Well, scientists use mathematical logic, quite a long trip from the sandbox.
Some people say that scientists need science philosophy, as birds need birdwatchers. At least birdwatchers build some houses for the birds, and make sure their predator population don't get too high. I'm still waiting for philosophers to get rid of those republican/conservative/evolutionist/put-your-own-retard here.
you simply do not understand those concepts.
Well, if you do it worse than science or religion, it's philosophy.
Remember this [slashdot.org] story from ages ago? Remember how well that returned on its promises of creating a real brain? That was spike-timing dependent plasticity as well, and unsurprisingly it never did anything resembling thought.
The only place where the FACETS European project promised to create a real brain was on
was to create a theoretical and experimental foundation for the realisation of novel computing paradigms which exploit the concepts experimentally observed in biological nervous systems
, according to its website [1].
As a matter of fact, this project has been a success, and led to the BrainScaleS European project, which
aims at understanding function and interaction of multiple spatial and temporal scales in brain information processing.
[2]. Again, there is no unrealistic/journalistic promises here.
[1] http://facets.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/public/goals/index.html [2] http://brainscales.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/
I think the REAL problem is that even the smallest brains have several billion neurons
Worms have hundreds, flies thousands. I'm still waiting (and probably be long dead before that happen) for a computer simulation/hardware design managing to do everything a fly can.
Also, most of those 10 000 connections are to nearby neurons, presumably because long-distance communication involves the same latency
As a matter of fact, in the brain long-distance connections are myelinated and are thus much master that short-distance ones.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.