[oceliker]

I always thought the spirit of the paper was "we have a set of techniques to probe the brain and try to understand functionality (e.g. calcium/voltage indicators, optogenetics, laser ablation); could we have understood how a black-box microprocessor works by using EE equivalents of these techniques?" It's less about applying equations and more about, say, activating one transistor at a time and seeing what happens.

[hprotagonist]

that is the spirit of the paper, and the answer is a resounding “no, not even close!”