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0 pointsa_bonobo2y ago0 comments

There's a wonderful paper on 1) from a few years ago:

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

>Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?

>We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data.

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0cf8612b2e1e2y ago

Nothing in biology is as regular and systematic as a microprocessor. Scientists study biology using round-about approaches because there is nothing else available.

zargon2y ago

This fact only makes the problem even worse.

mxkopy2y ago

This is a silly argument. It presupposes that meaningful knowledge about neurons is structured similarly to knowledge about microprocessors, which does not have to be the case since neurons aren’t structured like microprocessors.

bschne2y ago

Which was inspired by this, "Could a Biologist Fix a Radio?"

https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.p...

mannykannot2y ago

This paper, and its precursor 'Could a Biologist Fix a Radio?' mentioned by bschne, come across as somewhat smug and wiser-than-thou. While they do a good job in showing the difficulty of gathering useful information about complex biological systems, they tend to underestimate what human ingenuity can do with just that information which can be gained experimentally. This was demonstrated recently by the rapid development of synthetic vaccines against Covid.

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