Steve Reads

Kind of a cool article about Paul and Patricia Churchland, neuroscientists and philosophers. (Cached.) It’s a bit shallow, and makes me want to go read the Churchlands themselves; Cosma Shalizi recommended Patricia Churchland’s The Computational Brain a while back in an unrelated context.

The speculative part at the end, about the possibility of brains merging, seems to ignore something obvious: aren’t brains connected by newspapers, blogs and suchlike? The mechanism could very well be similar to propagation across neurons: you absorb some idea that you read somewhere, and you read it from a few other places. Each place where you read it has a certain reputation attached. When the total reputation of a given idea exceeds a critical threshold, you accept it. You then broadcast the same idea to everyone you know; they repeat the same model of propagation. This would then be similar to your basic McCulloch-Pitts neuron.

Granted, I know next to nothing about neuroscience, and indeed Cosma recommended the Churchland book in response to a vaguely-worded question similar to my idea above. I’ll check out her book and see if anything cool comes of it.