If you are assuming that a neuron contributes less than 2 bits of state (or 1 bit per 500 synapses) and 1 computation per cycle, then you know more about neurobiology than anyone alive.
I don't understand your statement.
I didn't say anything in my post above about the per neuron state - because it's not important. Each neuron is a low precision analog accumulator, roughly up to 8-10 bits ish, and there are 20 billion neurons in the cortex. There are another 80 billion in the cerebellum, but they are unimportant.
The memory cost of storing the state for an equivalent ANN is far less than than 20 billion bytes or so, because of compression - most of that state is just zero most of the time.
In terms of computation per neuron per cycle, when...
I've been going through the AIFoom debate, and both sides makes sense to me. I intend to continue, but I'm wondering if there're already insights in LW culture I can get if I just ask for them.
My understanding is as follows:
The difference between a chimp and a human is only 5 million years of evolution. That's not time enough for many changes.
Eliezer takes this as proof that the difference between the two in the brain architecture can't be much. Thus, you can have a chimp-intelligent AI that doesn't do much, and then with some very small changes, suddenly get a human-intelligent AI and FOOM!
Robin takes the 5-million year gap as proof that the significant difference between chimps and humans is only partly in the brain architecture. Evolution simply can't be responsible for most of the relevant difference; the difference must be elsewhere.
So he concludes that when our ancestors got smart enough for language, culture became a thing. Our species stumbled across various little insights into life, and these got passed on. An increasingly massive base of cultural content, made of very many small improvements is largely responsible for the difference between chimps and humans.
Culture assimilated new information into humans much faster than evolution could.
So he concludes that you can get a chimp-level AI, and to get up to human-level will take, not a very few insights, but a very great many, each one slowly improving the computer's intelligence. So no Foom, it'll be a gradual thing.
So I think I've figured out the question. Is there a commonly known answer, or are there insights towards the same?