We are no different than computers

[emjay]

My own models, lol..nothing at all approaching mind in it's totality or effectiveness.  Don't want you to get the wrong idea.  I model (and sometimes build) circuits largely with an aim to design better sensory for commercial ag - and no one's buying my little toys...they're all private use..lol.
(I'm butchering one of those parrot drones right now to haul an ir camera and plan paths that follow ir trace for watermanagement...and trying to sucker a buddy into programming a mobile app to handle the data, so as to replace the functionality lost when I destroy the native systems in order to jerry rig it.)

-IR can provide a means for detecting a whole range of problems in crops, from water to pests to disease.  Imagine having a bunch of cheap, tiny, resource efficient drones that did all of our detection work for us real-time, and could feed that data to our smartphone?  Trick is getting it to fly itself, eh?

Wow, that's impressive   I won't pretend to know all you're talking about basically you're an electrical engineer, into robotics? I find electronics really hard to grasp unfortunately. I'm just a programmer, or I was until I got RSI; still do it for fun sometimes but never again as a job   I have done a bit of Android programming in Java and have a small app on my phone but I really hate it - Android programming is the most laborious, boring, unintuitive programming I've ever come across. But it's nice to know that if I could come up with an x-factor idea, I would stand a chance of being able to make it into a reality.

Anyway I've looked at your link and watched the video. I wish they'd taken that approach to computing when I was at college: building a system from scratch and letting you play Linus Torvalds or that other guy, was it Richard Matthew ?Stallman? I think I have a better understanding of where you are coming from now; the guy in the video talks about increasing levels of abstraction and I always talk about that as well in reference to neural networks, as does my book, so I think we're on the same page. But the question of whether a neural network can be conceptualised in terms of logic gates like NAND is going to be a lot harder to answer. I do remember reading at some point that some people thought some neural circuits could have that sort of effect but I didn't really look into it much at the time. It might be fun to look and see how you could in theory create each of the logic gates with a neural network but whether they're possible or not doesn't make any difference if they're not configured that way in the brain; that will be the big test - finding them in the brain if they do turn out to be feasible. Anyway today I ordered a book that may be helpful called "Computing the Mind: How the Mind Really Works". I don't know if it's about ctm specifically but it is certainly about identifying all the features of mind, so could possibly be. That should give me a better idea of the distinct features to be looking at.