Post by general313 on Nov 15, 2017 20:35:02 GMT
If the idea is to fully replicate a human's consciousness, then it absolutely matters, and for all the reasons why functionalism is so appealing: what's floating around a single synaptic ion channel contributes to whether the neuron fires, which in turn contributes to the judgement and behavior of the neural networks it is a part of. Individual neurons are their own creatures with their own agenda's. They aren't simple mechanical circuits.
Trouble is no one knows enough about consciousness for anyone to claim more knowledge about it than "satisfying one's norms". But there does seem to be a repetition of that tendency, oft-repeated throughout the history of science, that the closer we look, the less difference we see between the living and the non-living.
Vitalism gave way to an acceptance that living animals follow the same chemistry and physics laws as non-living animals, including the development of offspring from conception to birth. As neural scientists probe deeper into how human vision works, they are discovering more about how the brain processes images for recognition, and it bears a striking resemblance to the neural networks used in machine learning. Learning and memory retention in human brains and neural networks work the same way, by adjusting interconnection weights (synapses in the case of humans and layer node coefficients in a neural network).
Neural networks use artificial neurons which have a very concise mathematical description.
You dismiss "simple mechanical circuits", but brains and smart computers derive their power in the organization of very large numbers of simple elements.