Don't get me wrong - I may not fully comprehend the math behind what is going on (as I noted, I have little understanding of calculus, and it is one of my faili

Don't get me wrong - I may not fully comprehend the math behind what is going on (as I noted, I have little understanding of calculus, and it is one of my failings that I am working to improve on) - but I do understand the need for the abstraction; I understand that it allows us to model the activation function and workings of a neuron, to a certain level of accuracy. I understand that it may -not- be the same way that a real neuron does it, but that it is close enough and works well enough to be useful. At the same time, I wonder if there isn't a simpler way of doing all of this - if there isn't a simpler model for the abstraction of a neuron that doesn't require back-propagation or calculus? In other words, have we become so use to the current concepts and models of ANNs that we have become hesitant or resistant to imagining other possibilities? Yes - what we have works, and it works well. Honestly, from what I know, and what I have learned (while I may not fully grasp the mathematical and calculus underpinnings of a neural network, I do have a good feel for how both forward and back-prop is implemented), our current general knowledge on ANNs (ie "how to implement a simple neural network") isn't super-complex. I only question whether it could be made simpler (and I'm not talking about a network of perceptrons or RELUs), or if, because of the early work (Pitts and McCulloch mainly), we are going down a less-than-optimum path (to use an ML analogy, we are stuck in a local minima) - one that fortunately works, but maybe there's something better out there? Again - I recognize as a non-expert in this field (I only consider myself a student and hobbyist so far) - I am likely very well off in la-la land. Even so, we know that quite often in engineering, the optimum solution tends to be the simplest solution; sometimes, that solution is simpler than nature (an airplane vs a bird, for instance). I have a feeling that may be the case with ANNs as well. I am not wedded to this idea, though - I just want to put it out there for consideration and maybe discussion. As I noted, what we currently have works well, and isn't a complexity nightmare, and is understandable to anyone willing to understand it. It very well could be it -is- the simplest explanation.