[tum92]

Oh the number of ways this model doesn’t match reality couldn’t even be counted. I suppose my standard for achieving an “artificial something” in biology is if accurately reflects reality well enough to learn from, and I only meant to imply that this might.

I will say that my mental model does hinge on the idea that the action of a single neuron at a single point in time in a single context can actually be equated to "sum(input*weight) > threshold". Doing the actual computation to figure out a principled measure of weight (and input, context, and maybe even time for that matter) is way outside our ability, but it seems like something that could be approximated in a simple experimental model!

[soco]

"if accurately reflects reality well enough to learn from" - but are we learning real stuff from that, or only implications from the fake/artificial thing? I mean for sure we can see that as a brainstorming, exciting by itself, but does that get us closer to understanding the real thing, or it's at the maximum a Plato's cave exercise in rationality?