Kevin K. <KK at _._> wrote:
> Harry Erwin wrote:
>> > On the other hand, it has some
> > relevance to Church's thesis, since I haven't been able to identify the
> > mechanism of a Turing machine (or any of the alternatives) in the
> > anatomy 8).
>> You're not going to find a Turing machine in the nervous system of a
> bat. A Turing machine is an infinite object. Any biological system of
> nerves with binary states is a finite automata, and thus can be
> simulated by a Turing machine. Therefore, you will never find something
> a bat can do which a TM cannot do, and Church's thesis is unaffected.
>> Kevin K.
Ah, but neurons do not have binary states. In fact, to define the state
of a neuron, you have to treat it as a continuous extended object. It
gets worse when you're dealing with a collection of neurons, because you
now need to keep track not only of the internal states of the neurons
but also the glial cells. So we're not dealing with a finite automaton.
--
Harry Erwin, PhD, <mailto:herwin at gmu.edu>,Computational Neuroscientist
(modeling bat behavior), Senior SW Analyst and Security Engineer, and
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, GMU. Looking--CV available at:
<http://mason.gmu.edu/~herwin/CV.htm>
