That's a good point, it is nuanced for sure. My line of reasoning is that ultimately the monkey only has to control one dimension of movement of some object, so

That's a good point, it is nuanced for sure. My line of reasoning is that ultimately the monkey only has to control one dimension of movement of some object, so whatever complex reasoning is required to arrive at the decision to move up or down (one dimensional movement), it would still be easier for a supervised learning algorithm to learn spatial-encoding neurons over a single dimension. I think this gets deep into the difference between premeditation and action and what that means at a neural level. I would guess that Neuralink is not processing the "logical thinking" as much as it is on the neurons that dumbly encode an association with ping-pong racket location. As long as some set of neurons uniquely fire approximately when the pong moves along its degree of freedom, different electrodes will pick up different voltages, and that can be learned by an algorithm. So we don't need to know how the monkey arrived at a decision, but rather just be able to index the possible outcomes of the decision. Which is why I thought that the entropy of the decision space mattered. It's easier to learn a smaller space. I would tend to think this is a dumb pattern matching cluster (e.g. see visual encoding[0]) that's being picked up by Neuralink, and not the actual "logical decision making". Although, there may be more subtle neurons that fire in a sort of "premonition" which have learned the correlation of the racket position with the ball over time. I can link to more papers on that -- it's not just visual encoding, but rats can "plan" where they are going to go, a sort of premonition. Humans also do this. It's like an echo that happens before you yell. That's what the brain does when you plan to go to the grocery store. This is all really interesting stuff, but I'm not an expert! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw6nBWo21Zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw6nBWo21Zk