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"Simply put, we have no idea how the human mind works." ~40,000 neuroscientists beg to differ. I'd argue that, more or less, we have a good, general, working th

• p-e-w 3y ago
  "What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman LLMs notwithstanding, I have yet to see a replication of the human mind created by humans. Therefore, I would take any claim that neuroscience 'understands' how the human mind works (a claim that I've never heard from an actual neuroscientist) with a huge amount of salt.
  • nathan_compton 3y ago
    Your original comment was that we have "no idea" how the brain works. This is absurd. We understand quite a lot about how the brain works. We know its functional elements (neurons, possibly glial cells) its basic mechanism of information processing (firing rates, spike timing) and we have a very general model of how those things are combined to actually process information (mutually inhibiting cortical columns, a laminar structure which represents (roughly) sequential stages of processing) etc etc etc. This hardly constitutes "no idea," and, indeed, the fact that artificial neural networks recapitulate in general terms the ability of neurons to process information, suggests that by the Feynman criteria (he said a lot of dumb stuff, in my opinion, by the way) we are beyond the stage of "[having] no idea." Not that it matters, but for various reasons I have spent quite a lot of time around neuroscientists and I think most of them would agree that "no idea" is a pretty ridiculous way to characterize the state of the field.