[js1138]

I don't think neurons are fully understood. I don't think neurons are the sole operational components of brains. I think all brain operation is accessible for study. I think animal brain function is identical to human brain function except for the obvious increase in complexity made possible by observable differences in size and structure. I don't think much is known about the way the various components function as a whole.

When we fully understand something like a bird or lizard brain I think we will have made some progress towards AI.

[unspun]

One may respectfully observe that you honestly say you're doing a-lot of believing, there. Why do you believe these things? And why do you believe that? And why in turn, do you believe that?

[Dataman]

I think animal brain function is identical to human brain function except for the obvious increase in complexity made possible by observable differences in size and structure.

Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Professor Roger W. Sperry, a psychologist at the California Institute of Technology, observed:

Before science, man used to think himself a free agent possessing free will. Science gives us, instead, causal determinism wherein every act is seen to follow inevitably from preceding patterns of brain excitation. Where we used to see purpose and meaning in human behaviour, science now shows us a complex bio-physical machine composed entirely of material elements, all of which obey inexorably the universal laws of physics and chemistry...

I find that my own conceptual working model of the brain leads to inferences that are in direct disagreement with many of the foregoing; especially I must take issue with that whole general materialistic-reductionist conception of human nature and mind that seems to emerge from the currently prevailing objective analytic approach in the brain-behaviour sciences.

When we are led to favour the implications of modern materialism in opposition to older, more idealistic values in these and related matters, I suspect that science may have sold society and itself a somewhat questionable bill of goods.

-Roger W. Sperry, "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (September 1966), pp. 2-3.