Posted: Oct 08, 2014 12:32 am
And again, you're working on the assumption that all life must resemble our own.
In the neurons that exist in the biology we know of, yes. But again, "neuron" could be more or less a concept unique to Earth, for all we know. And your incredulity on the options that may or may not be available are not especially relevant as to whether or not they exist.
That does make a lot more sense, but I must mention that life has a way of finding unexpected ways to deal with problems.
It isn't a problem of design so much as a problem with scale. In order to increase processing power of any neural network without increasing size would require the basic unit of that network to be reduced in size. So they would have to have something smaller than a neuron as the base unit. Any living version of a neuron is going to have to accommodate both the infrastructure to maintain the health of unit as well as it's information processing functionality. I doubt you will find many options smaller than a neuron.
In the neurons that exist in the biology we know of, yes. But again, "neuron" could be more or less a concept unique to Earth, for all we know. And your incredulity on the options that may or may not be available are not especially relevant as to whether or not they exist.
Then there is the heat problem. The denser the network the more heat it generates from processing. All processors are going to exchange heat energy in this way due to thermal dynamics. The denser the processor, the more infrastructure that is required to dissipate the heat, which takes up room. You will get diminishing returns as the scale get's smaller.
That does make a lot more sense, but I must mention that life has a way of finding unexpected ways to deal with problems.