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i intuitively think that there is something similar in kind between a fruit fly brain and a human brain regardless of the scale, and that cracking the smaller c

i intuitively think that there is something similar in kind between a fruit fly brain and a human brain regardless of the scale, and that cracking the smaller case will somehow lead to cracking the larger one. However, rather than hope, it leads me to a negative conclusion. That is, even at orders of magnitude smaller scales, and with full knowledge of how all the gross bits are connected, we still won't be able to understand what actually happens and why it works. I suspect this will be the case because the old microscopic will become the new macroscopic and we will realise that there is yet orders of magnitude more details to make sense of.

nh23423fefe 4y ago
Explanations can exist at multiple levels. Reducing mind to neurons to atoms doesn't destroy/invalidate the emergent description at higher levels. Just because we "know" the world is "made" of fields doesn't mean that the idea of objects is meaningless.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"the old microscopic will become the new macroscopic and we will realise that there is yet orders of magnitude more details to make sense of." That's already the case. Below the neuron level is the molecular level. Below the molecular level is the atomic level. Below the atomic level is the subatomic level. The last of these is still in the process of being explored and understood by physics, and there it might not even be possible to measure all there is at that level, much less make sense of it or adequately model it. As Roger Penrose famously pointed out, events at the subatomic level might be critical for consciousness, and we're very far from modeling even all the molecular interaction that happen in a human brain, nevermind the atomic or subatomic interactions.