Chinese Room question

[Sarevok]

The problem with the chinese room argument is that it relies on a falty understanding of how the brain works. The brain is made up of hundreds of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. A modern CPU is made up of hundreds of millions of transistors, so there is still several orders of magnitude diference in complexity, but the metaphor is still completely valid. Neither a neuron nor a transistor can do anything is isolation, but many neurons together form a network, just as many transistors are needed to form a logic gate. Neurons and transistors even work in roughly the same way. Both are simple on/off switches. The difference is that neurons run at around 100 Hz, whereas transistors switch on and off billions of times per second.

Are neurons really on off devices ? My understanding was that it is far different from anything in a electronic circuit. Biological neurons don't even resemble the structures modeled in artificial neural nets let alone the maze found inside a chip.

[Wyrm]

Are neurons really on off devices ? My understanding was that it is far different from anything in a electronic circuit. Biological neurons don't even resemble the structures modeled in artificial neural nets let alone the maze found inside a chip.

A neuron actually behaves nothing like an on-off switch, or a transistor. The only similarity is the ability to modulate signals. However, the comparison is apt, because it illustrates the fallacy of division: if something has a property, then one of the individual parts must have the property. That's obviously nonsense, made clear by the comparison.