Comment Re:Robert A. Heinlein, 1966 ... (Score 1) 65
You concede that the model is not the complete picture while also trying to mock me for saying it's not the complete picture. Poor show.
Um, no. I'll repeat: of the changes, none of which have a material impact on its general functioning. Indeed, some variants are even simpler than the original Hodgkin-Huxley model. But they all yield basically equivalent functional behavior.
For example, you can model the specific chemical behavior or thermodynamics behind neuronal behavior. Instead of assuming or measuring given synaptic strengths, you can model axons and dendrites to determine them. You can create models of multiple neurons at once. But none of these things change the overall behavior. The behavior modeled in the Hodgkin-Huxley model has held up for 2/3rds of a century. You are NOT going to debunk it in the comments section of a Slashdot article. Period.
Even with this when you're looking at a very narrow part of it, you're oversimplifying. Yeasts produce mostly ethanol but actually produce a range of different alcohols
It doesn't matter if none of that is what you care about. If you're a brewer, and you provide yeast a given feedstock and conditions, you get a given output, within given plus or minus margins. It's irrelevant how complex the yeast is. It doesn't matter how complex the gene transcription mechanism is, how complex the ribosomes are to assemble cyclin-dependent kinases to control the transition between the G1, S, G2, and M phases. What you get is, more or less, ethanol in water. The production mechanism is insanely complex. The output is trivial. We care about outputs, not production mechanisms.
And yes, we absolutely DO have wiggle room for a "more or less", "plus or minus" some percent, when we're talking about neuronal interactions. They're damped systems. Minor excursions get cancelled out.
Trying to produce an accurate model, of precisely which alcohols are produced and when based on what inputs is much, much more complex
Industrial brewers can very readily predict their yields for given yeast strains given given feedstocks at given temperatures, etc. Their models might be considered "complex" to, like, a child looking at them, but the level of complexity in modeling yeast alcohol production behavior is many orders of magnitude less than the model of complexity of the yeast themselves.
You're simply pushing a fallacy, that if a production mechanism is complex, the output must be equally or more complex. It's simply false.
HH model is just about conduction along the main axon
Loop back to my original post. And you don't have to model synaptic strengths - you can just measure them, or for simulation, simply fix them. That said, they are able to be modeled. But you don't need to.