Seeing red

[emjay]

In principle any comp system can be built using nothing but nand...so ultimately I'd have to say that if you knew how neurons worked, to an exacting degree...you would be able to build a replica of the system in another architecture, in nand rather than neuron.  Whether or not this theoretical machine would qualify, to you, as a precise model would be up for debate, I imagine.  All of this is only applicable if mind is comp, ofc.  

I use AND to simplify, grossly, when people are stuck on the fundamentals.....when they think that it -can't- be done.  You can zoom in and out with it.  For example, saying that if a nueron was only able to do what an and gate could do..it could yield this and this...or up higher, saying, if two centers of the brain A and B, through vastly complicated multidirectional concurrent processing involving billions of neurons yield state C...that's red apple.

Cool... that'll be a fun little project then, see if I can approximate one using nothing but logic gates And hopefully learn something about circuits in the process. But just two questions: 1. what's so special about NAND gates compared to other logic gates? and 2. Can each gate only accept two inputs or any number?