(2017-09-24, 03:49 PM)Max_B Wrote: Where as I don't understand why you ignore easily available evidence of neuron-less organisms which exhibit apparently intelligent behavior. If these organisms don't have any neurons, then they can't have any measurable neuron firing. So here are these organisms, exhibiting intelligent behavior, and they do so without any neuron firing - yet the measurement of neuron firing, is the very criteria you use to claim nothing is, and nothing can, be going on in the brain after "...after 10-20 seconds...", because scalp EEG (which measures neuron firing) is flat.
Human brain cells (neurons) are not identical to the single cell organisms, amoebas or parameciums which exhibit some kind of autonomous response. You certainly can't automatically attribute intelligence to them, though. It may just be a chemical reaction imitating intelligence. We don't know yet.
Irrespective of that, human brain cells (100 billion of them ?) don't act individually (apparently) they connect in an unknown manner to form a "whole" (apparently) and at some stage, no one knows when, consciousness is presumed to appear out of that complexity.
So I don't see how your faith in the ability of a paramecium to look intelligent, enables you to then make the giant leap of comparing them to human brain cells ?
Human brain cells that are not functioning do not suddenly turn into parameciums or multiples of parameciums able to perform tasks. And they certainly do not turn into something that has the power of conscious observation, reasoning with emotion and memory formation in real time at a distance.
This the problem with your thinking (your idea) Max. You're making gigantic leaps without any justification or evidence.