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Random Rants 4

Entry 523, on 2007-04-30 at 16:27:24 (Rating 4, News)

I spotted so many interesting items in recent news that I have decided I need another edition of my "random rants" blog to cope. Actually, these aren't all strictly rants, but never mind, its a catchy title.

Rant the first. I read that our former prime minister, Jim Bolger, told the Queen (of England, and many other countries as well, including New Zealand) that he thought that we would eventually dump her as our official head of state and elect one instead. Of course, its obscene that the Queen is our official head of state, even though its an entirely ceremonial position and she has no real power. Britain has clearly lost interest in its former colonies since it has joined the EU. Why would we possibly want to have a British monarch as our head of state? Its absurd!

Of course, the counter-argument is that the less leaders and politicians you have the better. Replacing the Queen with an elected president would just result in us having another sleazy politician instead of a harmless monarch. By this argument no president is better than a bad one, surely something the citizens of the US can identify with!

On a related subject is rant the second. Another item which I noticed is the debate over whether Prince Harry should be sent to Iraq. Many people would say send all the royals there, and tell the terrorists where they are. Oh, and send all the politicians too. But seriously, it really isn't a good idea. Of course, backing down now would be seen as a victory to the terrorists so it won't happen, but this situation should never have arisen in the first place.

Rant the third is more positive. Researchers have simulated part of a mouse brain using a supercomputer. Simulating brains is really difficult. The supercomputer could only simulate half a mouse brain and even then at only one tenth of real speed. But the fact that it could be done at all is significant. With the rate of progress in computing it should be possible to simulate real brains in realtime in a few years.

The observed behaviour of the simulation matched what is seen in the real brain, a quite amazing thing when you consider that it was only the neurons and synapse interconnections which were being copied.

There are two ways to interpret this, neither of which have a lot of validity at this early stage. First, we could say that the fact that it is so hard to simulate even a mouse brain shows that there is something special about brains and consciousness, and that a purely mechanistic explanation of mind is insufficient. Second, we could say that reductionism is sufficient to explain mind and consciousness because we can already get close to the point where we can reproduce them mechanistically.

As I said, neither of these conclusions are really supported by the facts. Its simply too early to know, but it is interesting that the first steps to creating artificial brains have already been taken.

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