[extropy-chat] Can a single brain cell recognize Bill Clinton?

[Emlyn]

(3) Has the data stream from the subject's optical system been preprocessed
by the optical system itself, leaving little for the neurons to do?


Nope, but it's probably been preprocessed by lots of other neurons.

Imagine that I were to write a face recognition computer program.
You'd show it pictures of faces, and it would decide (through some
horribly complex code) who the face belonged to, from a set database
of known persons. Say Bill Clinton is one of them.

If you were to then get into this program with a debugger, it is
highly likely that there would be at least one word of memory
somewhere which would take one value (or range of values) when the
program was processing a picture of Bill Clinton, and another (range)
when it was processing anything else. Straightforwardly, this memory
location would be involved in the processing at the output end of
things, holding a result.

-- 
Emlyn

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