
Neuroscience Can't Explain How a Microprocessor Works - dmitrygr
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21714978-cautionary-tale-about-promises-modern-brain-science-testing-methods?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20170119n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/8643534/n
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martyalain
This article reminds me this reflexion at the end of a paper I wrote a few
monts ago in
[http://epsilonwiki.free.fr/lambdaway/?view=lambda_calculus](http://epsilonwiki.free.fr/lambdaway/?view=lambda_calculus)
:

« Church numbers could be seen as tiny CPUs, small primitive engines ready to
iterate. Not dead datas stored in a memory and sequentially given to some CPU
iterating on them, but an arborescent structure of CPUs interacting in a de
facto parallel process. Maybe it's how Google's data centers work. Maybe it's
how our brain works, full of Church neurons. Why not ? [...]. »

Don't blame me if it is out the topic, but I wonder what some smart person
could think about that? Thanks.

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nerdponx
> The researchers found, for instance, that disabling one particular group of
> transistors prevented the chip from running the boot-up sequence of “Donkey
> Kong”—the Nintendo game that introduced Mario the plumber to the world—while
> preserving its ability to run other games. But it would be a mistake, Dr
> Jonas points out, to conclude that those transistors were thus uniquely
> responsible for “Donkey Kong”. The truth is more subtle. They are instead
> part of a circuit which implements a much more basic computing function that
> is crucial for loading one piece of software, but not some others.

This is blindingly obvious in hindsight, but not something I had ever
considered before. Really cool article.

