alt Hacker News> If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?
Perhaps this is already known, but I would think there is a high chance that our brains require "write access" to function. That is, the very process of neural activity inherently makes modifications to the underlying structure.
> a high chance that our brains require "write access" to function
There are multiple learning mechanisms that happen on different time-frames, eg neural plasticity, hippocampus are both longer-term processes for memory consolidation. Whereas the content of “RAM” might be better modeled as a set of fast dynamic weights representing ions and neurotransmitter concentrations.
My hunch is that you could model the latter fast weights in volatile memory, but I wouldn’t count these as “modifying the structure”.
Do you have any particular systems in mind where you have reason to believe that permanent modification is required for brains to function?