, so maybe I’ve just been lucky so far.
As someone whose specialty happens to be computer science, I would have to say 
that I agree overall with your overview, except for a few points.
This is a great overview and vey educational
You could grant that computers are probably not as massively parallel as human brain architecture, but that’s really a question of scale and not essence. Continue reading »