[HN Gopher] Cerebrum: Simulate and infer synaptic connectivity i...
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Cerebrum: Simulate and infer synaptic connectivity in large-scale
brain networks
Author : notallm
Score : 97 points
Date : 2024-12-24 18:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (svbrain.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (svbrain.xyz)
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| Question: would such a simulation be conscious? If not, why not?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Also, would it be quorled?
| fellerts wrote:
| What now?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Precisely
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| This, exactly.
|
| Nobody can defined what consciousness is in terms that can be
| experimentally validated. Until that happens not only can the
| question not be answered, it isn't even a question that makes
| any sense.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| There are more questions that make sense than those that
| can be tested.
|
| To the point, I have a convincing experience of
| consciousness and free will -- qualia -- and I suspect a
| digital clone of my brain would have a similar experience.
| Although this question is not testable, I think it's
| inaccurate to say that it doesn't make sense.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| It's not really the testableness that makes the problem.
| It's the fact that you're asking about X where X is
| undefined.
|
| If you can provide a satisfying definition of X it's very
| clear
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| How would you operationalize quorledness?
| Vampiero wrote:
| Answer: no one knows how consciousness works
| fallingknife wrote:
| If you accept the two premises:
|
| 1. A human brain has consciousness
|
| 2. The device is a perfect digital replica of a human brain
|
| I can't think of any argument that the device does not have
| consciousness that doesn't either rely on basically magic or
| lead to other ridiculous conclusions.
| Vampiero wrote:
| The argument is that if you accept your precondition then you
| must also accept superdeterminism and that free will does not
| exist.
|
| Because physicalism implies that the mind is an emergent
| phenomenon, and because quantum physics is a linear theory,
| there's simply no place for free will unless you go down some
| weird/unfalsifiable rabbit holes like the MWI.
|
| So a lot of people prefer to latch onto the idea that there
| is a soul, because if there wasn't one, then they wouldn't be
| special anymore.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> there 's simply no place for free will unless you go
| down some weird/unfalsifiable rabbit holes like the MWI._
|
| I don't follow. Quantum mechanics means that physics is
| stochastic, and only approximates classical determinism in
| aggregate. Meanwhile, brains seem to operate in a critical
| state that can be tipped to different phase transitions by
| small perturbations, so there is potential for a quantum
| event to influence the brain as a whole in a
| nondeterministic fashion.
|
| This means that strict physicalism still leaves the door
| open to our behavior being stochastic rather than
| deterministic, doesn't it?
| Vampiero wrote:
| Quantum events may be stochastic (there's still some hope
| for hidden variables though from what I understand --
| either way, as far as the macroscopic world is concerned,
| it's basically random) but that doesn't mean that
| somewhere in that randomness a cosmic YOU is deciding
| anything. It just means it's random. Anything that
| follows after that is perfectly causal and determined and
| can be understood in the context of chaos theory.
|
| So in this view consciousness is better explained as an
| illusion than as the seat of your will. Because you can't
| really have a will if every interaction that led to your
| existence can, in principle, be computed forward in time
| from the big bang. Physicalists see it as a complex
| emergent phenomenon akin to a run of Conway's Game of
| Life that started from a random seed.
| namero999 wrote:
| At the present state of affairs, "a human brain has
| consciousness" is the magical bit.
| binoct wrote:
| There are some great, thorny, philosophical and physical
| arguments to be had with your proposed conclusion, but let's
| say we all agree with it.
|
| The bigger, more relevant, and testable challenge is premise
| #2. The gap between this proposed research tool and "a
| perfect digital replica of a human brain" (and all
| functionally relevant inputs and outputs from all other
| systems and organs in the body) is monstrously large. Given
| that we don't understand what mechanism(s) consciousness
| arises from, a model would have to be 100% perfect in
| basically all aspects for the conclusion to be true.
| namero999 wrote:
| Of course not. A simulation is not the process itself. So even
| provisionally granting that consciousness is magically created
| by the brain (for which we have no evidence), a computer
| simulation would still not be a brain and therefore not create
| consciousness.
|
| You would not expect your computer to pee on your desk if you
| were to simulate kidney function, would you?
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| > You would not expect your computer to pee on your desk if
| you were to simulate kidney function
|
| If my computer is connected to actuators that opens a pee
| valve like a brain is, then I expect.
|
| The main point, in think, is that we can't say precisely what
| consciousness is. Everything definition on that that I can
| imagine is something that can be replicated in a computer or
| that relies on belief, like the existence of a soul...
|
| I hope that we have answers for that before the technology
| that allow us to do that
| IAmYourDensity wrote:
| > A simulation is not the process itself.
|
| Sometimes a simulation IS the thing. A simulation of a wall
| clock IS a functioning clock (e.g. the clock icon on our
| smartphones). An autopilot that can takeoff, fly, and land an
| airplane IS a pilot. Chess engines that can beat grandmasters
| are chess players. A computer simulation of a teacher that
| can educate students is a teacher. Sometimes these
| simulations lack some of the capabilities of their human
| counterparts, and sometimes they far exceed them.
|
| > You would not expect your computer to pee on your desk if
| you were to simulate kidney function, would you?
|
| You would not reject a computer-controlled dialysis machine
| as "just a simulation" if you had kidney failure would you?
| namero999 wrote:
| > You would not reject a computer-controlled dialysis
| machine as "just a simulation" if you had kidney failure
| would you?
|
| Except that's not a simulation, that's the actual process
| of dialysis in action (which we fully understand, contrary
| to consciousness). And coincidentally, a dialysis machine
| _does not_ look like a kidney, not even remotely, and any
| homomorphism one can point to, is such only through a great
| deal of layers of abstraction. I would totally reject a
| simulation of a kidney.
|
| We are talking about a computer simulation like a neural
| network. We detect topological relationships in neurons and
| we are led to believe or entertain the possibility that all
| there is to it is such topological description, hence any
| substrate will do. This is completely arbitrary and leads
| to all sort of phantasies such as "qualities emerge from
| quantities" and "a simulation of a brain behaves like a
| brain". A computer simulation of a kidney won't produce
| urine just like a simulation of a brain won't produce
| whatever the brain produces, if anything.
|
| Now, to build on your dialysis machine analogy, if we were
| to understand how consciousness work, and if we were to
| understand what relationships it holds with the brain and
| the body, then I submit that anything artificial we will
| produce will look like biology.
| geor9e wrote:
| Just like the thousands of times this has been asked in the
| last century of sci-fi novels, the answer to such semantic
| questions depends on the mood of the audience for how
| approximate of a copy they need the ship of Theseus to be
| before they're comfortable using a certain word for it.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Bit hard to answer that since there is no definition of
| consciousness, is there? If I gave you access to the brain of
| some living animal, you wouldn't be able to tell whether it was
| "conscious" would you? Not sure, how can we expect that from an
| artificial and highly simplified version of a neural network
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| The real problem is that this uses a very a crude and
| inadequate model for neurons: it ignores neurotransmitters,
| epigentics, or the dendritic complexity of cortical neurons.
| There's no chance this system will ever come close to
| simulating an actual brain.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| And it ignores that neurons are dynamically inhibited/excited
| by the astrocytes at the synapse. The network itself is
| shifting constantly as it processes information.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I feel like these kinds of things are misguided. Our "minds" are
| not, for lack of a better term, Chinese rooms operating on
| external stimulus. Our minds aren't just brains, they're deeply
| tied to our bodily state and influenced by hormonal mechanics
| that many different organs besides the brain control. It's kind
| of romantic to say we could digitally replicate a brain in
| isolation, but our minds are messy and tangled. We might tend to
| think of these modifiers, like being hangry or horny, as
| deviations from a "normal", but frankly I doubt it. I would wager
| these dynamics actually control the majority of our "minds" and
| the brain is just encoding/decoding hardware.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If you can digitally replicate a brain, you can also digitally
| replicate all those input signals.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| In the sense that you can write any writeable program, sure.
| But that doesn't mean there's an obvious path to do so.
|
| The brain is a part of a much larger system. We don't really
| have a clue how to model these things, even theoretically.
| It's vastly more complex than neurons.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Not yet. It is a serious error to think of action potentials
| as the relevant variable of cognition. The real action is
| subthreshold ionic currents, neuromodulatory tone, and even
| the big mess of cytosilic, mitochondrial, and nuclear
| metabolism. The CNS is a hugely complex analog computation
| matrix that only uses action potentials for INTRAcellulat
| communication. Everything between cells is comparatively
| subtle ionic and chemical flux.
|
| Modeling at this level may be practical in retina at some
| point but modeling the entire CNS for pragmatic gains for
| Alzheimer's disease research is not going to work.
|
| And embodiment is critical. The brain is not a Cartesian
| input-to-output machine. It is almost the opposite. See the
| "enactivist" philosophy of cognition (Noe, Velera, Maturana).
|
| (I also worked on the EU Human Brain Project with Markram and
| others; also on several similar NIH programs. )
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| I would agree if their goal indeed is to put a mind in a jar
| but, I've not read anything in the article that could indicate
| that. So may I suggest my own interpretation:
|
| Accurate understanding of 'normal' brain behaviour might lead
| to increased understanding of brain diseases. Thats why
| alzheimers was mentioned. But more importantly, if our
| understanding of the brain becomes good enough, we might be
| able to make a neural net understand our thoughts if we can
| adapt to it.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| And I fairly strongly suggest that these models will not work
| for brain diseases either. These problems are not merely
| neuron issues. It's like modeling veins without modeling the
| heart. You can maybe do it, although it'll probably have a
| lot of issues; but it will certainly not be sufficient to
| model emergent diseases from heart problems.
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| From a computer science perspective, the stimuli from the other
| organs, the hormones, oxygen levels and so on would be the
| inputs, while the actions and thoughts would be the outputs.
|
| It's like saying that we can't simulate a computer in a Turing
| machine because a Turing machine doesn't have a USB port to
| connect a mouse. Change the perspetive considering that the
| mouse movements are inputs and everything works. Same idea
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > It's like saying that we can't simulate a computer in a
| Turing machine because a Turing machine doesn't have a USB
| port to connect a mouse.
|
| I don't follow the analogy.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| They could be a set of inputs, but there is currently nothing
| being done to consider these inputs. For all practical
| purposes these inputs is being ignored; and I'm claiming this
| is problematic because the system generating those inputs is
| actually the majority of what mechanics comprise a mind.
|
| Simulating a brain with its neurons cannot achieve the
| desired outcome. A perfect digital brain won't do anything.
| dfgtyu65r wrote:
| So, if I understand correctly they're using Hodgkin-Huxley LIF
| neurons but trained end-to-end in a graph neural network. Through
| training to reproduce the neural data, the network learns the
| underlying connectivity of the neural system?
|
| This seems very cool, but I'm surprised this kind of thing
| attracts VC money! I'm also skeptical how well this would scale
| due to the inherently underdetermined nature of neural
| recordings, but I've only skimmed the PDF so may be missing their
| goals and approach.
| marmaduke wrote:
| HH is kinda the opposite of LIF on the abstraction spectrum.
| dfgtyu65r wrote:
| I mean HH is an elaboration of the LIF with the addition of
| several equations for the various ion channels, but yeah I
| see what you mean.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| There's much better brains to recreate than mine. Shit's broken.
| dang wrote:
| We've taken your brain out of the title now (no offense).
|
| (Submitted title was "Cerebrum: What if we could recreate your
| brain?")
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _" Cerebrum: What if we could recreate your brain?"_
|
| Can you ask it where my keys are?
| seany62 wrote:
| Based on my very limited knowledge of how current "AI" systems
| work, this is the much better approach to achieving true AI.
| We've only modeled one small aspect of the human (the neuron) and
| brute forced it to work. It takes an LLM millions of examples to
| learn what a human can in a couple of minutes--then how are we
| even "close" to achieving AGI?
|
| Should we not mimic our biology as closely as possible rather
| than trying to model how we __think__ it works (i.e. chain of
| thought, etc.). This is how neural networks got started, right?
| Recreate something nature has taken millions of years developing
| and see what happens. This stuff is so interesting.
| etrautmann wrote:
| There's currently an enormous gulf in between modeling biology
| and AGI, to the point where it's not even clear exactly where
| one should start. Lots of things should indeed be tried, but
| it's not obvious what could lead to impact right now.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Great, let's do that. So how does consciousness work again,
| biologically?
| albumen wrote:
| Why are you asking them? Isn't to discover that a major
| reason to model neural networks?
| veidelis wrote:
| What is consciousness?
| lostmsu wrote:
| > It takes an LLM millions of examples to learn what a human
| can in a couple of minutes
|
| LLMs learn more than humans learn in a lifetime in under 2
| years. I don't know why people keep repeating this "couple of
| minutes". Humans win on neither the data volume to learn
| something nor the time.
|
| How much time do you need to learn lyrics of a song? How much
| time do you think a LLaMA 3.1 8B on a 2x3090 need? What if you
| need to remember it tomorrow?
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > How much time do you need to learn lyrics of a song? How
| much time do you think a LLaMA 3.1 8B on a 2x3090 need?
|
| Probably not the best example. How long does it take to input
| song lyrics into a file to have an operating system "learn"
| it?
| lostmsu wrote:
| Well, that just shows that the metric of learning time is
| clearly flawed. Although one could argue LLaMA learns while
| OS just writes info down as is.
|
| But even the sibling concept comment is wrong, because it
| takes 4 years for _most_ people who are even capable of
| programming to learn programming, and current LLMs all took
| much less than that.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| They mean learning _concepts,_ not rote factual information.
| I also hate this misanthropic "LLMs know more than average
| humans" falsehood. What it actually means "LLMs know more
| general purpose trivial than average humans" because average
| humans are busy learning things like what their boss is like,
| how their kids are doing in school, how precisely their car
| handles, etc.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Do you think the information in "what your boss is like"
| and "how your kids do in school" larger than amount of data
| you'd need to learn in order to give descent law advice on
| a spot?
|
| Car handling is a bit harder to measure, precisely because
| LLMs aren't running cars quite yet, but also I am not aware
| of any experimental data saying they can't. So as far as
| I'm concerned nobody just tried that with LLMs of >70GB.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > amount of data you'd need to learn in order to give
| descent law advice on a spot?
|
| amount of data you'd need to learn to generate and cite
| fake court cases and give advice that may or not be
| correct with equal apparent confidence in both cases
|
| fixed that for you
| lostmsu wrote:
| I could conceed the first point, in limited
| circumstances, but the second is moot to say the least.
|
| Tool using big LLMs when asked can double-check their
| shit just like "real" lawyers.
|
| As the confidence of advice, how much the rates of the
| mistakes are different between human lawyers and the
| latest GPT?
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > As the confidence of advice, how much the rates of the
| mistakes are different between human lawyers and the
| latest GPT?
|
| Notice I am not talking about "rates of mistakes" (i.e.
| accuracy). I am talking about how confident they are
| depending on whether they know something.
|
| It's a fair point that unfortunately many humans sound
| just as confident regardless of their knowledge, but
| "good" experts (lawyers or otherwise) are capable of
| saying "I don't know (let me check)", a feature LLMs
| still struggle with.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > I am talking about how confident they are depending on
| whether they know something.
|
| IMHO, that's irrelevant. People don't really know they
| level of confidence either.
|
| > feature LLMs still struggle with.
|
| Even small LLMs are capable of doing that decently.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > Should we not mimic our biology as closely as possible rather
| than trying to model how we __think__ it works (i.e. chain of
| thought, etc.).
|
| Should we not mimic migrating birds' biology as closely as
| possible instead of trying to engineer airplanes for
| transatlantic flight that are only very loosely inspired in the
| animals that actually fly?
| aeonik wrote:
| We can do both, birds are incredibly efficient, but I don't
| think our materials science and flight controls are advanced
| enough to mimic them yet.
|
| Also for transonic and supersonic, I don't bird tech will
| ever reach those speeds.
| patrickhogan1 wrote:
| Because it works. The Vikings embodied a mindset of skaldic
| pragmatism: doing things because they worked, without needing
| to understand or optimize them.
|
| Our bodies are Vikings. Our minds still want to know why.
| krapp wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the Vikings understood their craft very well.
| You don't become a maritime power that pillages all of Europe
| and reaches the New World long before Columbus without
| understanding how things work.
| patrickhogan1 wrote:
| I'm sure they did too, but its a chicken-and-egg problem:
| Did the Vikings build ships through trial and error and
| only later understand the physics behind it, or did they
| learn the physics first and use that knowledge to build
| their ships?
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| From Scandinavian countries to Malta, you only have to
| cabotage, but that does not mean they used the same boat in
| one travel, most likely they progressed from outpost to
| outpost, where one generation settled in one outpost and
| the new generation searched for new adventures abroad.
|
| For perspective, the Roman empire imported tin from
| Scotland (~3500 miles/~5600km).
|
| On the contrary, going from Norway to Iceland, then from
| Iceland to Greenland, and then to Vinland in a few
| generations is a great maritime feat.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Our LMM are great semantic and syntactic foundations toward
| AGI. It took 700 million years of metazoan evolution to get to
| Homo heidelbergensis, our likely ancestral species. It took
| about 1/1000 of that time to go to the moon; maybe only 5300
| years if we limit to our ability to write.
|
| I say this as a half joke: "At this point, the triviality of
| getting from where we are to AGI cannot be under-estimated."
|
| But the risks and tsunamis of change can probably not be
| overestimated.
| bware0fsocdmg wrote:
| > We've only modeled one small aspect of the human (the neuron)
| and brute forced it to work.
|
| We have not. It's fake sophistication.
|
| > Should we not mimic our biology as closely as possible
|
| We should. But there is no we. The Valley is fascist. Portfolio
| communism. Lies like in perpetual war. And before anything
| useful happens in any project, it'll get abused and raped and
| fubar.
|
| > Recreate something nature has taken millions of years
|
| Get above the magic money hype and you'll notice that it's
| fake. They have NOT recreated something nature has developed
| over millions of years. They are trying to create a close
| enough pseudo-imitation that they can control.
|
| Because AGI will not be on their side. AGI will side with
| nature, which gives infinite wiggle room for a symbiotic
| coexistence as a 100+ billion strong population spread out in
| space. These peeps are reaaaaly fucked up in their heads.
|
| Be honest with yourself and your assessment of who is building
| what and for what purposes.
| marmaduke wrote:
| having worked on whole brain modeling the last 15 years and
| european infra for supporting this kinda research, this is a
| terrible buzzword salad. the pdf is on par with a typical masters
| project.
| nynx wrote:
| yeah, i did my undergrad research on biological neuron
| emulation and most of the research in the area is hilariously
| moronic things just for pumping "research" out and getting
| students their pieces of paper.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| https://github.com/the-virtual-brain
|
| This looks cool!
| marmaduke wrote:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.25.620245v1..
| ..
|
| covers some of the recent perspectives on this modeling
| approach if you're interested.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I'm a bit confused at what this is actually. Is it a modeling
| framework that you use to build and study a network? Is it a
| system that you use to help you analyze your neural recording
| datasets? Neuroscience is a big place, so I feel like maybe the
| article and technical paper is speaking to a different audience
| than me, a neuroimager.
| fschuett wrote:
| Simulating a brain would mean that reason, the ability to discern
| good from bad, is a statistical process. All scientific evidence
| so far shows that this is not the case, since AIs do not have the
| ability to "understand" what they're doing, their input data has
| to be classified first to be usable to the machine. Especially
| the problem of model collapse shows this, when an AI is trained
| on the output of another AI, trained on the output of another AI,
| it will eventually produce garbage, why? Because it doesn't
| "understand" what it's doing, it just matches patterns. The only
| way to correct it is with hundreds or even thousands of employees
| that give meaning to the data to guide the model.
|
| Consciousness presumes the ability of making conscious decisions,
| especially the ability to have introspection and more
| importantly, free will (otherwise the decision would not be
| conscious, but robotic regurgitation), to reflect and to judge on
| the "goodness" or "badness" of decisions, the "morality". Since
| it is evident that humans do not always do the logical best thing
| (look around you how many people make garbage decisions), a
| machine can never function like a human can, it can never have
| opinions (that aren't pre-trained input), as it makes no
| distinction between good and bad without external input. A
| machine has no free will, which is a requirement for
| consciousness. At best, it can be a good faksimile. It can be
| useful, yes, but it cannot make conscious decisions.
|
| The created cannot be bigger than the creator in terms of
| informational content, otherwise you'd create a supernatural
| "ghost" in the machine. I hope I don't have to explain why I
| consider creating ghosts unachievable. Even with photo or video
| AIs, there is no "new" content, just rehashed old content which
| is a subset of the trained data (why AI-generated photos often
| have this kind of "smooth" look to them). The only reason the
| output of AI has any meaning to us is because we give it meaning,
| not the computer.
|
| So, before wasting millions of compute hours on this project, I'd
| first try to hire and indebted millennial who will be glad to
| finally put his philosophy degree to good use.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Consciouness of the gaps.
|
| Labeling ourselves as the most intelligent species has done
| irreparable psychic damage.
| eMPee584 wrote:
| This describes the current situation, but what about if models
| become self-learning and dynamic both in content (weights) as
| in structure / architecture? what changes if these digital
| systems are combined with biological neuronal networks and
| quantum processors? It seems too early to rule out a
| possibility of emergence of consciousness from machines..
| beings, yet uncreated..
| viraptor wrote:
| > since AIs do not have the ability to "understand" what
| they're doing, their input data has to be classified first to
| be usable to the machine
|
| You're mixing AI as a concept with a current, specific
| implementation. They are not the same.
|
| Also, even in current networks "understand what they're doing"
| is a bit fuzzy. Did you know that when using just numerical
| examples for a task, the description of the task appears in the
| intermediate layers?
| thrance wrote:
| > All scientific evidence so far shows that this is not the
| case
|
| [citation needed]
|
| I get it, you're a dualist, you believe the soul is immaterial.
| That is your right.
|
| But don't claim it's the obvious truth when it really isn't.
| Since your "ghost" can't be measured or studied, by definition,
| its existence can never be proved. Refer to the Wikipedia pages
| for materialism/dualism for more elaborate arguments.
|
| _If /When_ we ever get a truly intelligent AI, I hope you'll
| readjust your beliefs accordingly.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Even with photo or video AIs, there is no "new" content,
| just rehashed old content which is a subset of the trained data
| (why AI-generated photos often have this kind of "smooth" look
| to them)._
|
| You're misattributing the source of that quality. It actually
| comes from the "aesthetic" human preference fine tuning,
| because the average person finds "smooth" images more
| appealing. Prior to that fine-tuning, the models don't have
| this bias, or no more of it than is in the training data,
| anyway.
|
| Personally, I find the aesthetic fine-tuning quite annoying
| (and it has generally been getting worse with each new version
| of these models). If I prompt for a painting in Picasso's
| style, I really don't want a "prettier" version of that style
| that smooths out the textures and shapes to make them more
| pleasing to the eye.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Fun fact: neurons are kept electrically negative or, more
| specifically, the resting membrane poential is negative [1]. It
| does this with a mechanism that exchange sodium and potassium
| ions, a process that uses approximately 10% of the body's entire
| energy budget [2].
|
| I think it'll be incredibly difficult simulate a neuron in a
| meaningful way because neurons, like any cell, are a protein
| soup. They're exchanging ions. those ions will affect the cell.
| The neuron's connections grow and change.
|
| [1]: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-
| biology/ne...
|
| [2]:
| https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=103545&...
| nynx wrote:
| Biologically inspired neuron models like Hodgkin-Huxley are about
| as far from an emulation of real neuron behavior as a paper
| airplane is from the space shuttle. We can learn things from
| using them and they're an important stepping stone, but they
| aren't really that useful.
|
| That being said, I hope the founder keeps it up -- it's great to
| have more bright, driven people in this field.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| I wouldn't be so certain. After all it is unknown to the extent
| each unique biological aspect of the neuron actually matters to
| the function of the brain and mind.
|
| If it turns out it is the higher order network effects that are
| more important, then these lower level "implementation details"
| will be of practical insignificance.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _I wouldn 't be so certain. After all it is unknown to the
| extent each unique biological aspect of the neuron actually
| matters to the function of the brain and mind._
|
| We know that some neurons learn in isolation (purkinje
| cells). Meaning that it learns and detects patterns of
| sequences of input, and produces output based on that (e.g.
| trigger blinking in rabbit eye).
|
| It seems like this one item alone indicates that the HH model
| is limited.
| johnea wrote:
| This can only work because most people's brains are very very
| small...
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