[friendlybus]

Everybody in the history of humans has said the latest technology is the best model for how a brain works. There used to be a piston model for the brain.

Self driving cars can't leave an enclosed environment and might never do so safely.

Richard Dawkins spoke very highly of the brains ability to do some kind of natural calculus for the sake of tracking a ball in flight, but most animals run on simple tricks and reference points.

Deep learning might be the "good think" for the next ten years, some of us are not going to let go of the transcendent truth that the brain is not defined by what we think it is. I see limited reason to see deep learning as more likely than some emergent behaviour from a vast number of simple rules. Like animals flocking together in a boid sim.

[Strilanc]

> Everybody in the history of humans has said the latest technology is the best model for how a brain works. There used to be a piston model for the brain.

Is this the same mistake as in "The Relativity of Wrong" [1]?

> people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proven to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about out modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

> [...]

> My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Modelling the brain as a bunch of pistons or as a complicated machine or clockwork thing is a lot better than as a magical clay golem or opaque soul. Modelling it as a computer is even better than that. Not a computer in the sense of an x86 desktop exactly, of course, but the concept of computation is clearly fundamental to understanding the system. Similarly, the brain is not ResNet but concepts like backpropagation are probably useful.

So, sure, maybe people have been using the latest fad to explain the brain forever. But that's only bad to the extent that the latest fad is getting further away instead of closer.

1: http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html

[friendlybus]

Degrees of wrongness along history would make sense in this discussion if computing were the only path for understanding the brain.

Ancients used to think that thinking happened in the gut and recently the microbiome pathway for describing thought has re-emerged. Both the gut pathway and the computational stream could be wrong.

The outcome of seeing the brain as a computational device will run out of juice like revelation has.

[mcilai]

There's one minor difference between past models of the brain and deep learning: deep learning can actually perform difficult and useful cognitive tasks that cannot be accomplished by any other means.

[friendlybus]

Computers beat chess by grinding out the answers, something previously unattainable for humankind. Computers can beat chess,go and starcraft now with curve fitting ml programs.

The problem is for all this power people still play chess,go and starcraft and we don't know how their brain works.

[__s]

Out of curiosity, do you believe in the concept of a soul?