3 ms·
"This example nicely highlights the importance of isolating individual behaviors to understand the contribution of parts to the overall function. If we had been
by mhneu 9y ago
"This example nicely highlights the importance
of isolating individual behaviors to understand the
contribution of parts to the overall function. If we
had been able to isolate a single function, maybe
by having the processor produce the same math
operation every single step, then the lesioning experiments
could have produced more meaningful
results. "
I submit that this direction is an important one to pursue.
- SilasX 9y agoThat also highlights why understanding the brain is a much harder problem: CPUs are deliberately engineered so that their different functions are nicely decoupled and easy to reason about. Brains are the result of a very messy evolutionary process that never came close to optimizing for "easy reasoning for refactoring".
- rz2k 9y agoYet if a particular CPU is produced in enough quantity and is cheap enough people will engineer uses out of it that the designers never thought of, and had no intention of making possible. It reminds me of talking to another player in an online Risk game where they didn't understand what an AI player was trying to do. The code was open source and something like only three functions, but in practice they did something completely different.
- mhneu 9y agoTruth. Compartmentalizing complexity is key