Re: Turtles All the Way Down

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#40

From: Christopher Connolly
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 20:24

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In article <37l2d0$hpr@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>The whole idea that the brain is doing something that requires
>integrating PDEs seems very unlikely to me.  The brain is made of
>biological cells, and cells do not have the high precision where the
>boundedness of 4th derivatives would have any particular relevance.

Whether fourth derivatives are meaningful or not is separate from the
issue of using PDEs (or ODEs) for modelling cellular and tissue-level
physical processes in the brain.  Since these processes are commonly
modeled using rates (e.g., of ion transport through the membrane), it
seems like ODEs, or possibly PDEs, are quite natural to use (and in
fact are used).  Besides that, what do you mean by "cells do not have
the high precision"?
---------
Chris Connolly   MIT Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
E25-616		 connolly@wccf.mit.edu

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From: connolly@levanto.ai.mit.edu (Christopher Connolly)
Newsgroups: sci.nonlinear,sci.cognitive,bionet.neuroscience,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turtles All the Way Down
Date: 14 Oct 1994 20:24:40 GMT
Organization: MIT Dept. of Brain and Cog. Sci.
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Sender: Chris Connolly
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