This paper offers some good points but exhibits a number of flaws that limit its applicability to the utility of current neuroscience methods. For a generally t

This paper offers some good points but exhibits a number of flaws that limit its applicability to the utility of current neuroscience methods. For a generally thoughtful conversation, see http://www.brainyblog.net/2016/08/30/could-a-neuroscientist-understand-a-microprocessor-2/ http://www.brainyblog.net/2016/08/30/could-a-neuroscientist-... from 2016. One comment that I'd like to highlight from this conversation is pasted below: " But no attempt is made to analyze the similarities and differences in those behaviors. All three game behaviors rely on similar functions. Depending on the level of similarity between the behaviors, you might think of it as trying to find a lesion that only knocks out your ability to read words that start with “k” versus words that start with “s.” That’s an experiment that’s unlikely to succeed. But if the behaviors are more like “speaking” vs “understanding spoken words” vs “understanding written words” then it’s a more reasonable experiment. The authors argue that neuroscientists make the same mistake all the time; that we are operating at the wrong level of granularity for our behavioral measures and don’t know it. That argument denies the degree to which we characterize behaviors in neuroscience, and how stringent we are about controls. The authors point to the fact that transistors that eliminate only one behavior are not meaningfully clustered on the chip. But what they ignore are the transistors that eliminate all three behaviors. Those structures are key to the functioning of the device in general. To me, those 1560 transistors that eliminated all three behaviors are more worthy of study than the lesions that affect only one behavior, because they allow us to determine what is essential to the behavior of the system. You can think of those transistors as leading to the death of the organism, just as damage to certain parts of the brain cause death in animals."