New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 07:27am Sep 24, 2003 EST (# 13900 of 13901)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

This passage is from Fundamental Neuroanatomy by Walle J. H. Nauta and Michael Feirtag . . . W.H. Freeman, 1986 ( Nauta wrote as a MIT professor - Feirtag from the Board of Editors of Scientific American ).

The passage is the last paragraph of Nauta and Feirtag's Chapter 2 - The Neuron; Some Numbers

"One last conclusion remains to be drawn from the numbers we have cited. With the exception of a mere few million motor neurons, the entire human brain and spinal chord are a great intermediate net. And when the great intermediate net comes to include 99.9997 percent of all the neurons in the nervous system, the term loses much of its meaning: it comes to represent the very complexity one must face when one tries to comprehend the nervous system. The term remains useful only as a reminder that most of the brain's neurons are, strictly speaking, neither sensory nor motor. Strictly speaking, they are intercalated between the true sensory side of the organization and the true motor side. They are components of a computational network."

Counting from the optic nerve and other sensory inputs (perhaps ten million axons feeding brain) and motor outputs (a few million) from brain - there are perhaps half a million intermediate neurons for each input or output neuron. This is a prodigious number - the more prodigious when you consider how N! increases with N . Still more prodigious when you consider how complex, and interconnected, the intermediate neurons are among themselves. Each intermediate neuron has of the order of 1000 connections with other intermediate neurons.

Social groups, and sociotechnical systems - are more complicated than single people in significant ways.

How is order possible? It surely isn't a matter of strict genetic determiniation - the neural organization is far too complex to specify with the amount of genetic code that people carry.

Some very powerful self-organization is going on here. And it is a lot better than the results of "monkeys with typewriters."

rshow55 - 07:31am Sep 24, 2003 EST (# 13901 of 13901)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

cantabb - 04:03am Sep 23, 2003 EST (# 13875 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.rcShbbu8Ii4.1452740@.f28e622/15578 includes this line, which he may have intended in a dismissive way - but that I felt was important:

Too bad the dots are NOT numbered. That would have helped some to get 'some' picture for the effort.

I responded in 13786:

Some dots are much better numbered than others - and for such reasons - we share about 100,000 definitions of words that we figured out for ourselves from a well marked context.

For work that is new - things are more precarious. And it takes more care.

To me, and I'm not alone in this - it seems a miracle - it is surely a mystery - that people "figure out language and culture for themselves - from clues, and the connections of context" - but we know we do - this is common and crucial to our humanity.

How can people be so smart? (animals in lesser ways, too.) How, given that people are so smart - can they also be so incredibly ugly and stupid? - These questions, together, constitute Plato's Problem - and I've been working to make useful headway on that problem - with enormous help from others. I believe that I have, too.

There is nothing I can possibly post on this board that won't be subject to criticism - and it is easy to set up standards by which criticism is just. From many different perspectives.

Still, I believe that some very important things can converge, and are converging. Convergences that are desireable.

Things about "what it means to be a human being" - and an animal - and a social animal - that I feel are both practically and aesthetically and emotionally important.

Cantabb thinks these postings are unworthy of mention on this board. They look like output to me. I'm working to summarize - and trying to satisfy some of Cantabb's concerns as I do so. It is hard to do - when you are as limited as I am - and hard to do under fire. Especially under fire from someone like cantabb , who I suspect is an able editor.

Meanwhile, here are those postings:

1623 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/1792

1624 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/1793

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense