This is lazy thinking. You could say the same thing about planetary motion but the ellipse equation does a pretty good job giving us a null hypothesis to build

This is lazy thinking. You could say the same thing about planetary motion but the ellipse equation does a pretty good job giving us a null hypothesis to build up from. If you’re a materialist then you’re going to believe that all of the minute biological details are relevant. If you’re a functionalist you can work at a more abstract level. From the 12 years of research I did in this space (both CS and Bio) I can tell you for certain that we can learn a lot more from a functionalist approach. And the reason we “can’t understand” 1000 layer deep neural networks is again because we don’t have a good theory of these types of computational systems. For instance I can tell you that most of the interactions w_ijk are completely spurious and if you cull the network you actually end up with a circuit that you can understand in the same way any EE undergrad can identify a 3 bit adder from the circuit topology.