[montereynack]

Sorry, but this is untrue; action potentials in neurons have extremely complex interplay with each other, including residual “soft” periods and chemically-induced changes in how they fire. Neurons don’t just “fire” or “not fire”, they adaptively change the strength of their firing constantly, unpredictably and continuously.

[RetroTechie]

Yes, and there's things like feedback / reflection, self-modifying like behaviour, lossy memory, emotional state, tiredness, aging, loads of drugs & hormones to influence the process, etc, etc.

Buuuttt... it's possible that few if any of those things are needed to capture the essence of a brains' functionality.

Maybe it's simply a matter of size. Maybe some configuration tweaks. Perhaps a different architecture.

We simply don't know - yet.

[sublinear]

> few if any of those things are needed to capture the essence of a brains' functionality

I'm pretty sure all those things being dismissed are the essence of a brain.