
Could Our Brain Be a Decentralized Blockchain System? - utkarshs12
Are all the nuerons in our brain interacting like a decentralized blockchain system to collectively make up our consciousness?
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BjoernKW
Short answer: No.

The blockchain essentially is a ledger, an accounting system. In order for
that to work in a decentralised manner it's vital that each node have a
complete copy of the data store and its history.

The brain on the other hand isn't an accounting system. It's decentralised,
too but its nodes - the neurons - serve a very different purpose than
Blockchain nodes. They only need to 'know' about their immediate environment,
i.e. the neurons around them. Therefore not only doesn't each neuron need to
have a complete copy of the data available but it would rather be tremendously
inefficient to do so.

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utkarshs12
I think the blockchain helps the transactions overcome trust issues due to
fraudulent nodes on the decentralized network and thus there is a requirement
of a complete copy of all the transactions to be present on each of the nodes.

In a brain however, we may consider the neurons to be ideal nodes which will
never act fraudulently. So if some data is stored on a neuron, all other
neurons can completely trust that the data will not be tampered (due to lack
of any motivation for a neuron to act fraudulently).

That means we could skip the blockchain database part completely because
'trust' is naturally present in the network.

Also now I'm not sure if there remains any further scope for us to apply the
idea of decentralized operations to the functioning of the brain's neural
network. Do point out if any ideas pop into your mind.

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BjoernKW
Well, trustless trust is exactly the point of blockchain technology. If you
can trust your participants anyway you don't need a blockchain.

On the other hand, neurons aren't ideal nodes that never act fraudulently.
There's plenty of false information or misfiring neurons in the brain. The
brain is very good at error correction and heuristics, however. So,
'fraudulent' nodes aren't necessarily a problem.

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gus_massa
No.

The main idea of the blockchain is that each block has a hash of the previous
block that has a hash of the previous block that has a hash of the previous
block ... so you get a chain of blocks.

Also, each mining node has the complete information of the previous block and
all the new transactions, so it can calculate the hash of the previous block
and a hash of the new data and create the new block.

Neurons have very few data available. They can sum, rest and make a small
amount of delay and accumulation, but each neuron doesn't know the state of
the whole brain and has no computational power to make a hash of it anyway.

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utkarshs12
Applying the idea of decentralization on a network of neurons was what I got
curious about. But I understand the blockchain is what makes the
decentralization work in the first place. And I agree, the idea of blockchain
is to maintain this continuously growing database of transactions on every
node. And if neurons have to work like a decentralized system, they've got to
have a blockchain like storage. That doesn't seem workable like you pointed
out. :)

