[Xenograph]

While I appreciate the intention, I think it's a bad analogy.

Can you think of a small piece of machine code that you could inject into arbitrary computers that would produce useful effects in some significant proportion of the computer population? (Don't think so...)

Computers and biological systems are so wildly different. Although perhaps you'd find better analogies comparing brains to machine learning systems. Eg. "Trying to find out how ADs work is like applying some simple numerical transformation on some particular part of a deep neural network and trying to find out what changes are produced".

Oddly enough.. I think ML researchers often do find little "tricks" that improve the performance of neural nets without being able to fully grasp how or why. It's somewhat similar to how we use and understand ADs.

[tsoukase]

Similarly, if you prescribe an AD to an 'arbitrary' person, most probably you do more harm than good, but I am sure you can find an appropriate code to try to 'cure' an 'ill' system.

The difference between biomedical and electronic systems vanishes when you approach them from the same abstraction levels, where the complexity of the brain forces us to stand: either extremely high (clinical/GUI) or extremely low (drugs/'therapeutic' machine code).

My understanding of brain is on par with that most of HW audience has about computers and vice-versa. So, as you correctly thought, the intent was to brigde this gap. Another analogy I like is, treating brain diseases with drugs is like repairing a car by spraying chemicals.

[fuzzfactor]

Talk about arbitrary, on the pharmaceutical front some very revealing and somewhat forgotten info seems to be in the comments:

>anon the II says: 19 February, 2021 at 1:03 pm

>About 27 years ago, a little company that I worked for was going through another transmutation in order to survive. We became a high-throughput screening/combinatorial chemistry company. The CEO told a story about how, by the time anyone figured out that we didn’t know what we were doing, we might actually figure out what we were doing. I volunteered to be the technical lead on the combi-chem side. Anyhow, we managed to get bought by Lilly in 1994 and shortly afterwards, we got a visit from Bryan Malloy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Molloy), the inventor of Prozac, who came down to see what his company had purchased. I met with Bryan and we had a lovely chat. But, he let me know that he thought that what we were doing was no better than “pissing in the wind”.

>I guess this means that he was doing much the same.