I think they need to fully figure out how individual neurons work before they move up to larger circuits.
An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#22What 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.
Deep learning?
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#23"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
A mind understanding itself may violate the second law, but a few minds understanding one mind should be theoretically possible!
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#24What 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].
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't we have that in the model that describes what the parts of the brain do? Proven to be wrong when you watch people with serious brain injuries re learn skills, but shown to have value by how it can predict what tumors or injuries will do to someone's ability.
Those models and explanations are not nearly as helpful as one might think. A lot of "neuroscience" explanations of everyday behaviour are mostly nonsense that sounds plausible and appealing ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817 , https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_0075... ). In this context plausible doesn't even mean plausible to a neuroscientist, it means more like consistent with the nons…
In general I'm very skeptical of much neuroscience. (If an article ever says 'emerging neuroscience shows...' you can be assured what follows is almost certainly BS.) Yet I found the senior researcher in this article quite refreshing about the limitations of their research.
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#26What 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.
You mean like “neuroscience”?
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#27The article touched upon the C. elegans connectome. There are a few interesting projects attempting to simulate the creature.
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#28If 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.
Constraints:
- No temperatures hot enough to melt silicon or metal.
- Everything must unfold from a single cell during the process of reproduction, no factories allowed.
- Everything must be made out of what it can find to eat, no mining allowed unless you're a subterranean bacteria.
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#29From the article, a quote that is enlightening:
if I asked, ‘Do you understand New York City?’ you would probably respond, ‘What do you mean?’ There’s all this complexity. If you can’t understand New York City, it’s not because you can’t get access to the data. It’s just there’s so much going on at the same time. That’s what a human brain is. It’s millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There’s no point when you can suddenly say, ‘I now understand the brain,’ just as you wouldn’t say, ‘I now get New York City.’ ”
Re: An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't we have that in the model that describes what the parts of the brain do? Proven to be wrong when you watch people with serious brain injuries re learn skills, but shown to have value by how it can predict what tumors or injuries will do to someone's ability.
I would equate our current understanding of the brain to the common knowledge that apples fall to the ground from trees; where else would they go? People knew that long before Newton.
Almost 2000 years before Newton, Archimedes wrote "Any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid or liquid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object."
The ancients knew a fair bit.