Connectionists: How the brain works

[Ivan Raikov]

My summary of the history of physics was quite wrong: the idea of
infinitesimals and their application has been around since the time of
Archimedes:

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/archimedes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal

The moral is, it takes a while for fundamental ideas in science to
promulgate :-)

On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 3:38 PM, Ivan Raikov <ivan.g.raikov at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Speaking of radio and electromagnetic waves, it is perhaps the case that
> neuroscience has not yet reached the maturity of 19th century physics:
> while the discovery of electromagnetism is attributed to great
> experimentalists such as Ampere and Faraday, and its mathematical model is
> attributed to one of the greatest modelers in physics, Maxwell, none of it
> happened in isolation. There was a lot of duplicated experimental work and
> simultaneous independent discoveries in that time period, and Maxwell's
> equations were readily accepted and quickly refined by a number of
> physicists after he first postulated them. So in a sense physics had a
> consensus community model of electromagnetism already in the first half of
> the 19th century. Neuroscience is perhaps more akin to physics in the  17th
> century, when Newton's infinitesimal calculus was rejected and even mocked
> by the scientific establishment on the continent, and many years would pass
> until calculus was understood and widely accepted. So a unifying theory of
> neuroscience may not come until a lot of independent and reproducible
> experimentation brings it about.
>
>   -Ivan
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 1:39 PM, Thomas Trappenberg <tt at cs.dal.ca> wrote:
>
>> Some of our discussion seems to be about 'How the brain works'. I am of
>> course not smart enough to answer this question. So let me try another
>> system.
>>
>> How does a radio work? I guess it uses an antenna to sense an
>> electromagnetic wave that is then  amplified so that an electromagnet can
>> drive a membrane to produce an airwave that can be sensed by our ear. Hope
>> this captures some essential aspects.
>>
>> Now that you know, can you repair it when it doesn't work?
>>
>>
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