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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 functiona
by 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.