An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience • Hacker News Board

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#31

Post by jvanderbot » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #19

gbjw wrote: post #14

Tangentially related: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? [1] (short answer: not with current analytic tools) [1] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

That's a bit silly because neuroscience tools are built got biological brains. electrical engineering tools are used on microprocessors, as they should.

OP and TFA meant "Would a similar method of observing a complex, connected system of systems work on a less complex example like a microchip if we had just up and found one?"

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#32

Post by SubiculumCode » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

gbjw wrote: post #14

Tangentially related: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? [1] (short answer: not with current analytic tools) [1] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

This is an over-rated article by those outside the field of neuroscience. While it brings up a few good points, it fails to acknowledge the sophistication of our neuroscience and behavioral techniques, and the value of converging evidence across levels of description. Also, its relatedness to the present article is tenuous at best.

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#33

Post by koroe020 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #4

What we need is a Newtonian model of the brain. A model that is incomplete and "wrong", but useful and generative. While Newtonian physics may be "wrong", is much easier to learn than quantum physics or relativity, etc. Neuroscience usually focuses on precision details, but doesn't aim to tell big picture stories. There are a few exceptions, however, like Karl Friston's free energy reduction model.

Translation: your level of familiarity with the material only allows you to “see” it as the separate details.

Daniel Coleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” offers a useful daily model for reasoning around it.

They exist but realize they’re going to “feel” different than physics models. With general physics knowledge one can literally implement tests and build on that independently.

With NS, one can read a model but without imaging machines and chemical testing... shrug... it’s harder to build a muscle memory.

Which neuroscience research argues is super important to connecting details into a composite one can intuit around competently.

Reading AND writing are important to learning English. Same with everything else.

TLDR the practical value of NS is already known: practice learning as we do, don’t be a dick.

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#34

Post by RocketSyntax » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

I am planning to solve this =) just cracked the inner workings of ANNs (future SHOW HN) and am going to read a book on computational neuroscience tomorrow.

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#35

Post by allovernow » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

RocketSyntax wrote: post #34

I am planning to solve this =) just cracked the inner workings of ANNs (future SHOW HN) and am going to read a book on computational neuroscience tomorrow.

Not to be discouraging, but if you're just starting to learn about artificial neural networks, you have a long way to go...

That said, in the few years of experience I've had with ANNs, they really do seem like an intuitive analog for human learning, at a high level. And thinking about training problems in this way, approximately "what kind of training data would I need to train a small child to do this" can be more helpful than one might have otherwise expected.

I think we're just a handful of major breakthroughs away from true AI, assuming compute and memory continue to scale. Certainly within 100 years.

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#36

Post by The_rationalist » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

JoeSmithson wrote: post #24

dr_dshiv wrote: post #4

What we need is a Newtonian model of the brain. A model that is incomplete and "wrong", but useful and generative. While Newtonian physics may be "wrong", is much easier to learn than quantum physics or relativity, etc. Neuroscience usually focuses on precision details, but doesn't aim to tell big picture stories. There are a few exceptions, however, like Karl Friston's free energy reduction model.

There are several of these (cognitive architectures) e.g. the ACT-R model[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT-R

Which ones aren't BS?

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#37

Post by jedberg » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

The author should go talk to some astrophysicists. They have a similar problem -- humans are unlikely to ever understand how the entirety of the cosmos works, but it's still interesting to learn about the small bits.

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#38

Post by jayd16 » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #18

soup10 wrote: post #3

If you've seen some of the high resolution videos of neural activity captures from even simple fish, the slightest motor movements activate hundreds of thousands of cells in a chaotic pattern. Neural circuitry is not neatly laid out like a silicon chip, its a forest of inter-connectivity that resists analysis even with extremely detailed visualization and data captures.

I think it’s interesting that people think we’ll be able to make something that does more in a smaller space. As if there was something other than the laws of physics preventing natural selection from testing smaller structures. Or that there’s something (other than the demands of the computation itself) constraining the architectures that were tested through natural selection.

We out design nature all the time. Evolution doesn't find perfection, it finds whats good enough.

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#39

Post by SubiculumCode » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #32

gbjw wrote: post #14

Tangentially related: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? [1] (short answer: not with current analytic tools) [1] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

This is an over-rated article by those outside the field of neuroscience. While it brings up a few good points, it fails to acknowledge the sophistication of our neuroscience and behavioral techniques, and the value of converging evidence across levels of description. Also, its relatedness to the present article is tenuous at best.

I don't care how often I get down voted for making the above comment in response to posts about this article. I am a neuroscientist and I will defend my field from overrated, simplistic criticisms that happen to appeal to the HN crowd's sensibilities.

Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience

#40

Post by stevebmark » Sat, Jan 25, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

I'm confused. This article doesn't say anything. It makes no points and has no insight. "There's a lot of data in neuroscience?" Is that the message? An unusual number of Nautilus articles frontpage HN like this one, where there doesn't seem to be any value in the article itself. What is going on?