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Exact text as I got it.

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Editor letter
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Dear Yehouda Harpaz

Re: Journal of intelligent systems

I have now received reports from three independent referees for your paper entitled "Can the neurons in the brain implement symbolic systems?"

Unfortunately one referee recommend rejection and I am inclined to agree with the comments made. Please find the comments enclosed along with this letter.

The nature of the referee's comments are such that the objections cannot be met by simple revisions. I am sorry that I cannot therefore accept the paper for publication. I hope that you will find constructive points from the review process which will help you develop your research.

Your sincerely,

Professor MJ Wright
Editor in Chief
Journal Of Intelligent Systems

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Review
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Name of paper: Can the neurons in the brain implement symbolic systems?
Author: Yehouda Harpaz

This paper has to be rejected for several reasons.

First of all, the author's knowledge in neurosciences is poor. Although the question he poses is legitimate, he is unaware of the pertinent discussion in progress at least over five decades. As early as in 1943 McCulloch and Pitts developed a neuronal model trying to show that neurons are logical devices operating according to all-or-none logic. This neuronal model requires exactly clocked operations. But the early enthusiasm about its logic and arithmetic capabilities was soon followed by the criticism of its neurophysiological implausibility. Until now exact pulse periodicity has not been observed in neural signals. Therefore, the author is right that single neurons cannot implement logical functions, but unfortunately his arguments are not new.

Considering the quoted "textbooks" or several papers one has the impression that the author is neither in neuroscience nor in artificial intelligence up to date. Apparently he does not realize the complexity of the problem he dealt with.

From a neurobiological point of view the neural assembly theory based on many experimental finding is one of the favourite approach to discussing the author's topic. The recent discovery of stimulus induced cortical synchronization in the visual system now provides a basis for bringing neural mechanisms of local and global stimulus encoding into juxtaposition with connectionist conceptualizations, with a view of accounting for construction of subsymbolic composites out of elementary stimulus features, on the way towards creating symbolic representation. The author does not refer to this important approach.

Authors who do not see the complexity of a topic or who cannot estimate if there is something new in their argumentation make tendentious statements. So this author does.

In summary, I see no possibility of proposing a revision of the paper.