Comments like this are incredibly grating. You condescend to the interlocutor for making a mistake which only exists in your own mistaken world model. Your confidence that neurons and ANN weights and «pulleys and gears» are all equivalent because there is, in theory, an intention to instantiate some computation, and to think otherwise is tantamount to belief in magic and broken causality, is just confused and born out of perusing popular-scientific materials instead of relying on scientific literature or hands-on experience.
> The fire because of input.
No they do not fire because of input, they modulate their firing probability based on input, and there are different modalities of input with different effects. Neurons are self-contained biological units (descended, let me remind you, from standalone unicellular organisms, just like the rest of our cells), which actually have an independently developing internal state and even metabolic needs; they are not merely a system of logic gates even if you can approximate their role with a system of equations or an ANN. This is very different, mechanistically and teleologically. Hell, even spiking ANNs would be substantially different from currently dominant models.
> So what, magic ? a soul ? If the brain is computing then the substrate is entirely irrelevant
Stop dumbing down complex arguments to some low-status culture war opinion you find it easy to dunk on.
> The fire because of input.
No they do not fire because of input, they modulate their firing probability based on input, and there are different modalities of input with different effects. Neurons are self-contained biological units (descended, let me remind you, from standalone unicellular organisms, just like the rest of our cells), which actually have an independently developing internal state and even metabolic needs; they are not merely a system of logic gates even if you can approximate their role with a system of equations or an ANN. This is very different, mechanistically and teleologically. Hell, even spiking ANNs would be substantially different from currently dominant models.
> So what, magic ? a soul ? If the brain is computing then the substrate is entirely irrelevant
Stop dumbing down complex arguments to some low-status culture war opinion you find it easy to dunk on.